Page - 12 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 12 120,000 migrants; by the turn of the century there were about 330,000 to 340,000. Shortly before World War I, the number reached its peak of 500,000. Figures for Polish-speaking people are lower. According to Kleßmann, they amount to 127,000 in 1900, 274,000 in 1910 (Kleßmann 1978, 37, 260), whereas Murzynowska makes use of the official Prussian statistics (143,000 in 1900, 304,000 in 1910), but also refers to provincial statistics (406,000 in 1910 and 457,000 in 1912) (Murzynowska 1979, 30). Taking the migration movement of the years 1910 to 1914 into account, the number of people of Polish migration background in the Prussian provinces Rhineland and Westphalia amounted to between 450,000 and 550,000 right before the beginning of World War I. The regional distribution of Polish migrants in the Ruhr area was not uniform. The city of Bottrop was the center of the earliest Polish worker migration in the 1870s. Later on, the Polish population was concentrated in the regions around Dortmund, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen and Essen, whereas the proportion of Poles in the corresponding rural districts was always higher than in large cities. 1890 1890 1910 1910 absolute % absolute % Recklinghausen City 716 5.1 12,404 23.1 Recklinghausen County 3,988 5.8 40,847 15.7 Dortmund City 626 0.7 9,722 4.5 Dortmund County 1,699 2.2 26,024 12.2 Bochum City 1,120 2.4 6,269 4.6 Bochum County 2,038 2.7 10,834 9.0 Gelsenkirchen City 1,930 6.9 15,065 8.9 Gelsenkirchen County 7,964 7.1 25,383 17.7 Herne City 2,121 15.2 12,364 21.6 Hamborn City 27 0.6 17,432 17.1 Essen City 211 0.3 3,805 1.3 Essen County 1,887 1.2 17,699 6.4 Table 2: Polish population (except Masurians and bilinguals) in Ruhr area districts with the highest Polish population density. (Kleßmann 1978, 267) As to the social structure of the Polish minority, it is noteworthy that, in the beginning, primarily unmarried young men or miners unaccompanied by their families migrated to the Ruhr area. The rapid increase in the number of wo- men shows that many men were soon followed by their wives and families (Kleßmann 1978, 41). By the time of World War I, the numerical proportion of men and women had almost reached the same level, the proportion of