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Volume V · Page 11
| been translated into their own language by wiser and more educated people while they themselves are unable to form their own judgment. We believe it to be an imperative need that each citizen should be given the opportunity to form his own opinion of the government which is over him, and for this it is necessary that the German language should be fostered more than before, and an understanding for that fact should be given to vaster circles. The legislation for education and all the bills we are going to present to you must be animated by this sentiment. We have waited for a long time. For a hundred years we have been expecting results from a different procedure. In future we will model our procedure more or less on the one which, for example, has been observed by France in Alsace to the great satisfaction of the Alsatians. |
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| Bismarck reports: For me, the beginning of the "Kulturkampf" [the struggle between the State and the Catholic church] was overwhelmingly due to its Polish aspect. Since the renunciation of Flottwell's and Grolmann's policy, and the consolidation of Radziwill's influence on the king and the establishment of a "Catholic Section" in the Ministry of Religion, statistics have left no doubt of the speedy progress of Polish nationalism in Poznan and West Prussia to the detriment of the German. In Upper Silesia the hitherto staunchly Prussian elements of the "Wasserpolacken" have been polonized ; Schaffranek was elected to parliament there, the same who as a speaker in parliament confronted us in the Polish language with the proverb about the impossibility of brotherly concord between the German and the Poles. Such a thing was possible in Silesia only because of the official authority of the "Catholic Section." When a complaint was lodged with the sovereign Bishop (Heinrich Foerster), Schaffranek was forbidden to "sit" on the left when he was re-elected; in consequence, this strongly built priest would stand to attention like a sentry for five or six hours, and in the case of double sessions for ten hours a day in front of the benches of the left, and had no need to get up when he took the floor for an anti-German speech. According to the evidence of official reports, thousands of Germans and whole village communities in Poznan and West Prussia, who had been officially listed as Germans by the former generation, had been brought up as Poles through the influence of the "Catholic Section" and had been officially classed as "Poles". Owing to the authority which had been bestowed on this section, this state of things could not be remedied without the abolition of the latter * * *." |
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