The Polish Coal Miners' Union and the German Labor Movement in the Ruhr, 1902-1934: National and Social Solidarity [Hardcover]

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this book provides the first complete account of the Polish miners' union in the Ruhr and places it in the wider context of the German labor movement, from the pre-World War I mass strikes to the dramatic post-war events which eventually saw its dissolution. The author persuasively argues that the union's demise does not signal an inherent contradiction between national and social solidarity. Rather, the conflict between these two ideals lies chiefly in the pre-war and post-war history of the Polish Trade Union. With this book, the author convincingly furthers his revisionist challenge of the standard view of the Polish workers' relationship to their German counterparts.Praise for the author's previous book, The Foreign Worker and the German Labor Movement (Berg, 1994): 'a fine piece of scholarship which deserves a wide audience among anyone interested in Imperial Germany, labor history, migration, or nationalism' (Central European History).John Kulczycki Professor of History,University of Illinois at Chicago

Kulczycki tells his story with a good sense of its human conflicts and drama, as well as with the meticulous attention to detail, nuance, and change that is expected of a specialized monograph. [...] a persuasive account of one particular labor organization within its discrete historical context and, by implication rather than with didactic rhetoric, he has also written a cautionary tale for our own time. The Sarmatian Review

Kulczycki... skilfully fill(s) a gap in the labour and political history of the Ruhr. Business History

This is an excellent conclusion to Kulczycki's trilogy of monographs on the history of the Poles under the Empire. It also provides fruitful points of comparison for labor histories elsewhere. Labor History

well researched, focuses on issues of central importance to historians of Poland, and offers an opportunity for analyzing the role of milC·