“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” quipped the Piedmontese statesman Massimo d'Azeglio in the 1860s. Much the same could be said of the re-creation of Poland in 1918 after more than a century of partition. Jochen Böhler, whose previous work explored German violence in Poland during World War II, turns to the bloody aftermath of World War I, as the newly resurrected Poland fought several battles for its sovereignty and borders. Böhler frames this period of national-existential struggle from 1918 until 1921 not as a series of isolated border skirmishes and wars, but rather as one great Central European civil war. This struggle to make Poland was also a struggle to make Poles. As Böhler notes, the battles over territory and loyalties can be viewed through the lens of three main questions: Where is Poland? What is Poland? What is a Pole? (2). His answers provide refreshing new context and interpretations in studying the history of Poland and East Europe more generally.

Böhler makes a mostly convincing case that Poland's skirmishes and wars (he counts seven) should be framed as one grand civil war. His most forceful arguments on this point come in the early sections of his third chapter. Böhler claims that the conduct of these many battles, in particular the “unrestrained violence and blurred boundaries between the protagonists,” qualifies as a civil war (62–63). Paramilitary bands, disheveled and hungry soldiers, revolutionaries, and counterrevolutionaries all engaged in violence against one another and against innocent civilians in ways that went beyond typical interstate wars. The unified goal of Polish nation-state sovereignty, in turn, unified these separate battles under a single war aim. Böhler sees this civil war in particular as a “post-colonial battle” over the spoils of felled empires, emerging in a vacuum of power without clearly defined sovereign states (62).

Böhler's narrative knits together all the major battles and wars of this period: the successful insurrection in Posen and low-level civil war in Upper Silesia, both against Germany; the skirmishes with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn; the armed struggles in the Ukrainian and Lithuanian borderlands; and the Polish-Soviet War. Although the first five were efforts to expand and define Poland's borders, the last one, against the Soviets, posed an existential threat to the newly constructed Polish state. Yet even here Böhler argues that, in its logic and effects, the Polish-Soviet War can be seen as a type of civil war. It remained undeclared, metastasized from early border skirmishes, and invited fluid and shifting coalitions among Poles and other ethnic groups. Although Böhler narrates these different battles in separate sections, he draws parallels and links that emphasize the commonality of these struggles.

Böhler's most innovative conclusion regards what he terms the seventh element of Poland's civil war: the “massive wave of violence” committed against civilians in Polish territories (65). This extra-military violence is discussed in his fourth chapter, which also features the bulk of his archival research. Here, Böhler vividly lays out how a vacuum of state order, combined with dreadful health and material conditions, emboldened soldiers, paramilitary bands, and some civilians to run amok. Most infamously, Poles perpetrated pogroms that claimed thousands of Jewish lives. Without downplaying Poles’ specific animus toward Jews, many of whom were accused of Bolshevist sympathies, Böhler provides a new context for these crimes. He sees the pogroms as the most virulent acts among a general marauding that robbed many people belonging to varied ethnic groups of their property or their lives.

Many of Böhler's most interesting findings highlight the lack of a unified Polish national identity, and the multi-ethnic, multilingual jumble of protagonists and antagonists. The Polish legions of the Great War enlisted a multi-ethnic cadre: Poles, but also Hungarians, Jews, Ukrainians, Latvians, Germans, and even some Armenians (41). Postwar Polish forces were often similarly multi-ethnic, especially when drawing men from the eastern kresy populated by Ukrainians and Belarusians. In Upper Silesia, many were bilingual, and German or Polish solidarities overlapped only loosely with language. Moreover, in almost every region, large swathes of Polish speakers—especially rural residents—remained indifferent or hostile to the new Polish nation-building project. The Polish army, for example, faced severe difficulties recruiting troops from rural areas for the Polish-Soviet War (131). Polish patriotism remained a largely urban phenomenon. Peasants in the eastern areas of the new state, in particular, often saw Polish troops as condescending, destructive imperialists who treated them worse than Tsarist Russia or the German occupiers had done (153). Combined with this lack of popular enthusiasm for the Polish cause were severe internal political divisions and squabbles. Böhler shows how the divergent political visions embodied by Roman Dmowski and Józef Piłsudski frayed any possibility of a unified front, as Poland waged military and diplomatic battles for its sovereignty.

Most of Böhler's work is not based on original archival research, but is meant as an interpretive synthesis of the significant historiography on these events (much of it in Polish). Thus, Böhler stakes his work's reputation on its interpretive prowess, and he mostly delivers, with a few caveats. The first chapter, on the larger context of nation-state building in Central Europe, cites much of the recent literature but appears noncommittal in taking a firm interpretive stance. In particular, his analysis of pre-1914 nationalisms in Central Europe as an “overheated accumulator” (19) plays into older powder-keg interpretations that are somewhat at odds with the newer literature, which he also cites approvingly. In the fourth chapter, when discussing anti-Semitic violence, Böhler absolves top Polish leaders of blame and stresses non-ideological factors. But in so doing he perhaps downplays the political preconditioning of rabid Polish anti-Semites such as Dmowski, and the structuring force of the Judeo-Bolshevist myth.

Finally, the work contains its share of quirks: Böhler makes use of numerous and very lengthy epigraphs, cited personal email exchanges with other scholars, and has a highly personal, autobiographical epilogue. Despite these distractions, Böhler's work successfully challenges both established and mythical narratives of Polish nation-building, revealing the contingent and violent nature of Poland's struggle for land and loyalty after World War I.