Border Trouble: Ethnopolitics and Cosmopolitan Memory in Recent Polish Cinema

ABSTRACTThis paper deals with a transnational network of scholars and their demographic concepts of ethnic homogenisation of Europe. Focusing on the ethnographer Karl Christian von Loesch and the sociologist Max Hildebert Boehm, it sheds light on German supremacist scholarship and its international entanglements in the interwar years. Loesch and Boehm headed the Institute for Borderland and Foreign Studies in Berlin, where they developed concepts of a new European demographic order based on ethnic segregation, border shifts, assimilation and population transfers. They closely cooperated with non-German nationalists. Indeed, Loesch and Boehm had a big impact on non-Germans scholars, who studied at their institute and who would later try to apply similar concepts of ethnic homogenisation to their countries. By discussing the work of three of their students, Franz Ronneberger, Mladen Lorković and Fritz Valjavec, the paper presents a case of transnational cooperation between German and south-eastern European scholars. Using Croatia as an example, the paper demonstrates how these scholars worked towards nation-states freed of ethnic minorities. The Second World War would bring them into a position to try to implement their projects. Yet, the brutal dynamics of the war quickly altered the reality scholars had planned to design. The grand demographic schemes paved the way for ethnic cleansing, but had not much to do with the way they were carried out.

1918 was a seminal year in the history of 20th-century Poland – the country which, together with other Central and Eastern European states, gained independence as the Great War drew to an end. At the same time, the Great War does not appear to occupy a special and privileged place in Polish cultural memory. As a matter of fact, overshadowed by the trauma of World War II it is anything but an important site of memory. In the field of visual arts and literature the period 1914-1918 did not bring works which would be either formally ‘modern’ or would account for the tragedy of the war. It might well be stated that the eruption of modern means of expressions which were used by artists and writers to narrate the experience of the Great War – the phenomenon that can be observed in art and literature of many post-World War I European states – did not leave any substantial traces in Polish culture. On the contrary, if the Great War was represented in Polish art, it was done so in a highly traditional and academic fashion. What one may find surprising is not only a special conservatism of formal means applied to textual and visual narratives about World War I. What also calls one’s attention to is the semantic operation conducted in Polish post-World War I culture: the substitution of the Great War memory with the memory of 1914-1920. This extension of the conflict by two more years made it possible for the new Polish state to divert the social attention and concern from World War I to the on-going fights for Poland’s eastern border. It was the latter that became a climax – not only in Polish public discourse but also in war art and literature. While the rest of Europe was, at that time, erecting the tombs of the unknown soldiers that died in the Great War, Poland was erecting the tomb of the unknown soldier that died in the Polish-Ukrainian war. The present article wishes to investigate some selected works of literature, art and architecture from the period 1916-1926 so as to illustrate the above-mentioned processes of the use and abuse of the meaning and memory of the Great War – all in order to create a new culture of memory for a new state.

The author of this essay interprets Agnieszka Holland’s cinematographic adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden as a work of an East-European creator musing on the essence of Western civilisation and comments on it in the context of the present-day questioning of the European unity, values, and standards in Polish culture. In the analysis of Holland’s cinematographic version of the novel, a special relevance is given to cultural (in)visibility of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The East-West divide is interpreted in terms of divergent conceptualisations of the major human transformative actions: work and sacrifice. In the multimodal idiom of Holland’s film, the music composed by Zbigniew Preisner occupies a special place. The East-European interpretation of the children’s classic promotes a vision of Englishness (treated as a pars pro toto exemplification of the broader concept of “the West”) as a space of resilience and triumphant life, against manipulative messages presenting the West as a space of corruption and “culture of death”.

Polish film has long enjoyed an outstanding reputation but its best known protagonists tend to be male. This book points to the important role of women as key characters in Polish films, such as the enduring female figure in Polish culture, the "Polish Mother," female characters in socialist realistic cinema, women depicted in the films of the Polish School, Solidarity heroines, and women in the films from the postcommunist period. Not less important for the success of Polish cinema are Polish women filmmakers, four of whom are presented in this volume: Wanda Jakubowska, Agnieszka Holland, Barbara Sass and Dorota Kędzierzawska, whose work is examined.

