Drzymała's van
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Drzymała's van (wóz Drzymały) was a symbol of Polish resistance to official Germanization policy in Imperial Germany. During the Partitions of Poland, Michał Drzymała (1857-1937) became a Polish folk hero in the Prussian- and later German-occupied sector of Poland.
In 1886 Bismarck created a Prussian Colonization Commission to encourage German settlement of Polish lands. The Commission was empowered to purchase vacant property and sell it to approved German applicants. The Prussian government regarded this as a defensive measure designed to counteract the German "flight from the East" (Ostflucht). In Polish eyes, the establishment of the Commission was an aggressive measure designed to drive Poles from their lands.
The campaign against Polish landownership produced a strong opposition with its own hero, Drzymała. In 1904 he purchased a plot of land in the district of Wollstein (Wolsztyn) but found that the Colonization Commission's rules forbade him as a Pole to build a permanent dwelling on his land. To get around the rule, he set himself up in a gypsy caravan and for more than a decade tenaciously defied in the courts all attempts to remove him. The case attracted publicity all over Germany. It was typical of the nationalities conflict in Prussia, where the Polish movement was dominated by peasants and where the state authorities confined themselves to legal methods of harassment.
The German Kulturkampf and the Colonization Commission succeeded in stimulating the Polish national sentiment that they had been designed to suppress.
See also
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