Between Hospitality and Hostility: The Experience of Migration Through Things

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose the category of ‘hospitable things’, and argue that it can improve our understanding of the relationships between subjects and objects in the situation of migration. The analysis uses a case study of Polish migration to territories of pre-war Germany and the Free City of Danzig – the so-called Recovered Territories [Ziemie Odzyskane] – in the twilight of World War II. Based on primary sources from the time, I scrutinise how the new Polish settlers transformed German property into ‘hospitable things’ with substantial help from the post-war propaganda. I reconstruct the affective atmosphere of the period and confront these expectations with the actual experience of hostility materialised by everyday things. The image of ‘hospitable things’ – waiting and ready to be taken – has been formed through the experience of migration in radically inhospitable circumstances. ‘Hospitable things’ enable people to cope with the emotions accompanying the fragile experience of displacement; they help to form and transform fears and insecurities, but also desires and wants.

KEYWORDS:

• Hospitable things
• post-war migration
• Recovered Territories
• politics of emotion
• material culture

Introduction

The experience of migration is often traced by material objects – the movement of people usually entails the movement of things (Parkin 1999, Savaş 2014, Auslander and Zahra 2018). In this journey, personal possessions are frequently reduced to a few items carried on people’s shoulders as a semblance of home. Some of them will probably be lost on the way to a new destination (De Leon 2015). A lesser-known part of the story is the experience of things that do not leave their assigned places, things that stay at home. They remain, as opposed to their owners, who are often unable to take all of their possessions in the event of displacement (Kaiser 2008). From the perspective of the displaced, things drift away, but from the perspective of migrant-settlers, who arrive in unfamiliar places, these things become an infrastructure of transition, helping them to cope with their emotions, insecurities, fears and also their wants.

This article considers the experience of Polish migration through things left by Germans on territories of pre-war Germany and the Free City of Danzig in the twilight of World War II. I propose the concept of ‘hospitable things’, and argue that a lack of human hospitality gives rise to the image of things that await and welcome. I explore how the Germans’ possessions were used and transformed – with substantial help from the post-war propaganda of the new Polish authorities – into ‘hospitable things’, ‘waiting and longing for new caregivers’. The image ‘hospitable things’ present is thus not so much that of what they are but rather an expression of needs – the way in which people need to be welcome. The experience of ‘hospitable things’ appears in radically inhospitable situations, in which hospitality among people becomes broken or destroyed. It usually occurs in the event of radical violence, when one group of people takes the place of another. The belief that things are hospitable – ready to be taken and filled out by people’s actions and feelings – was an effective defence mechanism that helped Polish settlers deal with the appropriation of German objects. I argue that the transformation of things from inhospitable into hospitable is done by creating a gap between things and people (their former owners). This gap allows for the creation of new relationships between things and new settlers (their new owners). The emotional connection is crucial to the process of appropriating someone’s possessions, which often ignites a sense of new possibilities and helps in the process of homemaking. As I show in the article, the precondition to establish a close relationship with things is the lack of their former owners. The presence of Germans makes it difficult for Polish settlers to incorporate things into their experience, and in this way, things become inhospitable. Things are treated here not as passive or static screens on which human emotions and desires are projected; rather, things themselves operate in a network of interests, interactions, and aspirations that both produce things and are produced by them (Latour 1991, 2005).

Migrants’ emotional experiences and the manner of their social and cultural construction have aroused the increasing interest of scientists in recent years. Migration allows us to look at ‘the spatiality and the temporality of emotions’ (Bondi et al. 2007, p. 3) concerning identity, belonging, and homemaking (Mar 2005, Skrbiš et al. 2007, 2008, Ralph and Staeheli 2011). As Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar point out: ‘The migration process is a powerful catalyser of change in emotional life – one that may make it physically and symbolically ‘out of place’. As people move away from home […] emotions themselves are on the move’ (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015, p. 2). In this article, I am interested in migrants’ emotional encounters with ‘others’ – not so much with other human beings, but above all with material objects. Engagements with inanimate objects are, of course, in many ways different from interactions with human beings – material things ‘have no autonomous mind or willpower, lack the ability to communicate through speech, and are mostly unable to move independently’ (Svašek 2010, p. 868). By focusing on the objects and emotions that take place in a particular geographic area (see, for example, Davidson and Milligan 2004), I attempt to characterise various emotional encounters with things both in the absence of their (former) owners and in their presence (or proximity).

