CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Aksnowicz, Adam Marcin |
|---|---|
| Title | Without Lwow and Wilno There is No Poland The cause of Kresy in exiled Polish Army press and propaganda in Italy, 1944-46 |
| Summary | This thesis looks at the role of press and propaganda of the Polish army in Italy during the Second World War aimed at securing Poland’s continued hold over its historically contested eastern borderlands, or Kresy, into the postwar period. More than approaching this goal as a political or military wartime objective of the exiled Polish state, the “Kresy cause” of exile Polish military elites developed into a multi-dimensional social, cultural, and ideological project succeeding prewar struggles over the eastern frontier’s vast and heterogeneous territories. This Kresowian1 project was perhaps most visibly apparent in the Polish II Corps’ 5th Kresy Infantry Division, which bore the name of the territories in question and acted as its symbolic reminder within Polish military exile in Italy. Through numerous paralleled modes of propagation, Kresy Division officers sought to cultivate in their subordinates a sense of collective mentality and duty towards the borderlands by constructing a hierarchy of collective imaginations towards those aims. To deconstruct the dynamics “Kresy cause,” the case of the 5th Kresy Infantry Division and its journal "On the Kresowian Trail" acts as a the nucleus of this investigation, along with supplemental primary and secondary sources for a broader contextualization which is required to understand its place in relation to the Second World War, Poland history and memory, and broader theoretical questions related to community and identity. |
| Supervisor | Janowski, Maciej; Sereda, Ostap |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/aksnowicz_adam.pdf |
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