Language / Polish language would look better written in Cyrillic Script? [212]


But this is an important point! In 1912, a hundred years ago, all written german looked like that:

Ironically it was the Nazis that promoted Latin letters during WWII because they ridiculously found the "gebrochene Schrift" Jewish by origin. Nevertheless I think it was to the advantage that German speakers adopted the Latin Antiqua letters that most of the other European languages have, too. Admittedly Gothic or Fraktur letters are much closer to the Latin alphabet - actually it's just a side alphabet of Antiqua - than cyrillic letters are to Latin.

It' a nice pastime to look what Polish would look like written in Cyrillic letters. Even German would fit perfectly into the Cyrillic alphabet. Just a few extra letters needed to be found and everything would work well.

But which government would spend billions of Euros or Zlotys to change the alphabet? It would also deprive future generations from their past. Modern Turks need to learn the Arab script first - which takes a couple of months to be fluent - until they are able to read Turkish texts written before 1924.

History / Questions about Polish borders, Galicia and Cossacks. [50]


This may be right, but you can be sure you'll also find many Germans and Poles that respected each other and intermarried.
There are no special relations between Ukrainians and Germans, despite the fact that the Klitschko brothers started their international boxing career in Germany and are still very popular there. ;-)


Right! But what does this prove? Because of the fact that Ukraine is a new nation it does not have as many rights as old nations like Poland and Germany, or what?


So is Leipzig, Dresden, Rostock, Chemnitz, Potsdam, Cottbus, Görlitz, Schwerin, Stralsund, Frankfurt/Oder and Lübeck. Other German cities like Cologne, Ratisbone, Mainz and Koblenz were founded by Romans and Kassel was founded by Celts. Do you think these cities are less German than Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg - cities that were founded by Germanic tribes?

This is backward 19th century thinking. To say the old Germanics that lived in central Europe are the exclusive ancestors of the Germans while the West Slavs that moved there in the 5th century are the exclusive ancenstors of Poles, is nationalisic propaganda, because all of them are the ancestors of all of us.

The Germans are a mixed race, the same as Poles, French, Brits or Ukrainians. The only difference is in Poland a Slavic language remained dominant and formed the Polish language while in Germany Germanic dialects remained dominant and formed a Germanic based language.

Therefore it is futile and useless to argue who was there first.

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

Did you know that Kurt Schumacher, the first opposition leader of the Federal Republic of Germany was a huge friend of the Polish people?

As leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) he was the opponent of Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Conservative (CDU) first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Born in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian city Chełmno, in German times called "Kulm in Westpreußen", a city that had two thirds Polish an one third German inhabitants around 1900, most of his classmates and later friends were Poles. Like most members of the German minority in Chelmno his family lived there for centuries alongside the Polish citizens. One of his closest friends was Franciszek Raszeja, who later became a well known Polish Professor for medizine [wiki] and got killed by the Nazis in 1942 while he tried to save the life of a Jew. Their friendship even went so far that Raszeja introduced him to the forbidden Polish Philomath Society where Schumacher spent a lot of time discussing with Polish students about politics. Schumacher learned Polish from his friends and spoke it fluently.

As a convinced Social Democrat the Nazis send him to various concentration camps Schumacher only survived as a very sick man. Nevertheless after the war he succeded in the re-establishment of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. His strict anti-communism saved the Social Democrats of West Germany to become instrumentalized by East German communists.

Due to lack of communication between communist Poland and West Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s he could not regain contacts to those of this Polish friends that survived WWII, which he always lamented about. As a sick man he died in 1952.

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


The size of a country is not important but what is on that territory. Otherwise Russia, Canada and Denmark (with Greenland) would be the world's major powers. Germany now is 40 percent smaller as it was in 1912 but it's economic importance is bigger than ever.


You are getting cynical, Grubas.

Yes, Germany did not volonteer to transfer her territories east of Oder-Neisse to Poland in 1945, but Germany has accepted it. And the former German inhabitants of those territories have it, too! Germany and Austria did everything to integrate the 12 million German refugees, so now they don't cause any harm or trouble, unlike the Palestinians that were expelled from what is now Israel in 1948. Many of them still live in refugee camps, still possess the keys to houses that no longer exist for over 60 years, and some of them still fire rockets on Israelian territory because their primary goal is to destroy the state of Israel in order to return "home".

