Germanisation
Germanisation, or Germanization, is the spread of the German language, people, and culture. It was a central idea of German conservative thought in the 19th and the 20th centuries, when conservatism and ethnic nationalism went hand in hand. In linguistics, Germanisation of non-German languages also occurs when they adopt many German words.
Under the policies of states such as the Teutonic Order, Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the German Empire, non-German minorities were often discouraged or even prohibited from using their native language, and had their traditions and culture suppressed in the name of linguistic imperialism. In addition, the Government also encouraged immigration from the Germanosphere to further upset the linguistic balance, but with varying degrees of success. In Nazi Germany, linguistic Germanisation was replaced by a policy of genocide against Slavs even when they were already German-speaking.
Forms
Historically there are different forms and degrees of the expansion of the German language and of elements of German culture. There are examples of complete assimilation into German culture, as happened with the pagan Slavs in the Diocese of Bamberg in the 11th century. An example of the eclectic adoption of German culture is the field of law in Imperial and present-day Japan, which is organised according to the model of the German Empire. Germanisation took place by cultural contact, by political decision of the adopting party, or by force.In Slavic countries, the term Germanisation is often understood to mean the process of acculturation of Slavic- and Baltic-language speakers – after conquest by or cultural contact with Germans in the early Middle Ages; especially the areas of modern southern Austria and extant part of German East Elbia. In East Prussia, decimation and forced resettlement of the original Baltic Old Prussians by the Teutonic Order as well as acculturation by immigrants from various European countries, primarily Germans, but also Poles, Lithuanians and Bohemians, contributed to the eventual extinction of the Prussian language in the 17th century. Germanisation in its modern form was conducted from the beginning of the 19th century as a set of Prussian/German and Austrian state policies of forceful imposition of German culture, language and people upon non-German people, Slavs in particular.
Since the flight and expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe at the end of and after World War II, however, these territories have been mostly degermanised.
Early history
Early Germanisation went along with the Ostsiedlung during the Middle Ages in Hanoverian Wendland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lusatia, and other areas, formerly inhabited by Slavic tribes – Polabian Slavs such as Obotrites, Veleti and Sorbs. Early forms of Germanisation were recorded by German monks in manuscripts such as Chronicon Slavorum.Since the Late Middle Ages, the Silesian Piasts and Pomeranian Griffins invited German settlers to settle in many areas constituting the Kingdom of Poland prior to its fragmentation while the Santok Castellany was outright sold to Brandenburg by the Piast dukes of Greater Poland. As a result, Silesia, Pomerania and Lubusz Land joined the Holy Roman Empire, as a natural consequence becoming gradually Germanised in the following centuries. Proto-Slovene was spoken in a much larger territory than modern Slovenia, which included most of the present-day Austrian states of Carinthia and Styria, as well as East Tyrol, the Val Pusteria in South Tyrol, and some parts of Upper and Lower Austria. By the 15th century, most of these areas had been gradually Germanised.
Historians have also noted that Ostsiedlung did not include deliberate Germanization, which in pre-national times was beyond imagination.
Outside of the HRE, the Old Prussians, originally a Baltic ethnic group, were Germanised by the Teutonic Knights who adopted a very different approach. When the State of the Teutonic Order unexpectingly seized Polish Pomerelia by force and decimated its population, launching at the same time a massive campaign to attract and ressetle to these areas as many German colonists as possible within a relatively short period. This event also produced the first historical record of a major German thinker openly calling for the genocide of the Polish people; the 14th-century German Dominican theologian Johannes von Falkenberg argued on behalf of the Teutonic Order not only that Polish pagans should be killed, but that all Poles should be subject to genocide on the grounds that Poles were an inherently heretical race and that even the King of Poland, Jogaila, a Christian convert, ought to be murdered. The assertion that Poles were heretical was largely politically motivated as the Teutonic Order desired to conquer Polish lands despite Christianity having become the dominant religion in Poland centuries prior. Such views did not remain purely ideas but were also put into practice in the wake of events such as the Slaughter of Gdańsk whose German population only achieved the majority after local Polish population was murdered and a new settlement was built by Teutonic Knights. The carnage was so extensive that it prompted the pope Clement V to condemn the Teutonic Knights in a bull which charged them with committing a massacre
The Teutonic Order did however not deliberately pursue Germanization. Germanization was rather the result of the colonial nature of the State. This is corroborated by the fact that Order's politics also resulted in Polonization in some areas of the Teutonic State, and Lithuanization in other areas. Correspondingly, even in villages under German right, there were Polish farmers and even a Polish Schultheiß is recorded.
