Goths, Slavs, Teutons, Poles, and Prussians: Migrations, Colonizations, Empires

The “colonial” history of the Wartheland stretches back as far as one is willing to expand the notion of colonialism. Scholars tend to initially describe specific groups as “migrating” before deciding at some later chronological point that those same groups are now “colonizing,” a fascinating rhetorical shift I shall return to later in this section. Peoples migrated into and through this region for thousands of years, cultures vaguely referred to as Celtic, or Baltic, depending on archeological finds. From 1000 BCE, Germanic tribes moved south from Scandinavia, migrating as far west as the Rhine by 100 BCE. Specific to our story of “Germans” and “Poles” in the Wartheland, the first group to settle were “German.” Germanic forest peoples settled along the coast, where they mixed with elements of Celtic culture and achieved, around 50 CE, “ethnogenesis” as the Goths.Footnote ¹ By 150 CE, the Goths had spread south toward Ukraine and Romania. What complicates the perennial story of whose “native” land this is, who are the “autochthonous” people of this region, is that the Goths then, simply, left. Around 420 CE, the Huns arrived. This new Turkic pressure from the East, alongside what seemed to be a more secure life inside the Roman Empire, led to renewed Germanic migrations. By 500 CE, archeological evidence indicates both a reforestation of the land east of the Oder and a discontinued use of Germanic cemeteries.Footnote ² Only then, between the fifth and eighth centuries, did the Slavs arrive into this seeming terra nullius. Unlike the Germanic peoples who are easily traced to Scandinavia, the origin of the Slavs is much more difficult to pinpoint beyond a region vaguely north of the Black Sea. Despite this migration past the Oder and up to the Elbe, the area was so depopulated that for centuries there was little more than a no man’s land between Saxons to the west and Slavs to the East.

The peace was not to last and the opening of the long conflict over these borderlands began in the 780s when Charlemagne, having recently conquered the Saxons and the Bavarians, crossed the Elbe and began raiding the Slavs to the East. From 928, Polabia, the area between the Elbe and the Oder, went back and forth between German and Slavic control before finally falling firmly under Saxon rule in 1147. It is noteworthy that, upon achieving ultimate control, there was an attempt to expel all Slavs and replace them with Saxon and Flemish settlers. A Slavic revolt in 1164 ended such extreme plans, however, and by the fourteenth century the Slavic population of Polabia (i.e., west of the Oder) was largely assimilated, with the notable exception of the Sorbs. During this same period, east of the Oder in the Wartheland, the Polish state was birthed. By 940, the Polane tribe was gaining power around Gniezno and, in 968, Mieszko I converted to Christianity and established a bishopric at Poznan. By the time of his death in 992, Poland stretched from the Oder to Krakow.Footnote ³ Thus, in the endless debate over “indigeneity” and connection to the land, the “Germans” were first to the Wartheland and lived there for at least 400 years – before leaving. “Poles” arrived in this relatively “empty” land from 500 and became the main settlers in this region, retaining the mantle of majority population ever since.Footnote ⁴

By the 1100s, there was an eastern settlement (Ostbesiedlung) scheme underway in which German-speaking agents, called Lokator, sought “Germans” from the West and sent them to the East with the promise of land to farm.Footnote ⁵ Among the main groups that arrived in the East were the Cistercian Monks, specialists in agriculture.Footnote ⁶ This migration was every bit as large as the modern settler project that will be our focus. To cite William Hagen, this was “a massive colonization movement which, at its twelfth- and thirteenth-century peak, planted hundreds of thousands of western German peasants on the soil of the Baltic plains eastward to, and beyond, the Oder.”Footnote ⁷ Additionally, and juxtaposed to the nineteenth-century “problem” of too many Poles in the German space, many Germans were invited to settle further east within the Slavic orbit, and over the next two centuries would linguistically and culturally assimilate into the Polish population, that is, were, in some pre-ethnonationalist manner, “polonized.”Footnote ⁸

Although nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historians would constantly invoke the initial conquest and settlement of this land as the foundational myth justifying their modern colonial fantasies, these medieval migrations had little of the recognizable trappings of nationalism, or “Germanization.” The Slavic peoples of this area were by 1100 already converted to Christianity, but their non-Slavic neighbours to the northeast, the Baltic peoples (including the original “Prussians”), were still “heathens.” In a move similar in fascinating ways to the story presented in this book, the newly arrived Cistercian monks attempted to both convert pagans and to drain and improve land for agricultural purposes. From this period through to the 1880s, one sees the slow shift from defining peoples almost exclusively by religion, to language, to finally ethnicity and blood, although we need only to invoke the word KulturkampfFootnote ⁹ to remind ourselves that religion in no way ever disappeared from definitions of colonial difference. This is especially true of a specific story that is central to the history of East Central Europe, from 1100 to 1945, that of the arrival of Jews escaping crusades and plague-related violence in Western Europe. The Black Death of 1348 would end this west–east migration.

In 1386, the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom was formed. It remained in power until the events that sparked our modern colonial story, the Polish partitions of 1772–1795. Polish nationalists would of course never forget what was once one of the most powerful kingdoms on Earth and, likewise, later German nationalists would never forget the Slavic–Baltic enemy that defeated the mighty Teutonic knights in 1410 at the Battle of Tannenberg, a catastrophe that led to the vassalage of the knights under Polish kings. Indeed, outside of the more powerful cities of West Prussia, such as Danzig, much of the German nobility was completely polonized within 200 years. Although the Teutonic Knights would be suborned into a Germanic nationalist myth, they were soldiers of God, not Germany. With the Reformation, however, the Teutons became Lutherans, privatizing their land and becoming the foundational members of a large landed elite, the Junker, who will be central to our story.Footnote ¹⁰ In the same period, the first stirrings of a proto-nationalist understanding of “the Germans”Footnote ¹¹ began to appear, and, by 1660, the Kingdom of Prussia, as a political entity free from Polish rule, appeared. To strengthen their new kingdom, once again Lokator were called upon to find and bring settlers. Many Germans continued to move from the West right through Brandenburg to settle in the Wartheland, so-called Great Poland (Wielkopolska), which in the tenth century had been the heart of the Polish Piast Dynasty, the earliest Polish state. There these Germans became “free” farmers alongside Polish serfs.Footnote ¹² The Polish nobility in the 1600s acquired larger plots at the expense of small farmers, which William Hagen argues resulted in a lower Polish population that necessitated German (and Jewish) “seasonal workers” (Wanderarbeiter).Footnote ¹³ This relationship would flip by the nineteenth century, with thinly populated large German estates importing Polish labour, and thus Max Sering would point to both situations as evidence for his claim that more small-sized farms would result in a higher number of farmer families and thus more children.

In a book about colonization, it is important to note that only at this point in the history of early modern Europe do we enter the 500-year phase that is the main focus of “colonial studies.” As alluded to in Chapter 1, for many decades the history of colonialism involved rather clear-cut binaries: (1) Europe was the Metropole, the Colony was a distant place separated by salt water and (2) the colonizers were white Europeans, the colonized were non-white, non-Europeans. Ruptures and weaknesses in this construction began to appear once the structures of colonial regimes were recognized: (1) in the adjacent settler colonization of “others,” such as Indigenous peoples on the North American, or Russian Central Asian, frontiersFootnote ¹⁴ and (2) in the racially nuanced colonial relationships of, say, the English in Ireland or the Japanese in Taiwan.Footnote ¹⁵

In the preceding pages, a close reader may have noticed constant flux between the terms “migration” and “colonization.” What exactly is the difference? For some reason the convention for the history of the Wartheland is to call the Goths migrants and the Saxons colonizers. Patrick Geary describes the initial “migration” of Slavs into Poland this way: “[t]heir spread was slow but violent, followed by the absorption of indigenous populations into their linguistic and social structures.”Footnote ¹⁶ How is that not a version of “settler colonization?” There appears to be an incredibly logocentric hierarchy of terms when it comes to the language of colonial studies: cultures with writing colonize, cultures without a written record migrate. Read a modern historical account of the Rhine 2000 years ago and you will find that the Romans colonized the left bank and the Germanic tribes migrated up to the right bank. Early Slavs migrate, but the Germans only migrate until the Franks take on elements of Roman civilization, then Charlemagne colonizes. Yet, two centuries after Charlemagne, the highly literate Muslim/Arab conquest and settlement of North Africa took place and yet continues to resist the label “colonial.” A common attempt to distinguish the two terms hinges on a distant connection to an imperial centre (metropole) or a lack thereof: the Romans in the Rhineland had governors reporting back to Rome, whereas the Goths in the Rhineland were not so formally tied to their brethren in, say, the Wartheland. The latter are thus depicted as “migrants” and not “colonists.” But again, the Umayyad caliphate was unified as it stretched west to Iberia; it was one empire with solid lines of communication and trade. “Adjacency” is clearly a stumbling block in these discussions, as virtually all empires expand into adjacent territory and “erase” peoples via assimilation or removal. The appeal of “saltwater” is obvious; the clear intervention of unoccupied space between Britain and North America, or Athens and Sicily, makes the designation of “colonization” much easier. But if we insist on saltwater separation, then the citizens of the independent United States in 1840, no longer politically controlled by the distant metropole of London, merely “migrated” into the Midwest and onto the Great Plains.