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

From a Polish point of view it seems to make perfect sense to see the "northern and western territories" as a compensation, because the Russians or Soviets only returned Podlachia with Białystok to Poland in 1945 and kept the rest of their share from the "4th Polish partition" for the Soviet Union and their successor states.

From a German point of view the loss of all territories east of Oder-Neisse surely is seen a reparation to Poland. Of course this does not necessarliy mean we are even regarding Nazi Germany's crimes towards the Polish society. Most Germans therefore don't expect Poles to say "thank you" for these territories, I just wanted to write something because Grubas' statement that Poland received nothing from Germany as a compensation is simply not true.

It is not that the Polish state only received the territory but also the private property (or what was left of it admittedly) from all of its 7 million former inhabitants. Yes, most cities were destroyed and plundered.

I don't want to sound cynical now, but looking at the experiences West Germans made in rebuilding their destroyed cities, it seems to be much easier to rebuild an almost completely destroyed city than to build a new city on the field. Look how my homecity of Frankfurt looked in May 1945:



Only 10 years later Frankfurt was one most important business locations of Western Europe. The reason is much of the infrastructure is still there, like streets, canalisation, foundations and so on.

Don't get me wrong, my Polish friends. I've been to Poland for the first time in 2010. I spent ten days in your country. First in Poznan, then Torun, then Gdansk, and after Gdansk we took a trip along the Baltic See over Ustka, then Kolobreg until Miedzyzdroje and then over Szczecin back to Germany.

I enjoyed it very much. The way you rebuild Torun und Gdansk is just stunning. I also liked the city center of Szczecin. I was a bit disappointed from Kolobrzeg, but it does not look uglier than medium sized cities in Eastern Germany. I have great respect for the Polish reconstruction efforts. My respect even gets bigger if I imagine that you rebuild those cities without receiving hundreds of millions of Marshall plan Dollars from the Americans, as West Germans did from 1947 to 1955.

So does it sound right to you if I write Poland got a halfway compensation from Germany in the form of the Oder-Neisse territories while the Russians so far returned nothing to you?

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


I just read he arrived in Vienna with 30,000 men not 3,000 as I wrote. I also didn't know he was the elected commander of the of the Imperial Holy Roman Forces. Here is a good summary about the Battle of Vienna and the crucial role of Jan III Sobieski: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

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

Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and East Brandenburg (Lubusz) and the territory of the Free City of Danzig should be considered as reparations.

Love / Is it acceptable for a Polish male to have a German girlfriend? [58]


Hahaha! Get your point!

Love / Is it acceptable for a Polish male to have a German girlfriend? [58]


But over the centuries it was pretty normal for Germans and Poles to mix and interbreed. You will hardly find two other nations in Europe that have mixed so much as Germans and Poles. So having a German or Polish girlfriend or boyfriend is like getting back to normal.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]

Jan Sobieski was respected and honored in every German speaking city in the late 17th century, because Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, most definitely would have fallen into the hands of the Turks, that besieged the city for months in the year 1683, if he and 3,000 Polish Winged Hussars haven't bailed out the city.

By the way: his crucial role in the Battle of Vienna was systematically neglected in Prussian and German historiography during the Polish partitions until the 1990s. When I went to school in Bavaria in the 1980s we never learned anything about Jan Sobieski and the very important role of Poland in saving the city, when the Turkish siege of Vienna was on the agenda. I read about it the first time in the early 1990s. But this has changed, now in every German documentation about the siege of Vienna Jan Sobieski's role is prominentely explained.

So surely the Danzigers liked and honored him, too. But I think they were loyal to him because he was a wise and capable king and not because he was an ethnic Pole. Under his rule a standard of living was possible in Danzig that wouldn't have been possible in one of the German states of the year 1683. Don't forget there was war in Germany from 1618 until 1648, so many parts of Germany still were devestated. Ethnicity did not play a big role in early modern Europe! So the Danzigers probably followed the old Roman proverb: Ubi bene ibi patria! (Where it is well there is the fatherland!)


You are right about that, but at the time when the buildings were constructed in Danzig, the Netherlands still were a part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Actually many of the "German" settlers that colonized the area around Danzig in the 1300s came from present day Holland and Flanders. The German dialect that was spoken in Danzig until the expulsion in 1945 still resembled a lot of Dutch. So the area of Northern Central Europe in early modern times was one cultural sphere dominated by Low German/Dutch/Flemish which was very much the same language in the 1700s.


