Page 95 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

went on, Polish schoolchildren would “surrender to the foreign influences of our national enemies,

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becoming indifferent and lost to the nation.” Revealing Poznanians’ ambiguous attitude toward

imperial legacies, which was characterized by a simultaneous rejection of German claims to

sovereignty over his city and an acknowledgment that German rule had created higher standards of

living for Poznań’s Polish-speaking populations, Biliński argued that he drew on some aspects of the

German model in order to protect the “most endangered province” of Volhynia. The only difference

was that the Germans had gained Polish land through the “trick” of the partitions, whereas Poles

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were simply recovering what should have been theirs all along.

[INSERT FIGURE 2.2]

Figure 2.2: Books destined for Volhynia, put together by the Poznań branch of ToNK (Towarzystwo
Opieki nad Kresami). The National Democratic politician Jan Marweg stands at the center of the
group. Source: The National Digital Archive (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe).

The idea that Poland’s imperial divisions could be transcended only if people recognized the

natural civilizational superiority of populations from the formerly German partition was similarly

reflected in plans to turn Poznań into a “patron” for Volhynia’s provincial capital, Łuck. Operating in

ways that presaged the peaceful “twinned towns” or “sister cities” movement that was to become

popular across European state borders after the Second World War, interwar Poles relied on a

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recognition of both difference and fraternity. The eastern town was certainly unlike its western

counterpart in several ways. Not only did its population of just over 21,000 in 1921 make Łuck a

much smaller urban settlement, but it also had a lower proportion of Poles (estimated to be just under

83 Jan Biliński, “Kresy Wschodnie – najżywotniejsze zagadnienie,” Życie Wołynia, February 17, 1924, 4.
84 Ibid., 4.
85 See, for instance, Antoine Vion, “Europe from the Bottom up: Town Twinning in France during the Cold War,”
Contemporary European History 11, No. 4 (2002): 623-640.

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