‘Roman Dmowski Understood’: Ethnic Cleansing as Permanent Revolution

Abstract

Poland’s postwar political consensus rested upon a mutual understanding between the communists led by Władysław Gomułka and the extreme nationalists, who represented the legacy of Roman Dmowski in Polish political life. First and foremost this involved the physical and cultural exclusion of Germans and the rewriting of key elements in Polish history so that the ethnic cleansing of Germans was depicted as the culmination of hundreds of years of mutual struggle and antipathy. This in turn fed the anti-Semitism that became a feature of Polish political life in the 1950s and 1960s. As relations with Germany improved, Poles could begin to look at this episode in their history with more honesty.