I concentrate on the Polish perspective, asking how new settlers dealt with this radical transformation of ownership. After researching across genres and media, I describe the emotions that arose in settlers in relation to things they adopted as their own when occupying formerly abandoned sites. The research is based on official documents, reportages and newsreels, as well as diaries and memories sent by Polish settlers for a competition called Diary of Recovered Territories Settler [Pamiętnik osadnika Ziem Odzyskanych] organised in 1956 by the Institute of Western Affairs in Poznan [Instytut Zachodni]. A part of this collection was published as a book, Diaries of Recovered Territories Settlers [Pamiętniki osadników Ziem Odzyskanych], in 1963. Although recountings of memories from 1945–1956 were encouraged, the settlers focused primarily on the first post-war years (1945–1946), arguably because of strong emotions accompanying the enormous change in their lives (Dulczewski and Kwilecki 1963, p. 16). Farmers, office workers and teachers wrote most willingly. Men sent their memories more often than women (the selection of diaries published in the book consists of ¾ memoirs of men). Due to this disproportion, more descriptions of things can be found in men’s diaries. This does not mean, however, that women wrote on the subject less willingly. Regardless of gender, settlers devoted a lot of space to descriptions of occupied houses and practical things – furniture, clothes or kitchen utensils – less often focusing on German items of symbolic significance or souvenirs.

In the article, I often quote men who extensively described the quantity, quality and appearance of everyday things. If leaving home and going to the Recovered Territories was associated with the choice of and search for better living conditions (and not with forced migration), the first exploratory expeditions were often made by men alone. This could have been associated with the dangerous journey and the uncertainty of what they might find there. Only after exploring the area, making sure that there was housing and land available for cultivation, were wives and children brought in. Furthermore, men were often the first to come to the Recovered Territories as soldiers and police officers, but they were also members of operational groups [grupy operacyjne]. The latter were among the few institutions established after the war to take ‘care’ of German property. Although the tasks of the operational groups were defined much more broadly, the press of the time emphasised that their role was ‘primarily to protect and secure the state property in the liberated territories’ (Grupy operacyjne ruszyły 1945). It is worth noting that men wrote in their diaries not only about their impressions and emotions but also often reported on women’s attitudes towards objects. These descriptions show how men imagined the relations of women with material things. Another good example of this is offered by Henryk Worcell’s short stories, which chronicled the attitude of women toward German objects from the perspective of the male protagonist. If men were often responsible for finding and occupying a house or apartment, the homemaking process was assigned to women. They are described by men and also described themselves as resourceful in finding the necessary items in other German homes. Additionally, women wrote in their diaries about the behaviour of other women, especially when they wanted to point out someone’s lack of moderation in collecting objects or the greed that did not allow for their fair distribution among new Polish settlers.

In the first part of the article, I compare the emotional discourses (Svašek 2010) created by the new authorities and official media with the experiences recorded in the personal narratives of the new Polish settlers. In the second part, I juxtapose these diaries with short stories by Henryk Worcell, who himself was a settler in the Recovered Territories. His short stories from 1946 are appreciated for their value as reportage. Bringing together these two different sources – diaries and reportage – works to capture the complexity of the post-war experiences. As a historical source, the diaries might raise uncertainty among historians – settlers sometimes have dates wrong, events are distorted and there are gaps in the memories. They require careful reading and comparisons with other sources. Nevertheless, the records offer a unique insight into the experience of the Polish settlers that cannot be found in official documents. Henryk Worcell’s stories-reportages are of similar value, presenting the author’s experiences and observations. However, it is worth noting that both the diaries and the short stories are not the apparent opposite of official propaganda. The emotional discourse created by the new government influenced and shaped the way of perceiving and understanding post-war events, which the settlers themselves were aware of. Therefore, I do not try to separate the propaganda of hospitable things from their ‘real’ experience as inhospitable; but on the contrary – I show the entanglement of these two orders.

