Jochen Böhler - Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921: The Reconstruction of Poland

Map 2. Embattled Poland, 191821

Nam quis nescit, primam esse prima est historiae legem, ne quid falsi dicere audeat? Deinde ne quid veri non audeat? Ne qua suspicio gratiae sit in scribendo? Ne quae simultatis?

For who does not know historys first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore [On the Orator], 55 bc

Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.

Ernest Renan, French philosopher and historian, in a lecture delivered at Sorbonne University titled What is a Nation?, March 11, 1882

In 1919, the year following the Polish declaration of independence, the famous writer Maria Dbrowska asked her audience an emotive question: Where is Poland? By that time, this was all but a rhetorical question, and it has continued to puzzle generations of students of Central and Eastern European history ever since. Recently Wodzimierz Borodziej has added a follow-up to this conundrum: What is Poland? Both questions, pointing at a period when the countrys geographical and political shape was in flux, seem highly appropriate. Poland, a state that had been erased from the European map more than one hundred years earlier, would only reappear at the very end of the First World War, and consolidate its geographical and political shape in its after-battles of 191821.