Sorbs - History and Cultural Relations

Since the year 806, the history of the Sorbian people has been one of conquest and reconquest by others. Their earliest forebears were the Luzici (in Lower Lusatia) and the Milceni (in Upper Lusatia), two Slavonic tribes who migrated westward into the current Sorbian territory from the lands just to the east of the Oder River sometime in the fifth or sixth centuries A.D. The political autonomy they enjoyed during those early centuries was brought to an end in 806 by Karl, son of Charlemagne. Although the region changed political hands several times, the Sorbs never again attained anything approximating an independent political existence. Although their conquerors were, at various times, Polish, Czech, and Bohemian, they were most often and most thoroughly under Germanic rule. The Christianization of the Sorbs began early, with the Moravian missions possibly arriving as early as the ninth century. But it was the Reformation, with Lutheranism's preference for the use of the vernacular, that provided the impetus to develop a written language. The development and maintenance of a specifically Sorbian literature, and thus the possibility of maintaining a separate Sorbian cultural identity in the face of German policies of colonization and assimilation, were linked to the religion of the region in another way as well—a sizable minority of Sorbs never converted from Catholicism. The Catholic church, recognizing the importance of these communicants in an Otherwise Protestant region, established the Wendish Seminary in Prague in 1706, providing a place where Sorbian students could become literate not just in German but in their own language as well. The 1700s and 1800s brought other changes to the Sorbian people. Once a rural population barred by law from participating in the life of the towns and banned from membership in the trade guilds, they were suddenly free to leave the land and enter wage labor. The linkage of the region to the rest of Germany by railroad in the mid-1800s brought Sorbian villages into more direct contact with the larger society, and by the 1880s the major industries of modern-day Lusatia—brown coal, iron, and glass making—were firmly established. All these changes contributed to the development of a literate Sorbian bourgeoisie, which responded readily to the Panslavic movement that arose in Prague in the mid-1800s, slowing the rush to "germanicization" and permitting the florescence of a specifically Sorbian literary culture. Although both the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime sought to restrain Sorbian efforts toward independence, the sense of a particularly Sorbian national identity never faltered. At the end of World War II, Soviet policies broke up the large landholdings of Lusatia, converted them back into agriculture, and introduced statutes that made Sorbian an official language. The special position of the Sorbs as an official national minority continued to be recognized after the Soviet Occupation Zone became the German Democratic Republic.