History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]

Ironside

Exactly! One should always put into account that in medieval times nations in the modern sense of the meaning did not exist. A nation was not very important for the individual because in the end almost everybody believed that they are direct decendants of Adam and Eve and that the end of the world is near. Therefore it was not a big deal for people to give up a language and change it in favor of a more prestigious one.

If you are judging events of the 1300s from a 21th century angle of view, your conclusions will defintely be distorted. There was no German "Drang nach Osten" masterplan. It was just the way a more developed and advanced culture was transferred from the West to the East. And of course the Germans did not invent this culture. They just handed over what they received from the Roman Empire a.k.a. early Italy and early France. And the Romans received this culture from the Greeks and the Greeks got it from cultures that existed in the "fertile crescent" between Euphrates and Tigris in modern day Iraq. Finally in the 1400s the Poles had their own "Drang nach Osten" phase and brought this culture to Eastern Slavic people.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]

The official language of the Teutonic Order was Latin. Since the majority of the Knights were of German origin probably they spoke Low German - a language much closer to modern Dutch than to High German - in colloquial matters. This fact does not make them necessarily German, at least not in the modern sense of the word, people from what is now Benelux, Eastern France, Czech Republic and Northern Italy participated there. The Teutonic Order was founded in Jerusalem at the time of the crusades and its main goal was the spread of catholicism in the first place. After they subjugated the Baltic Old Prussians - with approval of the Polish king by the way - they found taste in secular matters and built up their own monastic state, which annoyed the Polish King of course. Surely the arrival of the Teutonic Order was one of the main sources of Germanization in Old Prussia beginning with the 1200s, but I doubt it was the goal of the Teutonic Order to spread Germanness, it was just a side effect.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]

!


Dear Ironside,

What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the massacre of 1308? Come on, Gdansk was a relatively small city at that time and the Teutonic Order was not Germany!

I don't want to make Danzig a purely German city because Poles always played a role in city life and Gdansk obviously belonged to the Polish/Lithuanian Comonwealth for centuries, but I think there is no doubt that from the 1400s to 1945 Gdansk/Danzig was a predominately German speaking city. It is also clear that Danzig would have never become a Polish city again if it wasn't it for the Nazis and World War II and all the terrible things that commited.

The old Polish-Lithuanian State wasn't a nation state the same way as the Holy Roman Empire (of the German nation) was a nation state. Therefore Gdansk was as Polish as Prague, Brno, Ljubljana and Maribor were German.

As far as I can see Gdansk/Danzig is a very good example that in pre-nationalistic times Germans could be good and loyal subordinates of the Polish state and king without giving up their Germanness.

Language / New Dialects in Western and Northern Poland [24]

a.k.

So I guess Kashubian is a servilely endangered language because everybody who is able to speak Kashubian speaks Polish as well?

As you probably know in the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg there is still a Slavic speaking minority, the Sorbs. The last remnant of the old Slavic population that lived between Elbe/Labe and Oder/Odra.

Although since 1945 the GDR and reunified Germany are willing to endorse the language, it is very unlikely that Sorbian in going to survive the 21. century, because every Sorbian speaker also speaks German on a native-language level. So if one German speaker communicates with 19 Sorbian speakers their whole conversation is going to switch to German. The biggest problem is that the young Generation, although they learn it in school, has problems to learn Sorbian as good as German because with only 25.000 speakers there simply are not enough speakers anymore to practice the language. Besides the Sorbian language is divided in Upper Sorbian (closer to modern Czech) and Lower Sorbian (closer to modern Polish).

Since Sorbian and Polish are very close West Slavic languages you guys might be able to unterstand it. Here is Sorbian in written langugage: mdr.de/serbski-program/wuhladko/zasle-wusylanja/index.html and here is spoken Sorbian in a television program: mdr.de/mediathek/fernsehen/a-z/wuhladko102_letter-W_zc-59d7b54a_zs-dea15b49.html. My czech collegue laughed a lot about this programm. She said it sounds like Germans with a terrible German accents try to speak Slavic.

Language / New Dialects in Western and Northern Poland [24]

Dear gumishu, dear Wrocław,

Thank you very much for your answers.

So you still have strong recognizable dialects in those areas that were continously settled by Poles, while in most parts of the new gained territories in the west and north you hardly find any dialectal differences.

A dialect is very helpful to give people something like a feeling for a spiritual home or what the Germans call "Heimat". So can be said that people from the western and northern wojewodships are not as attached to their home areas like Poles from "Poland proper" a.k.a. Greater Poland, Lesser Poland or Masowia? A dialect is also a good carrier for traditions and stuff like that. I figured out that people from Central and Eastern Poland are more traditional and conservative than the Poles in the West and North as you could see during the last Polish elections when Tusk won the majority of votes in the new won territories. Problably the lack of dialects plays a role here.

By the way: In Germany, even three and four generations after the expulsion of Germans from what is now Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia, it can be seen, that the decendents of those refugees still are much more mobile than the old-established population of West Germany. In fact some social scientists have the theory that the enormous economic success of West Germany was only possible because around 1950 there were 8 Million people in Germany with no attachment to a home. So they were willing to move without hesitation to any place were there was work, while classic West Germans prefered to stay close to areas where they were born.

What about Poland? Can be said that people from small villages in Lower Silesia, Lubusz or Western Pomerania are more mobile than people from Masowia or Lublin?

History / Lwów, Wilno ... kresy - Poland have lost enormoust part of our heritage... [389]


If this is true then he should have learned from the recent collapse of the panslavist Yugoslav state that the idea of Panslavism 2.0 is not a very good one. If Croats, Bosnians, Serbs and Montenegrins, who virtually speak the same language, can't live in one state then why should Poles, Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs and all other Slavic nations should do?

By the way... what is with the many Non-Slavic nations that live in Russia? Alexmag, if a new pan-slavist State is your goal then shouldn't Russia return all non-slavic territories in Siberia and in the North Caucasus to their rightful owners, that lived there centuries if not milleniums before the first Slav entered their homelands, the same way as Serbia had to give up control over Kosovo?

History / Lwów, Wilno ... kresy - Poland have lost enormoust part of our heritage... [389]

Dear Alexmac,

It seems to be so important for you that certain nations in Europe share a Slavic heritage, but in doing so you forget that there are many more things that differ between the Slavic people.

Religion for instance is a very important part, then there are different histories, also different neighbour states are very important whose influences must not be underestimated, then there is a different folk culture and psychology. Russians and Poles may have a similar language but their way of looking at the world could hardly be more different. It appears to me that you are a Russian nationalist that looks for another way to construct a new empire but those days are definitely over!

And I surely don't judge nations or people by the fact if the language we speak share a common ancestor or if thirty or fourty generations before we had a common progenitor. This way of thinking belongs to the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. After the horrible catastrophy the Nazis put Europe in this way of thinking should be obsolete.