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The Polish Trade Union in the Ruhr Coal Field: Labor Organization and Ethnicity in Wilhelmian Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Richard C. Murphy
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Extract

The German industrial revolution that transformed the unified Reich into the leading European economic power by the eve of the First World War was accompanied by an equally notable demographic revolution. In 1871 less than a third of the country's population lived in urban areas (population over two thousand); by 1910 more than 60 percent of Germans were city dwellers. That urban growth was brought about by a great internal migration. Among the millions who forsook the countryside for the expanding industrial centers were large numbers of Poles, Reich subjects native to the eastern provinces of Prussia. Thousands of them—perhaps as many as half a million—attracted by jobs in foundries and mines and courted by labor recruiters, migrated to the prototypical German industrial complex, the Ruhr (Ruhrgebiet). There the Poles not only experienced the universal problems of adjustment from rural to urban and preindustrial to industrial patterns, but were also threatened with the loss of ethnic identity.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 1978 , pp. 335 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1978

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References

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22. Koch, Die Bergarbeiterbewegung, p. 72. The number of Poles who were members of either the older unions or the ZZP grew steadily throughout this period. The percentage of organized Polish mine workers who were represented by the ZZP also increased—from 63.2 percent (of 19,000) in 1905 to 72.7 percent (of 44,000) in 1907.

23. Nachweisung über die in der Gemeinde Bottrop vorhandenen Polen und Masuren, Feb. 6, 1905 (Staatsarchiv Münster, RM VII, Nr. 35b).

24. This account is based on Koch, Die Bergarbeiterbewegung, pp. 77–108, who has made good use of the extensive sources.

25. The formal exchange of correspondence is found in Engel, “Der Bergarbeiterausstand im Ruhrbezirk im Jahre 1905,” Glückauf, no. 8 (02 1905), pp. 213–32.Google Scholar

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29. Landrat Recklinghausen an den Regierungspräsidenten, Münster, Feb. 28, 1905 (Staatsarchiv Münster, RM VII, Nr. 35b).

30. Wachowiak, Die Polen, p. 71.

31. Again, see Koch, Die Bergarbeiterbewegung, pp. 121–29, for an account of the strike of 1912.

32. Kirchhoff, Die staatliche Sozialpolitik, p. 174, stresses the different nature of this strike.

33. Ibid., p. 158.

34. Bottroper Volkszeitung, throughout the month, but especially on Mar. 13 and 16, 1912.