In August 1914 the German labour movement did not oppose the decision to go to war, and workers responded with as much enthusiasm as other social strata: one of the most powerful labour movements in the world failed to live up to the ideal of class solidarity. The movement's relations with foreign workers, particularly Polish coal miners, in the Ruhr in the decades before the war foreshadowed this failure. The rural origins of the Polish migrants and their traditional Catholic religious beliefs led most observers, including their fellow workers as well as recent historians, to view them as obstacles to the labour movement and resistant to working-class consciousness. This study, based on extensive research in archives in Germany and Poland, documents a very different history - one in which Polish miners' militancy exceeded that of native miners, and whose relations with German workers were marked by both xenophobia and solidarity.

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this book provides the first complete account of the Polish miners' union in the Ruhr and places it in the wider context of the German labor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).