Troubling Recovered Territories

The Recovered Territories were resettled by people from various areas of Poland – from the central part of the country as well as the eastern Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union. As a result, Poland effectively moved west and began to occupy more than 100,000 square kilometres of land, constituting one-third of post-war Poland. These dramatic border changes were facilitated by the propaganda about the so-called Recovered or Regained Territories. The rationale for the term ‘recovered’ is derived from the history of these territories under Polish rule during the Middle Ages. Documents from the post-war peace conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam show changing rhetoric and argumentation, which was supposed to legitimise new Polish borders (Wagner 1964). The first stance which acknowledge the Recovered Territories as ‘compensation’ for the loss of the eastern territories of Poland, the so-called Eastern Borderlands [Kresy Wschodnie], appeared before the Yalta conference (Wagner 1964, p. 123). Another vital argument was compensation for the war damage caused by the Germans. However, it is worth noting that the politics of retribution against the Germans, collectively accused of waging war, was not limited to Poland (Glassheim 2000, Naimark 2001, Douglas 2012, Gerlach 2017). In the Polish context, the result of this policy was ethnic cleansing: more than three million Germans were expelled from Recovered Territories, leaving behind a great number of things. The Germans were never allowed to return for their belongings left behind. On the basis of legal acts introduced in Poland, these material objects became the property of the Polish state. The new authorities encouraged Poles to settle on these territories and take over everything that had been left there. In the official discourse that mobilised settlement, homes, left in a hurry, were open and ‘waiting’. All awaited the new settlers’ arrival.

The assessment of Poles taking over German objects is usually based on the new settlers’ life situation and intentions (Zaremba 2012, Halicka 2015). Settlement in the Recovered Territories took place as a result of forced migrations of Poles. Individuals and entire families, who could not return to their homes or workplaces due to war damage, took advantage of the opportunity to start a new life. Additionally, smallholders and landless peasants left their homeland and moved to the Recovered Territories, hoping for an improvement in their lives. German property was taken over by Polish settlers who often met their most basic needs, and as such, this mass repossession was undertaken with the approval not only of the authorities but also of Polish society. The Recovered Territories were also an important source of tradeable items, often of exceptional quality, associated with luxury in the post-war reality.

Politics of Emotion

Material goods – everyday objects, houses or even fertile soil – were supposed to fill the emptiness of the Recovered Territories, an emptiness created by Polish state propaganda. This rhetorical image, based on the dialectic of the lack of people and the plenitude offered by these lands, was repeatedly reproduced on posters, in films and daily newspapers, in order to act as a mobilisation tool. Poles were supposed to take the empty places in the social structure – in farms, stalls, shops, workshops, offices and banks – that appeared as a result of the expulsion of Germans from the Recovered Territories. These radical transformations of ownership based on expropriation were supported by the language. The term ‘left by Germans’ [pozostawione przez Niemców] was commonly and often used in the Polish language, describing all the property on those territories. The smooth wording – ‘left by’ – symbolically erased the owners, who, in unspecified circumstances, were conveyed as having passed objects to the Poles as their successors. The figure of ‘waiting objects’ appeared or was rather created, in the confrontation with German property – a confrontation marked by the radical violence of the time (Service 2013, Polak-Springer 2015, Kulczycki 2016).

