Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland by Peter Oliver Loew (review)

In a recent review essay, Michał Nowosielski pointed out that no monograph has been written so far on the history of the Polish minority in Germany (“Polacy w Niemczech. Stan i Perspektywy Badań,” Przegla˛d Zachodni 3 [2012]: 26). The existing scholarship in his estimation is fragmented, descriptive, narrowly focused, gender blind, or framed by the national history. Nowosielski called for a comprehensive history of the Polish minority in Germany from a transnational perspective (26–27). Peter Oliver Loew’s book is just that. For Loew, however, the reason why scholars have yet to write such a monograph derives from the difficulties with its terms: Germany, Poland, and minority (11). All three components of this topic resist easy or agreeable definition.

Loew’s pioneering work intends to make the “invisible” visible. Poles in Germany have been marginalized, silenced, erased, and deprived of agency. As subalterns, they have spoken discreetly, but were hardly heard. Or worse, their voices were hijacked for the purposes of national histories: for instance, when historians try to determine whether they were really “Polish Prussians” or “Prussian Poles.” Such an interrogation simplifies and singularizes their fluid, multiple, and often interchangeable identities in an ahistorical effort to fix them. Even today, “Poles in Poznań and Pomorze are jokingly called ‘Prussian Poles’ for their Prussian virtues” (122–123). Such self-identification defies national categorization. Indeed, people in borderlands often adhere to these fluctuating, multiple, elusive, and joking identities.

Keenly conscious of these methodological dilemmas, Loew sees identity both as a “pragmatic concept” and a “working concept.” Pragmatically Loew frames historical Germany encompassing both German territorial states and German-speaking states where Poles lived. The large part of East Prussia, Silesia, Pomorze, the Habsburg monarchy, and so on, were parts of Germany in this sense. As a working concept, he defines Poles in terms of both a subjective and an objective nation (12). In this way, Loew can count Marcel Reich-Ranicki—the Polish Jewish German “literary pope” (Literaturpapst)—as a Pole. Though Reich-Ranicki did not regard himself even as half Polish, he maintained a strong bond to Polish language and poetry (206). Yet this approach leaves open the question of where to place the “Polonized Germans” who had belonged to “group 4” in the Deutsche Volksliste (171), the Nazi institution that classified the peoples of Occupied Europe according to racial desirability. In Loew’s schema, they seem to be subjective Poles but objective Germans—which would make them ultimately Germans.

Loew ends up defining Poles, minorities, and Germany either too broadly or too narrowly because he still tends to reify identity. To be sure, he sees identity flexibly as multiple, fluid, and fragmented; but he often uses a mix of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. The term itself seems responsible for that reification. Referring to identity still allows readers to imagine that it exists independent of the actions that create it and the norms that legitimize it. An alternative might be to use the concept of identification as it draws attention to the agency of historical actors in dialectical interplay with power institutions and thus the tension between relational and categorical modes of identification.

Nonetheless, Loew’s panoramic description of the Polish minority in Germany is colorful, dynamic, wide-ranging, and transnational. His illustrations, postcards, and photos are fabulous. In the place of the stereotyped clichés of Poles as migrant workers, forced laborers, and seasonal workers, he explores the broad spectrum of their diverse historical traces. They include itinerant merchants at the Messe, the intelligentsia in exile, revolutionaries in the socialist movement, students at universities, artists in performance, inmates in concentration camps, prisoners of war in German POW camps, volunteers and conscripts in the German army during the two world wars, war expellees, postwar settlers, displaced persons, commuters, peddlers, marriage emigrants, and athletic stars, among others. That much diversity “makes it impossible to speak sweepingly of ‘Poles in Germany’” (278–279). The virtue of...