John J. Kulczycki. Belonging to the Nation

In his famous novel Levins Mühle (1964), Johannes Bobrowski wrote about a village in the German-Polish borderlands: “The Germans were called Kaminski, Tomaschewski and Kossakowski and the Poles Lebrecht and Germann” (6). Bobrowski, himself a son of East Prussia’s multiethnic borderlands, pointed to the complexity and fluidity of ethnic and national identifications in the border zones of Central and Eastern Europe. Neither a person’s name nor language preference was a reliable indicator of one’s identification with a particular nation. In many cases, people were reluctant to identify with any nation at all, deriving their sense of belonging through the identification with a certain religion or region instead. John J. Kulczycki’s Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951, is concerned with the Polish-German borderlands during a period of dramatic political and demographic change. It offers a detailed account of how the two, consecutive regimes of Nazi Germany and Communist Poland, both of which expanded their territories into the German-Polish borderlands, tried to eliminate the “problem” of national ambiguity by forcing the people to declare their loyalty to either the German or the Polish nation, and by expelling whoever did not belong to the titular nation. Contrary to what the book’s title might suggest, Kulczycki focuses on the time after 1945. Rather than offering a basis for comparison of the nationality politics of the two regimes, the one chapter on the German occupation regime in Poland during World War II provides the necessary context for a better understanding of Poland’s postwar politics. The country, now under Communist rule, had to absorb large swaths of German territory that it received in compensation for territory lost to the Soviet Union in 1945. Given the brutality of the German occupation regime and that regime’s cooperation with Polish citizens of German descent, the Polish leadership was convinced that Poles could no longer be expected to live side by side with ethnic Germans. This meant expelling and deporting millions of people to postwar Germany, among them hundreds of thousands of former Polish citizens, while at the same time ensuring that all ethnic Poles would be kept in the country, including those who until then had held German citizenship. Given the fluidity of ethnic identifications in the region, this was not an easy task.

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