The internal Polish propaganda about the Recovered Territories employed two contradictory approaches. On the one hand, the hostility against Germans who needed to be expelled, and on the other, hospitality towards things left by Germans. As Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo argue: ‘To be effective, propaganda must harness a rich affective range beyond negative emotions such as hatred, fear, and envy to include more positive feelings’ (Auerbach and Castronovo 2013, p. 10). In 1945, Zygmunt Wojciechowski, the founder of the Institute of Western Affairs in Poznań, wrote that to fulfil the great tasks in the Recovered Territories, ‘it is necessary to awaken the vital emotional states in Polish society’, which must ‘feel that it is going for its own [possession]’ (1945 cited in Dobrzycki 1974, p. 165). This purposeful ‘spatial affective politics’ (Thrift 2004) triggers the whole sphere of overlapping affects and emotions – from enthusiasm and pleasure, through to resentment, reluctance and hatred. ‘Hospitable things’ were one of the main rhetorical figures in the propaganda, which stimulated positive emotions like pleasure, belonging, and happiness with a return to the homeland. This was not only a tool to expel Germans but also an effective emotional defence mechanism that helped to justify the appropriation of German property.

The creation and mobilisation of affect shaped political and psychosocial life not only in immediate post-war Poland. In the context of West Germany, Anna Parkinson conceptualises ‘affect and emotion as central sociopolitical forces that both occupy and address the postwar subject in a variety of ways’ (2015, p. 2). The public sphere of the time in both of these neighbouring countries swelled with affect and emotion (although of different kinds on either side of the border), which were not only used but often abused. The analysis of ‘hospitable things’ in the Recovered Territories can be understood as a reconstruction of one of the ‘scenes of emotion’, to use Parkinson’s formulation, of the time.

The exceptional importance of the relationship between material practices and political imagination is underlined by Navaro-Yashin (2012), but also by other authors dealing with the topic of post-conflict societies (Leutloff-Grandits 2006, Bryant 2014). Navaro scrutinises the process of shaping Northern Cyprus after the Turkish-Greek conflict that spread violently in 1974. The three decades of post-war settlers’ experience were shaped by ruins, abandoned buildings and looted objects. Her timeframe allows seeing the ghostly existence of things – haunted by guilt, anxiety, abjection and uncanniness. Although I recognise at least some of this narrative in the Polish settlers’ memoirs, my analysis differs from Navaro’s account in terms of the ‘negative’ affects on which she concentrates, shaping people’s lives among things that belonged to the previous Greek-Cypriot inhabitants. Contrary to Navaro, in focusing on a very short period – the immediate post-WWII environment – I explore the importance of intermingled affects in shaping new material realities. As I argue, ‘hospitable things’, by accentuating positive attachment, do not simply hide the negative. They did not ‘“feel bad”, because they had been abjected’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 159). Conversely, they did ‘feel good’ because they had been useful and appreciated. The complexity of emotional encounters with material objects, ranging from hospitable to inhospitable, expressed the ambivalence of crossing the border – of country, home and intimacy.

Hospitable Things

The idea of hospitality in the context of migration has attracted a large amount of scholarly attention (Onuf 1998, Molz and Gibson 2007 Dahlberg 2013, Kelz 2015, Bulley 2017, Safouane 2017,). Despite this recognition, as Dan Bulley notes, ‘hospitality can be difficult to draw out or expand upon, in part because it is a practice we all know something about as we engage in or experience it on a daily basis’ (2017, pp. 5–6). This ‘everydayness’ seems to suggest that hospitality is an inherently positive principle. Nevertheless, as Jacques Derrida noted, Hospitalität is ‘a word of a troubled and troubling origin’ (2000, p. 3). The Latin word hospitalite possesses a curious ambiguity, containing its own antonym: hostilitas. In his text Hostipitality, Derrida depicts the idea of ‘pure hospitality’ as being based on openness, welcoming the guest who has not been invited in advance and whose coming is not known beforehand, thus finding the host unprepared. Derrida’s neologism – hostipitality – upholds the diagnosis of the paradox inherent in the idea of hospitality. This pardox is further evidenced by the proximity between ‘guest’ and ‘enemy’, ‘host’ and ‘hostility’ and ‘hospitality’ and ‘hostility’ (Derrida 1997, Still 2010). ‘Hospitality’ is always related to the moment of crossing the border or threshold – between me and others, private and public, individual and common, personal and political, generous and governed by the laws of the economy (Still 2010, p. 4).

