Page - 15 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 15 their families. Many of these people moved to Lorraine and other mining areas both in France and Belgium. Others, whose numbers can hardly be reliably estimated, went to the United States. In light of Kleßmann’s stipulation that the number of well-integrated Poles remaining in Germany was only one third of the pre-war figure (Kleßmann 1978, 193), one can conclude that during the 1920s an estimated 250,000 Poles migrated from the Ruhr area to other highly industrialized countries such as Britain, France or the United States. Several factors appear as possible causes of this further migration: the overall dire macroeconomic situation in Germany, the mining crisis, the Ruhr occupation, and the active recruitment by French mining syndicates which, under the auspices of the French military in the Ruhr area, had their own recruitment office in Duisburg in 1921 (Kleßmann 1978, 162). Yet, there were already “about 12,000 Polish miners from the Ruhr area in the cities of Barlin, Lens, Lalange, Dechy and D’Arenberg in northern France prior to World War I” (Kleßmann 1978, 161) – that is, at a time of economic growth which was not beset by the dire circumstances that prevailed in defeated post-war Germany. Hence, there must be other reasons for the widespread further migration among the Ruhr Poles, qualified miners who were not readily replaceable in the short term. Kleßmann provides a significant clue when he notes a “fatal circular mechanism” related to the successful recruitment efforts of the French mining syndicates: “Apparently, the hostility experienced in interacting with the German population led numerous Poles to give way to the campaigning of the occupying powers, and every single case of further migration which became known simply reinforced the general feeling of distrust towards the Poles” (Kleßmann 1978, 164). The portrayal of the Polish minority in the German press prior to World War I and the response in the Polish ethnic press can shed some light on the reasons for this distrust on the part of the German population. 3. The Polish minority in the German local press prior to World War I No comprehensive systematic analysis exists of the image of the Polish mino- rity communicated to the German majority by German local and regional newspapers. Whenever such sources are cited in historical studies on the Ruhr Poles (e.g., Burghardt 2000), only individual articles serve to illustrate specific aspects. The Recklinghäuser Zeitung lends itself well to an exemplary systematic content analysis, for Recklinghausen was the city with the largest Polish minority in the Ruhr area. The newspaper was published daily by the company