In 1904 in the village of Kaisertreu situated in the Prussian province of Posen, police began observing a daily ritual that would soon attract national and international attention. Every morning, a uniformed officer representing the fulsome authority of the all-highest imperial and royal majesty Wilhelm II marched out to a plot of land near a dilapidated farmstead to measure the position of a circus caravan, ascertained it had been moved, and walked back to the station. Soon enough, locals gathered to observe the spectacle, and in due time, others came from afar, staying in the nearby town of Rackwitz, today Rakoniewice, in a festive mood to visit the famous caravan and Michal Drzymala, the man who was making the Prussian state look like idiots.
Often, writing about the history of rebellion and resistance is a grim business, struggling through accounts of brutal repression and suffering. This is a different story. It’s a tale of clever activism, solidarity, and collective schadenfreude at the expense of the powerful, and it comes with a genuine happy end. And of course, no celebration in recent German history could be complete without coffee and cake.
There are more varieties of cake in Germany today than anyone can reasonably count, but there is one kind specifically that looks like it was born from local tradition. To this day, the joy of Streuselkuchen straddles the border, beloved in Germany and Poland alike. Made from easily available ingredients and in quantity, it was popular for rural celebrations and often sold at festivals, and surely you could have got some on an outing to see the Landgendarm make a fool of himself another day. This is the (rather wordy) recipe given in Therese Adam’s Schlesisches Kochbuch, published in Troppau (today Opava) in 1900:
#593 Silesian Streußelkuchen
You prepare the same dough as for Silesian cake, place it on a baking sheet once it has risen, draw it out with hands dipped in warm butter to about a finger’s thickness, brush it with egg yolk and melted butter, sprinkle it thickly with prepared Streußel and Zimmtzucker (a cinnamon-sugar mix), let it rise a little more, and bake it light brown. After the cake is taken out of the oven, you drizzle it with a little more melted butter, carefully slide it off the sheet onto a suitable board, let it cool, and cut it into slices of what size you please. This cake is very good with coffee.
The same dough, spread out by hand on a liberally greased baking sheet, can be covered in halved plums, skin side down, sprinkled with plenty of grated gingerbread (Lebzelt) and sugar, allowed to rise again and baked properly. You then also drizzle it with melted butter. Cherry cake can be prepared the same way. The cherries are arranged on the dough in regular rows, the cake is sprinkled with ground almonds and Zimmtzucker, it is also allowed to rise, then baked and, once finished, drizzled with butter.
594 Cake Streusel (Kuchenstreußel)
Take 2-3 handfuls of flour in a flat bowl, add 2 tablespoons of sugar and mingle it well with the flour. Pour on some butter or lard and stir it in with a spoon so that small lumps are created. If the Streußel is too dry or still very floury, pour on a little more butter, but if it is too soft, add a little flour and finish working the Streußel into crumbs with your hands. You also cover apple, poppyseed, and cabbage cakes with this.
Of course she also provides the recipe for the actual dough:
#592 Silesian Cake
Make dough of 2 kg of fine flour with 4 decagrams (40g) of yeast dissolved in lukewarm milk and 2 tablespoons of sugar together with the necessary amount of uncooked, but warm cream (Schmetten) and 28 decagrams (280g) of melted butter, one egg yolk, and a little salt. It must not bee too coarse, but also not too soft. You work it until it is smooth and set it in a warm place to rise. Meanwhile, you prepare the filling for the cake, be it apple puree, curd cheese (Topfen), poppyseeds, plum preserve (Powidl) or cabbage (see: fillings). Now you take the well-risen dough on a floured board, divide into as many parts as you have different fillings, roll out each part into a long piece about two hands wide, place the filling on it along its length and fold first one long side, then the other over it. Press it flat and wide with your hands, gently roll it out to one finger’s thickness, and cut pieces as wide as the greased baking sheet it. Lay the cake on that, brush it with lard or melted butter, and sprinkle it with grated gingerbread (Lebzelt) or Streußel. You continue the same way with the remaining dough. Let the cakes rise once again and bake them. You can also bake small, round cakes with this dough by cutting off pieces the size of a dumpling (knödelgroße), shape them round, place a spoonful of a filling of your choice in the centre, close the dough carefully over it, place the cakes on a greased baking sheet, shape them round, brush them with melted butter, and sprinkle them with Streußel or gingerbread (Lebzelt). If you have fresh plums or cherries, you can also cover the dough with them. The plums naturally have the stones removed, are laid skin side down, and covered with gingerbread and sugar. Apple and cabbage cake are covered with pounded almonds and sugar, poppyseed with Streußel. You can also fill the same cake with good, ripe blueberries, but they need a lot of sugar. Blueberry cake is covered with grated gingerbread (Lebzelt).