The relationship between Poles and Germans is based on deep uncertainty and suspicion. It is different, however, with the objects that received a lot of attention in post-war propaganda materials, reportages and diaries. My suggestion is that the insights Derrida arrived at, particularly those that go beyond relationships between people, are useful in the post-war context. The French philosopher asked relevant questions about human hospitality towards non-humans, about welcoming or ‘being made welcome by – the other or the stranger [l’étranger] as god, animal or plant’ (Derrida 2000, p. 4). But what about the otherness represented by inanimate, material objects? Can humans be hospitable to things – or, to pose this question even more provocatively, can things be hospitable to humans? Furthermore, how can furniture, clothes, or houses express this hospitality towards others?

Martin Heidegger and more recent scholars of ‘thing theory’ claim that entities possess different modes of being. Objects usually serve us as tools that are always at hand, thanks to which we successfully perform certain activities, like cooking, cleaning or writing (Heidegger 1927/1962, pp. 98–102). This readiness-to-hand [Zuhandenhe] of entities means that a hammer, knife or pen becomes phenomenologically transparent. We do not pay them special attention; instead, we look through them – in search of ourselves (what objects say about history, culture or society) (Brown 2004, p. 4). We confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us in regular, predictable ways – when the coat button falls off, the knife cuts the finger. In this way, objects become separate from us – they stop being mute, as we need to confront their independence. However, the difference between an object and a thing is not objective, but is shaped subjectively in a particular situation (Bernstein 2009, p. 69). In this sense, the thing is the ‘outcome of an interaction between subject and objects’, in other words, ‘thing names a subject-object relation’ (Brown 2015, p. 22). Under certain conditions, ‘any object can become a thing – or, more precisely, that thingness inheres (as a latency) within any manifest object’ (Brown 2015, p. 22).

Things, therefore, and not objects, are (or can be) hospitable. They are not passive objects but function as active entities – they demand attention, call for people or even interpellate them. ‘Hospitable things’, waiting and open, allowed people to cross the border, the threshold of the house and overcome strangeness. This was a kind of longed-for invitation to unknown lands, adapted to the particular moment and corresponding to the socially, politically and economically inhospitable situation. Things are not alive, but people behave in a way that gives them agency. This situation also reveals the power relationships between material entities and people. Objects remain under our control – we easily use and manipulate them; however, in certain situations, this power structure can be reversed by showing the interpellative capacity of things to subordinate and convoke subjects.

Between Hospitality and Hostility

In July 1945, Henryk Worcell, the author known for his post-war short stories, arrived in the Recovered Territories and settled in Heinzendorf (today’s Skrzynka) with a group of highlanders from Zakopane, taking up ten hectares of a farmstead. Initially, the settlers lived there among the Germans, but after just half a year, in February 1946, their displacement began. From the very beginning of his own settlement, the author noted the ‘feelings and attitudes of settlers’, which enabled him to describe the problems of social relations in an inconclusive tone, preserving all of its ambivalence (Pluta 1974, p. 94). At first, the process of Poles taking homes is accompanied by uncertainty and hesitancy when choosing the best and most beautiful place, and then to overcoming resistance – both German and the settlers’ own – in relation to people and also to material objects.

