of the Nazi regime, many Masurian clergymen, while politically loyal to the regime, supported the Confessing Church, critical of the German Christians.12 The Nazis had believed that in future the Masurians, as a separate non- German entity, would disappear, while those who would cling to their ‘foreignness’, as one Nazi report mentioned, would be deported. In May 1945, the Polonization work started with the effort to register the Masurians as ‘Masurian population of Polish descent’. However, these efforts were effectively sabotaged by the vio-lence of Polish looting bands. Those who did not want to register were accused of pro- Nazi or pro- American propaganda. Not until 1949, after violent pressing, did the majority register.13 Despite this formal regulation, the majority of the Masurian population went into inner emigration, reacting against collectiviza-tion and Polish language.14
The Swedish relief workers in the late 1940s found a great difference between the old and younger generations. Old people liked to speak Masurian, mixed with German words, while the children could not speak any Polish, since this had been forbidden during the Nazi regime, especially in the so- called estate parishes, where the squire had been a party member, and actively tried to reduce Polish customs.15 Then the Red Army had treated them as Germans.
The Difficult Position of the Evangelical Church of the
Augsburg Confession in Poland after the Second World War in Masuria
After the end of the Second World War, the pastoral responsibilities for the res-ident Protestants from the Prussian Evangelical Church were taken over by the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession (EAC) in Poland. This church had as early as 1920 been engaged in the connexion of Masuria to Poland. After
11 Richard Blank, ‘When Germans and Poles lived together’, in Keith Bullivant, Geoffrey Giles & Walter Pape, Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural differences, Amsterdam 1999, pp. 37−55, quoted p. 44.
12 Kossert 2001, p. 256.
13 Kossert 2001, pp. p. 309 f., 312 f.
14 Kossert 2001, p. 314.
15 Viktor Almgren, ‘Något om Masuriens land och folk’, in Kyrkor under Korset 1947, p. 155.
the German invasion in 1939 many pastors, among them Bishop Julius Bursche (1862−1942), were murdered as renegades and Polonizers.16
Marked by an oppressive Catholic majority, when ‘Evangelical’ was equated with ‘German’, the EAC had to define and defend its position as a Polish Church. As a minority Church the EAC had to lean close to the state for pro-tection against the overpowering Catholic Church. Therefore, the Church will-ingly accepted the Government’s programme of Polonization. They had to win the Masurians for a national Polishness and simultaneously to strengthen the Evangelical influence in Polish society.17 The ideological use of Re- Polonization instead of Polonization made things still worse. A Re- Polonization pre-supposed an earlier national consciousness that never was the case. A pro- German attitude was explained as based on material interests only, and since the Poles believed in and tried to ‘reactivate’ a Polish national feeling, they were disappointed.18
After the Second World War, the Polish Lutheran Church (EAC) under-stood the Masurians as tragic victims of a forced Germanisation who needed to be re- Polonized. There was no suggestion of recognising a separate Masurian identity.19 As the Polish journalist Andrzej K. Wróblewski stated, the Polish post- war policy succeeded in what the Prussian state never managed: the crea-tion of a German nacrea-tional consciousness among the Masurians.20
Most of the pastors who came to Masuria had themselves been prisoners in German concentration camps. Now they arrived in a formerly German region, where a vast majority of the population had actively supported the National Socialists. Their ideological view of their ‘Polish’ brethren clashed with the factual, chaotic situation. Andreas Kossert concludes that two worlds of expe-rience could not encounter each other in a more extreme way.21 This is easily enlightened by Reinhard Koselleck’s views on experience as horizon, where in this case two totally different experiences made it impossible to reach a common space of expectation.22