This is a perfect snack to share among a crowd with hot coffee or maybe chilled lemonade as you laugh at the police. But what had happened to draw all those people there? To understand this, we need to take a brief look at history.
German is one of the oldest literary languages in Europe, but Germany as a country is relatively young. The Empire that Bismarck forged in 1871, though it called itself Deutsches Reich and meant it, was less ethnically homogenous than it would have liked to be. It was home to unhappy captive French-speakers in Alsace-Lorraine and a Danish minority on its northern border, but by far the largest non-German population was made up of Poles.
Poland had ceased to exist as a country after Prussia, Austria, and Russia had decided to divide the territory between them in one of the most shameless acts of betrayal in eighteenth-century history, and the Prussian share had ended up integrated into the German Empire. The government held out the hope that these people could become a docile rural workforce that would eventually assimilate into German culture. The Poles, proud of their language and history, had no intention to do that.
Michal Drzymala, the hero of this particular story, was one such Polish-speaking citizen of Prussia who had lived a largely unremarkable life as a farmer in the province of Posen. In 1904, he purchased a dilapidated farmstead where he intended to rebuild for his family and ran smack into the racist barriers Prussian law had set up. Alarmed by the growth of the Polish-speaking population and their refusal to Germanise, the government had legislated German as the sole language of instruction in schools, mandated it be used in all clubs and associations, limited publishing, and flat-out forbade Polish-speaking people from building homes while encouraging German speakers to do so. That last law turned out a boondoggle mostly funneling money to rich landowners, but it had been meant as an act of ethnic cleansing.
Given its reputation in the English-speaking world, it comes as a surprise to many how comically inept Bismarck’s Empire could be at being evil. Its laws were harsh and often unequal, its government racist, its politics authoritarian, and much of the populace liked it that way, but they had rules that they played by. If anywhere in history exemplifies the idea that “the law is the law”, it is Germany around 1900, and Michal Drzymala knew this. When the police turned up to inform him that as a Pole, he was forbidden by law to rebuild the ruined house he had bought, he first settled into the still extant stables. The police then dug out a regulation banning fireplaces in outbuildings. The exasperated Drzymala went out and purchased an old circus caravan. Surely they could not ban that!?
They certainly tried. Having found there was no way they could legally stop him from owning the caravan or parking it on his own land, they discovered a law that limited the stay of itinerant people in any one place to 24 hours. That, the police decided, would take care of the obstinate Pole.
Drzymala obeyed. He moved his caravan by a few metres. The police returned, noted the fact, reported it up the chain of command, and were nonplussed to find the law actually never specified how far itinerant people had to move once their 24 hours were up. For a while, the officers returned daily to measure how much the caravan had shifted. Soon, the story was reported in the local press, then in national papers. Drzymala became a local celebrity, his cause supported by the Polish minority’s political organisations. Crowds, both Polish- and German-speaking, showed up to poke fun at the authorities while the case made its way through the courts. Eventually, the humiliation became too much and the official visits ceased. Still, support kept coming. There were many people in Germany who loved to see the self-importance of the government punctured.
In the end, the case was lost on a technicality. By that time, Drzymala had received enough in donations to buy a house – something the law had no power to forbid. He later moved to a larger farm in Galicia, where Austro-Hungarian law protected the rights of ethnic minorities, and seems to have done reasonably well there. When Poland regained national independence after the First World War, the young republic honoured the elderly farmer with a state pension which he enjoyed until his death of old age in 1937. His famous caravan was displayed in Krakow for many years.
The village once known as Kaisertreu is named Drzymalowo today. By all accounts, they still enjoy Streuselkuchen there.