This accompanies Peter Polak-Springer’s Contemporary European History article Gain Weight, Have Fun, Discover the Motherland: The German–Polish Children’s Summer Camp Exchange and Interwar Era Revisionism

After the First World War Germany lost its eastern borderlands to Poland, among them a region called Upper Silesia. This was an industrial area that was of particularly vital economic importance to Poland, which had none other like it. For Germany its retainment was more of a matter of national honor than economic need. In 1922 the League of Nations divided Upper Silesia between both states and until the Second World War each of them claimed the other’s part of the region as its own. They mutually based this claim on the premise that ‘our nationals’ (Germans/Poles) were living there. Indeed, there were conscious German nationals living in Poland’s formerly German borderlands, and there were also some patriotic Polish nationals living in Germany’s eastern border regions.

However, in Upper Silesia this situation was profoundly more complicated. The people of this region were mostly bilingual, often knowing both German and Polish, and were a hybrid of both national cultures with a common Catholic religion. As a result, it was hard to tell German from Pole, and, in fact, only a minority identified themselves consistently as exclusively German or Polish (indeed, many considered themselves to be just Silesian). Moreover, switching national identity for personal benefit was quite common. For example, those who represented themselves as Poles looking for jobs one day joined German minority associations for better employment prospects the next. The post-1918 history of this contested and ‘nationally indifferent’ (the term ascribed to an area of unclear nationality) region has been told in many books. However, little is known on the experience of children in this territory. This article highlights children’s stories, and in doing so also sheds light on German and Polish cultural diplomacy more broadly.

My article tells the story of how Germany and Poland cooperated on a common summer camp exchange for each other’s borderland children from Upper Silesia between 1924 and 1939. Indeed, if schools have always played an important role in shaping national identities, what happened in the summer, when school was out? The role of summer camps should not be ignored, and in fact they reveal how in this European interwar era of international law, states turned to cultural diplomacy to use as a tool to contest borderlands. Although they were theoretically collaborating on this summer camp effort, Germany and Poland were in fact trying to outcompete each other by bringing children from across the border to their respective summer camps. In doing so, they hoped to instill in children and young people a patriotic attachment to their ‘motherland’ or their ‘real nation of belonging’. Providing insights into children’s experiences in summertime and state policy, my article is a strong reminder that states used children as tools of irredentist politics.

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Main image credit: Summer camps for children from Germany during the 1930s