Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
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citizen wants to be a lord but none of these lords, except him who is not a citizen, wants to be a subject.”31 This lack of Polish identification with bourgeois values made Kant dismiss Poles from his description of (West) European nations in his anthropological lectures, which he gave annually from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. In his depiction of civilized nations, he excluded Poland, Russia, and Turkey, claiming that “since Russia has not yet developed what is necessary for a definite concept of natural predispositions which lie ready in it [national character]; since Poland is no longer at this stage; and since the nationals of European Turkey never have attained and never will attain what is necessary for the acquisition of a definite national character, the sketch of them may rightly be passed over here.”32 Poland’s political decline rendered it closer to other “backward” territories in the east. While Kant placed Russians and Turks outside of Europe due to their Asiatic ancestry and despotic governments, his omission of Poles from the civilized world ended up portraying them as fallen Europeans.
On the other hand, Kant described Germans as having a good character and a reputation for honesty and domesticity. Of all the “civilized” peoples, they were the ones who could coexist peacefully with other peoples, without challenging the established order. In his view, a German was “a man of all countries and climates; he emigrates easily and is not passionately bound to his fatherland. But when he goes to a foreign country as a colonist, he soon contracts with his compatriots a kind of civil union that, by unity of language and, in part, also religion, settles him as part of a little clan, which under the higher authority distinguishes itself in a peaceful, moral condition, through industry, cleanliness, and thrift, from settlements of all other peoples.”33 In other words, Germans were a group of industrious colonists who could adapt easily to any environment. The capacity of traveling and interacting with other cultures as “citizens of the world” was, according to Kant, the condition that favorably separated Germans, British, and French from other Europeans. In fact, the very same category of “European” came to be identified in his lectures with the ability to travel in order to learn about people and their national character.34 For the philosopher, Europeans were the only ones interested in exploring and obtaining knowledge from other cultures.
Kant believed that people did not need to leave their place of residence in order to pursue the knowledge of others. They could do it at home by reading the travel literature produced by others and by turning their gaze to local townspeople. With this proposal, Kant was validating himself as world citizen, given that he never went abroad to study populations. Unlike Forster, he was not a traveler, but he was an avid consumer of travel accounts. Moreover, Königsberg was located in a privileged geographical location that could bring the world to Kant.
A large city such as a Königsberg on the river Pregel, which is the center of a kingdom, in which the provincial councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the sciences) and which has also the right location for maritime commerce—a city which, by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even traveling.35
Thus, notions about German identity and citizenship were being associated in Kant’s works with the capacity of knowing the world through exploring other territories or the formation of cosmopolitan, multiethnic enclaves where the individual could experience different types of cultural interactions. Following this point of view, the Polish partitions could be justified in the sense that they brought different peoples under German oversight. Moreover, Germans, as “good colonists,” could bring into the Polish territories the bourgeois values of order and cosmopolitanism that Poles seemed to lack.36
Kant did not believe in the racial differentiation of whites but divided both whiteness and Europeanness along cultural categories and notions of progress. For him, racial differentiation occurred when inevitable hereditary characteristics were passed from one generation to another.37 Therefore, white diseased people suffering from hereditary conditions such as tuberculosis, scoliosis (Schiefwerden), and madness belonged to the same race as their healthy counterparts because they could still bear healthy progeny. What decidedly distinguished various groups of people and formed the basis of race was skin color. In “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace” (“Determination of the Concept of a Human Race”), Kant mentioned four races: whites, yellow Indians, Negroes, and the copper-colored red Americans. According to his theory, any other variation was a product of racial mixing. Kant believed that all human races had a common descent since individuals had the same “germ” (Keim) with equal developmental capacities, leading to racial difference only in response to climatic adaptation. Therefore, following this principle, Polish and German difference was not defined in racial or biological terms, but by cultural factors and national progress.
At the time that these views on race and national progress began to circulate in Germany, Poles in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were aware that they would have to transform their governmental system to counter the process of territorial expansion by their neighboring powers. However, the measures that Polish nobles took to reform the commonwealth actually precipitated the partition of the territories. The Polish partitions brought closer the problems of racial otherness and cultural difference pointed out by Forster and Kant. The images of chaos, underdevelopment, and unhealthy conditions and the desire to conquer them would be underlined in post-partition times, especially in the context of epidemics and the multiple Polish uprisings that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Typhus Epidemics and the Prussian-Polish Provinces
In his monumental work on disease and medical geography of 1860, August Hirsch, a renowned German physician and medical historian from Danzig, identified the incidence of exanthematic typhus (exanthematische Typhus) in the Prussian territories with a majority of Polish-speaking subjects. According to Hirsch, it was mainly in Upper Silesia, “the districts of West Prussia occupied by the Slavic population,” and Posen that the disease originated from between the years of 1828 and 1856.38 In other parts of Germany, it was either imported from abroad or resulted from the poor living conditions of lower social strata. The repeated incidences of the disease in the eastern provinces led physicians to believe that these territories were the natural, endemic place of the illness. Throughout the nineteenth century, typhus, next to cholera, became a main object of analysis of several German physicians writing about Prussian Poland from different political and scientific standpoints.
In a later and expanded edition of his work, Hirsch explained that over the course of history typhus was primarily a war and famine pestilence that closely followed the progression of armies in Europe.39 He considered the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as the final era when typhus had major continental impacts. According to Hirsch, the incidence of the disease for most of the nineteenth century had greatly diminished and was limited to certain places where the illness was endemic. Even the epidemic of 1846–47, which, in his point of view, spread without the same intensity that characterized previous centuries, was believed to be deriving from these localities. In Hirsch’s examination of the disease, Ireland, the Russian provinces of the Baltic Sea and Poland, Austrian Galicia and Silesia, certain parts of Bohemia, Upper Silesia, and Italy were identified as the main cradle of typhus for modern-day Europe. The Irish and Slavic populations were the most highlighted in his account of the disease. The Irish were blamed for introducing the disease in England and Scotland through migration, while the Slavs were responsible for spreading the disease to Germany and most of central Europe.
One of the reports about typhus that Hirsch cites in his work was published in 1833 and dealt with Upper Silesia. The sanitary report explained the causes of the disease in the following way:
Although there can be no doubt that typhus has sometimes been introduced by way of infection from Poland and Galicia, it is no less certain that in the eastern and southeastern parts of the department [Oppeln] it has often arisen of itself or generated afresh. The Slavic descent, the habits and customs of the inhabitants, and the great need and indigence in which they live, especially the