Polnische Zuwanderer in Mitteldeutschland von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart

The article shows the processes of migration of Polish rural workers to the central German industrial region of Bitterfeld (present Saxony-Anhalt) at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In the years after 1880 a small Polish ethnic community was established there, developing its Polish national identity. Although in the following decades the immigrants were subjected to processes of assimilation to the German society, Polish ethnicity continued in this small community until the 1940s. After World War II a part of the second generation immigrants remigrated to Poland. These persons and their descendants have even until today a hybrid German-Polish awareness, a transnational identity.