Recovered Territory

A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989

Bibliographic Data

ID19905958
AuthorsPeter Polak-Springer (0000-0003-3844-171X, corresponding author)
Year2015
Publication date2015-10-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueRecovered Territory (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/9781782388876
OpenAlexW4396717394
ISBN9781782388876
Open LibraryOL35509556M
LanguageEN
Citations received15

Upper Silesia, one of Central Europe’s most important industrial borderlands, was at the center of heated conflict between Germany and Poland and experienced annexations and border re-drawings in 1922, 1939, and 1945. This transnational history examines these episodes of territorial re-nationalization and their cumulative impacts on the region and nations involved, as well as their use by the Nazi and postwar communist regimes to legitimate violent ethnic cleansing. In their interaction with—and mutual influence on—one another, political and cultural actors from both nations developed a transnational culture of territorial rivalry. Architecture, spaces of memory, films, museums, folklore, language policy, mass rallies, and archeological digs were some of the means they used to give the borderland a “German”/“Polish” face. Representative of the wider politics of twentieth-century Europe, the situation in Upper Silesia played a critical role in the making of history’s most violent and uprooting eras, 1939–1950

Geography · Central European national history · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Soviet and Russian History · 20th century · Borderlands · Boundaries · Czech republic · ethnic relations · Ethnic relations · Europe · History · Intellectual life · Manners and customs · Poland · politics and government · Social life and customs · Transnationalism

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