In his short story, A Hot Day in Heinzendorf [Gorący dzień w Heinzendorfie], Worcell describes the process of selecting farmsteads, which was usually preceded by a thorough inspection. New settlers look into residential and commercial buildings, count animals – they check, compare and evaluate. The farmsteads still occupied by Germans – thanks to which most of the homes often remained in good condition (or were simply better than others) – are called ‘warm’ by the new settlers (Banasiak 1963, p. 110). The owners often try to discourage the Poles: ‘There is nothing to see here. A barn built, a roof full of holes’ (Worcell 1945, p. 4); thus, they devalue their possessions, showing decrement, negligence or deficiency. As the main character concludes: ‘And indeed, the house inside appeared not very elegant, and overall the whole farm was a bit neglected – not that much, however, to be unsuitable for being taken’ (Worcell 1945, p. 4). Between the inhabitants and the new settlers, a power game sets in, which depends on hiding and revealing, by turns the ‘real’ value of objects. By understating the value of the property, the Germans try to postpone the seizure of their house by the new settlers. Worcell shows the importance of German property, not only as objects of desire and the chance for quick enrichment in post-war scarcity but also tells the history of the complex relations between Poles and Germans through the objects.

Another scene of this (co-)existence is the story Wotan Departs by Train [Wotan odjedzie pociągiem], where the author depicts the growing tension just before the resettlement of the Germans. The main character, Stefan, a member of the Polish deportation committee, together with his wife Helena, occupies a room in a house that is soon to be left by its German owners – the Hattwig family. The main character closely observes his wife and describes her intense emotions towards German women, which are reflected in relation to material objects. She focuses on her own things; it is in them that she finds peace and security. She reaches deep into her dresser and dips her hands in familiar clothes. The settler couple observes how everyday objects gradually disappear from the house. The Poles interpret the phenomenon of the Germans selling objects as meanness. The new settlers, who, after all, will stay in this home, are not taken into account as future owners and, as a result, feel excluded. After ‘our Germans’ [nasi Niemcy], as the settlers name them, their things are taken over as ‘inheritance’ [spadek] (Worcell 1970, pp. 111–122). But when the relationship between the co-habitants becomes more ambivalent or even openly hostile, so too must the relationship with the German property. When the German family is finally deported, the immigrants face things to which they feel aversion. The presence of previous owners is still felt in these material objects. Henryk Worcell builds a history of things’ resistance to the new settlers and a history of brutal breaking of this resistance. Thereby, he describes how objects mediate the relationships between subjects but also how they effect the subject’s self-understanding.

The material things in Worcell’s short stories always come to the fore in critical situations or even trigger those situations themselves. They do not so much mediate contact between people, but rather mark the moments of the contact’s complete collapse. In this sense, things materialise here the crisis of human relations. Although the official post-war discourse was based on the tension between ‘hospitable things’ and ‘hostile subjects’, the aversion towards Germans was also projected onto inanimate things. That is because they were not entirely separated from their owners – despite legal efforts depriving owners of their rights to the things, they still contained some aspect of German identity, some Germanness.

‘The Western Lands are waiting for new settlers’ [Ziemie Zachodnie czekają na nowego osadnika] is the introductory phrase in a Polish newsreel Settlement in the Recovered Territories (Osadnictwo na Ziemiach Odzyskanych 1945) from July 1945. The voiceover informs us: ‘Wheat fields, fish farms, homesteads, agricultural machinery, ports, estates, towns – free country, but still ownerless, is waiting for a host’. Following this, we see idyllic pictures of fields, tools lying around, houses along the bank of a river, and a harbour with boats and abandoned oars. The central theme is the complete absence of Germans. Only through the careful selection of images was it possible to create such a place.

