Originally Posted by
Ouistreham
In the Middle-Age and Renaissance times, the Slavs couldn't but flee. They had to leave, they were no match, the civilizational gap was too big.
Things changed after about 1550. Poland became also a modern State, and to some extent Russia too.
Note that in the years 1550-1650, there was a general shift to the east: France took control of Lorraine and Alsace, Prussian expansion continued in the East, Poland included at some time all of present-day Belarus and Ukraina, and the Russians were conqueering Siberia.
From that moment Prussia began to assimilate some Slavs. It was a slow process. In Napoleonic times, French officers reported that in some remote places of the Mark Brandenburg, quite close to Berlin's suburbs, common peasants were still using a strange dialect that wasn't anything German. Similar observations were made in Pomerania. Afterwards, the Prussian State introduced universal education and military service, assimilation of Lutheran Slavic populations took place on a large scale in the course of the 19th century (some Kashubians and Sorbs managed to more or less resist Germanization though). But the process bumped into a limit in Upper Silesia, where Catholic Slavs developed explicit Polish national feelings.
My point is: historical Prussia as we know it and as King Friedrich of Prussia built it, had nothing Slavic. But the German Empire of the late 19th century absorbed some Slavic component, yes.
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