Page - 16 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 16 J. Baur. If the Polish minority was to be a topic for the local press at all, this would certainly have been the case in Recklinghausen. There are no exact figures on the circulation of the Recklinghäuser Zeitung during this period; an advertisement from November 1912 mentions a total of 12.516 subscribers (Recklinghäuser Zeitung, vol. 82., 16th November 1912, p. 1). How many of these subscribers were of Polish descent could become apparent when the Baur archives have been made available, but it can be assumed that the number was low, as the migrants had established a press of their own in the Polish language. According to the advertisement mentioned above, there was only a low amount of mail delivery in the predominantly Polish neighborhoods such as southern Recklinghausen and the mining settlement of “König Ludwig”. The Recklinghäuser Zeitung, which claimed to be the most widespread newspaper of the region, was more or less frequently and intensively read by at least one third, but no more than half of the 250.000 German residents of Recklinghausen. For the process of integration as defined above, the newspaper’s reports on the Polish part of the population – as a basis for the German majority’s knowledge of and attitude towards the Ruhr Poles – are of fundamental significance. In the context of our research, the Recklinghäuser Zeitung has now become the subject of a systematic and precise content analysis. Even the acquisition of the historical newspaper material ensures that we are the first to undertake this task, for the Baur publishing company in Recklinghausen has a very restrictive policy on providing access to the historical material (although the period in question is not generally considered to be controversial). The required volumes from the turn of the century were not – as might have been suspected – to be found at the Institute for Newspaper Research, but, instead, in the Baur archives in Recklinghausen. They were filed on microfilm and could not readily be printed out, which presented significant obstacles to analyzing such an extensive amount of material. For a first analysis of the material acquired under great technical difficulties, we can take recourse to a randomly selected 30-day period in 1912, a year which was not yet dominated by dramatic developments in domestic or foreign affairs. To determine whether or not journalistic coverage related to the Ruhr Poles was beneficial to that group’s integration process, reports affecting everyday life would seem to have the greatest relevance – the everyday life of both the Polish minority and the German majority, as well as the professional everyday life of the journalists. The most significant impression to be gained from this analysis is that the Polish minority – despite its size of 20% of the total population – is only rarely a topic in the voluminous local section of the Recklinghäuser Zeitung. Apart from the occasional appearance of obviously Slavic names in news about accidents and crime, there is little mention of the Polish minority in the newspaper’s