What does Germanised mean?

I am German with some ancestors from Czech and Poland. When I asked my family they said they were Germanised. What does that mean ?

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Check this first, then ask if you have any questions:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation

"Germanized" means both "taken over by/usurped by Germans", hence, no longer in original hands, as well as (historically, i.e. WWII) "Aryanized".

Your ancestors probably meant that they were Germanized, but taking the language or culture of Germany. The German minority in Poland today is mainly located in the rural villages near Opole (Oppeln). Most of these people have Polish surnames and are Catholic, but speak the Upper Silesian dialect known as Wasserpolnish (Water Polish), which is an archaic dialect of Polish that has many German words added during the time Upper Silesia was in Germany.

Could you give a few examples (typical words or phrases) illustrating the Wasserpolnisch regional dialect?
Vielen Dank!

Germanisation could be both voluntary or coerced. Bismarck's Kulturkampf was an example of forced Germanisation and Protestantisation of Prussian-occupied Poland. It got so that school children were even prohibited from praying in Polish (the Września revolt) and Poles were barred from buying land (Drzymała's wagon). But there have always been turncoats willingly embracing the imposed alien culture for benefits and advancement, Some even Germanised their surnames (Górski>Berg, Bialik>Weiß, Młynarski>Müller, etc.), because non-Prussians could not even work as be postmen in Pomerania or the Posen (Poznań) region. This, of course, happens all over. A classic example was former US VP Spiro Agnew. He or his family had not only changed the Greek name Agnopolos (or something of the sort) but he abandoned Greek Orthodoxy and embraced (of all things!) Episcopalianism, regarded as an upscale denomination for the 'better set'. (The Episcopalian Church is the American offshoot of Anglicanism — a denomination set up by bloody wife-killer Henry VIII!)

i think it was common then

Poles from Malopolska, especially around the podhale region use to use a lot of German words for quite few things, for instance like hebel for filing plane, Schiff for ship etc there are a few other examples. That's is probably because that region use to be part of the Austrian partition.

Very little on Wasserpolnisch in Wikipedia, but I did run across this lexicon which may interest some language buffs:
fazi.strefa.pl/SLOWNIKSLASKI.html

As I wasn't the poster who used the term "Wasserpolnisch" (correct German is actually "KUCHELpolnisch", by the way, though more common in Austrian vernacularLOL!!), I can't comment sufficiently on your query, I'm afraid:-)

I do know however, according to a Silesian-born colleague, that in parts of Śląską Górny, they say "bana" > Ger. "Bahn"/Eisenbahn rather than "pociąg" along with other 'Germanisms'!

Typo. I meant of course "Śląsk Górny", minus the final "ą"

My German-speaking Polish colleague just reminded me that "Kuchelpolnisch" (lit. "kitchen" Polish!!) and "Wasserpolnisch" are BOTH quite correct and have nothing to do with one another; the first is simply colloquial vs. academic Polish, the second, a specific reference to Silesian, German-influenced Polish:-)

Yours truly, Mr. Know-it-all, struck out once againLOL

Sorry,

Yes, and for a train whsitling in the forest the Ślunzoks say: Wyje bana w lesie!

I found a couple of Wikipedia articles that explain the Silesian dialect.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlesisch_(polnischer_Dialekt)
And also the less Germanized version spoken in Texas, by immigrants that left in the 1850's, before Bismarck's intense Germanization policies.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Silesian

Oberschlesien, I'm just curious. D'you consider Silesian or standard Polish your mother tongue? I presume you speak German as well, yes?

Lyzko, I consider English my mother tongue, because I was born in America. My ancestor Johann (Jan, John) Warzecha and Margareth (Malgorzata, Margaret) Kuczka came to Texas in 1855, from the village of Biestrzynnik, which was spelled Biestrzinnik back in old Prussia, and Imperial Germany. The name of the village was given the real German name Ringwalde in 1932. My father was half Silesian and half Irish and Scotch/Irish. My mother was all German, but her father was low-German speaking and her mother was High-German speaking from South Bohemia near Honetschlag (Hodnov), then in Austria, now in Czech Republic. My parents only spoke English and I only know a little of the German, Polish, and Silesian languages.

I email this woman in Germany who was born in Upper Silesia and then moved to Germany when she was 13, and she is a distant relative of mine and tells me about Upper Silesia and what happened to my family, since my ancestors left in 1855.

There is a German War memorial in Biestrzynnik with the names of at least three distant relatives of mine on it, Josef Warzecha, Paul Mehlan, and August Mehlan. I would like to know more about Josef Warzecha's service in the German Wehrmacht, like which branch of service he was in, and what was his rank, and where he was killed.

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If someone from Bohemia in the 1800's had the surnames '' Petera'' would they be Czech Bohemian or German Bohemian ?

On the basis of that info alone, one might venture the guess that it soudns mroe Bohemianowuld be Bohemian (Czech) than German. But so many different things have happened to names over the generations that such a guess could well be incorrect. There is a well-known PO woman politician named Piteras -- perhaps that was one form of Petera.. But again that's only a guess.

Slavicaleks, the name sounds Czech or Bohemian, but what the person considered themselves, is about the only way to tell if they were German or Czech. They were technically a citizen of Austria, but could have been ethnically Czech. There was the German admiral Walter Warzecha who had a Slavic or Polish surname, but was completely Germanized and was considered a German.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Warzecha

Thanks Polonius3 and Oberschlesien I guess ill never know.
And all Had very German first names like Johann Burda and Franz Petera ect

Just interesting to know... in the 1890s they migrated to Austria proper

In the 1890s could Czechs move to Austria proper? or only Germanised Czechs? and ethnic Germans?

