John Kulczycki’s Belonging to the Nation highlights the wrenching, chaotic, and often brutal processes by which the Polish state attempted to “Polonize” its western borderlands after the Second World War. By focusing on how the founders of what became the Polish People’s Republic decided who might be counted as Polish people in the region, Kulczycki makes a valuable contribution to the history of postwar Europe and to the role played by ideas of national identity in shaping that history. Kulczycki argues that accounts of the creation of ethno-national states tend to focus on mechanisms of exclusion at the expense of the equally consequential and messy mechanisms of inclusion. His narrative is driven by the tension between the Polish government’s need to identify who, in the territories it “recovered” from Germany after the war, counted as Polish; and the way that local and regional conditions had nurtured identities that refused categorical assignment to either the German or Polish nationality. Much depended on the determination for those subject to this scrutiny; those deemed to be German were subject to violence, imprisonment, and deportation, while those who were declared Polish became citizens of the new communist state. The stakes were high for the new Polish government as well, who needed the population and resources of the recovered territories to rebuild Poland after the devastation of WWII, but who also needed to rid the strategically crucial area of a group viewed with deep suspicion and hostility.

Drawing on a wide range of German and Polish primary and secondary sources, Kulczycki shows that the sorting out of nationalities began with a period of “wild” ethnic cleansing, when marauding Polish and Soviet soldiers took their revenge on borderland inhabitants they saw as German. This then segued to several years of a more bureaucratized process of ethnic categorization, as authorities in Warsaw pushed local officials to figure out who was Polish so they could be integrated into the new polity, and who was German so they could be expelled. Predictably, the harried and overwhelmed local officials found this nearly impossible to do. One problem was the persistence of enduring regional and other identities that overrode, or at least coexisted with, national identity. Another question was what to do about borderland residents who had been enrolled on the Deutsche Volksliste, the list compiled by the Nazi occupiers of those who had supposedly retained their German nationality while living under Polish rule. While having been enrolled on the list would seem to automatically disqualify one from “Polish” status, Polish officials had to concede that signing up was often mandatory. In addition, the list was generally unreliable, as the Nazis had no more been able to force clear ethnic definitions on people than the Poles were. Kulczycki is particularly good at extracting quotes from official documents that crystallize how the tension between the demand for rigid classification and the complexities of life in the borderlands unfolded on the ground. “To resettle Germans from Upper Silesia is not as easy to do as it is to say,” protested one exasperated local official (206). In the face of such realities, Polish ideologues and officials frequently had recourse to essentialist discourses of nationality, seeking traces of some eternal but obscured Polishness in the people whose fate was in their hands. Indeed, Kulczycki shows that such ideas had powerful historical antecedents in pre-war Poland. By highlighting the clear family resemblance between this kind of biological essentialism and Nazi racism, Kulczycki’s book raises important question about the similarities and differences between 20th century German and Polish nationalism.

While a major contribution to the history of how western Poland became (or did not become) Polish, Kulczycki’s argument would have benefited from a slightly longer chapter on the years between the World Wars. Kulczycki states in his introduction that he wishes his argument to shed light on universal processes that result from state building, while in his conclusion, he broadens this into a moral-political argument about the importance of respecting the rights of national minorities. He even suggests that the western allies committed some sort of moral transgression by agreeing to expel the Germans. But greater attention to the way that disputes between minorities and national states became internationalized after WWI, and the profound instability this created in Europe, would have cast the decisions made after the war in a somewhat different light. Those charged with the unenviable task of restoring order to Europe after 1945 certainly had that uneasy era in mind; and they can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that multinational states were not the key to an enduring peace.