One of the most famous works written about the US/Mexican border is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The opening pages explain that the author’s Aztec ancestors were living in the area of the American Southwest before they “migrated” to the area of today’s Mexico City. There is no discussion of the people they encountered already living there, instead, it is classic terra nullius. In the next paragraph, the Spanish “invade” and “conquer” the very same space.Footnote ¹⁷ One could argue that what the Aztecs did, and Germans in the nineteenth-century East undertook, was simply “migration and settlement,” while the Spanish, and Germans later in southwest Africa, set up a system of “territorial rule under conditions of racial difference.”Footnote ¹⁸ I do not see any easy bifurcation of these movements and, similar to the thinkers portrayed in this book, I see a long continuum of nuanced ways in which one group takes over territory and attempts to eliminate “difference.” This book is very much a part of the discussion that seeks a more sophisticated history of colonization than the post-1492 binaries. The Oder and the Warta contain only “fresh” water, and the main colonial subjects of the German empire in the East shared the same skin tone as their colonizers.

Moving toward the Modern: Frederick and the First Prussian Colonization of the Poles, 1772–1795

The more recent, arguably modern, colonial history of Prussian Poland began with Frederick the Great’s move into western Prussia in 1772. The great Polish–Lithuanian kingdom finally came to an ignominious end with the Polish partitions at the end of the eighteenth century: Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburgs each took a chunk of the kingdom, first in 1772, again in 1792, and then the final scraps were gobbled up in 1795, thus extinguishing an independent Polish state for the next 124 years. This expansion increased the size of Prussia by 50 percent and 3 million of the now 8 million Prussians were former members of the Polish Commonwealth.Footnote ¹⁹ Three million people did not, however, prevent Frederick’s colonizing gaze from seeing “empty space” in his newly conquered colonial territory, going so far as to declare: “The Polish provinces may be compared to no state in Europe, they may only be likened to Canada. As a result we need time and work to allow them to regain what bad administration has left in neglect for so many centuries.”Footnote ²⁰ As we shall see, this would not be the first time a German understood Canada as the ultimate descriptor of emptiness fit for colonization. Frederick undertook a massive program of “Peuplierung” that saw 300,000 Germans brought into western Prussia.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, for our story of “inner colonization,” his demographic plans are important. As Hagen explains, at the end of the 1770s, Frederick used state money to first buy up Polish estates and then sell (or lease) them to incoming German settlers. He did this, he claimed, “so that gradually we will get rid of all the Poles.”Footnote ²² Here we have the first instance of government funds being committed in order to subsidize and entice “colonists” (here, 3,200 German families from the southwest) to replace Poles. Importantly, this was not yet a nationalist program; Frederick wanted to replace Polish nobility because he found them untrustworthy, but he had little to say about Polish peasants. In fact, he allowed Polish to be taught at the elementary level in school. There was, however, a hint of a much more radical future when Frederick first insisted that every Jew in West Prussia be expelled, before agreeing to a mere 7,000 being forced to leave.Footnote ²³

Figure 2.1 The German and Russian empires in 1871

(drawn by graphic company – original created for the author)

The First Model? Buying up Bankrupt Estates and the Flottwell Regime, 1795–1871

With the birth of modern German nationalism during the fight against Napoleon, we see the first signs of a modern, ethnolinguistic understanding of Germans versus Poles. In the wake of the 1806/1807 uprising in the Wartheland, when Poles joined forces with the French in the hopes of throwing off Prussian control, Prussian officials reacted with ideas that strongly foreshadowed what would unfold over the course of the next century: they now wanted to have local Poles learn German and embrace German cultural and social values, all the while physically replacing Polish gentry with Germans, through such “legal” methods as raising the rent on Polish estates by 50 percent more than German landowners paid. These officials thus saw the situation in a similar manner to Frederick, deeming Polish nobles the problem and not peasants per se. But the peasants were no longer to be left alone completely. Linguistic Germanization, through school and church, would be a tool to erase Polishness. While these ideas were mooted, real change was happening on the ground with the help of an institution that would be crucial by the 1880s. From 1821, the Prussian Landschaft, a land credit bank in Posen, successfully helped Germans buy up bankrupt Polish estates.Footnote ²⁴ But with another uprising in 1830/1831 (this time mainly in Russian Poland), the next incremental step would be taken.

In 1830, Eduard Flottwell arrived to take up his new position as Oberpräsident (high commissioner) in Posen. Flottwell believed that the Poles could only be brought under control through “an inner fusion of the two nationalities” (with German culture predominant of course), and he set out on a program to strengthen both the use of German in the educational system and an updated version of Frederickian-style colonization. In a move echoing what would happen on a much larger scale in 1886, “with special state funds, Flottwell purchased bankrupted Polish estates and sold them to Germans. He also sold, to Germans only, estate-sized parcels of royal domain land.”Footnote ²⁵ Further, Flottwell ensured that any royal estates were only sold to Germans. While this did result in a shift in land ownership,Footnote ²⁶ the in-migration of more Germans was not central to the program. In this way, it was still the case in the 1830s that those overseeing “colonization” in Prussian Poland were more concerned with the political control of land and people than with the strongly nationalistic, ethnolinguistic hallmarks of the later, “new” imperialism. In 1840, circumstances swung back somewhat in favour of Poles when several important Polish figures from the 1830/1831 uprising were given amnesty and re-entered the “fight,” while Flottwell decamped. All of this contributed to what a later German historian of Posen called the “zig zag course” of the history of this province.Footnote ²⁷

Flottwell left Posen in 1841, and government funds for purchasing property came to an end four years later. The 1840s also saw the peak, then end, of a moment of philo-polonism among German liberals, the so-called Polenbegeisterung. German liberals saw Russia as the greatest demon and, therefore, supported the nationalist struggle of Poles under the Czar’s yoke. But when, during the 1848 revolution, it became clear that Poles under Prussian control wanted a similar national independence to what Germans were striving to achieve, well, that was the end of German excitement for Poland. The German liberal belief that freedom was good for everyone except those under the German boot will linger for the rest of our story, indeed until there were no national minorities left on rump German soil in the late 1940s. By the 1850s the word Germanisierung began to appear more and more often, now meaning not just the assimilation of the Polish nobles, but the peasantry as well. At the same time, the Flottwellian program was revived in a purely market form as German land credit banks were no longer allowed to lend to Poles, which led to many Polish estates going bankrupt and resulted in 100,000 hectares (hereafter “ha”) of Polish land ending up in German hands between 1848 and 1861. A rebounding economy in the 1860s led to the continued purchase of land by Germans in the province of Posen, without the need of government assistance, which enervated any discussion at the time for a formal return to a Flottwellian colonization program.Footnote ²⁸

Around this time, one of our major players enters the scene, and his attitude toward Poles would prove crucial. Growing up on his family’s Junker estate in Saxony, Otto von Bismarck learned enough Polish as a youth to speak with the seasonal workers and seems to have had no issue with Poles of such a station. As a student, however, he could not stand what he deemed the flamboyant demeanor of the Polish nobility. Hence, Bismarck had the typical nineteenth-century attitude that the Polish elite were the problem, and not the peasants. During the revolution of 1848 he was already making quite clear that he “knew” Poles and that their political independence had to be avoided at all costs. During the January Uprising of 1863 he declared that Polish independence would be “fatal” to Prussia.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, at the head of Germany, a nation that would formally come into existence in 1871, was a man destined to do all in his power to keep the German East German.

