With the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, Sarmatian mythology lost its function as an umbrella identity for the various nations of the Commonwealth. Loyalty to a constitution, a common history and a common political culture receded into the background, to be replaced by a definition of Polish nationality in terms of language and ethnicity. After the partitions, the discrimination and chicanery against Polish-speakers and Catholics who, under the new regime of Berlin and Königsberg, had to suffer from harsher measures of expropriation and higher taxation than Protestants, and their total exclusion from civil service careers, contributed to the increasing polarisation between ‘Poles’ and ‘Germans’. The dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian state made it even easier to mark the difference between a ‘Western, civilised’ part of Enlightenment Europe and a ‘barbarian’ East. Beyond that line was no longer just the Ottoman Empire, but the border was redrawn on the Memel and the Vistula rivers.

The national antagonism between Germans and Poles was not invented in 1772; in the past, Prussian historians had emphasised the German origins of the Teutonic Knights and of a majority of the population who had settled in the Prussian lands for centuries. From the sixteenth century language had been an issue, even in parliamentary debates, and many burghers had been eager to retain the use of German as one of their fundamental privileges.