Zygmunt Wojciechowski

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Zygmunt Wojciechowski (born April 27, 1900 in Stryj near Lemberg , † October 14, 1955 in Posen ) was a Polish historian with a focus on constitutional law from a Polish political point of view.

Life

Wojciechowski, who was born in Galicia , volunteered for military service in Marshal Józef Piłsudski's legions during World War I in 1917 , but was no longer deployed. He studied history and law in Lviv , a cultural center of the new Poland . Received his doctorate in 1924, he published work on the early medieval state of the Piasts . In 1925 he became a lecturer at the University of Poznan , where from 1929 he held a chair for the history of the state and old Polish law. In 1939 he became dean for law and economics in Poznan .

Wojciechowski was a supporter of the Greater Poland idea in the 1930s , which provided for a western border on the Oder . During the Second World War he worked underground and was part of the Polish government delegation for education from 1940 to 1945 . (The Polish government delegation presented a provisional represents that the time until the safe return of the Polish government should be bridged from the first French and then English exile.) In December 1944, in his Warsaw apartment the design for the Instytut Zachodni (= West Institute ), which should serve the scientific research of the " regained western territories" and prepare their integration into the Polish state. After the war he continued teaching in Poznan, where the Instytut Zachodni had been relocated when it was officially founded in February 1945. He remained director of the institute until his death. He was the driving force behind the spread of the "Western Idea", which declared all short-term conquests 1000 years earlier by the first rulers of the Polans , Mieszko I and especially Boleslaw I. Chrobry , to be the original Polish motherland , which was to be regained .

Wojciechowski's son Marian Wojciechowski was also a historian and deputy chairman of the Polish delegation of the German-Polish Textbook Commission .

meaning

In addition to his academic teachers, Wojciechowski counted Roman Dmowski in particular among his role models. He is considered the chief ideologist of the " League of Young Nationalists " (" Związek Młodych Narodowców "). In the 1930s he "had become one of the masterminds of a political group whose declared political goal was the establishment of an authoritarian, homogeneous Polish nation-state". At that settled in Poznan " West School " he added the theory of Polish " mother " or " root areas " (= " Ziemie macierzyste ", " rdzenne ") in which in October 1945 in the establishment of the "Ministry of the Recovered Areas “Knocked down. He was an opponent of "Jewish democracy" and Bolshevism , so that he harbored sympathy for both Italian fascism and National Socialism . In the latter he believed the Christian universalism of Otto III. to see again.
During the war, however, he made a U-turn and worked with the Polish Communists , who were also aiming for a Polish expansion to the west as a war goal.

The Instytut Zachodni became an important institution for anti-German propaganda in the People's Republic of Poland , from which it has been responding to the border revisionist demands from West Germany since the 1950s .
As a mirror image of the requirements of German Ostforschung , Wojciechowski was the successor to Roman Dmowski "in the occupation and post-war period both conceptually and as a 'science manager' the leading figure in Polish Western research ". His book “ Polska-Niemcy ”, published in 1945, is regarded as a key work and “flagship” of the “Polish Western idea” . Dziesięć wieków zmagań “(= Germany and Poland. A Thousand Years of Wrestling ). It is seen as an answer to Franz Lüdtke's book about the war against Poland from 1941, “ A Millennium War between Germany and Poland ” (History Primers for Wehrmacht and People 3, Stuttgart 1941). Wojciechowski developed the idea that Poland would regain “the entirety of its motherland” by “returning” to the Oder and Neisse.

literature

  • Robert Brier, The Polish “West Thought” after the Second World War 1944-1950 (PDF; 828 kB), Digital Eastern European Library: History 3 (2003).
  • Roland Gehrke, The Polish Western Thought until the re-establishment of the Polish state after the end of the First World War. Genesis and justification of Polish territorial claims against Germany in the age of nationalism , Verlag Herder-Institut: Marburg 2001; ISBN 3-87969-288-2 .
  • Markus Krzoska, For a Pole on the Oder and Baltic Sea. Zygmunt Wojciechowski (1900-1955) as historian and journalist (individual publications by DHI Warsaw 8), Osnabrück 2003; ISBN 3-929759-49-7 ; ( Full text online ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robert Brier, The Polish “West Thought” after the Second World War 1944-1950 (PDF; 828 kB), Digital Eastern European Library: History 3 (2003), p. 8.
  2. ↑ Thomas Strobel: Transnational Science and Negotiation Culture, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8471-0524-4 p. 187
  3. ^ Robert Brier (2003), p. 16.
  4. ↑ R. Brier (2003), pp. 48-52.
  5. ↑ R. Brier (2003), p. 16. - Michael Burleigh describes how Albert Brackmann , Wojciechowski's German counterpart, was a generation older than Heinrich Himmler in May 1939 with his essay “ Otto III. and the state transformation of Poland and Hungary ”. It was Brackmann about Bolesław I (Poland) in dependence on Otto III. to introduce. (Michael Burleigh, Germany turns eastwards. A study of 'Ostforschung' in the Third Reich , London (Pan Books) 2002, p. 133; ISBN 0-330-48840-6 .)
  6. ↑ See Markus Krzoska, For a Poland on the Oder and the Baltic Sea. Zygmunt Wojciechowski (1900-1955) as a historian and publicist . Diss., Osnabrück (Fiber-Verlag) 2003; ISBN 3-929759-49-7 .
  7. ↑ R. Brier (2003), p. 14 f.
  8. ↑ According to Grzegorz Strauchold, Wojciechowski's title "undoubtedly alluded to Franz Lüdtke's book ' A Millennium War Between Germany and Poland '" published in Stuttgart in 1941 (in: Jan M. Piskorski / Jörg Hackmann / Rudolf Jaworski [ed. German East Research and Polish West Research in the Field of Tension Between Science and Politics. Disciplines in Comparison. With an afterword by Michael Burleigh. German East Research and Polish West Research, Volume 1, Osnabrück [fiber] 2002, p. 69; ISBN 3-929759-58-6 ).
personal data
SURNAME Wojciechowski, Zygmunt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Stryj , Lviv
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1955
Place of death Poses