The scope of this thesis falls under the title, “Woodrow Wilson, World War I and the Rise of Poland”. The author’s intention in selecting this topic is to examine the national and political re-emergence of Poland in the early twentieth century from a predominantly American perspective, as no other Western nation had played as great a hand in this “rebirth”. Covering the better part of a decade and more that begins by tracing Woodrow Wilson’s ascension to the United States presidency, the examination centres upon the extent of and reasoning behind this Wilson-led influence as wielded through the channels of foreign diplomacy with and regarding Poland. Underlining America’s first substantial foray into internal European diplomatic affairs, the study analyses, in turn, American involvement and interest in the Poles’ burgeoning drive towards self-determination and national sovereignty leading into and throughout the First World War; Poland’s weighty part in the American government’s documented preparations for peace in Europe; and Wilson’s significant personal response to the ultimately successful course of the Polish independence movement, among other European developments leading up to the war’s close. Research conducted in this exercise comprises an analysis of primarily American foreign diplomatic and domestic political sources (including considerable emphasis upon the personal papers and documents of Woodrow Wilson himself), as well as of similar Polish sources where they pertain to American interest. Furthermore, scrutiny of the diplomatic records of other nations necessarily involved in this arena of “Great Power” politics, such as Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Western Powers, adds to the inspection. The author believes that such investigation exposes the unlikely dimensions of America’s, and especially Wilson’s, critical involvement within this particular East European historical setting. In this light, Wilson’s triumphant crusading on behalf of the rights of small nations – and equally his ensuing reversal of fortunes over the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations Charter – can be seen to be embodied within the momentous revival of Poland’s independence and the subsequently rocky path of the “new” nation’s fledgling statehood.

This dissertation argues that the interpretive framework from which Fontane's Effi Briest is commonly approached limits discussion to metropolitan core culture and fails to address Fontane's path-breaking accomplishment. After outlining limitations of some prominent approaches to Effi Briest in chapter one, my next four chapters explore alternative reading strategies that instead situate the novel in the imperial context of the new German state inflected by transnational relations and problematize the tendency to see Germany as a space territorially and culturally homogenized and stable. Chapter two reads the novel through Foucault's notion of heterotopia to demonstrate Fontane's heterotopic strategies as a counter-model to the monolithic mapping of novelistic space. In chapters three and four I use Bakhtin's chronotopic strategies to show how Fontane "fuses together" fictional time and space into a productive force for depicting society in motion and change. I demonstrate how this "spatial turn" breaks with the traditional time-paradigm and opens up space for polyphony and dialogism. Chapter five discusses Fontane's Wanderungen contrapuntally to draw attention to Fontane's counter-strategies, which break with the master narrative in favor of small-scale ones, to show their relevance for Effi Briest. The rest of my dissertation focuses on the novel's Eastern Pomeranian/Kessin-based chapters. Chapter six addresses the spatial arrangement of Hinterpommern from the viewpoint of the ruling elites. Chapter seven treats Kessin as a hybridized "third space" that both resists the dominant and represents an unstable and ambiguous alternative to paralyzing dichotomies of opposites. I also look into Hinterpommern as a contested space between Germans and Poles - and their competing claims over the Kasubians, inhabitants of the strategically important Baltic area. In chapter eight I show how the Polish margins impinge on Fontane's fictional representation of Prussia and are articulated in both the content and structure of Effi Briest. In chapter nine I discuss Fontane's representation of Polish/Slavic-hyphenated characters in terms of their different responses/resistance to anti-Slav/Polish prejudices and measures. In revealing the creative and transformative powers of margins this dissertation models alternative ways of approaching canonical writers and contributes to the transnationalization of German studies in particular and cultural studies in general.

This thesis considers how attitudes shaped British, French, and American policy regarding the rebirth of Poland. From the outbreak of war in 1914 to the plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921, Allied and American policy-makers first considered whether Poland should be an independent state and then where its borders should be. As they did this, they developed attitudes about these questions, for instance about Poles and the right or ability of the Polish nation to administer a modern state. Such considerations assumed that national character exists and is important in the success or failure of a country. My research draws on literature from social psychology in defining the development of such understandings as consistent with stereotyping, in other words using generalisations about social groups to understand those groups or individuals. Allied and American policy-makers considered Poles to be, for instance, quarrelsome, aggressive, anti-Semitic, pitiable, passionate, or loyal. The thesis begins by examining pre-war attitudes to Poland and the impact of the war on these and on the diplomacy of the Polish question. It then discusses the re-emergence of an independent Poland in 1918 and the impact on policies and attitudes of the Polish delegation’s claims at the Paris Peace Conference, of events on the ground, and of the Russo-Polish War. Allied and American decision-making on the rebirth of Poland was central for European diplomacy not only because the attitudes they expressed left lingering grudges on both sides, but also because Poland’s frontiers were an irritant throughout the interwar period until Germany and Russia invaded Poland in September 1939. Moreover, the conclusion that attitudes were a factor in decision-making contributes to a growing recognition among international historians and international relations theorists that it is necessary to look beyond individuals' 'rational' motivations.