Page 250 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

of 1921 and 1931, the most “backward” and least “Polish” population appeared to be in the

ascendancy, leaving the more “civilized” and more ethnically Polish areas further west lagging

behind.

Fears of civilizationally and nationally lop-sided growth had already become a staple in the

right-wing press prior to the mid-1930s. In the months following the execution of the December 1931

census, publications like the National Democratic newspaper the Warsaw Courier and the Kraków-

based conservative journal Time (Czas) engaged in public handwringing about the relative growth of

eastern populations. According to an article in Time, “the culturally lower and mainly non-Polish

population of the eastern borderlands is growing more quickly than the higher in this sense [i.e.

culturally higher] Polish population of the central and western lands,” leading to a situation in which

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the least valuable people were gaining increased influence in the state as a whole. But by the mid-
to-late 1930s, fears that such statistics represented a more serious problem for the state reached

beyond the pages of popular right-wing publications. At the International Population Congress

(Congrès International de la population), which was held in Paris in 1937, one Polish demographer

argued that those areas with a “low cultural level” were producing disproportionally large numbers of

people, an idea that closely corresponded with prevailing French ideas that “the most ignorant

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countries are also the most fecund ones.” In short, Poles were now claiming that their own eastern
citizens played the same role of a fertile-yet-civilizationally-inferior population that German elites

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had assigned to Poles during the nineteenth century.

In Volhynia, scientifically based claims about Polish demographic losses provided fodder for

those who criticized Józewski’s policies and called for more radical and immediate solutions to the

13 “Polityczne wskazania spis ludności,” Czas, January 17, 1932, 1.
14 S. Adamowicz, “La natalité en pologne en raport avec l’importance des agglomerations,” Congrès International
de la population (Paris, 1937), 162. The quotation from France comes from the demographer and physician Jacques
Bertillon. Cited in Camisciolo, Reproducing the French Race, 26.
15 Gregor Thum, “Imperialists in Panic: The Evocation of Empire at Germany’s Eastern Frontier,” in Thum and
Reinkowski (eds.), Helpless Imperialists, 151.

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