Poland as Colonial Space

Although this book will make the argument that settler colonialism begins with an understanding of land and space in the countryside just outside of the Metropole, it is nevertheless the case that at some point settler colonialism expands beyond the “familiar” and into space that is deemed “Other,” land and people that are “primitive” or “oriental.” Our “Orient,” our “East,” will be Poland and, as Larry Wolff has so dramatically illustrated, Eastern Europe as “Oriental” or “Other” was discursively well-established by the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁰ With the Enlightenment in Western Europe, and ultimately the growth of nationalism and its idolatry of one language, one people, one land, the “mess” of “backward” Eastern Europe became a powerful trope against which the West could define itself. While Paris saw itself as the peak from which culture sloped downward in all directions, by 1800 Berlin/Potsdam had managed to see itself as existing on a similar ridge, from which culture sloped dramatically downward on the way to Warsaw and, ultimately, Asia.Footnote ³¹

Hatred toward Polish independence after 1848, as well as the idea that Slavs were culturally inferior, found wide support in Germany, and thus the concept of the eastern borderlands as a site of colonialism was in no way limited to some radically conservative fringe. Recently, historians have been arguing for the centrality of expansionist colonial thinking as fundamental to the liberal nationalist intellectual tradition of nineteenth-century Germany. Matthew Fitzpatrick, Jens-Uwe Guettel, and Erik Grimmer-Solem have elaborated upon the argument that the “safety valve” provided by colonies, the dilution via emigration of the dangers of overpopulation and out of work peasants and labourers, was a crucial element of a global system.Footnote ³² What exactly such a colonial empire would look like was in no way limited to a classic, “saltwater,” that is, overseas, system. In his earlier, seminal work, Woodruff Smith argued that there were two German colonialist ideologies by the 1880s, one a settlerist idea, the other an economic, indirect understanding of colonial goals.Footnote ³³ This allowed him and other historians to delink their heroes, such as Max Weber, from an imperial past of racism and settlerism in Eastern Europe that culminates with the Nazi Generalplan Ost. If the “correct thinking” Germans of the past had triumphed, so the argument goes, the extreme settlerism of the Third Reich would never have happened. Alas, so goes the argument, the race-based colonizers won out on the crooked path to 1933. Fitzpatrick, Guettel, Grimmer-Solem and others have convincingly shown that there is, however, no easy bifurcation. Liberal nationalists supported the economic exploitation of, and settlement in, German Southwest Africa, and very much pursued colonialism wherever an exploitable “lesser culture” existed, be that in South America, along the Danube, or in European Turkey.Footnote ³⁴ Guettel extensively documents the specific place of the American West in the imagination of these thinkers, long before Max Sering journeyed there in the 1880s. Indeed, long before Germany was a united nation capable of running its own colonial system, there was a desire for spaces to which Germans could go and be safe from assimilation themselves. As early as 1817, Hans von Gagern cited the American West as a place where German colonies could be founded. By the 1840s, Friedrich List, heavily influenced by what he had seen in North America, imagined his own version of a settler frontier right beside the German-speaking peoples, when he pushed a Mitteleuropa idea of an economic (indirect colonial) space integrated with railroads: “We have our backwoods as well as the Americans, the lands of the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, all of Turkey, the entire Southeast beyond Hungary in our hinterland.”Footnote ³⁵ And the next great spatial thinker, whose name would be forever tied to his geopolitical term Lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel, saw settler colonialism as the engine of modernity.Footnote ³⁶ As this study will show, in Max Sering we have a powerful example of the strong link between such liberal nationalist ideas and the very settlerism, inspired by America, that did in fact culminate in Generalplan Ost.

Birth and Youth, 1857–1871

Into this world, our main character, Max Sering, was born, on January 18, 1857. Home was a small village quite literally on the very border of the West and the East: Barby on the Elbe. His father, Wilhelm Sering, was a music professor and composer. His mother was Elisabeth Friedländer, whose father, Abraham Salomo Friedländer, was Jewish.Footnote ³⁷ At an early age Sering learned to play the cello and he would have a lifelong love of music.Footnote ³⁸ As a child he saw peasant homes being broken up as the landless and unemployed left for the big city of Magdeburg. In other words, the idyll that would forever inform Sering’s utopian understanding of the world, his small Saxon village, was being destroyed by the forces of modernity and industrialization before his very eyes. From the age of ten until he left Saxony at fifteen, he attended the “Gymnasium Unser Lieben Frauen”Footnote ³⁹ in that nearby big city, and observed what became of many of those same famers, watching them suffer through their new lives in dirty, overcrowded tenement buildings. This experience ignited the agrarian flame that would forever burn in Max Sering’s heart. If the adult is ultimately formed in youth, it requires no leap of the imagination to understand why Sering fought his entire life to ameliorate the processes he witnessed as a child.

The Empire Is Born: Max Sering in Alsace, 1872–1883

Max Sering often claimed that January 18, 1871, was the greatest moment of his life.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was his fourteenth birthday, and it was the day that William the First was crowned Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Sering’s favourite day was the culmination of the unification of Germany and the defeat of France and was an early illustration of his lifelong liberal-nationalist impulse that combined national unity with aggressive imperialism. These were values cherished by the German elite from the Kaiser’s Empire to the Third Reich. While assuredly an exciting moment for the young man, Sering could not have foreseen that Germany’s triumph over France set in motion events that would dictate his future career. The new Germany’s greatest prize from the war was the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. With this new territory came the ancient city of Strasbourg and its renowned university. In 1872, the university was renamed Reichsuniversität Straßburg, and soon Sering’s relatively successful composer/teacher father received the call to bring his family to the new Reichsland, the new Germany’s first “colony.” There they settled in among the Germans living near the university where his father taught music. After a youth already shaped by watching the detrimental effects of Germany’s industrialization upon the idyllic farmlands of Saxony, the fifteen-year-old Sering moved to a life in the borderlands, where he was surrounded by foreign, “backward” peasants, Alsatians in need of German civilization. In a certain way, already as a teenager, Sering experienced the newly unified Germany’s very first program of “inner colonization.”

Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringian

Alsace-Lorraine had many similarities to the eastern borderlands of Germany that will be the focus of our story, connections that were underway well before Sering arrived. In the wake of the failed uprising in Russian Poland in 1830/1831 some 400 Polish nationalist refugees fled to Strasbourg, arriving between December 1831 and March 1832.Footnote ⁴¹ These Polish nationalists escaped from an area just east of what would become the German Empire, from a situation of Russian imperial “nationalization,” to the territory just west of that future German Empire, a land and population then dealing with French imperial “nationalization.” The uprising had repercussions in Prussian Poland as well, as many Prussian Poles had enlisted in Posen to then join the fight further to the East against Russia. This evidence of Polish nationalist fervor also existing in German territory led to the replacement of the Pole Antoni Radziwill, the Governor of the Grand Duchy of Posen, by the German Flottwell, who then began the colonization program of the 1830s. There were in fact many similarities between the eastern and western borderlands before Germany officially annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Alsace was more liberal than Lorraine, with its industrial powerhouses of Strasbourg and Mulhouse.Footnote ⁴² One observer, in 1911, noted that “Lorraine has not profited from Nature to the same extent as Alsace, … with large estates and a petty bourgeoisie struggling for its existence, it is a land that, on the Lotharingian plateau, is reminiscent of the situation east of the Elbe.”Footnote ⁴³ In 1871, Bismarck did not in fact want Lorraine. Unlike the “German” speakers of the Alsatian province, he feared that this Polish-like landscape was in fact a little too like his quarrelsome Polish provinces. The Lotharingian population was too “French,” but in the end the military value of Metz was deemed necessary and thus what most understood to be two distinct historical regions were meshed into Alsace-Lorraine.Footnote ⁴⁴

Not only did the young Sering move to a borderland of fraught nationality, he and his family settled in a Reichsland, a political unit much more akin to a colony than an equal federal state (or Land) of the Empire. On the one hand, due to the anti-Berlin jealousies of nearby Baden and Bavaria, Bismarck could not simply make Alsace-Lorraine Prussian territory (as were the Polish lands in Eastern Germany). On the other hand, granting a statehood equal to normal German provinces, with its attendant sovereignty, would place too much power in the hands of the “untrustworthy” natives. The upper and lower Rhine districts of Alsace, along with Lorraine, became the three Bezirke (districts) making up the combined Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringien, an imperial state directly governed from Berlin, answerable to the Emperor and not the Reichstag. An Oberpräsident (from 1879, a Statthalter) was appointed to rule largely through emergency powers. Beginning in 1874, a Landesausschuß was elected through indirect voting from members of a rather limited franchise set up in order to provide some cloak of autonomy. Nonetheless, any orders coming out of this body could be overruled by the Emperor. The farce of some local autonomy was only furthered by a system that mixed some old French laws with new German ones; a chaos easily exploited by the German colonizers.Footnote ⁴⁵

Furthering the anti-democratic flavor of this imperial space, in 1879 the very man who had participated in the crushing victory over France, who had led the military occupation until 1873, General Field Marshal Erwin von Manteuffel, was appointed Statthalter of the Reichsland. Serving as Manteuffel’s adjutant was the Polish Prussian Count Bogdan Hutten-Czapski. He only served from 1884 until Manteuffel’s untimely death a year later, but this was enough for him to see firsthand the daily negotiations between occupiers and occupied that he had earlier witnessed in his homeland.Footnote ⁴⁶ As befits any good colony, the Alsatian natives were conscripted into the army but, due to fears of their lack of loyalty, the recruits were in fact sent for their garrison duty to the Polish provinces in the East.Footnote ⁴⁷ While these young Alsatians were only temporarily out of the territory, some 460,000 Alsatians emigrated to France by 1910, resulting in a demographic problem quite unlike the Prussian Polish situation. Despite depopulation, the rural areas remained “Alsatian” as German in-migration was mainly to the cities, with the number one destination being Strasbourg.Footnote ⁴⁸ The main German quartier in that city sprung up around the new Reichsuniversität.

