Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939-1951 - Hardcover

John J. Kulczycki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674659783 ISBN 13: 9780674659780

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2016

Synopsis

When the Nazis annexed western Poland in 1939, they set about identifying Polish citizens of German origin and granting them the privileged legal status of ethnic Germans of the Reich. Following Germany's defeat in World War II, Soviet-dominated Poland incorporated eastern Germany and proceeded to do just the opposite: searching out Germans of Polish origin and offering them Polish citizenship. Belonging to the Nation examines these efforts to nationalize inhabitants of the contested Polish-German borderlands, underscoring the processes of inclusion and exclusion that mold national communities. Histories of national minorities in the twentieth century often concentrate on ethnic cleansing. John Kulczycki approaches his topic from a different angle, focusing on how governments decide which minorities to include, not expel. The policies Germany and Poland pursued from 1939 to 1951 bear striking similarities. Both Nazis and Communist Poles regarded national identity as biologically determined-and both found this principle difficult to enforce. Although the goal was to create an ethnically homogeneous nation, Germany and Poland allowed pockets of minorities to remain, usually to exploit their labor. Kulczycki illustrates the complexity of the process behind national self-determination, the obstacles it confronts in practice, and the resulting injustices.

About this title

Review:

"The complicated ambiguities and ambivalences in national affiliations their exigencies, constraints, and sometimes surprising pragmatics have recently inspired some of the best work on the twentieth-century nationality conflicts of east-central Europe. A wise and seasoned specialist in the Polish experience of German rule, Kulczycki now brings this lens to the Polish-German borderlands under successive regimes of occupation, with characteristically revealing and important results." --Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism

About the Author:

John J. Kulczycki is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674659783
• ISBN 13: 9780674659780
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416