History / Frederick the Great governments from Poland's perspective [24]


Well at least he was never seen having women around him. And for King this always would have been a very easy thing. He paid visits to his wife once a year (!) and often he greated her with sentences like "The Queen has aged!".

History / Frederick the Great governments from Poland's perspective [24]


Frederich the Great managed to transform a small and insignificant state into one of the five European great powers that would shape the face of the continent until 1918. Unquestionably he had a great strategic talent. He was able to see the weak spots at his neighbors and he was ruthless enough to use those against them, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to steal Silesia from the Austrians and to forge an alliance against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the aftermath shoot an old European big player out of the game and erase it from the map.

He was probably gay! As a young man, he wanted to desert from Prussia with his putative lover an Hans Hermann von Katte in order to escape his tyrannic father Friedrich Wilhelm I. - the so-called "Soldier King" - who only cared for military matters. They were caught and incarcerated at Küstrin (present day Kostrzyn nad Odrą) . Frederic II. then was forced to watch the public decapitation of his friend Katte. He was so shocked that he lost his mind and fainted. After that he was still incarcerated for weeks and treated like an ordinary prisoner. It took the Roman-German emperor Karl VI. in Vienna, who interfered in this matter and expressed his concern to the "soldier king" that this is not a way to treat a person of noble blood that once would inherit the Electoral throne of Brandenburg. After these traumatic incidents Frederic II. personality changed and he hardened.

He was a great admirer of literature, his friendship with Voltaire is well documented and he even wrote music. The "Hohenfriedberger Marsch" is a great piece of march music. But he also was an emotionally cold man, hated women, rarely had a good word for his servants and did not spare the lives of his soldiers that he wasted in many battles.

So is he a model for the 21. century? Surely not! He probably made Prussia great but he also made the Prussians small. When he died Prussia was a great barrack yard. It is sad that other states had an army but Prussia was an army that had a state. His influence on Poland was surely devastating for Poles and what is with Germany? A weaker Prussia would have been even better for the Germans because Prussia then may have been merged into Germany and not Germany into Prussia, as it was in 1871.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

Don't feed the troll! It is a great relief to me that now, in the year 2015, it is possible to have fruitful discussions with my Polish friends, even under such a completely silly headline "When will you Poles give..." because no one gives a shxxt!


East Prussian toponyms were of Baltic and Polish origin up to 70 percent. It started after WWI that some cities Germanized their names, like the Masurian "Oletzko" turned into "Treuburg". Then in the year 1937 under Nazi rule more than 2,000 East Prussian towns and villages were forced to adopt German style names, with no reference to their original ones, in order to disguise the Non-German origin of the territory. Cities with beautiful names like for instance Pillkallen were named Schlossberg, Stallupönen had to take the name Ebenrode, Darkehmen turned into Angerapp, even beautiful river names like the Szeszuppe were turned into the ridiculous and boring German word "Ostfluss" (Eastern River). In some counties people no longer could orient themselves on maps for a while because practically every village was renamed.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

It's the same with Alsacians in Eastern France. Until the 1970 most of the population there, in der everyday lifes, spoke their Alemannic dialect, similar to the German spoken in Switzerland and the German state of Baden-Württemberg in the South West. They are definitely of German origin, in fact the area was annexed by French King Louis XIV. after the 30 years war. But it doesn't change the fact they consider themselves French and not German.

I think the same is true for many members of the German minority in Poland. Most of them are definitely of Polish stock, but if they choose to consider themselves German, what can you do about that?

All nations are "imagined communities" anyway. I would say more than 30 percent of all Germans are originally of Slavic origin and what do you think? How many Poles are of non-slavic origin: From the Pre-Indo-European original European population, Germanic, Celtic and Baltic?


Yes, his surname meant something like "Squirrel" in Old-Prussian. Just take the Lithuanian word for squirrel, the living language that is closest to Old Prussian. There squirrel means "voverė".

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

But you are right with your assumption. In the 1990s I meat several Upper Silesians with German passports that hardly spoke a word of German.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


Didn't I write that - the ones I saw on TV?

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


I saw people from the Upper Silesian German minority on German television several times. They all speak good, for most of the time grammatically correct German, but they all had very strong Polish dialects. But it should that before the war the Upper Silesian German dialect had a very strong interference from the Polish language, in fact they sounded like a Poles trying to immitate the Lower Silesian German dialect.

