Page - 21 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Horst Pöttker | Successful Integration? 21 Still, language itself was not the most salient issue, as attempts on the part of German publishers to set up a Polish-language newspaper demonstrated. The preference for the established, radical Polish press as opposed to these German attempts at Polish-language publications can be seen, for example, in the history of Wiarus Polski and the paper modeled after it, the Narodowiec, which not only outlasted World War I, but also followed the mass of Polish miners who migrated further to industrial regions in France and Belgium. Apart from an interruption because of the German occupation, the Viarus was published in Lille from 1923 to 1961 (Kleßmann 1974, 397); the Narodowiec followed migrating Polish miners to Lens, where it continued to be published up to the end of the 1970s. When so many migrants leave a country, not in order to relocate in their homeland, but to move to another foreign country, and their newspapers (are forced to) follow them, it is certainly not appropriate to speak of a minority’s successful integration into the society at large. Title Place of Publication Frequency Tendency Circula- tion Subscrip- tions In the Ruhr Area Wiarus Polski Bochum daily radical nationalist 9,000 8,500 Tygodnik Maryanski Bochum weekly religious 5,000 4,500 Glos Gornika Bochum 2 x per month unionist nationalist 30,000 Gazeta Gornicza Bochum weekly unionist social dem. 3,000 Narodowiec Herne daily radical nationalist 3,500 2,700 From the East OPD DO Gazeta Grudziadzka Graudenz 5,200 Postep Posen 400 Katolicki Posen 500 Sokol Posen 1,000 Total of subscriptions DO/MS/D 21,200 Table 5: Large-scale Polish Newspapers (“Ethno-Press”) in the Ruhr-Area, 1911. [OPD = Oberpostdirektion Dortmund]. (Source: Kleßmann 1978, p. 280f., 282) But just as certainly, the ethnic newspapers mentioned above did not contri- bute to the integration process of the Ruhr Poles. They campaigned against almost any aspect of intercultural integration: against learning the German language, buying goods in German shops, interethnic marriages – especially