Post-War Historiography in Poland and Czechoslovakia: National Narratives and Communist Legitimacy

The impact of the Second World War on historical scholarship varied dramatically across Central and Eastern Europe. Polish historiography suffered catastrophic human losses, including the death of its most innovative theoretician, Marceli Handelsman. Yet, even amidst Warsaw's devastation, reorganization proceeded under leaders like Tadeusz Manteuffel, who bridged the discipline and the new communist power as director of key historical institutes.

Other national experiences differed. Hungary faced continuity issues from the emigration of Jewish scholars and academic collaboration with fascist regimes, rather than physical destruction. Slovak historians, conversely, opportunistically benefited from Czechoslovakia's dissolution and the expulsion of Czech professors from Bratislava University, emerging post-1945 with greater confidence and skepticism toward Czechoslovak unity.

As communist parties sought legitimacy, they strategically turned to national history and culture. This marked a significant shift from the interwar communist movements' internationalist stance. The new goal was to craft a historical interpretation "national in form and socialist in content," adapting the Soviet paradigm to local contexts. To garner popular support, Polish, Czech, and Slovak communists leveraged potent anti-German sentiment, framing recent history as a millennia-long struggle and emphasizing Slavic brotherhood.

In Poland, this fueled the development of the "Polish Western Idea" (Polska idea zachodnia), institutionalized in the Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni) in Poznań under the nationalist medievalist Zygmunt Wojciechowski. His work, such as Polska—Niemcy: Dziesięć wieków zmagania, presented a millennium of conflict as a biological German hatred of Slavs, now reversed by a Slavic march westward. The institute's journal, Przegląd Zachodni, blended scholarship with political loyalty to the new borders and the communist state, mirroring German Ostforschung with a pan-Slavic element.

Czechoslovakia lacked an equivalent institutionalized "Western idea," but its historiography similarly depicted a thousand-year Czech-German struggle ending with the expulsion of a traitorous populace. A more prominent motif was pan-Slavism, vigorously promoted by figures like Zdeněk Nejedlý, a musicologist and communist minister who became the leader of Czech Marxist historical science. Even non-communist historians, such as the liberal Moravian Ladislav Hosak and Slovak author František Bokes, incorporated strong anti-German and pro-Slavic narratives into their works, blending interwar geopolitical language with new ideological currents.

This synthesis of nationalist and communist interpretations was short-lived. With the Stalinization of the late 1940s, orthodox historical outlooks changed rapidly. At a 1950 conference in Wrocław, Wojciechowski was condemned for chauvinism, and the notion of a Slavic Drang nach Westen was rejected. Although anti-German undertones persisted, the open nationalist-communist synthesis was marginalized. The Hungarian experience differed, where historians like József Révai and Aladár Mód had already mixed patriotic and internationalist analyses, making the shift to Stalinism less dramatic.

This early post-war period was thus indicative of communist historical politics. The parties learned to use popular national narratives to approach a wider audience, while historians learned to trade cooperation for a degree of professional survival, setting a pattern for the fraught relationship between scholarship and power in East Central Europe.