Yes, it is difficult to explain that. After the 30 year's war the Holy Roman Empire was pretty much dysfunctional. States began to fight against each other and bigger states like Austria and Brandenburg began to acquire territory outside the sphere of the Holy Roman Empire (Hungary, Prussia, Polish Particions etc,). But the realm still existed until Napoleon abolished it in 1806.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]

Hitler and the Nazis wanted to destroy the Polish state and nation completely. What can be worse than that?
I don't know which plans Stalin originally had for Poland and the Poles. The fact that in Katyn and other places he began to kill the Polish elite, too, like the Nazis did, is pretty ominous. But at least after 1945 there was a Polish state and a place where Poles could live so I wouldn't say Stalin was much worse than Hitler (to the Poles).


True, but there is one detail thats importance should not be underestimated. The loyality of the German speaking Danzigers went to a multi-ethnical and multi-cultural Polish state and King, not to a modern Polish nation state.

Yes, Scots, Flemings, Dutchs and Kashubians and some Russians also lived in Danzig, but it does not change the fact that the (North and Low) German element was predominant in Gdansk over many centuries.

I notized many times that some Poles try to overstate the Flemish and Dutch element of the historic Danzig city culture in order to diminish the German one. Until the 20th century the differences between Low German, Dutch and Flemish were just minor. There still is a complete dialect continuum between all three languages and all languages are mutually intelligible. In Danzig Low German was replaced by High German only in the first decades of the 20th century.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


The city names Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Rostock, Schwerin, Potsdam, Görlitz and the names of hundreds of other German cities are also Slavic by origin? Does this mean these cities are less German than Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg? What about Cologne, Mainz, Regensburg which were founded by the Romans? Should countries like France and Italy make claims for these cities because of that?

I wrote enough about Gdansk which was a city of the Polish/Lithuanian Commonweath inhabited by a German speaking majority for centuries. It's a proper Polish city since 1945 and nothing is going to change that.

Wroclaw indeed was a city of the Polish realm until the 14th century but what does this mean for today? Your argumentation is dangerous because in return Germans of the year 2700 (if there still is something like Germany and Poland which I doubt) could make claims for Szczecin and Wroclaw because the city populations were predominantly German 700 years before.

This whole discussion is completely fruitless because neither Germany nor Poland have the demographic power to repopulate even one city like Szczecin or L'viv.


Does this mean there are no legally binding treaties for Poland regarding its border with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine? Are you sure about that?

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]

You have examples for this?

Even Yanukovych wouldn't like to become Putin's backer. The Russians didn't succeed too much in making friends the recent years and they lost a lot of their charisma.

If you ask me it's more probable the Russian Federation breaks apart in the next fifty years than there will be a Soviet Union 2.0. But agin: everything is possible and I might be wrong.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


Nobody can foresee the future.

Who in the year 1900 would have thought that only 20 years later Poland would be an independent country again. Which Pole of the the year 1920 would have thought only 30 years later Wroclaw and Szczecin would be Polish cities and all Germans would have left.

Everything is possible.

But I don't think the majority of Ukrainians will give up their independence to become "Little Russians" again.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


Yes, it's a joke. I just read it again. Sorry folks! Still have to learn about the Polish humour! ;-)

America is still a very young nation and they never had to deal with decline and defeat, until now! They will have to learn a lot in the next decades, the hard way, if they don't take care! We Germans owe a lot to Americans and I hope they will have wise politicians the next years. The Western world needs them.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]

Really? Then please indulge me by answering the following questions:

How do you want to move the Polish eastern frontier back to the state of the year 1600, without fighting a war against Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia? Since Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania would fight for their existence as independent states and nations you better should be prepared for a lot of resistance from their side, let alone the Russians with thousands of nuclear weapons they still possess.

Who in the world would support Poland in its vendetta? What is going to happen with the population that lives in these territories?

Also I guess you want to leave the present German-Polish where it is since 1945 or do you want to "return" to the historical border between the Holy Roman Empire and the First Rzeczpospolita?

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


You are absolutely right about that! But please note the Holy Roman Empire is as German or Non-German as the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita is Polish in the modern sense of the word.

I've always found it interesting that in many Polish discussions the Holy Roman Empire does not play a role at all, while in contrary the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is treated like it was an ethnically uniform state. The amount of ethnic Germans in the HRR was higher than the amount of Poles in the First Rzeczpospolita.