Your ancestors were probably amongst the first Polish colonists to Ameirca, brought over from Śląsk by a priest named (believe it or not) Leopold Moczygemba. He set up the village of Panna Maria, Texas, said to be America's oldest permanent Polish settlement.

Polonius3, yes my ancestors originally went to Panna Maria in 1855, they were in the second group of colonists to Panna Maria, but they moved to Yorktown, Texas by 1862. Johann Warzecha was a sergeant in the confederate army, and survived the Civil War, but died in 1869 at the age of 43. He was digging a water well on his farm and suffocated after hitting a shallow pocket of natural gas.

This is sometimes very hard to tell.

When the All-Bohemian Social Democratic Party broke into a German and a Czech fraction in the early 1900s, due to massive differences caused by the rising ethnic tensions between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, there was the funny coincidence that the family name of the leader of the new German party was "Czech" while his Czech oponent bore the family name "Nemec".

In my school I had a (decendant of Sudeten Germans) school friend whose father's name was Eduard Benesch while in 1945 the Czech communist leader's name was Klement Gottwald.


I really did not know there is a settlement of Upper Silesians in Texas. I have close relatives in Austin so I traveled a lot around in Texas. I know there is a Sorbian village called "Serbin" not too far from Austin but an Upper Silesian settlement is news to me. Did they stay in contact with other immigrant settlements from Germany or, due to their Polish vernacular, did they stay among themselves before they got Americanized?


You need to check the Viennese telephone book. On some pages it looks like you looking for a person in Prague or Brno.

Funky Sanoan, the Silesians of Panna Maria, pretty much stayed to themselves. If you read some of the books about Panna Maria by T.Lindsay Baker, they say that there was a family of German Catholics that lived in Panna Maria and had a store there, and they all learned to speak Polish. They also tell about how the American cowboys after the Civil War would ride into the village and shoot up the place and ride their horses into the church. They did this because the Silesians were suspected of having Unionist sympathies during the Civil War. Some of the Silesians would change sides if captured by the Union forces, because they did not own slaves and had no real loyalty for the Confederacy. After all they thought they were coming to the United States, not the Confederate States, only a few years before the war.

I got my email contact in Germany, who grew up in Upper Silesia, to read the old letter from Johan Moczygemba and she said that it was about 90 percent like the modern Silesian language she spoke at home growing up. She was taught standard Polish in school and had to learn standard German when her family moved to Germany in the late 1970's.

I went to Serbin once to look around, but the museum was closed on the day I was there, so I just explored the cemetery and looked at Jan Kilians cabin.

That's hilarious, but very telling. Indeed, nothing is clear-cut with these territories and these peoples.

You probably know about the Nueces massacre (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre). More then 30 first generation German Texans that opposed slavery and remained loyal to the Union were massacred by Confederate soldiers in 1862.

I once saw a contemporary documentary film on Polish TV in which the inhabitants of Pana Maria in Texas still spoke very good Polish with some American accent. I was truly astonished that the Polish language there has surivived almost untouched since around 1850! The people were telling where their ancestors originally came from in the Opole region in Oberschlesien and showing the letters of their relatives in Oberschlesien to them, and all this in near-excellent Polish except for only a few of them who could only speak American English. Do you know perhaps what was their village of origin in Opolszczyzna (Opole region)?

I think living in rural areas may help conserve the Old World language better than urban milieux can. My late dad once went hunting up in northern Michigan and in Alpena (pronounced: al-PEE-na) ran across an oldtimer whom he could speak Polish with. It was fluent, if somewhat raspy, dialectal Polish. My dad asked him when he had come over to Ameirca and the chap replied: 'Panie, jo jest urodzony w Alpinie' (probably a reflex of the Germanised Polish of Prussia: ich bin geoboren, rather than urodziłem się).

Ziemowit: The older people in Panna Maria can usually still speak Polish. When I went to the visitor center in Panna Maria about 8 years ago, there was two older women working there and they started trying to speak Polish to me, but I only could speak English, so they talked to me in English also. I would not be able to tell if they spoke Polish good or not.

The first settlers came from around the village of Wielka Pluznica near Toszek or Gross Pluschnitz bei Tost. That was the home village of father Leopold Moczygemba, who first came to Texas to minister to the German immigrants in Texas in 1852, then he saw how the German settlers were prospering in Texas, so he wrote to his brothers back in Pluznica to come to America also. They passed the letter around the area and got a group of Immigrants together and left in the fall of 1854. So the first group was from Pluznica and the surrounding villages. One of the letters that is studied the most was from Johan Moczygemba from Pluznica.

My Ancestors Johann Warzecha and Margareth Kuczka were from Biestrzynnik and went to church in Szczedrzyk, and they came to Texas in the spring of 1855.

There is two books on the Silesian immigrants called Silesian Profiles and Silesian Profiles 2. Johann Warzecha and Margareth Kuczka were in Silesian Profiles 2. His brother in law Johann Kuczka was in the first book Silesian Profiles.There is a map of the villages in Upper Silesia that the immigrants came from on the website. silesiantexans.com/maps.htm It is the second map, the first map is one of where the Silesians settled in Texas.

Parisville, Michigan was probably the 2nd settlement of Prussian partition Poles. Their language also reflected German influence in such expressions as 'Mój wnuk je trzy lata stary' (drei Jahre alt).