German Lower Silesian also had interferences from Polish, but to a lesser extent, for instance the complete absence of the German Umlaut "ü" - the sound between u and i that Poles and other Slavs hava a hard time to imitate. Lower Silesians always replaced the "ü" with an "i", just like most Poles do when they speak German, so "Bihne" instead of "Bühne" (stage). This sometimes lead to funny misunderstands, when German Silesians wanted to have a bag (German: Tüte) but instead they sad "tit" (German: Titte).

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


Due to the fact the East Prussians were atomized in 1945 and their ancestors were spread all over Germany more than about 1 percent of the Germans have surnames with Old Prussian or Lithuanian origin, like:

Kallweit (Smith), Wowereit (Squirrel), Naujoks (Newman, Nowak), Adomait (Son of Adam), Kurpjuhn (Shoemaker), Lenkuhn (Pole) and so on

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

East Prussian was a beautiful dialect. It was unique among German dialects because it retained a sizable amount of Old-Prussian substrate and many loanwords from Lithuanian and Polish/Masurian, like

Alus for beer
Flins for pancake
Panewka for pan
Kujel for pig
Marjell for little girl

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


I guess if you click your way through youtube you are going to find some old recordings.

Here is something from Nazi German time I found. Apparently some German ethnologists went out to all areas of Germany, Austria, Danzig and the Czech Lands in years from 1935 to 1937 and recorded the German dialects they heard there.

The result was something like a jukebox called "Lautdenkmal reichsdeutscher Mundarten" (Sound Monument of Reich German Dialects). They wanted to devote their efforts to the "Führer" but to their misfortune Hitler hated dialects. He wanted to be the people he considered as German to be as uniform as possible. So he disencouraged the whole project and the "Sound Monument" was forgotten in an archive in Marburg.

It was rediscovered in the 1970s and today it is a valuable source of spoken German dialects how they were spoken just two years before the horrors of WWII began that destroyed old Europe and many of its dialects.

Here the link: uni-marburg.de/~naeser/ld00.htm

For Low Prussian dialects (spoken from Danzig/Gdansk to Memel/Klaipeda please click on:
13. Danzig / Gdansk
18. Elbing / Elbląg
24. Angerburg / Węgorzewo
26. Stallupönen / Nesterow
68. Tilsit / Sovetsk

For German Silesian dialects please click on:
48. Ober Hermsdorf/A village close to present day Nysa
4. Baberhäuser-Hirschberg / Jelenia Góra

There are many old German dialects there to discover.

Please don't bother if you speak German but nevertheless hardly understand anything. Even I have a hard time understanding them. Since all of these dialects are close to extinction the 21st century German ear for dialects has forgotten about those ones. But its a good way to grasp the sound of the dialects

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


I guess we all would be surprised to find out how many dead languages our ancestors spoke in the last 3,000 years if we had the means of following that.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


You are probably right. In the long run the Sorbian language is moribund and it is unlikely it will survive the 21st century! If mocking about the language of the Grandpartents is the last stage of a language before it dies then Sorbian is only one step before that. Every speaker of Sorbian is probably more fluent in German. They all have no accents when they speak German but a German accent when they speak their mother language.

Ironically it was the shifting of the German border to the Oder-Neisse line (alongside with lignite mining in the GDR of course, that destroyed Dozens of Sorbian villages from the 1950 to 1989) that gave the last killing blow to Sorbian. Up to twelve million Germans, that had to leave their former homes in Central and Eastern Europe, were flooding into the FRG, GDR and Austria. They had to be integrated everywhere all around the country, also in the language area of the Sorbs. Since every Sorb is fluent in German they began to switch their conversation from Sorbian to German when only one Non-Sorbian speaker was around, so Sorbian gradually began to fade from public spaces.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

They are very different by phenotype, so they appear to be very different, but they are not so different by genotype. The last person that spoke the language that is the progentor of Slavic and Germanic languages probably is not older than 4,000 to 4,500 years. For the history of man this is no more than a blink.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


They surely didn't!

We all just should not forget that a language that is not standardized - like all European languages exept Latin and Greek were 2,000 years ago - just had tremendously fast mutation rates. Languages could change so fast when there were given from generation to generation that you could compare it to the game "Chinese whispers" (German: "Stille Post", Polish: "Głuchy telefon"). Every person in the game that gets a word whispered is like one generation. So after only 100 years or five generations a language could be transformed to an almost incomprehensable new form.

Since the dawn of mass media and standardization most of the European languages got frozen, mostly in the form they had in the 1750s. An average German surely can master a written German text from the 1760s while the same text in the Middle High German, spoken 1360 might be very difficult to understand.

