Minority or migrants ?: Poland is trying what Turkey is already doing

Minority or migrants?
Poland is trying what Turkey is already doing

By Thomas Dudek

Little noticed by the German public, the Polish parliament is cutting funding for mother tongue lessons for the German minority living in Poland. The Polish government does not hide what it is about.

Since the Polish parliament passed a new media law, there have been renewed concerns about the freedom of the press in Poland. However, in the shadow of “Lex TVN”, which sparked protests across the country, the Polish parliament made another controversial decision.

According to this, the German minority, who are recognized in Poland and primarily reside in Upper Silesia, are to have their funding for mother-tongue teaching cut by 40 million zlotys next year. That is the equivalent of around 10 million euros and a fifth of the total funding. In addition, a further reduction of 120 million zlotys is already planned for 2023. Around 48,000 children currently benefit from the language lessons, not all of whom are members of the German minority. Only 150,000 people in Poland are currently committed to this.

But this aspect did not play a role in the decision. “It cannot remain that way in Poland for the German minority and the German language to pay 236 million zlotys. In Germany, however, where 2.2 million Poles live, there is not a single cent from the federal government for the Polish minority,” grumbled Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek, who is one of the hardliners in the government, in the parliamentary debate. “That’s enough.” Czarnek did not hide what he was about: “We demand that the Federal Republic of Germany complies with its international obligations and human rights. Then we will release the money again.”

Resentment and two lies

Anti-German resentment is an integral part of national-conservative politics in Poland, but this decision is based not only on it, but also on two lies. It is true that the federal government does not spend a single cent on the native language teaching of Poles in Germany, but the federal states are responsible for education in Germany. And they certainly offer the Poles living here this offer, to which Germany committed itself in the German-Polish neighborhood agreement signed in 1991. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone there are over 5,000 children learning Polish in schools. Even if, to be fair, it must be mentioned that not all federal states act as exemplary in this regard as North Rhine-Westphalia.

The second lie concerns the alleged Polish minority in Germany, whose recognition the national conservatives have been demanding for years. According to estimates, there are around 2.2 million people with a Polish migration background in Germany. However, this does not mean that it is Poles. Around 1.5 million of them came to Germany between 1950 and 1989 as emigrants and ethnic German repatriates. If they were still living in Poland today, they would be counted as members of the German minority there. The rest are Poles living here, who make up the second largest immigrant group in Germany, but like all other migrants do not represent a recognized national minority such as the Danes living in Schleswig-Holstein or the Sorbs in Brandenburg and Saxony.

Nonetheless, the decision of the Polish Sejm could have far-reaching consequences for the German-Polish relationship and the local coexistence of Poles and Germans. With the money cut for the German minority, the Polish government itself wants to promote Polish lessons for the Poles living in Germany. In view of the educational policy, which was also turned upside down by the PiS according to its ideas, and the Polish associations in Germany that are close to the national conservatives, the question arises whether Germany is now a kind of Polish version of the “Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion”, short Ditib threatens with which the Turkish government tries to exert direct influence on Turks living in Germany and Germans of Turkish origin.

A glance at the branches of the “Club of Gazeta Polska” that are active in Germany shows that some of the Polish clubs should be treated with caution. This is a kind of discussion group for the PiS-related weekly magazine “Gazeta Polska”. Their German offshoots first attracted attention in 2016 when the then Prime Minister and now PiS MEP Beata Szydło visited Berlin. Club members from Berlin and Hamburg accompanied their entire official visit with shouts of “Beata, Beata”. These clubs attracted attention in German-Polish circles as the “claqueurs” of the outgoing Polish ambassador Andrzej Przyłebski in January. Such appearances may be embarrassing, but otherwise there is nothing wrong with it.

Guests from far to the right

However, guests from Poland who hold lectures and patriotic recitals in the German offshoots of the “Club of Gazeta Polska” are less harmless. There would be the married couple Anna and Andrzej Kołakowski, among others. The couple and their offspring became famous in their home country because they were at the forefront of counter-demonstrations in the so-called equality parades with which the LGBT community in Poland fights for tolerance and recognition. Not infrequently these ended in skirmishes with the police and before the judiciary. Anna Kołakowska, former Gdańsk PiS MP, also made headlines because she did it on Facebook calledto “shave the head” of the opposition politician Agnieszka Pomaska. The allusion was clear: This happened after the Second World War in Poland with women who had got involved with Wehrmacht soldiers. But this and other scandals did no harm to Kołakowska and her husband, a singer-songwriter. Several times they were guests in a club of the “Gazeta Polska”. Most recently in Essen in 2019, where she held a “Polish Evening” in the premises of the Polish parish there near the Church of St. Clemens occurred.

Another questionable guest of the Essen “Gazeta Polska Club” and the Polish parish there was Stanisław Michalkiewicz, who gave a lecture there in 2014 on “Antipolonism”, among other things. The titles of some of his books show that the publicist’s struggle against “anti-polonism” is closely linked to anti-Semitism. “Herrenvolk in Jewish”, “Germans, Jews, Volksdeutsche” or “Anti-Semitism? A wonderful idea” are just a few examples from his extensive bibliography. Most recently, Kołakowska and Michalkiewicz, who also made guest appearances in other German cities, gave lectures at the “5th Meeting of Patriotic Groups in Western Europe”. This took place in 2019 in “Haus Concordia”, an educational and meeting place of the “Christian Center for Culture, Tradition and Polish Language” in Herdorf, Rhineland-Palatinate.

At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that most of the Poles living in Germany have little to do with the PiS and the clubs it favors. This is shown by both the poor results that the PiS achieved in elections among Poles living in Germany and the fact that most Poles in Germany did not organize in any Polish associations. Changing that is obviously the aim of the Polish government.

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