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Poland's So-Called Corridor

By Ignace Jan Paderewski
April 1933
Article Summary and Author Biography

IGNACE JAN PADEREWSKI, pianist and composer; Premier of Poland in 1919 and Polish delegate at the Paris Peace Conference

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YOU may read today in the newspapers and magazines that what is called the Polish Corridor was taken away from Germany. This is not correct. In dealing with serious international problems proper terms should be used -- proper formally, historically and logically.

Germany, formally and as a whole, took no active part and found no direct advantage in the dismemberment of Poland. Historically, our territory now called the Corridor was wrested from Poland by Prussia and remained a realm of the Prussian Kings for 99 years. Only in 1871, and still as a part of a Prussian province, was it incorporated into the new German Empire. Is it then logical to draw the whole of Germany into a conflict and controversy arising from an act of violence perpetrated, as everybody knows, by Prussia, Austria and Russia? We do not harbor any hostile feelings in regard to Württemberg or Bavaria, Hanover or Saxony, though from the latter we got two very poor kings. We have no grudge against any grand duchy or any other member of the former German Federation or German Empire. We sincerely desire to establish peaceful, normal, friendly relations with Germany and preserve them in secula seculorum, forever.

The Germans are a very great nation. Their contributions to our modern civilization are of the very highest order. Their achievements in all domains of human activity and thought -- in industry and commerce, in science whether speculative or practical, in philosophy, poetry, literature, in the arts and above all in music -- are positively immense. A nation that has produced men like Gutenberg and Reuchlin, like Albrecht Dürer and Holbein, Kepler and Leibnitz, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Bach, Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner and so many others -- such a nation deserves not only respect but admiration from the civilized world...

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