Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew Demshuk, American University, Washington, DC, USA
Smoothly integrating theoretical analyses of nationalism, foreign-language scholarship and Polish archival readings, this book succeeds on three levels. First, it integrates nationalist theories into its assessment of population policies and practices in the contested German-Polish borderlands, offering a useful case study for courses on comparative nationalism or ethnic cleansing. Surveying the tension between earlier, civic understandings of nationality and reigning ethnic conceptions by the eve of World War I, Kulczycki uses his first chapter to highlight how European trends towards the ideal of national self-determination and ethnic homogeneity set the stage for tragedy in ethnically mixed spaces where neighbours with varying dialects and traditions had long coexisted between the crystallizing German and Polish nation-states. Plebiscites in the 1920s in southern East Prussia and Upper Silesia reveal how, in practice, the imposition of organic nationalism ironically supported Ernst Renan’s civic notion of nationality, in which residents should choose their nation (a decision that returned with far greater stakes amid the Nazi invasion and then Polish annexation of Upper Silesia’s rich industrial region).
Second, it compares Nazi ethnic cleansing in western Poland with the subsequent Polish ethnic cleansing of eastern Germany – in many ways recapping findings in Michael Esch’s Gesunde Verhältnisse: Deutsche und polnische Bevölkerungspolitik in Ostmitteleuropa, 1939–1950 (1998), which likewise traces the inspiration for post-war Polish ethnic cleansing in preceding Nazi policies of elimination and selection. Rightly emphasizing that effective comparison must retain the context that brutal Nazi invasion and population policies triggered Polish revenge, Kulczycki also integrates the broader influence of European trends and impositions. After all, it was Winston Churchill who upheld the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne (which gave international recognition to Greco-Turkish ethnic cleansings) when he called for ‘a homogenous home’ for the Polish nation in February 1944 (62). Given this context of pan-European support for ethnic cleansing, Kulczycki asserts that ‘despite the clash between the Nazi and communist ideologies and the difference in the level of violence employed, the German and Polish policies in the years 1939–1951 bear a striking similarity, making them seem less exceptional and suggesting their grounding in wider transnational beliefs and practices’ (3). Both conquerors deployed biological definitions when determining who could remain or stay; each engaged in competing hyper-national polemics (German Ostforschung and Polish myśl zachodnia); and in each case biological demands often gave way to economic and strategic considerations, as, for instance, when workers were allowed to remain for a supposedly temporary duration as slaves in industry or agriculture. Key to Kulczycki’s comparison is the 1941 German nationality list (Volksliste), which classified residents of annexed territories into four categories, with ethnic Germans at the top and Poles at the bottom. After 1945, this list was inverted by the Polish national verification process in the former German eastern territories, as those formerly at the top were deprived of their rights and usually expelled. But Kulczycki is most interested in those in the middle of the list, whom the regime chose not to expel. Building on scholarship about national indifference/uncertainty, Kulczycki observes that in practice ‘behavior had greater weight than descent’, as the Nazis often retained ethnically questionable residents to secure labourers and conscripts, and subjects became German to retain their property and escape deportation, even death (34). Although Nazi and later Polish authorities upheld biological categories embedded in an organic understanding of nationalism, autochthons who registered on the Nazi Volksliste or later underwent verification as Poles were effectively choosing their nationality, albeit under duress (306).
Third, the book closely examines the ethnic evolution of post-war Poland’s western borderlands. In the midst of an ‘ideological proxy war’, in which Polish and German scholars encouraged nationalist threads in their respective societies to prove ancient territorial claims, annexation of former German territories fused nationalism with communism (72–3) and even led Poland’s Catholic church to ‘unequivocally’ support the communist policy of ethnic cleansing and Polonization, unwittingly reinforcing the regime’s national legitimacy (129). This coincided with the forced migration of millions classified as Germans, because (as communist leader Władysław Gomułka professed in May 1945) ‘all countries are built on national principles and not multinational ones’ (87). Plunder and revenge permanently alienated autochthonous minorities from newcomers and the government that had sent them (104–6). Although the regime first retained Slavic-speaking autochthons to prove ancient Polish claims and retain needed labour (not unlike preceding Nazi pragmatism) (77–8), the regime soon ‘did not respect the culture and traditions of the very population whose presence supposedly justified possession of the borderlands’ (302). Maltreatment from settlers and Polonization policies prompted many autochthons to voluntarily leave for western Germany before 1948 and in periodic waves thereafter – notwithstanding their supposed ‘verification’ by 1949 and recognition as citizens in 1951.
In the end, this book offers advanced students a synthesis of over two decades of research on Europe’s most violently contested twentieth-century borderland, and specialists may find Kulczycki’s detailed analysis of Polonization and verification policies particularly useful. Of course, the book’s breadth precludes involving every aspect of a deeply complicated story. Perhaps for this reason the Holocaust is largely absent, and immediate post-war persecution of remaining Jewish minorities is only sketched (201–4), even though nationalist obsessions with homogenization affected more than the majority which held German, Polish and regional identities. Sadly, the book lacks a bibliography and uses abbreviated endnotes – a fatal combination, likely chosen by the publisher, that hinders full assessment of the book’s impressive source base. Nonetheless, the author has done a great service to specialists and students, whose knowledge of extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing will be enriched by this tragic case example.