Waldenburg into Wałbrzych: Multiethnicity and Local Agency in Poland’s Wild West, 1945–49

This paper probes the postwar demographic transformation of Wałbrzych, a Lower Silesian industrial center transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Challenging top-down narratives of socialist reconstruction, it explores how second-tier actors’ understandings of industrial modernity shaped settlement policy and ethnic politics beyond dictates from Warsaw. Situating Wałbrzych on Poland’s untamed frontier, I argue that local visions of state legitimization through economic productivity drove dynamics departing from central authorities’ emphasis on cultural uniformity. Drawing on national, regional, and municipal archives in Poland, I show how local priorities helped produce an exceptionally diverse populace by post-war standards, including Germans, Jews, and Polish re-migrants from Western Europe. Amid the upheaval of the immediate postwar period, German industrial workers, Jews from across prewar Poland, and Polish remigrants from France all espoused distinct visions of civilizational self-mission to situate their future in Wałbrzych. Seeking both communal autonomy and economic security in a rapidly changing local, national, and international context, Wałbrzych became a space to civilize both Poland and oneself. By illuminating the frictions between the state’s dual goals of economic reconstruction and rapid Polonization, I highlight the thrillingly uncertain atmosphere of the immediate postwar era, while offering a significant test case for studying the politics of multi-ethnicity in post-1945 Central Europe.