The academic institution in Strasbourg had in fact always been a foreign element in a sea of hostility. It was founded in 1621 as a Protestant university. Throughout the eighteenth century it was a major centre of learning, especially of medicine and law, the latter subject studied there by none other than Goethe in 1770. The century following the French Revolution was difficult for the university as its Protestantism became a major obstacle to its flourishing within France. By 1870 it had become a Lutheran training academy as it continued to exist in a world apart from its Catholic surroundings. Hence, its quick transformation into an imperial university, a beacon of German Kultur, in a land seemingly in need of a “civilizing mission,” was an easy adjustment. After the destruction of the library during the war in 1870, a call for new books was made across the Empire. The enthusiasm for this frontier university was such that by 1881, with half a million volumes, the university possessed the largest library in the world.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, the university received more funding from Berlin than any other in Germany, was able to attract top talent as well as hold more seminars (as opposed to lectures), and thus became more attractive to students.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was to be an “Arbeitsuniversität,”Footnote ⁵¹ a hard-working university. The new faculty were to be young and energetic, although it was hoped that they would not be too nationalistic, so as not to enflame Alsatian nationalist yearning. For this reason, both Alsatian history and literature were taught, as well as the Alsatian dialect. Additionally, twelve Alsatian faculty from the previous administration were kept on.Footnote ⁵² Finally, certain “problematic” older, well-known German professors, such as the firebrand Treitschke, were not invited to Strasbourg.Footnote ⁵³ In their place, men like Gustav Schmoller and Friedrich Knapp were sent, both of whom arrived in 1874. Each man’s predilection for a “scientific” approach was presumed to mean that they would not be overt nationalists. In Schmoller’s words, this was all intended:

But from the start, all signs indicated that, despite the attempt by the first (Alsatian) Rector, Roggenbach, to appease Alsatian feeling, German nationalism would become the overarching mission. The opening ceremony was little more than an exercise in “Hurrapatriotismus,” and shortly thereafter it was decided that all classes would be taught in German. As for the supposedly “non-nationalistic” faculty, they immediately saw the purpose of the university as nothing less than a vehicle for the Germanization of Alsace.Footnote ⁵⁵ The university’s young faculty (average age thirty-five) produced scholarship at a frenzied pace, with the idea that simply by working hard they would impress the “lazy” Alsatians. Their students were young men often sent by patriotic German fathers wanting their sons “to serve” in the borderlands. They managed to overcome a hostile native population, as well as a lack of cheap housing, with a good deal of arrogant, nationalist ardour: “living conditions at this colonial outpost may have been worse than in other German university towns, but the patriotic idealism and enthusiasm were greater.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The recently arrived Germans tended to live close to each other, near the university. German concerts, beer gardens, and the Cologne carnival were imported to evoke national heritage as well as to display to the “natives” the many benefits of German hegemony. The Strassburger Post was founded and proved to be very popular. It was in such a hothouse of German imperialism and zeal, among a sea of natives to be assimilated, that the teenage Sering came of age. The memoirs of fellow Germans (and Alsatians) in this period tell us the atmosphere was nothing less than a “colonial” situation. As a historian of the Reichsuniversität writes,

Unsurprisingly, such attitudes and behavior did not go over well with the Alsatians:

This theme of two solitudes runs throughout the memoir literature, despite the desire of at least some of the German professors to engage on friendlier terms with the locals. The historian Friedrich Meinecke, who fell in love with Strasbourg during his 1901–1906 tenure there, rued the fact that the one time his Alsatian neighbour invited him to dinner, it was at the local restaurant and not in the neighbour’s house: “We live here in a colony, as we professors say amongst ourselves.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As a student in the late 1870s, Sering would have experienced this segregated culture, frequenting German student hangouts that were often next door to Alsatian haunts. Whether or not Sering ever hurled an insult or a punch, it is safe to say he would have witnessed many a donnybrook in the streets outside these establishments.

It is not surprising that Alsatians were adept at frustrating German attempts to assimilate them. After all, the French had been trying to make these speakers of a largely German dialect speak French for more than sixty years with little success. Along the lines of what was occurring in Prussian Poland, the German administration tried to force locals to learn and speak High German, but there were many exceptions for students at both the elementary and secondary levels, and by 1919 very little headway had been made. In fact, almost all the evidence for a shift from French to German can be accounted for by French emigration and German immigration. Further, the teenage Sering’s high school curriculum would have devoted as many hours to French language lessons as German, a fundamental difference between the experience of German colonists in the West versus the East, as teenage Germans in Posen spent no time learning Polish.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet, akin to the situation in Prussian Poland, Alsatian natives were subject to Germany’s official state campaign against Catholicism, the Kulturkampf. Even after Bismarck’s campaign officially ended in 1879, the conflation of Catholicism with the “backward natives” of Alsace continued. The professors at the imperial university were in fact among the harshest propagandists, arguing that one simply could not be both a serious scholar and a Catholic.Footnote ⁶¹ Finally, in addition to heavy-handedness with regard to education and religion, in the 1870s the German government did little to help the Alsatian economy flourish. The owners of textile factories in Mulhouse, the region’s main industry, fought throughout the 1870s for protective tariffs, which they, along with the rest of Germany, finally received in 1879. And it was on the topic of tariffs that Max Sering wrote his doctoral dissertation, which he would finish in 1881.

Upon completing Gymnasium, Sering initially joined the Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment King Ludwig III of Bavaria (Niederschlesisches) No. 47 in Strasbourg on April 1, 1876. In another example of comparative borderlands, this unit had been garrisoned in Posen until 1870, and it would again be stationed there, after Sering’s service, in 1887.Footnote ⁶² After only one year, however, Sering developed a nasty case of gout and was forced to join the Ersatz Regiment, presumably to take on less physical duties. During this period, he also began attending classes at the university. In June 1879 he entered the Civil Service, being sworn in as a Referendar, a legal trainee. He took up a position in Colmar, but continued to pursue his doctoral studies in Strasbourg, perhaps riding the rail link between the two cities that had opened in 1841. For the final doctoral stage of Sering’s Strasbourg studies, he was under the supervision of both the rising star Georg Friedrich Knapp and the already legendary Gustav Schmoller. Sering was thus indoctrinated in the “Historical School of Economics,” the traces of which would dominate everything he published throughout his long life.

February 23 to March 18: Experts on the East Coast

Upon arrival, Sering spent most of the final weeks of the North American winter indoors, meeting agricultural experts as well as politicians. The young academic initially debunked for the more familiar terrain of the university town of New Haven. There he had two important consultations. The first was with Henry Walcott Farnam, son of the seventy-nine year-old railroad president Henry Farnam. The younger Farnam had studied under Schmoller, gaining his PhD at Strasbourg in 1878. Farnam Sr. was also present in New Haven and, given that he had been intimately involved in both the construction of the Erie Canal, first as a cook then later as a surveyor, he would have had much to tell Sering. In the 1850s and 1860s, Farnam Sr. experienced the transition of transportation from canals to railways when, as president of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad, he oversaw the extension of rail to the Midwest. Later, Sering would tie the extensive nature of the North American railway network to the success of that continent’s “inner colonization.” Schmoller had written ahead asking that the younger Farnam look after Sering, and later Farnam responded that they had had a nice time, though Sering had spent far too much time writing in his journal.Footnote ⁸⁵ The next person Sering sought out was William Henry Brewer, then chair of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. There would have been no end to what these two could discuss, from soil chemistry to Brewer’s extensive knowledge of California which he had helped survey in the 1860s, to his recent participation in the 1880 Census of Agriculture. Brewer was an expert in the where, when, and why of growing wheat in the United States.

