Nationalism in New Tongues: Cultural Pluralism and the Making of Polish Wałbrzych, 1945–49

This paper explores the temporary yet significant expansion of the boundaries of Polish nationalism enabled by the acquisition of new territories, the so-called Ziemie Odzyskane (Recovered Territories), in 1945. Focused on the Wałbrzych coal basin, I probe how the need to incorporate lands without Polish populations led officials to depend on former outsiders for state building. Jews unable to return to their pre-war shtetls were valued as Polonizers in a German-dominated landscape, leading Holocaust survivors to harness their cause to that of the state as a means of securing a Jewish future in Poland. Polish émigré miners returning from France – whose leftist politics were unwelcome in the Polish Second Republic – took on key roles in public life and industrial development, connecting interwar and wartime struggles to new lives in Wałbrzych. Finally, a small number of ‘autochthonous’ residents offered officials a further means of legitimization, with allegedly Germanized Poles used to support Polish claims to the area.

Collectively, this loosening of nationalism’s boundaries reflected official recognition that the legitimacy of Polish rule would be measured through the success of economic reconstruction in this important coal-mining center. However, with these diverse residents dependent on the goodwill of state authorities, by linking their fate to official goals of homogenizing the ‘Recovered Territories,’ they also undermined their ability to exercise a distinct collective subjectivity. With Poland’s Stalinizing regime limiting discourse along increasingly rigid national and ideological lines, the temporary beneficiaries of territorial expansion were ultimately bound to a project that destroyed the foundations of cultural pluralism by 1949.