So Germanic and Slavic languages may sound very different now but this does not mean they were not much more similar 3.000 years ago. Everyone can see that Slavic and Germanic languages still have striking similarities when it comes to basic words:

Milch/milk/mleko
Wasser/water/woda
Mühle/mill/młyn
Schwester/sister/siostra
zwei/two/dwa

You could go one and go one with that list.

So why making a dichotomy between Germanic and Slavic languages instead of accepting these language groups still are relatively close related?


The last speaker with Polabian as mother language died in 1756, the last person with some limited knowledge of Polabian died in 1825, according to Wikipedia. As you noted those speakers lived in the very west of the former Polabian language area, in an area in Lower Saxony called "Wendland". Note: "Wende" is the old German word for Slav.

Of course the last forms of polabian were heavily Germanized. Just check the Polabian Lord's prayer:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polabian_language

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


A common language without any scripture, without newspapers, television and radio? I doubt that! Lets say there were a bunch of closely related village vernaculars but surely no uniform progenitor language.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

Sure, but they remain in the German Slav contact zone. A large portion of both states, Germany and Poland, have a large share of that area.

It should be our major goal to overcome the anachronistic romantic 19 century concept of nation - the one that Crow loves so much - that sees the people solely as a community of descent with a common language as expression of closeness. This concept has neglected a great deal the amount of mixing that always has occurred between neighboring nations especially in that Germanic Slavic contact zone. Here a good Wikipedia article:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania_Slavica

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

What happens at the Polish-German border is just what happened on Germany's western borders 20 years before. Since the border becomes invisible it becomes more and more blurred. When driving vom Aachen on the German western border zu Belgium or the Netherlands you sometimes have problems to spot the border point. Suburbs of Aachen spread several kilometers deep into both neighboring countries.

By the way: before the war there were no two people in Europe that were so mixed and intertwined as Germans and Poles. We should not forget that the sharp and small border that still exists between Germany and Poland today is something new for us. Just look at the German-Polish language border of the year 1910 on this map. The languages switched sometimes from village to village over an are of several hundred kilometers. Linguistic enclaves were common:


The Lower Sorbian language is still alive, but unfortunately its original unique Slavic accent was replaced by a more German like one. For those of you who want to listen to how contemporary Sorbian sounds:

ardmediathek.de/tv/Wuhladko/Wuhladko-Das-Magazin-in-sorbischer-Spr/MDR-SACHSEN/Video?documentId=29856188&bcastId=7545372

Watch their news! The more clicks they get the more air time on TV they receive.

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History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


True! But it doesn't change the fact that last week a bunch of neo-nazis attacked red cross aid-workers with stones that try to help refugees from 3rd world countries. One young woman was seriously injured. What a disgrace!

I know the majority of East Germans is disgusted too by pictures like this. But I would not say there is a smashing peace, love and harmony attitude regarding the East German relationship with foreigners.

Much has improved at the German-Polish border, and the concept of trying to re-unite the divided cities Kostrzyn/Küstrin-Kiez, Frankfurt-Oder/Słubice, Guben/Gubin and Görlitz/Zgorzelec by trying to make them true bi-national cities with is worthy of all support. Nevertheless the German-Polish border - at least on the German side - is threatened to become a wasteland! All cities there have lost more than 25% of their population since 1990.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


The problem with Germany is that it is too powerful to be something like a big Switzerland or Austria. I detest war like you but it would be rather naive to think the rest of the world will leave Europe or Germany in silence if they noticed we are not able and ready to defend ourselves.

Unfortunately the present situation appears to me that Germany is too powerful for Europe that it just fits into the line with other European nations, and simultaneously it is too small to dominate the European continent. Besides Germany is not able to be the European hegemon because not enough time has elapsed since the Nazi terror. You saw it in Greece and in Portugal. When the going gets tough and Germany has to take tough decisions everybody will see the Nazis or at least the revenants of Kaiser Wilhelm in us. And last but not least our politicians are not able to play the role of a hegemon, just like American politicans can. They just learned to hide behind the strong back of the USA.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


I agree with most of your post, but why do you think President Gauck is a war monger? Please specify!

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4501]


Doesn't make we wonder since most of the Masurians left or had to leave for Germany in 1945. Probably her original Polish name was Orczikowski then which was Germanized to "Ortzikowsky" since the "cz"-Sound is difficult to reproduce in written German, because you need for letters for it ("tsch") and "Ortschikowski" sounds and looks a bit silly in German.

Thank you very much for your help!

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]


Is it in English language? Then I'll give it a try!