Figure 2.2 Max Sering’s journey through the United States and Canada, February 23–September 26, 1883

(Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], p. 48)

From New Haven, Sering was soon off to Washington DC, where his letters of introduction got him a series of meetings, including one with the Commissioner of Agriculture, George B. Loring, as well as two men whose jobs would have very much interested the detail-oriented Sering: Chief Statistician for the United States Department of Agriculture, Jacob Richards Dodge, and Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, Joseph Nimmo, Jr. Sering was brought up to date on the current state of settlement in the West by none other than the Commissioner of the General Land Office, N. C. McFarland. Finally, he met the German Ambassador Karl von Eisendecher, who was a close confidante of Bismarck’s.Footnote ⁸⁶ Sering returned to New York and then embarked on his great journey westward.

March 19 to April 2: From Coast to Coast

Upon leaving the East Coast, Sering had a quick, initial view of the vast expanse of the North American continent. In a mere thirteen days he travelled first to Chicago, then southwest to Omaha, then west to Northern California. While he would be returning to the Great Plains in August, this would be his only excursion to the far West. An early spring visit to the Rockies must have been rather cold. Nonetheless, from Denver he visited Colorado Springs and rode on horseback to Manitou Springs, and the foot of Pike’s Peak.Footnote ⁸⁷ He then proceeded through the Rocky Mountains and down to Salt Lake City. While he seems to have been quite taken with the massive irrigation systems of Utah,Footnote ⁸⁸ he had very little to say about the Mormons. This is especially notable when compared to his attention to the Mennonites of Manitoba and their ability to maintain a unique identity within North American culture. This suggests that it was not the religious element of Mennonite identity that so fascinated Sering, but the fact that they were Germans, holding on to their Germanness. He then trained straight through northern Nevada to Sacramento, before finally reaching the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco.

April 2–18: California

Sering based himself in San Francisco for sixteen days and made a series of trips throughout Northern California. He visited Sacramento, San Jose, and Monterey, before conferring with the German American Eugene Hilgard at Berkeley. Having already discussed North American soil chemistry with Brewer at Yale, Sering was well prepared to go into much more detail with one of the greatest minds in the world on the subject. Hilgard was born in the Rhineland in 1833 but was taken to the United States by his family at age two. He had returned to Germany for advanced study at the age of fifteen, receiving his PhD under Bunsen at Heidelberg in 1853.Footnote ⁸⁹ Now Professor of Agricultural Chemistry and Director of the State Agricultural Experimental Station at Berkeley, the fifty-year old Hilgard surely saw elements of himself in the precocious Sering. Having spoken to Hilgard, especially as this would have been in German, Sering was well prepared for his next excursions into the richly soiled valleys of California. In the Sacramento Valley, he visited farms at Red Bluff, then strolled through the largest vineyard in the world with former Governor Stanford, at his Great Vina Ranch. Sering continued on to the giant Chico ranch of John Bidwell, one of the earliest American immigrants to California, and a future Prohibition candidate for President of the United States. Sering did not indicate whether he spent any time at the famous Bidwell Mansion, a house that saw guests ranging from President Rutherford Hayes to Susan B. Anthony.Footnote ⁹⁰

Sering continued his tour of Californian settlement and agriculture into the San Joaquin Valley, visiting the farm of Mr. Henry Huffmann at Merced. Huffmann, also born in Germany, had arrived for the Gold Rush in 1850. He stayed and became a successful wheat farmer. This “father of Merced” also had a hand in railways, wheat hauling and storage, as well as working as a “town site agent,” choosing spots along proposed railways for towns, including Merced.Footnote ⁹¹ Again, having a German explain all of this in detail to Sering was surely exceptionally helpful, as these were all themes of great interest to him and his research. After completing his California tour in the Santa Clara Valley around San Jose, Sering’s overall impression of California was one of enormous, yet unclear, potential. There was a lot of land available for agriculture, but the dependence upon future systems of irrigation left him wondering whether or not Californian agriculture would be worth the cost.Footnote ⁹² After returning to San Francisco, he embarked on a two-day boat trip up, first, the Oregon Coast, then the Columbia River, to Portland, from April 18 to 20.

April 20 to May 24: The Pacific Northwest: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia

After establishing his new home base in the growing city of Portland, Sering immediately set off on a six-day-long journey with the indefatigable Henry Villard. Born in Speyer, Germany, Villard slipped off to the United States while still a teenager after clashing with his conservative father. Working as a journalist Villard covered first the American Civil War, then the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Between these two conflicts he saw enough to become a lifelong pacifist. Although the monarchist Sering would have had some trouble with Villard’s arch-Republicanism, Sering was surely very much open to Villard’s strong affiliations with the Free Soil Movement, especially Villard’s attempt in 1856 to establish a colony of Germans in Kansas.Footnote ⁹³ Free Soilers were early homesteaders, often Abolitionists, who possessed the settler drive Sering would later highly praise. The time of Sering’s visit, April 1883, was an extraordinarily busy period for Villard. As president of the Northern Pacific Railway he was pushing to complete the line and connect Portland to Montana by September. Sering joined Villard’s bustling entourage on the tracks as it first went south for two days along the Oregon and California Railway to the end of track at Roseburg, visiting the University of Oregon in Eugene along the way.Footnote ⁹⁴ They then travelled two days east from Portland through the Columbia River Valley along the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company tracks to The Dalles and Pendleton. From this point, Sering and company boarded wagons and went through Umatilla to Blue Mountain.

There was an Indian reservation at Umatilla, named for the tribe, and passing through was a horrific experience for Sering that burned itself into his memory. After being forced to settle on the newly formed reservation in 1855, the Umatilla had occasionally fought white settlers as late as 1879, usually because of their restricted access to food.Footnote ⁹⁵ What Sering witnessed that April from his wagon must have been shocking, for he would later criticize what he saw as the “American” treatment of Indigenous peoples: to attack them or simply herd them onto unproductive land, presumably, to die out.Footnote ⁹⁶ His experiences here were in sharp contrast to what he would see a few months hence, a program of assimilation in Manitoba. Thus, to put this in its most blunt form: from an early age, Sering opposed the kind of systems that would later be put in place in occupied Poland at the time of his death in November 1939. Although every bit the ethnic chauvinist, Sering believed in assimilation, not eradication.

From Blue Mountain, the party entrained for Walla Walla, then north to Grange City on the Snake River. After two days on a steamer up the Snake, Sering arrived at Lewiston, Idaho. At some point Sering and Villard parted ways.Footnote ⁹⁷ Villard returned to Portland and then eventually left for New York City where he would meet a large delegation from Germany in late August, including Max Weber, Sr. In late September this group, along with a huge entourage of American officials, would travel west, right across the continent by rail along the, by then completed, Northern Pacific Railway.Footnote ⁹⁸ It is interesting to note, as evidence for Sering of the boom and bust nature of both rail building and land speculation, that the Northern Pacific went bankrupt soon after its completion, and Villard was back in Germany by 1884.

Sering made several day trips during the remainder of his time in Portland. Surely one of the more fascinating would have been to the “primitive Christian,” communist commune of Germans at Aurora. In addition to his interest in the idea of German colonists’ ability to maintain their “Germanness,” there is no question that economists of the “Historical School” flirted openly with elements of socialism. Sering also managed to visit the farms of the well-known pioneer William Barlow, and stay with Thomas Cornelius, in the town named after this politician and former Indian Fighter.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sering visited the capitol, at Salem, and was able to sit down for discussions with the State Secretary.

