Captured in this study are the complexity and fascination of one hundred and fifty years of Polish political, cultural, and socioeconmic history. The author traces the course of peasant emancipation in Poland from its beginnings during the Enlightenment to its aftermath in the cultural awakening of the peasantry during the half century prior to World War I and shows how the peasant question played a vital role in the struggle for independence in partitioned Poland.
The book synthesizes, for the first time in any language, the work of leading Polish historians during the present century. It presents a clear analysis of the disintegration of the economic system based on serfdom and compulsory labor prevalent in feudal Poland and traces the emergence of modern capitalist conditions, including wage labor and independent property rights.
Also analyzed is the role of foreign goverments in the emacipation process. The freeing of the serfs took place during a period when all or most of the country was under the rule of Russia, Prussia, or Austria. Although emancipation was due primarily to economic forces withing Poland, it was hastened by peasant resistance and the national struggle for political independence led by Polish patriots who demanded far-reaching social reforms.
This comprehensive study provides valuable information not only to those with a particular interest in Poland but also to scholars concerned with the parallel problems in Russia andother Eastern Eurpean countries, to specialists in agrarian history, and to students of Eastern European history who lack adequate reading materials in English.
Martin Blumenson refers to this book as a “sensitive, beautifully written personal memoir,” and calls it a contribution to understanding, “particularly to Americans who know little of how World War II and its immediate aftermath disrupted the lives of those who survived the defeat of Germany.”
Vividly, humanly, Shelton tells her story from the point of view of a teen-age German girl, one who witnessed her country’s surge to power and who felt the ignominy of both Germany and Germans after the fall. She reaches a point during the war when “Sometimes the way we now live seems unreal, as if we were marionettes, with orders and permits and schedules attached to us instead of strings.”
But after the defeat of Germany life gets considerably worse. The victorious Russians evict the natives from their homes. They sneer and leer at the women who must venture forth for food. In this defeated land “the nights become unbearably long; without any physical activity by day, sleep refuses to come. I yearn for sleep, be it temporary or eternal. Death is becoming a friend; the enemy has a new name now: Rape.”
Then comes the dreaded order to evacuate all Germans from Lower Silesia: “How can a whole people be uprooted, disowned, tossed aside like useless flotsam—how? With the stroke of a pen, with a new line drawn on a map, we are sentenced to homelessness.” Not knowing where they will be sent, they plod out into darkness and cold with the other Germans, their worldly goods reduced to what they can carry. Embittered, they are herded into vermin-infested freight cars, still unaware of their destination.
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