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Abstract
This dissertation demonstrates, using the example of the Free City of Danzig (1920-1939)—a city-state that was established as part of the Treaty of Versailles to grant Poland access to the Baltic Sea and local autonomy to the predominantly German population—that encounters in regions of conflict are characterized by both antagonism and cooperation.
Showcasing cooperative and antagonistic relationships between the population and the government in three institutions within and outside the city—a shipyard, a casino, and a university—as well as a range of illicit transnational relationships, this project argues that Danzig’s political leaders tried to make sense of the ambiguous Free City status through exacerbating divides along national, ethnic and class lines as well as through (unintentionally) creating diverse, multiethnic spaces filled with immigrants who seized the opportunities of the city-state and contributed to its cultural and economic advancement.
Danzig’s local population grappled with the bifurcated governance framework in various related ways, but local support for the city-state solution remained consistently low. This project reveals that lack of support for the Free City was not an instinctive reaction characterized by German nationalism (a view dominant in the historiography) but was rather due to the hardship that the majority of the population experienced because of significant changes in the economics of everyday life after the establishment of the Free City. The local population’s negative response originated in the emergence of what this dissertation calls a “post-war borderland society,” a community that languished in post-war conditions longer than other parts of the former German Empire, while almost overnight it confronted a wide array of new (legal and illicit) socio-economic opportunities.
Based on research in German, Polish, American and Swiss archives and bringing German and Polish printed primary and secondary sources into conversation, this dissertation moves beyond the dominant historiographical narrative about German-Polish antagonism in Danzig to offer a nuanced interpretation of the history of a city most commonly regarded as nothing but a failed geopolitical experiment that contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War.