One significant excursion Sering made during this period was a week-long trip north to Seattle and Victoria. Sering later wrote the following about the entire region, from Portland to British Columbia: “A few words are more than enough to describe the cultural possibilities of this region.” Sering summed up the landscape that he saw, with its tall tree-covered mountains plunging straight into the sea, vistas that today elicit gasps of envy from most visitors, as being incompatible with proper colonization, containing little flat land for cultivation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In response to what he had seen in Nebraska and California, Sering was becoming an agrarian settler colonizer, seeing future strength for countries that could get their people onto the land as yeoman farmers. British Columbia, and its rugged coastline, might be suitable for paintings but it was not land upon which to build a nation. At most, he considered this area useful for its timber. On his way back south from Seattle, Sering strolled through the White River Valley and was flabbergasted at the sight of hemlocks standing ninety metres tall. He left Portland for good on 22 May, heading east to Walla Walla again, where he spent two days. He would later claim that the view out his train window as he snaked along the Columbia, with the river, the cliffs, and the mountains, was one of the most beautiful sights in North America.Footnote ¹⁰¹

May 24 to June 6: Through the Rockies

From Walla Walla, Sering rode the Northern Pacific to end of track on the Flathead Indian Reservation, in the Territory of Montana. He then travelled the final untracked section of that continental link by wagon with Villard’s Chief Engineer General Adna Anderson. Anderson may well have first met Villard when they were both affiliated with the Army of the Potomac, he as a General, Villard as a journalist. Anderson had made the initial arduous journey west from Bismarck to Portland in 1881, plotting out the route of the future railway. Now with Sering, they spent five days going east through Missoula, and Deer Lodge, before meeting up again with the westward moving track at Helena.Footnote ¹⁰² Along the way they visited several farms, all of which had significant herds of cattle. From Deer Lodge they made a side trip to visit yet another German American, Conrad Kohrs, who grazed his 50,000 head of cattle over 40,000 square kilometres. After speaking to officials in Helena, Sering took the train to Livingston, then spent a couple of days visiting Yellowstone by wagon, before entraining again at Livingston and moving on to Bismarck, arriving on June 6.

June 6 to July 28: The Prairies

The months of June and July 1883 were arguably the defining period in Sering’s life. The Prairies, a flat, seemingly “empty,” high modernist grid of perfectly laid out farms, each with its yeomen family, tilling the soil and strengthening the nation, on each side of the international boundary, seems to have provided the Platonic ideal of what Sering spent the rest of his life dreaming of and desiring for his Fatherland. He claimed, “The Prairie is the actual location (Sitz) of American competition.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Without a forest to clear, the region had been settled and was productive quite quickly, a major wheat competitor by the 1870s.

Bismarck, capital of the Dakota Territory, was surely a pleasing name for Sering. It was his initial Prairie stop and the first true boomtown that he visited. This is where he initially saw the downside to completely “free” ownership of land: rampant speculation. Bismarck had had some ups and downs in the 1870s, including locust swarms that destroyed everything in their path, but when Sering arrived in early June 1883, he found a town of overflowing hotels, a place that seemed to be having a permanent “party” (Festtage). East Coasters and European immigrants were flowing into town in the hopes of buying a (what had until quite recently been free) parcel of land. Sering was introduced to a former railway employee who had sold his free homestead (now within the city limits of Bismarck) for $75,000. Sering watched two men betting town lots in a card game. Here, and soon after in Jamestown and Fargo, Sering sensed the calm before the storm, and indeed it was not long after he left that the whole Dakotan real estate boom went bust.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Sering was powerfully affected by the rampant speculation that he witnessed both here and later in Manitoba, and it led to his lifelong struggle with the question: should yeomen farmers be free to sell the land they have been given? Historical School economists were not feudalists, but they were not exactly capitalists either.

On his journey from Bismarck to Fargo, Sering visited the gigantic Dalrymple Farm. At perhaps 75,000 acres, this “bonanza farm” had overtaken many smaller neighbouring plots and employed farmers as wage workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ After Fargo, Sering proceeded to St. Paul, where he stayed for a week. There he met both government and railway officials. He also met Charles Pillsbury, a man who had worked for firms in Montreal and had noticed that the majority of western wheat was being processed far from its source, in eastern cities. He set out to alter this system. Sering was taken to visit the recently opened Pillsbury A Mill, which was now processing 5,000 barrels of flour a day. Sering also met William Folwell, a math professor who had spent some time in 1860 studying philology in Berlin and who was now president of the University of Minnesota.

It was in fact the idea of “Germanness” that most affected Sering during his stay in Minnesota. He referred to St. Paul as being “overwhelmingly German.” On the journey south from Fargo he had stopped and visited the German settlement at Perham, and then, from St. Paul, he journeyed out to the German town of Carver. Referring to what he saw in these two towns, Sering claimed that the German farms of Minnesota were among the most beautiful in North America. While in the household of a German farming family in Carver, Sering witnessed the father consult a copy of Albrecht Thaer’s Principles of Rational Agriculture (Grundsätze der rationellen Landwirthschaft). Sering was also very pleased to see the sons of this and other German farmsteads staying on to keep the farm going. He claimed that “American” sons often left the farm for “less stressful” jobs as businessmen. Witnessing these German farms, Sering was so impressed that he made a remark that expressed both his absolute patriotism and an opinion to the effect that if America had been settled only by Germans, the country would be much more successful.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From St. Paul, Sering travelled north, this time over the border and up to Winnipeg, where he would be based from June 17 to July 13.

Canada

An important German arriving in the boomtown of Canada’s West was not an uncommon event by 1883. The German Professor Otto Hahn had recently been through town with a group of German observers, and Rudolf Meyer’s description of his visit in 1881 was just hitting the bookstores in Germany. William Hespeler had become a chief organizer of German settlement on the Prairies in recognition of his success in luring German Mennonites from Russia in 1874.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Provincial leaders were eager for new immigrants, especially those they deemed ethnically (or racially) superior, and thus Germans were welcome. During Sering’s first few days in Winnipeg, he had meetings with Lieutenant Governor James Cox Aikens, Minister of Agriculture C. Acton Brown, as well as the Minister of Public Works Corydon Brown, whose experience in draining wetlands was of great interest to Sering as he would later become an eager land-reclaimer. He also met the powerful mill owner W. W. Ogilvie before being introduced to, and put into the care of, William (Wilhelm) Wagner, who promptly took Sering out to his farm northwest of Winnipeg.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Born in 1820 at the extreme eastern edge of Prussian Poland, in Grabowo, William Wagner had found himself caught up in the revolution of 1848. He was captured south of the city of Posen, escaped, and ultimately fled to Canada in 1850. Posen, along with West Prussia, was ground zero of the German demographic struggles in the East, and it was also where Wagner had studied, and indeed met his future wife. After several years in Montreal, Wagner briefly returned to Germany in 1859 to marry Adelheid Fenner, who came from the small village of Ossowo southeast of the city of Posen, not far from Wagner’s own birthplace of Grabowo. He returned with her to Montreal where he was a prominent member of the German Society.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Wagner was consistently engaged in encouraging the overseas migration of Germans, publishing both A Guide for Those who Want to Settle in Canada, especially on the Ottawa River (Canada-West), and Canada, a Land for German Immigrants.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Further, he actively pushed for “inner” migration, or indeed “inner colonization,” in his work on the scheme of the remigration of Germans from Montreal to the new frontier in Manitoba.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Montreal-based German Society sent him to Manitoba in 1871 to find a suitable location to found a German-Canadian colony, and it was on this journey that he “saw” Prussian Poland:

About thirty kilometers further down this track, just north of Poplar Point, Wagner staked his claim. Although his hopes of founding a German-Canadian colony did not pan out, by the time Sering visited in 1883, Wagner had turned his initial plot into the thousand-acre “Ossowo,” named for his wife’s hometown and in tribute to the area’s similarity to that Prussian Polish landscape.

In Wagner, Sering found a man who represented both Germany’s problem and its solution. An incredibly capable German, Wagner left the stifling East of Germany where landed aristocrats (Junker) possessed most of the property and almost all political power. He had then debunked from the “overfull” Canadian East of Montreal and settled as a “free” man in Canada’s West. Free in that he owned the plot of land that he lived on and farmed, and free in that he had political power. It must have impressed Sering that the German immigrant Wagner had become a Member of the Provincial Parliament for his local riding of Woodlands, in January of 1883. Here on Wagner’s farm, Sering saw a fully realized form of “inner colonization”: a nation enticing its people to leave the “full” East to settle on “empty” land where through yeomen farming they would increase the bounty and security of the nation. There would be no better icon of the fruit of inner colonization for Sering than the example of William Wagner.

After a couple of days at Ossowo, Wagner and Sering took a two-day trip by wagon to the “Halfbreed” settlement at St. Laurent and the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort at Oak Point, both on the shores of Lake Manitoba. What Sering saw at these two places very much informed his understanding of the role of racial assimilation versus exclusion and would directly mirror his later understanding of Poles and other Eastern Europeans, people many in the German establishment considered “half-civilized.” Sering despised the “incorrect” form of indirect, non-settler colonialism represented by Oak Point. As a fur-trading post, Oak Point symbolized the “temporary” arrival of Whites conducting the basest form of economic activity: the trade of trinkets and alcohol for pelts. Under such a system, no one settles the land, builds a solid home, tills the fields, and strengthens the nation.Footnote ¹¹³ Sering was therefore glad to see the fort at Oak Point, and the colonialism it represented, falling into disrepair and being replaced by what he considered to be thriving agricultural colonies, such as what he saw at the nearby Métis settlement at St. Laurent.

