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whom we have already encountered—military settlers and border guards—created models of rural

settlement in the 1930s that they expected local people to admire and emulate.

It is worth noting that this act of creating the right kinds of rural settlements always occurred

in competition with other national groups. Most strikingly, Polish approaches to rural modernity in

Volhynia both pushed against and echoed claims made by German commentators who were

themselves engaged in a civilizing mission in the province. As part of their attempts to reconfigure

the political map of Europe in the wake of the First World War, representatives of the Weimar

Republic and the Nazi regime drew on nineteenth-century myths of Polish economic mismanagement

(Polnische Wirtschaft) in order to highlight the Second Republic’s inability to create better living

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standards for its citizens. German academics who traveled to Volhynia in the 1920s asserted that
settlements inhabited by ethnic Germans were cleaner and more modern than those of the

surrounding Slavs; by the late 1930s, Nazi publications featured photographs of the domestic

conditions typical of the Volhynian Germans in order to support arguments about the civilizational

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and racial superiority of these populations. Images of a woman seated at a loom and a modest, but
clean, kitchen were placed alongside short descriptions of the customs of non-German populations

(the author of one book noted, for instance, that Ukrainians situated ovens in their living rooms and

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often used them as beds). And yet, while Germans constructed Slavs, including Poles, as a less
civilized group, Polish military settlers and border guards drew on precisely the same indices of

civilization in order to label the mainly Ukrainian-speaking populations as backward.

97 Jeffrey K. Wilson, “Environmental Chauvinism in the Prussian East: Forestry as a Civilizing Mission on the
Ethnic Frontier, 1871–1914,” Central European History 41 (2008): 27-70; Blackbourn, Conquest of Nature, 239-
296.
98 On German civilizing missions in Volhynia, see Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (New
York, 2012), particularly 102-108.
99 Viktor Kauder, Das Deutschtum in Polen: Ein Bildband (Leipzig, 1939), 55-58.

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