In the population transfers that occurred at the end of the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe, the case of Poland is unique, as mass population movements there accompanied a westward shift of the entire national territory by over 200 kilometres. While it gave up its eastern border region (Kresy) to the western republics of the USSR (Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania), Poland drifted towards the west into the formerly German areas of Silesia and Pomerania. In the history of population displacements in this country, this example represents the most accomplished of the great post-war ethno-demographic surgeries, as Poles evacuated from the new Soviet eastern territories settled into the annexed western territories from where Germans had been expelled. But the history of this enormous movement has until now been unequally explored; research concerning the new western territories has long been conducted and flourished, while the history of population displacements in the eastern areas has yet to be written. Apart from the significant and long-established taboo on this chapter of Polish-Soviet relations, different explanations can be given as to why historians have taken less interest in the population transfers in this particular area. In the international context, the settlement of the new border and subsequent population transfers were considered a solution to an old problem, rather than a post-war question.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey entered into the Treaty of Lausanne to regulate the orderly transfer of Greek and Turkish populations displaced by the First World War. The treaty established a Mixed Arbitral Tribunal and a Mixed Commission to deal with property issues ensuing from the transfer of populations. However, a dispute arose in the implementation of the treaty which was ultimately referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) for an advisory opinion. In its decision, the PCIJ sketched some of the main features of the international legal personality of international organizations and articulated the basic elements of the implied powers doctrine, thereby initiating the path towards consolidating the role of international organizations as international actors in their own right with powers beyond those strictly attributed to them by their establishing treaties. Some authors have assessed the performance of the Court in critical terms.

ACCORDING TO THE PREVAILING HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, around 40,000 to 56,000 Czechoslovak Jews returned from concentration camps and exile to their former homeland in order to start a new life after the Second World War. At the same time, some 3,500 Holocaust survivors came to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany hoping to find a new home there. This statistic corresponds to 3 percent of the Jewish population that had lived in that territory before the war. These figures directly convey the disaster of the Shoah on a factual scale, one that most historians corroborate. However, such a narrative is just one way of looking at the past. This point of view lacks the phenomenological dimension of the atrocity and does not depict the distressed human condition of the returning Jews and the post-traumatic anxiety they had from being in concentration camps. These experiences, whether in an individual or collective form, are the core of literary narratives dealing with these past events and memories of these events. Paul Ricoeur states that literary narrative offers a view into the human condition, since it conveys human life in its complexity and different modalities. Literary narrative opens a new horizon for understanding the world that surrounds us in the context of the past, present, and future. Drawing from Ricoeur's perception of narrative, in the following text I pursue the literary narratives about Holocaust survivors returning from concentration camps or exile immediately after the Second World War. The study concentrates on the Czech literary text, All the Colors of the Sun and the Night (Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nacht ) by Lenka Reinerova and the (East) German novel, Der Boxer by Jurek Becker. Both works consist of stories of Jewish survivors in Czechoslovakia and East Germany (the GDR). My analysis explores the differences and similarities between Czech and German literary narratives about Jewish survivors. It encompasses how Czechs and Germans perceived them, the survivors’ struggle with anti- Semitism in the pertinent societies, and their quest for self-identity and a homeland. Despite the small number of returning Jews, they played an important role in the cultural and political life in both countries. In Czechoslovakia, both Czech-speaking and German-speaking Jews, such as Egon Erwin Kisch, Luis Furnberg, and Lenka Reinerova, were active in cultural life until they were struck by a new anti-Semitic wave that took the form of political trials during the 1950s.

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.

