At the outset of this book, I asked the question “Who is a Pole?,” and the reader might have noticed with growing irritation that throughout its pages I have not really answered it. Frankly, I think that from an academic perspective, this is impossible to do. In my personal view, a Pole is somebody who identifies as a Pole, usually has been born in Poland or brought up by people who were, and has developed a strong feeling towards this country. It does not necessarily have to be love, but for sure it is neither hate nor indifference, it is a feeling which makes one care for the country’s history and fate. I am convinced that nobody else can tell this person that she or he is not a Pole, producing “evidence” such as following the “wrong” religion, political conviction, worldview, or lifestyle, or featuring the “wrong mixture” of blood and genes. I regard such lines of argument as an absurd form of modern paganism.
I, myself, am not a Pole. I have not even been raised in a Polish–German contact zone. My borderland is the German–French–Luxembourg trijunction, but since I was seven when our family moved there, I have not one Romance bone in my body. To my own bewilderment, I feel a strong emotional attachment to the Black Forest and to Westphalia where my parents respectively stem from. I never lived there for a long time in a row, but I spent considerable periods of my childhood and youth there, and in both places I have a lot of relatives: aunts, uncles, and cousins. For them, though, I am surely not a “local,” because I do not speak the local dialect, plus I do not know the local history, humor, customs, or cultural codes. A victim of globalization, my earliest memories are inextricably linked to the Ruhr Valley instead, where for the first time in my life I heard the strange-sounding Slavic names of the large Polish immigrant community, to the city beach of Accra in Ghana, and first and foremost to Trier with its exceptional architectural amalgamation of antique Roman and German history from ancient to our times. When I visit these places, it feels like coming home. I would say I am a German with a geographical identity problem. After my studies, I lived in Warsaw for ten years, but it somehow feels too late to become part of my personality. It was enough to gather a basic knowledge of Polish and to love the beautiful country where it is spoken, and first and foremost my Warsaw family—but not to become a Pole.
My sons, though, are Polish and German, their mother being a proud Varsovian. They speak both languages fluently and love their grandparents from both countries, where they spend a considerable time every year with their families. Tragically, their great-grandfathers fought on opposite sites during the Second World War, but this was a very long time ago. They will learn about it eventually, because it is also part of our common family history. It will be harder to tell them—let alone to explain—what Germans generally did to Poles during the occupation of Poland in 1939–45, given the fact that they are descendants of both.
Where do our sons belong in times when ethnic nationalism is on the rise again? In the supermarket in Jena in Thuringia where we now live, my wife is told by total strangers to talk German with our kids. In nearby Leipzig, crowds of German ethnic nationalists meet on a weekly basis for demonstrations to “defend” the German nation against “alien” influences. When I then watch the annual transmission of the rallies in Warsaw commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 on August 1, or the independence of 1918 on November 11, and the dignity of the events is disturbed by radical youth shouting slogans of hate—then I think that ethnic nationalists look and act everywhere just the same, while the real patriotism allows for a wider variety of biographies, beliefs, experiences, and ways of life. I have no better answer.