Dissertation

From Prussian East to American West: German discourse on colonization and emigration in Poland and North America, 1763-1845

Tamm, Ingrid Jessica

1997

Overview

This study offers a comparison between two German intellectual discourses on colonization, and concludes that these discourses are linked and are signposts of German ethnic nationalism based on their assumptions about non-assimilation. The first discourse encompasses the late eighteenth-century debate over the colonization of the Prussian East. The second discourse includes the German plans to establish a German colony in North America in the nineteenth century, a New Germany. The effort to transplant some quality of Germanness (Deutschtum) to the New World and thus the use of the word \"colonization\" to describe this process is related to the previous attempt to do the same in Prussian Poland. After the first of the Polish Partitions, the language of the Prussian administration in Prussian Poland reflected the state policy whereby ethnic Germans were brought in through economic benefits and special legal status and were to settle by themselves as Kolonisten. Frederick II and his civil servants spoke of colonies as ethnic enclaves with a mission to spread Enlightenment. Likewise, the German publicists and promoters of a Germania in North America wrote of German \"colonies\" and \"colonists\" in America who were supposed to preserve a \"Germany\" far from the politically fragmented cluster of German territories in the Old World. But because German civil servants lacked political control over the emigrants to America, they voiced concern over potential Americanization of these migrants. The tension of preserving this \"Germanness\" while living amongst non-Germans was at the heart of both of these discourses. The means of achieving this was through colonies.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Ethnic studies / European history / Minority & ethnic groups / Political science / Sociology
• ISBN: 0591511576, 9780591511574