Purpose: Representatives of various nations and cultures have marked their influence on the multicultural heritage of Silesia. In the centuries-long intricate history of this region, which is special because of its location, various cultural options clashed, which left their mark on its diversity, creating a specific cultural mosaic. The present area of Lower Silesia was subjected to a particular influence of German culture, until a new balance of power and division of political influence in Europe took place after World War II, which involved the shift of Poland's borders westward and the incorporation of lands referred to from then on as “recovered”. Both the period of resettlement and the settlement of the incorporated western lands led to a great deal of socio-cultural turmoil, which is described in recent publications by Zbigniew Rokita (Rokita, 2023) and Karolina Kuszyk (Kuszyk, 2019), among others. One of the elements of the changes taking place in the area was the issue of the transit of the cultural heritage found there. The purpose of the article, therefore, is to show the process of acquisition and use, and therefore the transit of such heritage, which has now become the basis for the creation of a brand that is associated almost worldwide with Polish culture. The brand, which at the same time is a key element in the promotion of one of the historic Lower Silesian cities - Boleslawiec, and thus the promotion of the entire Lower Silesian region, and even the whole of Poland, is the Boleslawiec Ceramics. The article will present examples of building a regional product brand and creating a contemporary image of the city based on this “adapted” cultural heritage. Project/methodology/approach: The article is explanatory and descriptive in nature. The research methods adopted in this paper indicate a qualitative type of research. These include, both the technique of observation and content and document analysis, i.e. on the basis of observed phenomena and facts occurring in urban space, as well as the analysis of the literature on the subject and found factual data (desk research), the process of creating the image of the city based on a specific regional product will be shown. Findings: Modern cities are increasingly using the following to build their image in an innovative way: cultural heritage, special qualities or symbols of the landscape, but also the creative industries that characterize them. Originality/value: The innovation of the article is to analyze the ways in which the city carries out promotional activities, conducive to promotion and development, using the attributes that distinguish the city and thus make it original, attractive and interesting, with a particular focus on creative industries. The results of the analysis and formulated conclusions may allow the use and implementation of similar solutions in other cities to stimulate their future development and build their own image. Keywords: cultural heritage, cultural transit, image of the city, branding, creative industries. Category of the paper: empirical research (observation) and desk research.

This research investigates the urban development of the city of Drama, Greece, as a result of the political changes that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, it follows the urban transformation caused by its annexation from the Ottoman Empire to Greece and the vast-scale population transfer formalised through the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. The aim of this study is to explore the effects of political and ideological shifts - wars, regime changes, formation of new states or division of countries/empires - on the built environment. These inflict changes to urban continuity, architecture and cultural topographies. The study builds upon the concept of urbicide, which describes violent urban destructions and cultural cleansing, and aims to extend it to non-conflict urban scenarios. For this purpose, the concept of urbanix is introduced and its cultural manifestations are explored in the case study of Drama. The city and its components are treated as depositories of urban memory and, so, a palimpsestic reading is employed, in an attempt to investigate the traces of the contested past of Drama in its urban form. Population exchange will be examined as producing disrupted topographies for the departing populations, associated with cultural cleansing. The research interrogates: a. how the urban environment is affected by political conditions; b. how is urbanix manifested in contested countries in relation to religious, ethnic and cultural cleansing; and finally, c. which mechanisms of urban manipulation are employed as a means of nation-building and history rewriting by the ruling regime. During this period, the Greek urban environments were used as tools of nation building and cultural identity formation. The creation of the country and the establishment of its national borders sparked a venture of Hellenisation of its territories. The arrival of Christian refugees and the expulsion of Muslims reinforced the ethnic homogeneity, while the need for rehabilitation triggered drastic urbanisation processes. The Ottoman architectural and urban tradition all over Greece suffered change, neglect, abandonment and destruction, as they embodied a pluralistic cultural identity that needed to be disassociated from the present and future of the country. The case study of Drama is looked at both from the urban and building scale, the analysis of which highlights typological approaches as expressions of rejection or re-appropriation urbanix categories. The former is clearly evident in the disruption of the urban form and development, through the imposition of a new urban plan in 1930. Finally, the Ottoman buildings were either demolished, abandoned or majorly intervened upon to serve the new national identity and reflect the re-established urban homogeneity of this region.