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4501]

Thank you. As far as I know her ancestors were from Masuria exclusively. Since the German "tz" is the equivalent of the Polish "c" it is problable the original Polish spelling was "Orcikowski".

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]

I should also be noted there was a great sense of being treated unfairly by the allies and its Polish and Lithuanian neighbors in East Prussia.

The interbellum Polish-German political relations never were good but they deterioted more and more in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and finanlly to such an extent that an economoc war between both countries started. Therefore East Prussia was practically locked away from the rest of Germany and only to reach unchecked by air and sea! Due to that fact the East Prussian economy almost broke down completely and therefore the standard of life was much lower than in the rest of Germany.

Did you guys know that the German-Polish Vistula border that existed from 1919 to 1939 between Poland, East Prussia and the Free City of Danzig never was in the middle or on the shore of the river but a couple of meters inland on the East Prussian side? Even farmers were no longer allowed to let their cattle drink from Vistula water. At least five or ten meters before the river there was the German-Polish border.

Here a map with the demarcation line:



Don't misunderstand me! This, of course, does not justify the German assault on Poland in September 1939 but helps to explain why so many East Prussian voted for the Nazi party.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4501]

Hello and greetings from Frankfurt/Germany. A good friend of mine with ancestors from Masuria bears the germanized Polish name "Ortzikowsky". Does it have a meaning. She does not know and I would like to tell her.

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]

So many things got lost irretrievably in central and eastern Europe. The older I get the more I understand the magnitude of crime and malefaction that was caused by National Socialism (and not to forget Stalinism too, of course).

I once saw a great French-German documentary (filmed in 2004) about the Kaliningrad/Königsberg situation, which I can highly recommend to anyone who is interessted in the topic:

docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Koenigsberg_is_Dead

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]


Hey Jon, I never doubted that the destructive politics of the Nazi governement ist responsible for the annihilation of permanent German presence east of the rivers Oder and Neisse! I just wanted to make clear that not every German was a Nazi and some people were Nazis without being German.

It should be noted that the NSDAP had extraordinary high election results in East Prussia, especially in Mazuria, despite the fact hat many people there still spoke their Polish-Mazowian dialect as venacular.


If everyone is guilty who benefits from an injust situation then we all in the first world are doomed, because our way of life and life standard is based on the abuse and looting of third world resources!

There is a German proverb, problably there is a similar Polish phrase too: "Wer den Wind sät, wird den Sturm ernten!" (Those who sow the wind will reap the storm!)

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]


I agree on that. I don't see that Russia is going to give up Kaliningrad. Why should they?

Nevertheless if things in Russia should continue to go wrong - what I don't hope - and Russia should destabilize to such an extent that at least parts of it break apart, then we would be stupid if we didn't make any mind games. To me it is pretty clear that Kaliningrad could not become part of another state, neither Poland nor Lithuania nor Germany. It could become an independent state or semi-autonomous territory, embedded in European structures. But the territory surely would remain a Russian speaking territory with Russian traditions. It is not unlikely that many cities in the territory will get their original German names back, eventually. The city with the ridiculous name "Sovetsk" at the Lithuanian border, until 1946 known under the reputable name "Tilsit" is begging for years in Moscow to get its old name back, but Putin refuses.


Nazi Germany wouldn't have been so terrifying successful if it hadn't had millions of supporters among other nations! Also there were millions of Germans either unpolitical or in opposition to the Nazis.

Responsible for the Nazi crimes are those who perpetrated them, either German - which the vast majority of the Nazi apparatus was - or any other nation! And a German child that was so unfortunate to be in East Prussia in January 1945 surely was not responsible for her fate. I hope we can agree on that!

History / Future of Kaliningrad Oblast - is it possible to annex by Poland or will it become an independent country? [137]

So the former inhabitants of East Prussia, the woman and children, are the sole responsible people for the outbreak of WWII?

Besides that "Königsberg" maybe a historical term now, but I bet it will be the future name of the city in twenty or thirty years because it is very unlikely that the city will be named after mass murderer Kalinin forever! Don't get me wrong! Like the vast majority of Germany I don't want East Prussia back! The root has been torn out in 1945, and Germany, the same as Poland and Lithuania by the way, does not have the demographic power to recolonize it.

Therefore I think it should be the major goal of all Europeans to ensure that the Kaliningrad Oblast does not cause any trouble in the future for its neighbours.

News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]


And Poland wanted Germany to finally accept the Oder-Neisse-Border. Regarding the French view on Germany I always remember a phrase that was very common in France around 1990: "We like Germany so much that we are happy there are two of them!".