History / Ukrainian-occupied Eastern Poland [135]


Didn't Poland accept its Eastern Border with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in international treaties?

As a German I can deeply understand that some of you refuse to accept Lwów, Wilno, Bresc and other Kresy cities as foreign territory, but there are certain realities that need to be accepted: Poland does not have the demographic power to (re-)Polonize those cities. It couldn't even Polonize one single city like present day Lviv that is close to the Polish eastern border. How many Poles would like to move to Lviv if they had the chance to?

Or would you leave the Ukrainian population there and then try to govern a city, thats population probably would react hostile to Polish state representatives?

In my opinion both scenarios would isolate Poland in Europe completely and destroy the Polish economy.

History / Are you proud of Polish colours? [27]


No, the black, red and golden flag goes back to the "Lützowsches Freichorps". A Prussian guerrilla unit that fought against the Napoleonic troops in 1813. The used black uniforms with red and golden knobs and German nationalism with a strong anti-French sentiment as ideology.

They used these colors on their uniforms because the colors of the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire (of the German nation) were black, red and gold.

History / Are you proud of Polish colours? [27]


Did you guys know that the German republican black, red and gold flag was first displayed alongside the Polish white and red colors at the Hambacher Fest in 1832? German and Polish patriots together were demonstrating for the freedom of their nations.

Here is a German stamp that remembers this incident:

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

I am German and I was born and raised in Germany. You can't beat that!
And if you think modern Germans only care about work and don't know how to enjoy their private lifes then you obviously know not very much about your western neighbour. "Erst die Arbeit, dann das Vergnügen" is one of the most primitive and out-dated cut and dried opinions about Germans. What is next? Germans have no hearts and are like robots?

This is just like if I said Poles are lazy and are not capable of organizing a state or other complicated organisations. This is what Germans were tought in Imperial Germany because the Prussians needed an apology why they helped to get rid of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Who are the Germans anyway? Between the mentalities of a Swabian and a Hamburger or a Rhinelander and a Brandenburger are worlds of differences.

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


"Erst die Arbeit, dann das Vergnügen" may have been popular as a proverb in Germany until the 1960s, but the majority of 21st Century Germans does not take it too serious. Germany very much has developed into a leisure time society. Just look at German TV.

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


You don't need any Allies to tell you this. A visit at the WWII section of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin can help you.
And what happened to the millions of Poles that were alive before 1939 and dead after 1945? What is your explanation if they were not killed by Nazi Germans and Soviets?

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


So what about street names? Did you rename street names in Polish cities in order to honor your lost Kresy cities after 1990? I guess it was forbidden under the communists to remember the Kresy territories in public. In West Germany every major city has its Breslauer, Stettiner, Danziger and Königsberger Straße.

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


Then please correct me with valuable data if I should be wrong. All the demographical data I find in the net says differently, Ironside. Like this ethnographical map that shows dominant languages within Poland in the year 1937: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Poland1937linguistic.jpg


When the Nordstream pipeline was planned the Polish-German relations under Schröder and Kaczynski were really bad, so Schröder made that egoistic move. The Polish fears to be encircled and isolated again were underestimated from the German side. Mistake! Probably not the last one in the Polish-German relationship.


Agreed! The problem is, believe it or not, Germans don't want to lead Europe! It was so easy to let the Americans, Brits and French do all the politics and Germans only do business.

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


"Germany" can be seen as a metaphore for the German state, the German culture or for certain German regions. You are the one that sees Germany as the state only.


I think it does. The European population is shrinking in comparison with Asia, Africa and Latin America. The European economies are losing ground, too. China, the USA and most other states don't really care about Europe's opinion in world politics. But at least Europe is the only continent in the world that transports a new idea that never was there before: the idea that nations and states that were deadly enemies for centuries co-operate and try to form supra-national structures in order to use synergetic effects, because all states together are more powerful as every state for itself. This idea worked pretty well between Western European states. It is more difficult between Germany and its Eastern neighbours, which understandable after all that happened in the past, but do we have a viable alternative as to co-operate? I know trust needs its time but we need to work on that.

Did Poland really make such a "terrible deal" when its borders were shifted west? Let's be honest: Poles were in the minority in the Kresy territories. The big cities like Wilno and Lwów had Polish majorites, but Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians formed an abundantly clear majority in most parts of the countryside. Also the former German territories were much more developed.