178 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 Polish one. Jewish petty trade was complementary, not in competition with Polish peasant fanning. Jewish and Polish religious and communal differences were for the most part mutually incomprehensible and held in contempt by both sides, but these alone did not necessarily lead to conflict or antisemitism. All that changed after the First World War and the reunification ofPoland. Modem Polish ethnic nationalism desired a unified and homogeneous Poland, and from its perspective Jews represented an unassimilable and dangerous minority. Evenbefore the Nazi invasion, on the eve of the Second World War, there were forces in Poland that wished for the disappearance of the Jews. Thus Hoffman traces contemporary Polish antagonism to Jews, not to some distant past or to something inherent in Polish culture, butto modem developments, especially ethnic nationalism andthe extraordinary period ofNazi occupation. Although Hoffman's point is well taken and provides a needed corrective to a view that Polish culture was inherently and from its inception antisemitic, nevertheless, in her desire to tilt the argument the other way she may have overcompensated and neglected traditional Polish and Polish Catholic sources ofantagonism to Jews. A more extensive study would need more fully to take into account the role ofPolish Catholicism and the nefarious role that Jews were assigned by it as Christ-killers and demons. Indeed, the view that Jews kidnap children to drain their blood in order to mix with flour for matza during the Passover festival is a view that can still be found in Poland. Such views did not lead to the Final Solution, but during the Nazi occupation they prevented many Poles from reaching out to their fellow Jewish sufferers. Robert Melson Department of Political Science Purdue University Jews in a Graeco-Roman World, edited by Martin Goodman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 293 pp. $70.00. This volume contains 16 essays by as many scholars, on various aspects of relations between Jews and Gentiles in the ancient world. The introductory essay by the editor argues, reasonably, that the oddities of the Jews in the Graeco-Roman world were no greater than those ofmany other distinctive ethnic groups, such as Idumaeans or Celts. In support ofthis thesis he invites us to consider what we would know about the Jews if we had only the testimonies of pagan authors and epigraphic and papyrological evidence. A real test of the thesis, however, would require that we also examine what we know of other ethnic groups. Engaging as this essay is, it is somewhat misleading as an introduction to the volume, since the question it poses is not pursued in the other essays. These are grouped under four headings: "The Hellenistic and Roman World: Jewish Perspectives"; "SoCial Integration?"; "Similarities?"; and "Differences?" Book Reviews 179 The first group, presented under the heading "The Hellenistic and Roman World: Jewish Perspectives," contains three essays in addition to Goodman's introduction. Gruen's essay, now incorporated in his book Heritage and Hellenism, notes the differing attitudes of the Sibyl to Greeks and Romans. Since he rejects most proposed historical references in the book, however, he leaves the impression that most of the oracles were written a propos of nothing in particular, a feature which he mistakenly claims to be typical ofapocalyptic literature. Seth Schwartzargues thatthe hellenization of Near Eastern cities, best exemplified in the cases of Jerusalem and Shechem, involved nothing less than a redefinition of what it meant to be a Greek. Daniel Schwartz argues that the saga of the Tobiads belongs in the second century RC.E. rather than the first, and that the value of Josephus for the history of the Hellenistic period has been underestimated. Part II, "Social Integration?," contains two essays: Benjamin Isaac considers the evidence from Eusebius on Jews, Christians, and others in Palestine and concludes that the overwhelming majority of villages had a mixed population, Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and pagan. David Noy asks where Diaspora Jews were buried, and concludes that the development of separate Jewish burial areas was a relatively late phenomenon. Part II, "Similarities?," has six essays. Albert Baumgarten discusses voluntary associations and Jewish sects. He notes that the sects made greater demands on their...

Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I, by Jesse Kauffman. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. 267 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). In a 1917 letter to his wife, Hans von Beseler, Governor General of German-occupied Poland during WWI, confessed, would ... prefer it if there were Germans living here ... but there are Poles here, and you can't chase them all away or kill them all, so you've got to find a way to live with them somehow (227). This statement encapsulates an essential point of Kauffman's engaging and well-researched book, arising from his Stanford dissertation. While scholars have often interpreted such comments as revealing German colonial fantasies, foreshadowing Nazi genocidal policies, Kauffman instead concentrates his analysis on the last part of the statement, drawing a clear distinction between the German occupation regimes of World War I and World War II. Beseler, at the heart of Kauffman's story, sought to lay the foundations of a Polish nation-state during the occupation--albeit one subordinated to German diplomatic, military, and economic interests--but a Polish state nonetheless. Whereas German policy in WWII aimed to wipe out any trace of Polish statehood, crush its army, and eradicate its educated elites, the occupation regime under Beseler endeavoured instead to establish a Polish administration, a Polish army, and a Polish education system that would produce the professionals and officials necessary to exercise Polish sovereignty (within limits defined by the Germans, of course). The failure of Beseler's project, Kauffman suggests, contributed to the brutality of the Nazis' occupation just two decades later. Rather than establishing a colonial protectorate that would pave the way for a German settlement colony, Beseler aimed to win Polish sympathies and lay the foundations for a subordinate state, which Kauffman documents in chapters on the nascent Polish army, bureaucracy, school system, and university. While it has often been dismissed as a cynical ploy to recruit cannon fodder for the German war effort, Beseler's efforts to create a Polish army were based on other long-term goals. Beseler himself privately expressed skepticism about the usefulness of Polish units in the current war, and aimed instead to build an army that would be subordinate to German command in wartime and would help shield Germany against Russia in the next. It would also serve as a core institution of the nascent Polish state. Parallel with the development of a Polish military, occupation authorities built a Polish administrative apparatus, including elected representative bodies in both town and country. …

At the end of World War Two, Central and Eastern Europe were subject to a huge process of ethnic homogenization. A forced exodus of millions of people redefined the national characteristics of the Central-European States in the post-war period. The German populations from the Eastern territories of pre-Nazi Germany and the German minorities from the Central and South-Eastern European states were the most affected by this tragic destiny, with 14 million expelled and almost 2 million dead. The integration of Eastern Germans into their new homeland was difficult and tortuous. Key words: German refugees, Post-war Germany (1945-1960), Public memory, Forced population transfers

Turkiye ile Yunanistan arasinda nufus mubadelesi sorunu Balkan Savaslari sirasinda ortaya cikmisti. Savasin sonunda iki ulke arasinda bu konuyla ilgili bir antlasma yapilmissa da Birinci Dunya Savasi nedeniyle nufus degisimi yapilamamisti. Birinci Dunya Savasindan sonra Anadolu’da baslayan Turk-Yunan savasinin Yunanlilar tarafindan kaybedilmesinden sonra Anadolu’dan Yunanistan’a Rum gocu basladigi gibi, Yunanistan’dan da Anadolu’ya Musluman gocu baslamisti. Turkiye ile Birinci Dunya Savasi’nin galibi olan devletler arasinda imzalanan Lozan Antlasmasi da iki ulke arasinda karsilikli nufus mubadelesi yapilmasini karara baglamistir. Turk ve Rum nufusun karsilikli mubadelesi 1923-1930 yillari arasinda gerceklestirilmistir. Bu calismada, Turk-Yunan savasinin bitiminden Lozan Antlasmasi’nin Turkiye ve Yunanistan parlamentolarinda tasdik edilerek yururluge girmesine kadar gecen surede, Yunanistan’dan Turkiye’ye goc etmek zorunda kalan Muslumanlarin Yunanistan’da maruz kaldiklari kotu muamele ortaya konmaya calisilmistir. Arastirma yontemi olarak ilgili literatur ve donemin Istanbul basinindan Tanin ve Tevhid-i Efkâr gazetelerine yansiyan haberlerin taranmasi tercih edilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda Yunanistan’in muhacirlere karsi olan tutumu ve Turkiye’nin aldigi onlemler tespit edilmistir.

This chapter talks about the impending Polish takeover of the German territories. On August 2, 1945, the Allies decided to remove from the German Reich all territories east of the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers and place them under Polish administration, with the exception of northern East Prussia, which was to be ceded to the Soviet Union. By this point in time a Polish mayor was already in office in Breslau and the population exchange was in full swing. However, before the Allies had reached an agreement about the precise location of the new German–Polish border, and while experts in the London Foreign Office and the Washington State Department were still reviewing the economic and logistical consequences of the various border proposals, the Soviet government and the Soviet-installed Polish regime had resolved the border issue on their own.