Wagner would have been especially proud to “show off” St. Laurent as he had in fact been the surveyor of the site in the Spring of 1872 and subsequently watched the “civilizing” transformation that farming was having on many Métis. At the time of the survey, the St. Laurent Métis population were quite different from the stereotypical Red River bison hunters. These Lake Manitobans would hunt and fish while wintering on the northern shore at Duck Bay, and only keep a summer pied-a-terre on the southeastern shore at St. Laurent where Wagner measured out plots in April and May of 1872, in his role as a Dominion Lands Surveyor. Wagner was disappointed to find those with at least some European “blood” allowing this fertile soil to lie fallow: “With the exception of a few potato patches nothing showed to signs of agriculture although the ground is well adapted for the culture of all cereals … I allude to it only for the purpose of showing the Dept what use of land is made here, and yet every one of these people expecting to have four miles back from the Lake.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wagner was not in favour of ‘giving’ land to people who showed no inclination to farm. But by 1883 much had changed. Throughout the late 1870s there had been a steady trickle of Red River Métis into the St. Laurent area. Many of these families combined agriculture, dairy farming, and fishing and had become relatively prosperous. These were the “Halfbreeds” Sering saw. This idea, that “half-civilized” peoples could be raised to near-German levels of civilization if one surrounded them with modern farming and showed them how to plough “straight furrows,” would become Sering’s approach to Poles in Eastern Germany, and indeed this set him apart from the biological racists who later claimed that no Pole (and, surely no Métis) could ever assimilate. What Sering failed to see here in Manitoba, and later in Posen, was a system in which race-based restrictions on participation in the larger farming market made it very difficult for Métis, and almost impossible for fully Indigenous people, to succeed in this experiment. Both here, and later in Eastern Europe, Sering’s utopian goggles blinded him to the realities and injustices on the ground.Footnote ¹¹⁵

What is significant about both of Sering’s Indigenous encounters however, the Métis here and the Umatilla earlier, is the manner in which they highlight Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination,” which states that “[s]ettler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not necessarily genocidal.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In both Washington Territory and southern Manitoba, the colonizer desired the land (territoriality) and therefore wished the Indigenous to be erased: the Umatilla were to physically disappear (die off) while the Métis, as Indigenous hunters and fishers, were to become farmers in the European style. Intriguingly, and directly to Wolfe’s point about the structural link between the desire for territory and elimination, the very existence of the Métis spoke to the earlier, “Oak Point style” of non-settler colonial engagement in which French traders wanted furs, not property, therefore, as opposed to seeking the elimination of Indigenous peoples, they instead married into Indigenous families and produced Métis children.

Upon returning to Winnipeg, Wagner delivered his guest into the capable hands of yet another Manitoban German, Julius Eberhard.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Sering and Eberhard boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and headed west on a twelve-day journey. Brandon was the first stop, and both there and throughout the trip, Sering was constantly confronted with the problem of land speculation that seemed endemic to colonizing endeavours. Grand Valley, on the opposite side of the Assiniboine River from Brandon, was originally to be the CPR-chosen town site, but when this caused the land cost to spiral, the CPR engineer Rosser simply chose the shanty town of Brandon two miles further west.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such inefficiencies annoyed Sering, but this example paled in comparison to what Sering would see two weeks later in “Niagara.”

Back on the CPR, the pair’s next stop, due west, was Indian Head, where they disembarked from the train and then travelled along a beautiful tree-lined alley directly to the truly impressive Bell Farm, at the time claimed to be the largest farm in the world. At 64,000 acres and continuing for nine miles along the CPR, with two-and-half-mile-long furrows running perpendicular to the rails, Sering was in awe of its magnitude. Although there were twenty-seven cottages on the property, each inhabited by a farming family with an acre of their own to cultivate, this operation was ultimately more a “factory,” with managers overseeing unskilled labourers who received a thirty-five dollar wage punctually on the twentieth of each month.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Sering was already forming his opinion that such massive holdings, akin to the giant Junker estates in the German East, curtailed settlement as they failed to provide land to individual, small farmers. In Sering’s mind, a landless proletariat could only work seasonally, had no ties to the land, and, as in Germany, had no loyalty to place or even country.Footnote ¹²⁰

Sering and Eberhard then took a two-day detour to the idyllic Qu’Appelle Valley and marvelled at the excellent soil and scenery, and especially the successful “Indian” farms they saw there. In his contribution to Otto Hahn’s 1882 book, Eberhard had shown some interest in the status of “Halfbreeds” and Indigenous people. He had commented on how “Indians” stayed away from Europeans, lived on reserves, but were nevertheless “peaceable and good-natured.”Footnote ¹²¹ In his report of July 1883 to the Department of Agriculture, Eberhard described how he and Sering had come across “Indian” farms in this Valley and that “these were arranged very proper in-deed.”Footnote ¹²² For Sering, this would have been another example of settlement agriculture that was so successful as to be seemingly turning “Indians” into good, Canadian farmers. Evidence as well of the opposite (and bad) form of colonialism was again present: the nearby Hudson’s Bay Company fort, the palisaded structure at Qu’Appelle, represented pure extraction economics and no settlement. Back at Indian Head the two continued by train to Moose Jaw and land considered “poor country” in terms of soil. Locals informed Sering that green and splendid country did in fact exist not far away, at Old Wives Lake, but being pressed for time the two continued west, on to Medicine Hat.Footnote ¹²³

Among the hundred odd tents of this new town seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Sering found himself amid a landscape in the act of being reinvented as ideal settler territory. In the early 1860s, this area had been deemed by the geographer and explorer John Palliser to be an arid wasteland, unfit for settlement. The CPR – and thus settlement – was supposed to run well north of this inhospitable land that had been dubbed Palliser’s Triangle. Then, in 1874, a group of scientists led by John Macoun began to recategorize the area as no longer arid but teeming with possibilities and ready to be filled with settlers. In fact, the Canadian government feared that unless Canadian settlement occurred just north of the border, Americans would wander too far north and ultimately claim Canadian territory. By 1879, the infamous rubric “Palliser’s Triangle” was removed from the map as settlement spread across this land. The area was directly juxtaposed to the aridity of the supposed American Desert, just the other side of the border. In fact, at this point Canadian officials were telling settlers that southern Saskatchewan was much like Central Europe, and the United States a bit too much like the Gobi; dry, empty, and deeply foreign. In an effort to lure immigrants north to the Canadian West, one West was deemed full of potential, the other empty of promise.Footnote ¹²⁴ Thus, the CPR, with its accompanying Canadian settlement, was now set to run through the southern section, creating a belt of Canadian colonists strengthening and thus defending the border. Sering was aware of the importance of using settlers in borderland areas, along with an armed force (here, the Northwest Mounted Police), for nationalistic and strategic purposes. But this German scientist, forever taking soil samples, was not fooled by Macoun’s new report. It was the land well north of the track, along the North Saskatchewan and Peace Rivers, that Sering speculated might prove ideal for agrarian settlers.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet for Sering to have visited those areas would have taken an extra month and he still had American midwestern states to visit. Sering and Eberhard briefly travelled out to the “end of track,” just west of Medicine Hat, and there watched 200 men lay four miles of track a day. There is a photo of this working camp, taken within a day or two of Sering’s visit, which depicts a teepee nearby. Further, in a letter to Schmoller, Sering wrote that during his journey he had often slept for days “in tents among Indians.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Despite the fantasy of emptiness that Sering would always associate with the North American West, there is no doubt that he was constantly made aware that there had indeed been people in these spaces before the arrival of the Europeans.

