Page - 11 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 11 interaction theory to the initial assessment of the Ruhr Poles’ integration process. 2. Polish migrants in the Ruhr area – an example of successful integration? From the establishment of the German Reich in 1871 to the beginning of World War I, the amount of black coal mined in the Ruhr area increased tenfold, while the personnel of the mines increased sevenfold. This seemingly miraculous growth in industrialization would have been impossible, if hundreds of thousands of Poles had not emigrated from the four eastern provinces of the then German Empire – Posen, Silesia, Eastern and Western Prussia – to the mining region in Westphalia in hope of enjoying a better standard of living. Much like today, even at that time an exact count of ethnic minorities and migrant groups was difficult, simply because an exact definition of who is a “migrant” or “person of migration background”, is not at all self- evident. More than 99 percent of the Polish migrants back then were German citizens. Apart from their own – or their parents’ – place of birth, and apart from somewhat imprecise and variable criteria such as language or religion, the two groups of German majority and Polish minority did not exhibit much divergence. In accordance with the German and Polish seminal works on the subject by Christoph Kleßmann and Krystyna Murzynowska (Murzynowska 1979) – which essentially refer to the same historical sources – one can draw the following approximate picture: Year People of Polish origin Polish-Speaking People (Kleßmann 1978) Polish-Speaking People (Murzynowska 1979) 1870 10 1880 40 1890 122 32 36 1900 333 127 143 1910 497 274 304 (Prussian statistics) 406 (Provincial statistics) 1912 457 Table 1: Poles from the Eastern German Provinces in the Ruhr area (in thousands). (Kleßmann 1978, 37, 260 and Murzynowska 1979, 25, 30-31) Around 1870, about 10,000 migrants from Eastern Prussia lived in the Ruhr area; by 1880 this number had increased to 40,000. In 1890 there were about