Carole Fink

Stresemann's Minority Policies, 1924-29

Gustav Stresemann, Weimar Germany’s most illustrious diplomat and statesman, was a champion of minority rights. The first European leader to raise the minorities issue to international prominence, he promised at the time of the Locarno treaties to defend the rights of eight million ethnic Germans who lived in Eastern Europe. From 1926 to 1929, as a permanent member of the League of Nations Council, he worked for improvements in the international system for minority protection. Stresemann’s minorities diplomacy, with its mixture of ardent public advocacy and shrewd private strategy, receives brief mention by historians, except for those who link it with his revisionist Ostpolitik.1 It seems timely to analyse his policies, because the nature and outcome of his protracted involvement with the question of Auslandsdeutschtum fit neither of the rival Stresemanninterpretations : the good European versus the German Machtpolitiker.2 Here we find Stresemann initiating a complex secondary strategy, a ’holding action’ which produced repercussions in domestic and international politics and which ultimately eluded the control even of a consummate politician. At the end of the first world war, the number of European minorities had been reduced considerably, from one hundred to approximately twenty-five million persons. Yet a new, and potentially

Reviews: Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919—1933, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2005; 960 pp., 14 maps; 0198221142, £39 (hbk)

included in this volume, especially his arguments that a ‘substantial Jewish element’ was active in NKWD murder of Poles, that ‘Jewish communists’ killed 7,000 Christian Poles between 1944–7, and that ‘Jews were disproportionately represented’ in the communist leadership of immediate post-war Poland (132, 150, 153). Revisionist works debunking the authenticity of Z . ydo-komuna (Jewish communism), now often referred to as a myth, have asked critical questions that also would have been important to consider, including whether the ‘Jewish communists’ identified themselves as ‘Jews’, and the extent to which their ‘overrepresented’ presence in the ranks of the post-war regime compared to that of ethnic Poles was just an exaggerated stereotype. Stachura denies neither the existence of anti-Semitism, nor instances of its outbreak into violent attacks against Jews, such as the Jedwabne Pogrom. However, his propensity to defend the ethnically Polish core nation by attacking the Ukranian, Jewish and German minorities for their ‘hostile’ attitude towards the Polish nation-state, rather than his offering a more even-sided interpretation of minority-majority relations (i.e. in the context of nation-building on the part of the state of interwar Poland) may limit the book’s appeal (184). Nevertheless, all interested in the history of the Second Republic should still consider this work for the stimulating insights the author provides.