In 1994, at a time when German and Polish politicians and intellectuals still rejoiced in a reconciliation process between Germany and Poland that seemed to bring to a happy ending a century of conflict and bloodshed between the two nations, the journalist and social scientist Klaus Bachmann threw the provocative term “reconciliation kitsch” into the debate. The rhetoric employed by the protagonists of Polish-German reconciliation, Bachmann claimed, tended to gloss over persisting conflicts of interests and incompatible interpretations of the past, instead of creating space for an honest conversation about differing perspectives. What to many seemed like a very pessimistic view was proven right by political developments in the 2000s. The conflicts triggered by the plans for a Center Against Expulsions in Berlin and the rise of the Law and Justice Party in Poland demonstrated, to the surprise of many, how easily nationalist resentments could be reactivated, and how deeply Germano- or Polonocentric interpretations of the past were still rooted in both societies.

In her important book, Annika Frieberg takes Bachmann's concept as a vantage point to explore how, starting in the 1950s, German and Polish intellectuals and journalists built a transnational media network for the promotion of better relations between Poles and Germans. Frieberg does not denounce these efforts as “reconciliation kitsch.” To the contrary, she describes with much empathy what Polish and mostly West German activists accomplished. By promoting a more positive image of Polish society in West Germany, and of West German society in Poland, they helped prepare the ground for Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, the establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany's socialist neighbors. The policy shift was contested in West German society. It not only required treating the socialist governments of east-central Europe as partners after dismissing them hitherto as Soviet puppet regimes, but also recognizing postwar borders, including the German-Polish border.

The point of Frieberg's study is to show both the accomplishments and the limits of a reconciliation process in which German and Polish journalists, public intellectuals, and media functionaries, many of whom were Catholic and Protestant lay activists, took a leading role. Among the great merits of her study is that Frieberg goes beyond print media by highlighting the growing importance of television, and television documentaries in particular. She convincingly shows that West German documentaries, seen on public television by tens of millions of people, had tremendous influence in creating more understanding for the challenges and accomplishments of postwar Polish society and greater awareness of Polish suffering during World War II.

Once Brandt took office as chancellor in 1969 and embarked on Ostpolitik, he could count on liberal media activists to defend his diplomatic initiative against his critics. After all, the time was all but ripe for a major foreign-policy shift. The crushing of the Prague Spring and the antisemitic government campaign in Poland in 1968 as well as the wave of anti-Zionism throughout the socialist camp in response to the Six-Day War were used to discredit Ostpolitik as the wrong signal at the wrong time. Yet a broad alliance of West German liberal media, with many of the early protagonists of German-Polish reconciliation now in leading positions, provided covering fire against Brandt's critics and thus helped make Ostpolitik a success.

As Frieberg argues, however, the early phase of German-Polish reconciliation in the 1950s and 1960s came at a price. Its protagonists tended to gloss over certain aspects of the past that were difficult to discuss at that time and could not be easily integrated into a narrative of Polish-German reconciliation. That narrative was based on the notion of German wartime guilt and Polish victimhood. Yet the details of German guilt in occupied Poland were not spelled out to such a degree that German society would have to face up to the whole dimension of German atrocities, not only against Polish Jews but also non-Jewish Poles. In return, antisemitism in Polish society and the brutality of the postwar expulsion of Germans were not addressed to such an extent that the notion of Polish victimhood would have been challenged. The activists got away with these omissions by largely excluding Polish Jews and German expellees from the conversation. This is what Frieberg means by “peace at all costs,” a peace that was thus built on a fragile fundament. The question remains unanswered, though, if a more honest, more comprehensive conversation about the past would have been a realistic option at that time.

Some readers might have wished for a more even representation of West German, East German, and Polish activists of reconciliation, as well as a broader chronological scope. Frieberg only touches on the 1980s and 1990s, when the reconciliation process really took off. However, the chronological focus on the 1950s and 1960s and the thematic focus on West German activists and their Polish interlocutors, with the latter's perspective explored mainly through published sources and interviews, is justifiable. Dramatic changes had to take place in West German society before better German-Polish relations could be established, and before a majority in West Germany was ready to accept the permanence of the German-Polish postwar border and support Brandt's Ostpolitik. Unlike in the GDR or communist Poland, this change had to occur in a pluralist, democratic society, where the government was not in a position to suppress opinions that ran counter to its foreign-policy objectives. Hence journalists and media activists played such a critical role during what one could call the incubation period of Polish-German reconciliation.

More work needs to be done to fully understand what allowed central European societies to come together again after the horrors of World War II and engage in a reconciliation process that is still ongoing. Frieberg's thoughtful and highly informative study of the Polish-German case is a welcome addition to the very limited English-language literature on this topic. A must-read for students of postwar German-Polish relations, this book will hopefully inspire further studies in this field and encourage more historians to pay attention to television as an understudied but critical source to explore changing perceptions in postwar Europe.