Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
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in the course of the three partitions that the Russian Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Kingdom of Prussia carried out on the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. By 1795, the commonwealth had disappeared as a political entity from the map of Europe. For many Polish intellectuals, the partitions represented a traumatic moment in history and the source of Polish uprisings and political struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Poles did not forget easily that, before being under German administration, the commonwealth was a major imperial force in central Europe—whose dominion extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea—until its decline in the eighteenth century.13 Polish superseded Latinate and other local Slavic languages and became the literary and official language of the “Republic of Nobles.” Polish intellectuals also remembered that King Jan III Sobieski saved Christianity by stopping the advances of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and that the May Constitution of 1791 was the first set of liberal principles adopted in Europe.14 The view of a glorious past persisted in the memory of many, especially at moments when the Prussian state enacted discriminatory laws and policies against Polish-speaking subjects.
The partitions marked the beginning of the cultural and territorial expansion of the Prussian state. They also served to draw an imaginary line on the map of Europe, separating the rising cultures of the West and the fallen cultures of the East, turning the Polish territories into frontiers of civilization. As Karen Friedrich observes, the “dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made it even easier to mark the difference between a ‘Western, civilised’ part of Enlightenment Europe and a ‘barbarian’ East.”15 Apologists for the partitions blamed the political corruption of the Polish nobility and the ineffective rule of weak monarchs for the aggressive political actions that Prussians, Austrians, and Russians committed against their Polish neighbors. German intellectuals viewed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a political model that should be avoided. It was precisely in this period when Germans began to write about the polnische Wirtschaft (Polish economy) to point out Polish cultural weakness, backward ways, and lack of administrative skills.
Georg Forster was one of the Enlightenment figures who contributed to the negative characterization of Poles. It was he who introduced this particular use of the phrase polnische Wirtschaft at the end of the eighteenth century.16 Forster was a well-known German natural scientist and world traveler, born near the city of Danzig in Royal Prussia—a province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772. When he was a child, he joined his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, in a scientific expedition to Russia to explore the Volga steppes and study the possibility of establishing German colonies in the region.17 From 1772 to 1775, Forster served as a translator and scientific assistant on James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. In 1777, he published his memoirs of the trip, A Voyage Round the World, which introduced seminal ethnographic observations about Polynesian peoples to Europe. His cultural relativism in treating Pacific cultures and the positive portrayal of the islanders as noble savages contrasted greatly with his depictions in private letters and travel journals of Polish culture in central eastern Europe.18 Although his main criticisms were directed against the serfdom system and the tyranny of the Polish nobility, Forster’s views on common Poles were still demeaning. Far from being “noble savages,” he described Poles in 1786 in the following way:
The actual people, I mean those millions of beasts of burden in human shape, who are completely shut out from the privileges of humanity here—and are not counted as part of the nation even though they make up the greatest mass—these people are now truly sunken, via a long accustomed slavery, to a degree of brutality and insensibility, and of indescribable laziness and bone stupid ignorance, from which, even if the wisest steps were taken—though there is not the slightest sign of this—it would probably not rise to the same level of other European rabble in one hundred years.19
In Forster’s view, the political system had dehumanized the general population beyond redemption. If the Pacific islands were a paradise and a place of innocence, the Polish-Lithuanian territories represented the fall of people from paradise.
Forster made a direct comparison between Tahitians and Poles when writing about a trip he made in 1784 to Vilnius, where he was offered a position at the University of Vilnius. In his memoirs he lamented that he went to encounter not the “soft” people from Otaheitie (Tahiti), but the “hardheaded” and “stupid” Poles.20 The moment he reached Cracow, he complained about the “dirtiness,” the “swinishness,” and the swarming of Jews and “Polacks” (Polacken) everywhere.21 He considered his trip to Vilnius a punishment after the travel he had once made around the world. Rather than opening himself to a new set of cultural experiences, he described his appointment in the commonwealth as a cultural exile. He likened youth, beauty, and joy with his stay in Tahiti and attached images of total decay and backwardness to his trip through the Polish-Lithuanian lands. He also had great difficulty learning Polish, which in a letter to his fiancée, Therese Heyne, he described as a hard, “barbaric” language because of the multiple consonants it employed.22 He immediately followed this anti-Polish statement with the remark that Tahitian language had few consonants. Moreover, he sometimes referred to Polish peasants as the “Polish Pecherais” (polnische Pescherähs).23 In his expedition to the Pacific, the Pecherais of Tierra del Fuego were the “most wretched beings” that Forster had encountered. They were the indigenous people of an archipelago in South America who, according to the explorer, could never be uplifted and become like Europeans. While Forster’s views on the Polynesian peoples inspired anticolonial and utopian sentiment regarding this part of the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, his opinions about Poles served to validate the partitions and infuse German colonial feelings about the Polish lands.24
The main difference between Forster and other intellectuals regarding debates about race in the Enlightenment period was that, by traveling around the world and becoming a recognized scientist, he could claim the expertise others in Germany lacked in the art of classifying peoples.25 In addition to this, he was born in a Polish territory, where he spent most of his childhood before he moved to England in 1766. After returning from his voyage around the world he became a professor of natural history in Kassel, from 1778 to 1784, and then in Vilnius from 1784 to 1787. The Polish Commission on National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), created in 1773, offered him an academic appointment for eight years to help reform the university and lead the plans to establish a botanical garden, a library, and a natural history collection (Naturalienkabinet).26 Forster contemplated the idea of staying in Vilnius for sixteen years, but left after only three years.
In his famous essay, “Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen” (“Something More about the Human Races”), published in 1786, Forster criticized Immanuel Kant’s philosophical views of racial unity in favor of the plurality of races.27 The scientific explorer believed that climatic conditions were the most important factor determining a person’s race. He claimed that he had seen how black babies shared almost the same color as European babies at birth and then due to atmospheric effects on the skin acquired the skin color of the parents.28 The relationship he posed between race and climate was so strong that he considered a black person born in Europe to be a modified creature, lighter in color and different from what he would become in the native land. He observed that even if the unity of mankind were proven to be true, and black men were shown to be “our brothers,” the system of slavery would never disappear as long as “the cruelty of white people made them act despotically over their white fellows.”29 Although the essay did not directly engage Polish subjectivity, his experiences in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth helped him understand that human oppression went beyond racial difference and skin color.30 Moreover, the images he used in other texts against serfdom in the Polish lands were similar to those he employed when criticizing slavery. He defined both systems as the power of white men ruling despotically over their weaker fellows. For people reading Forster’s essay on the plurality of human races, it was easy to see the parallels between blacks in colonial settings and Poles in central eastern Europe.
Despite their intellectual differences, Kant’s opinion of Poles was no more favorable than Forster’s. For the German philosopher, the Polish-Lithuanian