Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951 by John J. Kulczycki (review)

Even the language we speak is permeated by nationalizing rhetoric, the way we understand life is structured by words charged with additional meaning. We habitually say that one "belongs" to a nation, as if one were born with a label around his neck, while a nationality is no more than a cultural corpus that we learn through a process of social engineering. The "belonging" to a nation is a social construction imposed on individuals who, for whatever reason, are considered part of that nation by someone, whoever he or she might be. In the book under review here, John J. Kulczycki, emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, discusses the way in which the "national" classification of the inhabitants of an extensive territory at the historic frontier between Poland and Germany was taking place. According to the author, "between 1939 and 1951 two different regimes pursued the ethnic homogenization of the Polish-German borderland by officially recognizing selected inhabitants as belonging to the titular nation, removing others through more or less forced migration or execution and repopulating the area with individuals of the desired ethnicity" (P. 300). Kulczycki's work gives a very concrete example of manipulating the population to construct nations – in the same area but by different powers.

The question of the national identification of the inhabitants of the Polish-German borderlands has been extensively studied. This literature goes back to the 1930s and 1940s, to classic works by Stanislaw Ossowski and his school. Many of the findings of the constructivist approach in nationalism studies, including the writings of Ernest Gellner or Eric Hobsbawn, were already foreshadowed in the empirical findings of these researchers of the Polish border regions: national indifference, ambiguity of identities, multiplicity of ascriptions.¹ The literature on ethnic cleansing and the expulsions of Germans after 1945 is also impressive, covering different aspects: international diplomacy, the forms of expulsion, the numbers of people expelled and the victims of forced relocations, as well as the study of their settlement in Western and Eastern Germany and their treatment by locals. Given this rich historiographic background, Kulczycki takes a different approach: "My study examines the processes involved in deciding who should not be expelled, whereas the expulsion itself has occupied the center stage of the controversy" (P. 6).

The structure of the book is straightforward and clear: the introduction is followed by a chapter providing information about the Polish Border-German Borderlands. Chapter 2 discusses the German occupation of Poland in 1939, and the two next chapters outline the post-1945 territorial and population adjustment under the provisions of the Potsdam Conference. Chapters 5–13 discuss the process of "Polonizing identities," which included verification of the population, rehabilitation of some categories of Germans, and the conclusion of the politics of verification by 1950.

The general survey of the Polish-German borders, although accurate, surprisingly lacks references to the work of the late Helga Schultz, a leading German authority on the subject, or any of her students (such as Katarzyna Stokłosa and Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast). Meanwhile, the school of borderland studies that was developed at the European University Viadrina has made a major contribution to the field, and references to the work of its members would have saved Kulczycki much effort. There are also surprising omissions in citing Polish historiography pertinent to the subject. For example, the works of Jan Maria Piskorski are scarcely mentioned at all (with the exception of his book on Ostforschung, which is less relevant to the topic).² Similar oversights of existing historiography in the first chapter make the discussion of the Deutsche Volksliste (DVL) (the infamous list in which the occupants included those whom they considered "compatriots" of varying degrees) the weakest part of the book. Michael Esch has studied German and Polish population policies in...