Don't get me wrong: Like most Germans I wouldn't have shifted the borders of Poland west in 1945, and I would appreciate if Breslau, Stettin, Liegnitz and Kolberg still were German cities. But the reality of the year 2012 is different from that and this has been finally accepted from the German side more than 20 years ago, legally binding! Stalin shifted Poland's border west because he had an evil plan: He wanted to keep half of Poland's interbellum territory for the Soviet Union and he thought that Germans would never accept the Polish border at the rivers Oder and Neisse. Therefore Poland had no other alternative but to stay an ally of Russia eternally. Let's not grant "Uncle Joe" this success.

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


I read your post several times because I thought I misread something in the latter part of your post. Do you really wanna say Hitler's intention was to make Poland a Dominion of Germany, just like Ireland was to England or Hawaii to the US? Even if Hitler should have made such an proposal to Churchill in June 1940 it is pretty obvious this was ludicrous attempt to led astray the Brits and the other Western allies, because the Western half of Poland was already annexed to Germany, and I don't mean the frontier of the year 1914 but also Greater Polish cities like Lodz were annexed to Germany. Millions of Poles were deprived of even the simplest human rights and being already expelled from their homes and deported to the "General Gouvernment", hundreds of thousands of members of the Polish elite were already killed. Which frontiers of Poland did Hitler guarantee to Churchill?

The occupation of Poland was something completely different from the Nazi German occupation of France, the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway, which was a rather classical occupation of defeated states during a war, except for the hundreds of thousands of Western and Northern European Jews of course.

What the Nazis did in Poland was not a normal occupation but a systematic program to annihilate the Polish nation and millions of Polish individuals. I don't wanna get too deep into that, but it appears to me you have a lack of knowledge what happened East of the German frontiers in the years 1939 to 1945, so would suggest you read a bit about what happened in the "Generalgouvernement", before you write nonsense like this, which is a slap in the faces of millions of victims and their kinsmen. Wikipedia might be a good start: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Government

-----------------------------------------

I agree with you that Germany is not the sole responsible nation for the outbreak of WWI, and that the inhabitants of Danzig were deprived of their right of self-determination in 1919 when the allies decided to create the Free City of Danzig. Obviously the Danzigers wanted to remain within Germany borders.


Ironside, I would have expected you know that the areas Prussia annexed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Greater Poland (Provinz Posen) and most parts of Royal Prussia (Westpreußen) were returned to Poland without a plebiscite. It is debatable if the majority of inhabitants of Westpreußen/Pomorze/Royal Prussia would have voted for Poland in 1919.

I know your opinion that you think injustice - as the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century definitely was - does not expire and therefore the German inhabitants in these territories did not have the right of self determination.


Every nation if pursuing her own interests. This is not a secret. But the vast majority of Germans have learned that Germany needs to be well integrated into a European framework of co-operating states if Germany wants to be successful. Question is do Poland and Germany have the same interests. In a world where the European influence is shrinking rapidly I think the answer is yes.

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


This is utter nonsense! I know this happened once to a non-married Polish father of a child with German citizenship, but this rather proves that fathers in Germany that have no rights except paying money for their children, if the child's mother wants it that way, than a systematic discrimination of Poles. The responsible official at the youth welface office, that ordered that the Polish father is not allowed to speak Polish with his child, is a complete idiot, but this is an individual case and not the basic rule. You are putting it out of proportion. In my post office in Frankfurt there is a Polish woman working and she has a big sign in front of her where you can read in big letters: "Mówię po polsku!" (I hope i wrote it correct).

Regarding Erich Kempka: I once saw it on German TV that he had Polish parents. Doesn't the Wikipedia article acknowledge that?

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


I said Germanized Pole. Or more precisely a German with Polish parents. Big difference! He obviously lost the ethnic identity of his parents totally and was Germanized within one generation. Hard to understand someone is able to suppress the provenance and culture of his parents or grand parents in such a radical way.

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

I found another example for a Germanized Pole, a rather interesting one.

Erich Kempka, son of Polish immigrants to the Ruhr area. He was Adolf Hitler's chauffeur, member of the SS and the Lebensborn organisation, that esoterical association that tried to create the "aryan super human" by systematically interbreeding "racially precious" folks and steeling blonde and blue-eyed children from Poland and other occupied countries. Polish probably was his first language, learned from his parents, but he refused to speak it. Funilly his wifes maiden name was: Daranowski. He peacefully passed away in lovely Freiberg am Neckar in 1975:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Kempka