Emptying the Ethnic Enclave? Mapping the Early 20th-Century Residential Concentration and Sociopolitical Behavior of the Ruhrpolen

This poster will examine the residential patterns and sociopolitical behavior of Polish-speaking migrants to the German Ruhr region and their descendants during the first half of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds-of-thousands of Polish-speaking workers arrived in the Ruhr, arguably continental Europe’s most dynamic industrial center, from Germany’s eastern territories. These migrants and their descendants, commonly known as “Ruhrpolen,” founded hundreds of Polish organizations in the Ruhr and, at least initially, clustered in particular neighborhoods close to factories and coal mines. Nationalist German state officials, who feared that these so-called “Polenkolonien” (Polish colonies) might serve as hotbeds for Polish nationalist agitation and general social disorder in the Ruhr, intensely surveilled these neighborhoods and enacted harsh “Germanization” programs designed to draw the inhabitants of these enclaves into German-language milieux.

Most existing scholarly works on the Ruhrpolen have depicted the gradual dissolution of these Polish “ethnic enclaves” in the Ruhr as a fundamental driving force behind the eventual “integration” of Polish-speaking migrants and their descendants. In this conception, Ruhrpolen who “emptied” these ethnic enclaves set themselves on a clear path toward “Germanization,” repudiating, in effect, their Polish cultural roots.

But these scholarly arguments have largely drawn on the perceptions of German state officials and Polish-speaking migrants and their descendants. Very little intensive empirical research on the residential concentration of the Ruhrpolenand its relationship with general patterns of sociopolitical behavior within this community exists today.

Employing digital history methods to examine this question, this poster will display a series of detailed maps that document the residential concentration of the Ruhrpolen from the early-to-mid twentieth century in several cities in the Ruhr, such as Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Herne, and Duisburg. Moreover, it will also reflect on a fundamental question surrounding the “integration” of the Ruhrpolen during the first half of the twentieth century: what relationship existed between residential patterns among Polish-speaking migrants and their descendants, especially their concentration in certain neighborhoods, and broader modes of sociopolitical behavior among these Ruhrpolen, such as their participation in German nationalist organizations or left-wing radical movements?

More concretely, the representations on this poster will consist of images produced by GIS mapping software that incorporate data from historic address books and city maps from the first half of the twentieth century held by municipal archives in the Ruhr. Accompanying charts on the poster will also measure whether significant relationships existed between an individual’s residency in a neighborhood with high numbers of “fellow” Ruhrpolen and their sociopolitical activities, such as membership in Polish civil society clubs, German veterans’ associations, Communist organizations, and institutions of the Nazi German state. Membership and participation records for these associations will be drawn from municipal and federal archives in Germany.

This poster has the potential to reveal novel insights into the evolution of residential concentration among the Ruhrpolen and to measure empirically whether the traditionally posited link between the residential “desegregation” of Polish-speaking migrants and their descendants and processes of sociopolitical “integration” in the region actually holds true.