The settler diary of Franciszek Buchtalarz can be read as a commentary, in a manner of speaking, on a newsreel about ‘settlement in the Recovered Territories’ made a dozen years earlier. We do not know whether the settler saw that particular film, but a comparison of these two sources – newsreel and memoir – allows us to see images at work. The logic of imposing and permeating images present in the media of the time, and recalled from personal experience, reveals the dynamics of social relations, practices and images. In July 1945, Buchtalarz wandered along the Oder River, past the village of Żabnice, and then headed towards the town of Gryfin, where he saw a church tower in the distance:

Behind the village, we walked to the large abandoned garden. The buildings were whole, but the glass in the greenhouses was cracked from the April fires. The ca. two-hectare garden was planted with rows of young cherries, already fruiting. In the courtyard, various home appliances and tools lay around. Just behind the house, which stood on the bank of the Oder River, a well-organised harbour was located. A small rocking boat appeared to wait for passengers. Abandoned oars and fishing rods seemed to wait for amateur anglers. Going further down the unpaved meadows, we entered a city side street, planted with trees. Among the gardens and orchards, comfortable houses stood as though waiting for settlers. (Buchtalarz 1957, p. 64)

Things were abandoned in a slapdash manner, lying around in the yard – Buchtalarz’s words can be read as a story of their desertion by humans. The impression of boats, oars, fishing rods and even whole houses awaiting new settlers is expressed here with some reservations (‘seemed to wait’, ‘as though waiting’). The author is hesitant as to whether objects can have their own wills. It looks as though Buchtalarz does not really make any judgement here – as he comments, ‘it is a custom all over the world to welcome strangers and to give water to the thirsty’ (1957, p. 64). This maxim can have equal relevance to people and objects. In the post-war narrative, things commonly have a double duty: on the one hand, they desire new careers; on the other, they express hospitality to people by offering them shelter and satisfying their basic needs. The belief that things left by Germans needed to be taken care of was based on the belief of their gradual degradation and destruction. Being taken care of protects them against the loss of use value. Thus, their existence only makes sense in human hands, and without those, things fall into decay.

Images of fully equipped houses and farms, which give the impression of their readiness for new settlers, are repeated many times in various memoirs. The Polish settlers who arrived in the Recovered Territories often described it as ‘the land of milk and honey’, highlighting the well-planned, developed spatial arrangements, advanced infrastructure (which aroused a sense of alienation in some), larger farms or the number and quality of objects found in undamaged houses. This positive image of a settlement site often results from comparing the new environment with that left by the settlers. Some Poles came from villages and small towns with a much lower level of development. However, such comparisons are not always favourable. The settlers yearn for their left homes, and the new landscape seems strange to them – land challenging to cultivate, buildings and vegetation different from those known. As settlers admit, disappointment comes from disappointed hopes. Rumours and stories about beautiful and spacious houses full of objects turn out to be untrue. What one finds in the Recovered Territories is largely determined by chance, the time and the place of arrival. It was not always possible to choose the settlement location, and it wasn’t easy to guess what one would find in a given town – which is to say, not everyone was able to acquire the loveliest house.

On 14th July 1945, Stanisław Pawlus arrived in a small village located in the Kłodzko Valley:

In Ruszowice the whole transport occupies a large building. We are already happy. On the second day, when women dash to the village, happiness set in. There is plenty of everything in the houses, even dinners prepared on the tables that the Germans left when they escaped. (Pawlus 1957/1963, p. 270)

The ‘dinners prepared on the tables’ are the realisation of the impression of fullness. This wording can be read as a description of the first impressions of the houses, fully prepared for the reception of their new Polish hosts. Such an association implies a shared, cheerful atmosphere, which the author emphasises. An important part of this image is the ready dinner, which suggests genuine hospitality and openness to the other. But from the other perspective, it can be perceived as an immediate experience of the brutal post-war expulsion of the Germans, who left almost all their property. An unfinished meal is a sign of the urgency of this event and a symbol of hostility. This impression appears in the absence of former owners. Objects betray the lack of people – the meal is uneaten – and reveal the violence of their departure. But precisely because of the absence of their owners, houses may be perceived as open, able to be inhabited by new settlers.