Modern Germanisation
Differences in Austrian and Prussian approaches
In respect to Austria, northern border of Slovene-speaking territory stabilised on a line from north of Klagenfurt to the south of Villach and east of Hermagor in Carinthia, while in Styria it closely followed the current Austrian-Slovenian border. This linguistic border remained almost unchanged until the late 19th century, when the second process of Germanisation took place, mostly in Carinthia. Germanisation of the Ladino-Romantsch Venosta Valley in Tyrol was also undertaken by Austria in the 16th century. Following the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, at the time one of the last meaningful territories of the HRE not dominated yet by the German language, was subjected to two centuries of recatholicization of the Czech lands accompanied by growing influence of German-speaking elites, at the expense of declining the Czech-speaking aristocracy, elite Czech language usage in general. Despite the great importance to Czech literature of poets and writers of the era like Bedřich Bridel, Czech nationalist historians and writers such as Alois Jirásek have referred to the 17th and 18th century in the Czech lands as the Dark Age. As a further step,Emperor Joseph II sought to consolidate the territories of Habsburg Monarchy within the Holy Roman Empire with those remaining outside of it, to centralise the government, and to implement Enlightenment principles through absolutism. He decreed that Austrian German was to replace Ecclesiastical Latin as the official language of Government. Hungarians, however, perceived Joseph's language reforms as an act of linguistic imperialism and cultural hegemony, and they responded by insisting on using their heritage language. As a result, the lower Hungarian nobility launched a literary renaissance of the Hungarian language and culture. These lesser nobles often questioned the loyalty of the magnates, less than half of whom were ethnic Hungarians, and many of these had become French- and German-speaking courtiers. The Hungarian national revival was so successful that the Government in Budapest did not learn anything from the failure of Emperor Joseph II's linguistic policies and, following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, unwisely launched a coercive Magyarization policy aimed at forcibly assimilating the many speakers of other minority languages within the Kingdom of Hungary, which ultimately triggered a domino effect. Anti-Hungarian and heritage language revival movements arose in Transleithania among Slovaks, Romanians, Serbians, and Croatians within the Kingdom of Hungary, triggering in Cisleithania the Czech National Revival and United Slovenia movements, in both parts of the Habsburg Monarchy the Croatian Illyrian movement, as well as in the Bosnia and Herzegovina condominium the Bosnian movement, some of them ultimately forming Yugoslavism, while the Polish and Ukrainian-speaking population of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria benefitted from the broadening of Galician autonomy.
File:Polskie-nazwy śląskich miejscowosci z patentu Fryderyka II 1750.jpg|thumb|300px|Polish names of Silesian cities from a Prussian official document published in Berlin in 1750 during the Silesian Wars
During the 18th-century, a more harsh and brutal form of Germanisation efforts, initially practiced in Farther Pomerania and East Prussia and extended following the Silesian Wars also to Silesia and County of Kladsko gained from the Lands of the Bohemian Crown as well as later to the terrories of Lauenburg and Bütow Land and the Starostwo of Draheim pawned by Poland, was introduced by Frederick the Great as a result of the partitions of Poland to the newly gained Polish territories of Greater Poland, Pomerelia, Warmia and Malbork Land. The Prussian authorities settled German-speaking Protestants in these areas. Frederick the Great settled around 300,000 colonists in the eastern provinces of Prussia. He aimed at a removal of the Polish nobility, which he viewed with contempt, describing ethnic Poles in newly reconquered West Prussia as "slovenly Polish trash" and compared Poles to the Iroquois. From the start of Prussian rule Poles were subject to a series of measures against their culture: the Polish language was replaced by German as the official language; most administrative positions were filled by Germans. Poles were portrayed as "backward Slavs" by Prussian officials who wanted to spread Protestantism in the German language. The estates of the Polish nobility were confiscated and given to Protestant members of the German nobility.