Sering and Eberhard then began their return journey. After a stop in Swift Current,Footnote ¹²⁷ the two spent some time checking out the farmland near Regina, saw a steam plough in action, and obviously asked enough questions of those they met to catch the attention of a reporter for the Regina Leader: “Mr. Max Sering, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Bonn, and Mr. D.[sic] Eberhard, both Germans, have been spying out the land with the view to seeing what amount of wheat this country was likely to send to Europe. They were astonished at the fertility of the soil around Regina.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Back in Winnipeg, Sering continued to be treated well under the false assumption that he, like earlier German “observers” before him, was in Manitoba in order to entice new German immigrants to head for the Canadian West. His mission was exactly the opposite. His goal was to stop Germans from leaving Germany; however, this was either not understood by his hosts or it was overlooked and ignored. Sering guessed that they hoped that his report would spark more immigration, regardless of its intent. He was surprised (and annoyed) to be asked at the last minute to address the Legislative Assembly (in English). For all that, Sering was ultimately very pleased with the incredibly high opinion Manitobans seemed to have had of German settlers. He boasted that they were the “most sought after immigrant,” and were considered “real farmers and settlers, not speculators.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Sering spent one more day with yet another successful German who had become a member of the Legislative Assembly, Edward Gigot. He had been born in the German city of Mainz, not terribly far from the French border, and took Sering on a tour of his riding, which included the town of St. Francois Xavier. It was on this daytrip that Sering received his biggest shock in terms of the dangers of speculation. Some twenty-four miles northwest of Winnipeg they travelled down the “Avenue” of an entirely staked out “city,” to be called Niagara. Sering was told that the lots had all been sold for a fortune to people in England, and then left completely undeveloped.Footnote ¹³⁰ Such speculation, Sering would later write, could only be curtailed by heavy government involvement in the parcelling out of land with the regulated participation of private companies. In addition to seeing the “ghost” city of Niagara, Gigot pointed out many empty farms that had been abandoned in the wake of the “crash” that followed the boom in land prices in 1882.Footnote ¹³¹

Sering made no note of a program taking place in nearby French settlements in Manitoba, which is startling in its similarity to what would soon be happening in Prussian Poland. At the very moment that Sering was in Winnipeg, “La société de colonization de Manitoba,” based in Montreal, was directing French-speaking colonists from Quebec to the West in order to (1) prevent them leaving the country completely, as many had already left for the factories of New England; and (2) reverse the demographic imbalance in Manitoba, where the old French Red River settlement was being engulfed by an Anglophone Flood.Footnote ¹³² Sering’s last stop was the Mennonite colony of Niverville as he journeyed south toward the American frontier. For Sering, finding these hardworking, successful peasants, still “German” despite many years away from the homeland, proved that Germans could be set up in a sea of natives, in this case, non-German settlers, and yet not “go native.”Footnote ¹³³

Back in the United States

After crossing the international boundary, Sering spent some time in northwestern Minnesota, penning a brief to Schmoller on July 16, from a certain “Ramsey’s Farm.”Footnote ¹³⁴ This farm, near Warren, as well as another owned by Ramsey near Stephen, and a third, that of a Mr. Kelso near Hallock, were all again giant farms in the Dalrymple/Bell mode. In contrast to these megafarms, Sering claimed that almost every “small” farmer he met in the northwest wanted to sell, as they were all so heavily in debt. One of the crucial issues both here and in Manitoba was that farmers could only break ground and trade in the summer months. The brutal prairie winter resulted in rather idle hands for the remaining six months of the year. Sering seems to have spent a well-deserved leisurely two weeks on these farms before once again moving south, stopping at the Dakota capitol at Yankton, and then on into the Heartland.

July 30 to August 27: On the American Farming Frontier

It is difficult to piece together Sering’s exact peregrinations over these four weeks. It appears that from Yankton he headed south, through Sioux City, to Omaha, then West, on the Union Pacific, riding it all the way to Cheyenne in Wyoming. There he visited the Swan Brothers operation, with more than 33,000 head of cattle. He then trained straight east again, through Omaha to Lincoln. He visited farms and ranches in North Platte as well as Grand Island, the latter founded by German immigrants. From Nebraska he then travelled south to Topeka and Kansas City, east to St. Louis, then finally northeast, through Springfield, to Chicago.

Sering spent some time amid the deep and rich soil of southern Iowa. After visiting Des Moines, he went out to Ames and spent several days with Adonijah Strong Welch, the president of the Agricultural School there. Welch was more an administrator than an agricultural specialist, but this experience would have provided Sering with much to draw upon later when setting up the agricultural school at Dahlem (Berlin). While in Iowa, Sering also visited the German community of Belleville that he had heard about several times on the trip. Although the town had been founded by refugees of the 1848 Revolution (like Wagner), Sering was deeply troubled by the advanced state of assimilation he encountered there. German kids spoke English in the streets and, later, when visiting a German American, Mr. Frentz, in Monmouth, Illinois, he noted that Frentz no longer even understood German. This was in stark contrast to the German Mennonite community Sering had just visited in southern Manitoba, and was crucial to what he would surmise when it came to local political conditions and the ability of Germans to maintain their Deutschtum.Footnote ¹³⁵ Frentz nevertheless encouraged Sering’s growing disdain for American farmers, for he claimed that here in the Midwest Germans outperformed Americans, and that the farms that Frentz had visited in England, France, and Holland were also much better than what one saw on “miserable,” “full of weeds” American farms.Footnote ¹³⁶ At this point, in a letter to Schmoller, Sering indicated that this experience had swayed him strongly in favour of German colonies, situations in which German culture and language could be protected from assimilation. He indicated that he very much wanted to visit and analyze the situation of Germans living in South America. Erik Grimmer-Solem believes, in Sering’s talk of “safe” colonies, he was “undoubtedly … thinking of Brazil and Venezuela.”Footnote ¹³⁷ In the same letter Sering spelled out the most basic tenets of what his life’s work would be, that settler colonialism could heal the “damage” wrought upon a nation by modernity, and that one could not therefore ignore the “great economic and psychological processes which a wide and untapped territory offers a nation.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Sering never failed to register his astonishment at the speed and scope of the settlement of the West. In describing the landscape from Omaha to Chicago, he could not believe that these 800 km had been settled in a mere one and a half generations. The towns all seemed to have the same logical grid pattern, possessed clean and well-painted buildings, and had commercial areas separated from residential ones. He was less enamoured by the large western cities that appeared to have been built too quickly, with ramshackle buildings for the initial settlers that were now occupied by factory workers, “Negroes,” and other poor people. He nevertheless understood the necessity of these large centres to process the incredible volume of grain and livestock coming off the land and noted the rather positive development of slaughterhouses opening in Des Moines and Omaha, set up in order to take pressure off the overwhelmed industry of Chicago. While at these centres and out among the wheat, corn, and cattle of this region, Sering knew he stood in the very heart of one of the largest agricultural export economies the world had ever seen.

August 28 to September 26: Wisconsin, Ohio, Canada again, then home.

Sering visited Milwaukee and Madison, before joining a local German immigration booster, Mr. Ludloff, for a two-day journey by foot through the Wisconsin forests to visit remote settlements.Footnote ¹³⁹ A final two-day stop in Chicago, which included a visit to the Kilbourne and Co. butter and cheese factory in nearby Dundey, was followed by one more visit to an interesting German-American, this time in Ohio. While based in Cincinnati from September 9 to 12, Sering twice visited the farm of Charles Rümelin, near Dent. Rümelin had been in the area for fifty years, from before the railroad, through the boom in settlement, to the strange post-boom moment when Sering arrived. Due to speculation, as well as an overzealous land tax regime in Ohio (at least according to these two Germans), the original settlers had sold their land and moved on to the newest western frontier. Due to rampant deforestation, the Miami Valley was now a system of rolling hills cut by sharp new valleys created by runoff. Everywhere were empty farmsteads covered in weeds. Indeed, on a wagon ride from Cincinnati to Dent, a local farmer explained to Sering that it was no wonder that everyone left for greener, western pastures.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Here again Sering was struck by the need to find a formula that would, yes, put a farmstead into the hands of an independent, yeoman farmer, but would then both protect him from certain larger economic forces and disallow him from speculating and moving on.

From Ohio, Sering again travelled north to Canada, this time crossing near and admiring the Niagara Falls.Footnote ¹⁴¹ While stopping over in Montreal, he noted the bustling port, yet he failed to comment on the political situation there that in some very interesting ways mirrored his youth in Alsace. As the business elite of Montreal at the time were Anglophones, one wonders if he even got to use his boyhood French. He then moved on to the national capitol, Ottawa, where he was received by none other than the Prime Minister himself, John A. MacDonald. After additional meetings with the Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Mr. A. M. Burgess, and, in Quebec City, the Governor-General, the Marquis of Lorne, Sering returned to New York. During the final days of his great journey, from the 22nd until his departure on the 26th, Sering made his farewells. Finally, he boarded the Elbe, and by early October was once again in the Fatherland.