Unveiling the Identity of Post-War Poland

Photograph of the UCLA campus by ACasualPenguin from Pixabay

By Lenka Unge, CERS Program Coordinator

Every year, UCLA welcomes Fulbright Scholars from around the world to its campus to conduct advanced research in collaboration with its faculty. One of these scholars is Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who spent five months at the Geography Department of UCLA in the second half of 2021.

Ćwiek-Rogalska investigates the culture of remembrance in Central Europe and the expulsion of German-speaking inhabitants from Poland and Czechoslovakia after 1945. She is the author of Remembered in Landscape. Czech-German Borderlands in the Times of Change and has published her works in various journals on Slavic culture and society. She recently co-created an online catalogue of German War Memorials in Pomerania.

Her Fulbright research project, Identity, Landscape after Expulsions in Post-war Poland, builds on the idea of "ethnographies of encounter" and is partially inspired by the work of Lieba Faier, Associate Professor at UCLA Geography, who worked closely with Ćwiek-Rogalska during her stay at UCLA. “It was a fantastic collaboration,” Ćwiek-Rogalska says.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Ćwiek-Rogalska quickly became involved with the interest group Culture, Power, Social Change (CPSC) at UCLA Anthropology, which in November 2021 hosted her talk on Spectral Transformation: Moving Objects, Porous Places and Creating the Continuity in Post-war Poland. Co-sponsored by the Center for European and Russian Studies, the lecture addressed the role of disturbing objects in the creation of landscapes and Ćwiek-Rogalska mesmerized the audience with her analysis of memoirs written by Poles who resettled in former German territories. Reflecting on the benefits of participation in the CPSC seminars, Ćwiek-Rogalska says: “It was not only a boost towards coming up with a new method of analyzing the materials I’ve gathered, but also towards presenting them in a new way.”

As Ćwiek-Rogalska was preparing to return to her home institute in Poland, we interviewed her to learn more about the research project she conducted while at UCLA and her future research plans.

Tell us more about the research project you worked on while a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UCLA

The aim of my project was to study strategies of coping with the presence of Germans expelled from the region of Western and Central Pomerania in Poland after 1945. I wanted to position my approach within the framework of "ethnographies of encounter," as proposed by Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel. These researchers draw attention to the fact that in encounters between cultures, for example, between the colonized and the colonizer, relations are always unequal, but at the same time generative and open-ended. Two groups may seem to exist in two distinct cultural worlds; but their encounter involves intense cross-cultural negotiation and interaction. That perfectly maps the case of Germans (former inhabitants) and Poles (current inhabitants) of Pomerania. To study the presence of German-speaking inhabitants of the region is to focus on change and process instead of a static view of culture and heritage. Using this theory allowed me to show to what extent German culture was absorbed into the culture of new Polish settlers.

What motivated you to address this topic?

I have always been interested in this question because Pomerania is my home region and my grandparents came to Pomerania to replace the expelled Germans. Since the beginning of my career as a researcher, I have been looking for answers to the question of how it is possible that one culture was wiped out and simply replaced by another. And why, despite these attempts to completely erase it, it is still so palpable in landscape. I look for new ways to describe the process of erasure, and grasp the experience of newcomers, as well as to explore the impact of these suppressed traces on representatives of the next generations, such as myself.

What has been most exciting about your research project?

The most challenging part was to translate the situation well-known in Central Europe into more general terms that could be of interest to American scholars. I believe it is not a site-specific problem, and yet to work on this project for a new audience meant that I had to limit the historical background and open the case study into more universal questions. At the same time, this was the most exciting part of the work. The American and European academia are very different. To present my outcomes properly, I had to learn new ways of talking about them. I have learnt how to explain regional phenomena in a wider context and worked through new methods of investigating.

When will the results of your research be published?

I am working on two articles that I wish to submit in the first half of 2022. One is the outcome of the talk I’ve given and is entitled “Spectral Transformation: Moving Objects, Porous Places and Creating the Continuity in Post-war Poland”. The second one will pinpoint Polish resettlement of the Recovered Territories within the framework of settler-colonial studies.

What are the next steps in your research career? What projects will you work on after returning to Poland?

I will focus on pursuing two projects. The first one, Resettlement Cultures in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia after 1945, is funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant. It will not only be an opportunity to start my own research team, but also to operationalize the category of post-displacement as a form of afterlife. The project, based on archival records and fieldwork, will be carried out in three regions in Slavic Central Europe. I hope that my approach will bring fresh insights into everyday life in the post-displacement regions by providing a more nuanced and coherent understanding of forced migration processes and their continuous reinterpretations in different political and ideological regimes.

The second project, Documents and Bureaucracy in the Formerly German Lands: State Making, Regulating and Controlling in Poland and Czechoslovakia (1940s-1970s), is funded by a grant from the Polish National Science Centre. I aim to study the role of bureaucracy and documentation, as well as their mutual relations in formerly German lands of Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first two post-war decades. The hypothesis I will explore is as follows: In post-1945 Poland and Czechoslovakia, following the expulsion of German-speaking communities and resettlement of the lands in question, a specific form of bureaucracy was implemented. Its goal was threefold: to create respectively Polish or Czechoslovak sovereignty, to organize and regulate the migration processes, and to control ways of living. At the same time, all three processes were intertwined with the introduction of a new political and social order. Following the hypothesis, I would like to investigate how bureaucracy created new states in the territories in question, and how it was, or was not, able to control and construct subjects and objects.

Tell us about your involvement with Sprawy Narodowościowe and how our students and faculty can contribute to the journal

Sprawy Narodowościowe. Seria nowa (which translates to Nationalities Affairs) is one of the oldest Polish journals focusing on nationalism and ethnicity, publishing articles in humanities and social sciences. Since the most recent volume, the language of publication has been English. This year, we celebrate the 95th anniversary of the first issue. The current volume of the journal will discuss the experiences, appearances and narratives of exclusion in and beyond Central Europe. As the editorial team, we invite articles addressing real as well as virtual spaces of exclusion. The deadline for submission to this volume is February 28, 2022. Interested students and scholars who have an idea relevant for the current issue are welcome to contact us. We will answer their questions and discuss how they can contribute. Information about the call and contact details of the editorial board can be found here.