16 Kossert 2001, pp. 321, 307 f.
17 Kossert 2001, pp. 321 f.
18 Kossert 2001, pp. 302.
19 Kossert 2001, pp. 324, 321 f, Kulczycki 2016, p. 84.
20 Andreas Kossert, Ostpreussen: Geschichte und Mythos, München 2005, p. 358.
21 Kossert 2001, p. 322, Kulczycki 2016, p. 84.
22 See, for example, Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, Stanford 2018.
The majority of the remaining population could speak Polish, but not read or write in this language. Furthermore, ‘Poland’ was associated with an engaging Catholicism, which the Lutheran Masurians under no circumstances wanted. In Gawrzyalken, the new pastor Jerzy Sachs experienced that only five Evangelicals came to the public church service, though about one hundred Protestants went to private devotions in private homes. Because of rumours also from Polish Catholics, the Masurians did not believe in the durability of a Polish Evangelical church and regarded its pastors as ‘verdeckte Katholiken’
(covert Catholics), who wanted to force their Polonization. That they continued to visit private devotions was in line with the old Masurian lay preaching tradi-tion from the Pietist Gromadki. A few of these preachers had remained and could reactivate the traditions of Lay Protestantism, this time against the tendencies of Polonization. A special expression of this popular piety were the almost totally lay- organised Mission celebrations, that since 1951, in the peak period of Stalinism, were arranged everywhere, with church choirs, ‘Posaunenchöre’
and child groups from the EAC taking part.23
That the Masurians went to the Gromadki devotions instead of the Polish church services may seem unexpected, since the Gromadki earlier had been in conflict with the German authorities because of their Masurian language, but most of them had been loyal to the Prussian state.24 Still more surprising is that there were old bridges between the Gromadki − a Gemeinschaftsbewegung from the 1830s − and the Catholic piety. Like the Lithuanian Protestants, the Gromadki demonstrated an ‘impressive outward piety’, such as statues of saints in Masurian homes. Protestant Masurians had even participated in Catholic pilgrimages and observed Catholic holidays, though in the political struggle most of the Gromadki pleaded for ‘a space in between’.25 This points to the need to distinguish influences of Catholic piety that could be combined with the Lutheran tradition from other Catholic traditions, and especially from the Catholic hierarchy.
The Gromadki protested rationalism in theology and church. Among the so- called Stundenhalter − the leaders of prayer meetings − were people from the
23 Kossert 2001, pp. 323 f.
24 Stefan Berger, ‘Border Regions, Hybridity, and National Identity: The Cases of Alsace and Masuria’, in Q. Edward Wang & Franz L. Fillafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross- Cultural Approaches to Historiography. Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers.
New York 2007, p. 377.
25 Helmut Walser Smith, ‘Prussia at the Margins’ in Neil Gregor, Niels Roemer & Mark Roseman (eds), German History from the Margins, Bloomington, IN 2006, p. 75.
lower classes, where books of Johann Arndt were widely read. Another distinct feature was the lay preaching. The long distances in Masuria made them used to services without clergy.26
From 1946, the EAC severely criticised the attitude of Polish society. While supporting the Polonization politics, the Church criticised the insufficient pro-tection of the Masurians against Polish looting bands as well as their treatment from the majority population. They emphasised how counter- productive it was to treat the Masurians as Germans. During the so- called verification actions in 1948−1949, the EAC found its influence too weak to shape a Polish mentality among the Masurians.
Those faithful to the Evangelical Church felt themselves alienated from the EAC. Pastors were sometimes regarded more as propagandists then as soul- carers. Another important aspect was that − contrary to the case in Pomerania or Lower Silesia − the pastoral care in the German language in Masuria was forbidden by the state. The pastors, too, wanted to treat the Masurians dif-ferently from the remaining ethnical Germans in Pomerania. However, with public services in German, the EAC would have been open to attacks from the Catholic Church as being ‘German’. This was an unsolvable dilemma, since they as a Protestant Church were committed to preach the gospel in the native language.
In Ortelsburg, a Swedish priest preached in German, and was translated by the Polish pastor into Polish. A female participant said: ‘Uns tat das Herz weh, denn wir waren ja nur Deutsche in der Kirche.’ Sometimes, singing in German was allowed. Private devotions were almost exclusively held in German, and some pastors used the German language at funerals, the communion of the sick, and at house visits. The removal of German inscriptions on memorials, altars, and church windows (especially Bible quotations) were met with pro-tests; and some subjects were kept secret for some years. Still after the polit-ical liberalisation in 1956, a layman, Emil Leyk, demanded the introduction of German services, since only the German language, and not Polish, reached the Masurians in liturgy and preaching. This he regarded not as ‘anti- Polish’, but as a ‘matter of the heart’. The official Polish language had isolated the Masurian Christians from their Church.27
26 Janusz Bogdan Kozłowski, ‘O istocie gromadkarstwa mazurskiego’, in Komunikaty Mazursko- Warminskie: Kwartalnik no. 2, p. 242.
27 Kossert 2001, pp. 324 f.
The weak position of the EAC led to weak protests against the illegal occupa-tion of Evangelical Church buildings by the Catholics. Though the EAC was de-ployed by the state as the legal successor of the Evangelical Prussian Church, it had no infrastructural possibilities to proceed against the attacks. For example, in the Neidenburg district, all the evangelical churches in 1946 were in Catholic hands, and the Protestants had to lurk in cemetery chapels and halls. This Evangelical−Catholic antagonism led to a stronger polarization, strengthening the German mentality in the Masurians.28
Later on, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski boasted Poland’s acquisition of the German lands east of Oder- Neiße as ‘the greatest Counter- Reformation in recent history’. Not only formerly Protestant churches in Masuria were taken over, but Catholics also staged ‘ceremonial burnings of Protestant church books’. Addressing a large gathering in 1959, one priest said that ‘there was once a large black stain of Lutheranism on the map of Masuria. Now there are only scattered spots; let us pray that these also disappear.’29
Still in the 1980s, the Roman Catholic Church mostly illegally occupied Evangelical church buildings. In Puppen in Ortelsburg, the small Evangelical congregation was beaten (‘geprügelt’) from their church during the service on 23 September 1979. This triggered a big wave of emigration that made the Evangelical communities in Masuria a disappearing minority in a formerly Protestant region.30