page_title: Zygmunt Wojciechowski
section_title: Post-war
hierarchical_section_title: Zygmunt Wojciechowski / Biography / Post-war
caption_attribution_description: English: Zygmunt Wojciechowski. Plaque in Imperial Castle in Poznan. Polski: Zygmunt Wojciechowski, tablica w Zamku Cesarskim w Poznaniu.
context_page_description: Zygmunt Wojciechowski was a Polish historian and nationalist politician. Born in 1900 in then-Austria, he obtained a doctorate from medieval history at Lviv University. In 1925 he moved to Poznań, where he became a full professor in 1929. In 1934-1939 he became politically involved with the nationalist party Endecja. During occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany he worked in Polish underground opposing German genocide of Poles by providing underground teaching, which was banned by German state and worked on future concept of Polish borders that would provide Poland with safety against any further German aggression. He supported an alliance with Soviet Union and after the war he continued to work as historian in People's Republic of Poland and headed Western Institute that studied former Polish territories recovered from Germany and history of Polish-German relations. He was a recipient of Commander's Cross and Officer's Cross of Order of Polonia Restituta.
context_section_description: In 1945 his book "Poland-Germany. Ten centuries of struggle" (first edidion 1933) was reissued. To Wojciechowski the history of Polish-German relations was coined by an eternal struggle against German aggression which was founded on a lack of the ability of Germans to cohabit peacefully with Slavs and their "biological" hatred of everything Slavic. Wojciechowski described his view of the post-war situation:
  "There is a new epoch of Slavic march to the west that has replaced the German Drang nach Osten. Who doesn’t understand it, won’t understand the new era and won’t see properly the place of Poland in the new international reality”
  Wojciechowski supported a new German-Polish border that would allocate the whole Oder Lagoon up to the river Peene to Poland.
  He resumed teaching at UAM. He became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU) in 1945 and of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in 1952. In 1944, he established the Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni), an institution dedicated to studying the Polish history of what would become the Recovered Territories. Initially in Warsaw, the institute's seat moved to Poznań in 1945. Wojciechowski remained its director until his death in 1955. In 1945, Wojciechowski founded the affiliated journal Przegląd Zachodni ("Western Review") and remained his editor-in-chief until his death in 1955. (An English-language version of the journal under the title Polish Western Affairs was published from 1960 to 1994). From 1948–52, he was also founder and editor-in-chief of the "Journal of Law and History" (Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne), which continues to exist to this day. In his prologue to the bookseries "Old Polish lands" (1948–1957) he explained the purpose of the volumes to the reader:
  "Our publication ... is biased; in fact, it is consciously biased. ... We have not gone out of our way to write so-called objective history. Our task was to present the Polish history of those territories and to place the modern Polish reality of those territories within this historical context."
  In 1950, as Poland underwent Stalinization, Wojciechowski was condemned for his "anti-German chauvinism" at a Polish historians conference. Hence the open synthesis of nationalist and communist historiography became less influential, though Polish Marxist publications maintained an anti-German undertone.
  Zygmunt Wojciechowski died in Poznań, Poland, he was the father of historian Marian Wojciechowski (1927–2006).
caption: Zygmunt Wojciechowski - researcher of the Western Lands - plaque in the Imperial Castle in Poznań
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