Breyer the Researcher

Research to gain knowledge, research to spread knowledge

In 1928 the researcher Walter Kuhn visited Albert Breyer at Sompolno. Till then Walter Kuhn hat concentrated his research on the Germandom in Volhynia, how­ever the origin of the Germans in Volhynia was still a mystery to him. The exchange of the two researchers and Albert Breyer's results for Congress Poland suddenly made clear, that the settlements were connected and that there had been a move­ment from Central Poland to Volhynia.

Walter Kuhn wrote: 'The indispensable information about the settlement history of the Germans in Congress Poland had been almost unknown at that time, at least it had never been available in printing. I first heard about it when, after a hike in the area of Łódź, I visited principal Albert Breyer in the small Kujawian town of Som­polno, whose life's work was the research of the settlement history of Germans in Congress Poland. Since these settlements predominantly were private settlements by Polish aristocrats, each one a small and limited undertaking, they lacked a big central source, like the ones produced by the great governmental colonization realized by the Habsburger or the Hohenzollern. Breyer had to go through all the separate church books and Schulzenladen of every little village. Gradually he got the idea of three big settlement streams, which moved since the 16th century from West Prussia, Pommerania, the Neumark and Lower Silesia through Poland further to the East. ... It became clear, that the Vol­hynians were only the last tip of expansion in the East ...

This picture revealed itself to Breyer and me during the exchange of our experi­ence. ... Breyer wrote a lot of separate detailed studies, but the extensiveness and the local fragmentation of his subject slowed down his progress very much'[1]

The exchange between the two researchers is clearly visible in their works. Walter Kuhn had just got his degree as an engineer when he started to study Volkskunde and history in 1927. When he met the elder Albert Breyer in 1928 he was only at the beginning of his studies. Breyer's methods of research partially found their way into the book Deutsche Sprachinselforschung (Research of German Linguistic Is­lands) published in 1934 by Walter Kuhn.  On the other hand Breyer's Deutsche Gaue in Mittelpolen published in 1935 and later works showed the usage of meth­ods described in Kuhn's systematic approach to research linguistic islands.

So the merits of Albert Breyer's works should be seen in the fact that he created and published the first comprehensive account of the multi-layered history of Ger­mans in Central Poland. Without his systematic research the origin of our ancestors would have stayed in the dark. Most researchers would have shrunken back from the first step into the jungle of church books, settlement contracts and court re­cords written in four different languages.

This chapter of history of Central Poland would certainly have stayed undiscovered without the unflagging researcher Albert Breyer and his reliable attention to detail.

Jutta Dennerlein - April 2007