Redefining National Belonging in Poland after the Second World War

In 1945, so the story goes, Poland became ethnically ‘homogeneous’. Some elements of this story are incontestable. The vast majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population had been killed during wartime German occupation, and most survivors of the Holocaust emigrated in the first years after the war. But if we look more closely at the population that now inhabited the new Polish state, we see that assumptions about ‘homogeneity’ were highly premature. The question of who should be considered ‘ethnically Polish’ proved to be enormously complicated and controversial. Professor Bjork will be discussing his research into the debates and anxieties surrounding ethnic difference and divergent historical experiences that lurked beneath the image of culturally uniform postwar Poland. He will be focusing in particular on how the Roman Catholic church—ostensibly the guardian of a monolithic ‘Polishness’—wrestled with the challenges of mass migration and cultural difference within its parish communities.

James Bjork is Professor of Modern European History at King’s College London. His book, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (2008), was awarded the Kulczycki Prize for the best first monograph in Polish Studies. Professor Bjork’s current research is focused on migration and ethnic difference in the reconstruction of Polish Catholicism after 1945.

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