[Posen]

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 285 of April 29, 1849, Second Edition]

*
Cologne
, April 28. Our readers will be grateful if from time to time we examine the “splendour and power” of our Hohenzollern royal house and the simultaneous miraculous prospering of the main props of its noble throne, the Mark bug-ridden petty knight-errantry, transplanted into all the provinces.

In this instructive inquiry we turn today to the Polish part of our narrower fatherland. Already last summer, on the occasion of the glorious pacification and reorganisation of Poland with shrapnel and lunar caustic, we examined the Germano-Jewish lies about the “predominantly German population” in the towns, the “large German landed property” in the country, and the royal Prussian service to the growth of general prosperity. Readers of the N[eue] Rh[einische] Z[ei]t[un]g will recall <
“The Poland Debate in Frankfurt”
>, how from the official counts and the evidence of the Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen to the bourgeois transition minister Camphausen we learned that the parts of the country drawn within the Prussian demarcation lines were inhabited not by half, but barely by a sixth part of Germans, while the lying statistics of the Prussian government gradually enlarged the alleged German population the more the march of the counter-revolution seemed to make a new partition and new diminution of the Polish part possible; that the German national simpletons and money-grubbers of the Frankfurt swamp parliament in these counts still counted the Polish Jews as Germans, although this dirtiest of all races can be related to Frankfurt neither by its jargon nor by its descent, but

at most by its profit-madness can stand in a relationship of kinship to Frankfurt; that to be sure a relatively very small number of small German landowners are firmly nested in individual districts, and moreover as a result of perfidious Prussian speculation on Polish misery, since according to the cabinet order of 1833 all
subhastated
estates could be sold exclusively only to Prussian cabbage-junkers, to whom the government advanced the money for the purpose; that finally the benefits and services of Hohenzollern paternalism consisted in the fact that, after the March revolution, out of cowardice the finest promises of a “national reorganisation” were made, then, with the growth of the counter-revolution, the country’s throat was squeezed ever tighter by a fivefold ever greater partition, whereupon the reorganisation was made dependent on the “pacification”, the surrender of weapons, and, when this had been accomplished, at last “My glorious army” was let loose upon the defenceless, trusting country, in order, in union with the Jews, to plunder churches, burn down villages, flog Poles to death with ramrods or burn them with lunar caustic on public squares, and, having taken vengeance for the faith in “March promises”, to proclaim on this field of corpses the honour of God and of His Christian-Germanic Majesty.

This was the labour of love of the Prussian “reorganisation” in Posen. Now let us also turn to the origin of the great Prussian landed property, the domains and manorial estates. Their history will instruct us no less about the “splendour and power” of the Hohenzollern house and the value of its beloved tramp-knight-errantry.

In 1793 the three crowned thieves divided the Polish booty among themselves according to the same right according to which three highwaymen divide among themselves the purse of a defenceless wanderer. Posen and South Prussia at that time acquired the Hohenzollerns as
hereditary
rulers in exactly the same way as the Rhine Province acquired them as hereditary rulers in 1815: according to the right of trafficking in men and selling of souls. As soon as this right of trafficking in men and selling of souls is abolished, the Poles, like the Rhinelanders, will strike a
red
line through the title to possession of their
hereditary
Hohenzollern Grand Duke.

The first thing with which the Hohenzollern father of the land revealed his Prussian grace in the stolen Poland was the confiscation of the former Polish crown and church estates. We have in general not the slightest objection to such a confiscation; on the contrary, we hope that the turn of
other
crown estates will soon come. But we ask,

for what purposes were the thus confiscated estates used? In the interest of the “general prosperity” of the country, for which the Brandenburg paternalism cared so graciously in the pacification and reorganisation work of 1848? In the interest of the people, from whose sweat and blood those estates originated? We shall see.

The then Minister Hoym, who for 20 years had administered the province of Silesia quite independently of all supervision and had used this power for the most junker-like swindles and extortions, was, as a reward for his services to God, King and Fatherland, also entrusted with the administration of South Prussia. Hoym proposed to his lord and master, in the interest of the “splendour and power” of the house and for the establishment of a brilliant and powerful cabbage-junkerdom devoted to him, to give away as many as possible of the ecclesiastical and starosty confiscated estates to so-called
“men of merit”
. And thus it happened. A crowd of hedge-knights, favourites of royal mistresses, creatures of the ministers, accessories whose mouths were to be stuffed, were presented with the largest and richest estates of the stolen country and thereby “German interests” and “predominantly German landed property” were grafted upon the Poles.

In order not to arouse the royal greed, Hoym had taken the precaution of stating the value of these estates to the King at only the fourth or sixth part of their worth, sometimes even lower; he feared, and probably not without reason, that the King, if he learned the true value, would think of his own paternal pocket rather than of anything else. In the course of the four-year administration of Hoym after the “pacification” of 1794 until 1798, the following were given away in this manner: in the Posen Chamber District 22, in the District of the Kalisch, former Petrikau Chamber 19, in the Warsaw District 11, altogether 52 larger and smaller portions of estates, which in total contained no fewer than
two hundred and forty-one
individual estates. Their value had been given to the King as 3
1
/
2
million talers, but their true value was more than
twenty million talers
.

The Poles will know from whom they are to knock out this twenty million talers, stolen from them according to the right of trafficking in men, the Polish milliard, at the next revolution!

In the Kalisch District alone, the estates given away amounted in area to
over a third of all the royal and ecclesiastical possessions
, and their revenues, even according to the wretched giveaway valuations of 1799, amounted to 247,000 talers a year.

In the Posen Chamber District, the domain of Owinsk with its extensive forests was given away to the fancy-goods dealer Tresckow, while the neighbouring Starosty of Szrin, which had not a tree, was declared a state domain and now had to buy its wood at state expense from Tresckow’s forests.

Finally, in other districts, the estates were expressly freed from the ordinary taxes in the deeds of donation, and indeed
“for all time”
, so that no Prussian king should ever have the right to impose new taxes.

We shall now see in what manner and to which
“men of merit”
the stolen estates were given away. The extent of these cabbage-junker services, however, compels us, for the sake of coherence, to treat this chapter in a separate article.