Page - 13 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 13 women increasing from 40% in 1890 to 80% in 1910 (Murzynowska 1979, 36). At the same time, the proportion of Poles who were born in the Ruhr area increased to one third (Murzynowska 1979, 33). Much like the demographic trends among ethnic migrants today, the birth rate – which was higher than average in the German Empire among miners in any case – was especially high among the Polish and the Masurians (Kleßmann 1978, 42). Year Men Women Women per 100 Men 1890 25,539 10,145 39.5 1900 88,745 53,969 60.8 1905 120,266 84,421 70.2 1910 171,892 131,930 76.7 Table 3: Numerical proportion of men and women among the Polish population in the Ruhr area. (Murzynowska 1979, 36) The overall picture that these statistics present indicates that the majority of Ruhr Poles did not intend to return to the Eastern agrarian areas, which were characterized by large land holdings, rural stagnation, and large-scale unemployment. Instead, the migrants desired to seek their fortune in the prospering mining regions along the Rhine and Ruhr. A willingness to integrate was especially high among the Protestant, mostly conservative and monarchist Masurians from Eastern Prussia. But it also seems that many of the predominantly Roman Catholic immigrants from Posen, Western Prussia and Silesia were just as determined to make their living in the industrialized West. Most of them put this decision into practice, but many did not settle permanently in the industrial region along the Rhine and Ruhr, as the statistics demonstrate. According to Kleßmann and Murzynowska, who again made use of the Prussian statistics, the number of only or mostly Polish-speaking migrants in the Ruhr area sank significantly from 304,000 to 82,000 between 1910 and 1925 (Kleßmann 1978, 261). This cannot exclusively or even to a great extent be attributed to the acquisition of the German language in the meantime. In the same period, the number of bilinguals only increased by 29,000, from 25,000 to 54,000, whereas the number of people exclusively speaking the Polish language dropped dramatically from 249,000 to 15,000, almost tenfold the increase in bilinguals.1 The number of people of Polish migration background in the Ruhr area had decreased significantly by the mid-1920s, although exact specifications on the extent of migration, further migration, and return to the homeland are “virtually impossible” (Kleßmann 1978, 152) due to the discrepancies, even 1 Calculations on the basis of statistics from Kleßmann 1978, p. 261.