Authors

Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez¹;  ¹ Instytut Slawistyki PAN, Poland

Discussion

Käthe Schirmacher was a German writer and activist, advocating for women's rights and the international women's movement in the 1890s. After World War II, she became an activist of the volkist Deutschnationale Volkspartei, supporting its anti-Semitic, xenophobic views. From the beginning of the 20th century, she was also involved in "Ostmarkenpolitik", i.e. the policy of the German right wing on the eastern fringe of the German Empire, aiming at repelling the "Polish threat". Schirmacher was, of course, well known to Polish women  nationalist activists who wrote about her in the Poznań-based magazine "Głos Wielkopolanek" ("Voice of Women from Wielkopolska"). In my presentation, I want to focus on the paradoxical relationship between Polish and German nationalist activists, oscillating between supporting women's emancipation and nationalist demands, and referring in various ways to the inequality between Poles and Germans in Prussian Poland. I will describe their relationship using the category of nationalizing relay as a cultural transfer between nationalist circles in the situation of inequality in Poland under the partitions.