THE PRUSSIAN PARTITION 97Henceforth, it was clear that the new German Reich was going to be far more
inimical to Polish nationality than the old Prussian regime had ever been. In ret-
rospect, 1871 can be seen as a decisive turning-point. The declaration of the
German Empire in the Palace of Versailles, which proved so ominous for
Western Europe, cast its shadow over the East as well. Henceforth, the good
Prussian had not merely to show that he was a loyal servant of his King; he had
to live up to his reputation as 'the best of Germans'. The imperial union of the
German lands established Germanity as the touchstone of respectability, in a
way that had never pertained before. In earlier decades, no one had ever con-
sidered that Prussia's Polish subjects were in any way less Prussian than its
German, Danish, French, or Lithuanian subjects. In his famous address An mein
Volk (To my People), delivered at Breslau on 17 March 1813, on the occasion of
Prussia's re-entry into the war against Napoleon, Frederick-William III
specifically appealed to the separate peoples of his Kingdom - Branden-burgers,
Prussians, Silesians, Lithuanians - for a common effort against the common
oppressor. At this time the author of the address, State-Councillor Theodor von
Hippel, did not judge the Polish-speaking element or the Germans as worthy of
separate notice. There is plenty of contemporary evidence to show that the
King's Polish-speaking subjects thought of themselves, not as 'Prussian Poles',
but as 'Polish Prussians' - a phrase which in later times would have been con-
sidered a contradiction in terms. The idea that the population of the Kingdom
could be categorized according to the language which they spoke was entirely
alien to the pre-nationalist era. In 1835, in response to one of the earliest
attempts to conduct a linguistic survey, the squire of Langenau (L^gowo) in
Mazuria, Samuel von Polenz, penned the following return:
On these properties, there are 52 persons of the male kind and 59 of the female kind, who
have command of both the Polish and the German languages: 8 persons of the male kind
and 11 of the female kind, who can speak properly in Polish only, but who can mouth a
few broken words in German: 15 persons of the male kind and 12. of the female kind who
speak exclusively in German: one male who speaks German, Polish, French, Latin, and
a little Greek; another who speaks German, Latin, French, and Hebrew, and another
who speaks Russian: and 16 persons of the male kind and 19 of the female kind who as
yet neither speak nor read any language at all, but merely shriek and babble...^13
It was quite inappropriate, of course, on the basis of this return that the official
charged with determining the number of German-speakers should have
recorded the population as' consisting of 175 'Germans', and zo 'Poles' (includ-
ing the one Russian). But it would be equally incorrect to imagine that the
majority were Poles. They were both Polish and German at one and the same
time, and all, irrespective of their language, were first and foremost Prussians.
Such distinctions, which were understood by everyone in Frederick-William's
reign, were unthinkable in the Wilhelmian Era.
Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Polish
and German Nationalism was completely reversed. In the pre-1848 era, both
Poles and Germans had seen each other as allies in the struggle against the