After crossing the threshold of the house, settlers often carried out an inventory. Franciszek Kluska, who after the war took over a house and farm in Osiedle Poznańskie near Gorzów Wielkopolski, created inventory of the entire village:

In our village, we found 23 threshing machines, […] farm tools and everything we had at hand. Our housewives had plenty of food at hand, and pots, bowls, spoons, plates and various household tools, sometimes without knowing what they were used for. And we have here 30 such housewives who have not bought any tools until today, and farmers have tools such as ploughs, harrows, motorcycles, etc. (Kluska 1957, p. 334)

The precise enumeration serves to organise things, each of them gaining space in the cognitive grid. The lists of objects, regardless of the criteria adopted by the settlers, can be read as a way of dealing with the present materiality. In Franciszek Kluska’s description, all the most important items are ‘at hand’; he could see in them tools ready to meet human needs. Farms were also selected on this basis; the number of ready-to-use, undamaged objects was one of the most important criteria. In the first view, things are reduced to their functionality: the settlers harness their ancillary nature and immediately enter the role of their users. In this way, objects’ previous ‘users’ vanish. As the Polish settler describes, instead of being stolen or taken away from someone, things are found. Kluska does not ask questions about their owners; items are treated as separate, no longer attached to the Germans. In this way, by their ‘finding’, things are ripped out of previous relationships so that they can be included in a new family.

In his diary, Stanisław Dulewicz recorded the moment of entry into the house of the former German mayor in the seaside town of Rügenwalde [Darłowo in Polish]. The house had been hastily abandoned by the owners, who left many personal items. Dulewicz described how he chose clothes along with his acquaintances and then dressed in the lavish evening gowns found in the closets. The objects ‘stoją otworem […] dla zwiedzających’ (1957/1963, p. 477), which can be translated literally as ‘are standing open to the visitors’. The Polish idiom stać otworem connotes availability, access without hindrance. Dulewicz describes literally ‘scrambling through the excess of useless’ items accumulated by the German family. The new settlers dressed in the clothes of previous owners and played their roles – by imitating gestures and poses and recreating the social encounter. Finally, they sat in comfortable armchairs in the living room and lit Cuban cigars found in a cabinet. The scene might suggest the ease with which the new settlers literally ‘enter’ the clothes. Unlike his friends, who chose the best quality clothes, Dulewicz points out that he only took a woollen jacket from the house of the last German mayor – too large for him and already worn. But in the new settler’s narrative, this object takes on a symbolic dimension. After taking over the city (and the jacket), Dulewicz became the first Polish mayor of post-war Darłowo (Zborowska 2017, pp. 440–441). In his diary, the men swap places – the Pole literally takes the German’s place in the social structure.

The question concerning hospitality after World War II refers to the crossing of various paths of compulsory post-war migration, motivated both politically and ideologically. The relationship between the Poles coming to the Recovered Territories and the Germans who were uncertain of their future on the land can at best be described as compassionate, sometimes a mutual understanding based on the shared experience of compulsory migration. Paradoxically, however, the post-war politics of emotion on both sides of the volatile border claimed that everyone was ‘at home’. Hospitality, however, is hard to find in both official and personal post-war records, at least as far as hospitality between people is concerned. Even though it was often expected by the Poles, it rarely turned out to be the case: the relationship between Poles and the Germans who still lived in their homes was based rather on great mutual insecurity and mistrust.

If ‘hospitable things’ greeted the new settlers, closer relations with them did not always remain so positive. The inanimate objects sometimes even became hostile. To maintain the interpretation of the role of the image of ‘hospitable things’ that I reconstruct in this article, we should also look at the moments in which materiality resisted. The experience of objects’ ‘hospitality’, wherein things are given a voice, expresses not the will of the things themselves but rather that of the settlers. The narrative about how Poles took control of inanimate objects often revealed a complete lack of human control. Perhaps, if we want to hear the voices of things, we should instead turn our attention to the moments when they seem to be wayward or do not fit easily into narrations about ‘hospitality’.

The displacement of people and objects as a result of war not only enables the imagining of a different material order but also provides some freedom in (re)organising reality. In this way, they reveal the potentiality inherent in things. Other uses of familiar objects by Polish settlers are interwoven with narratives about the misuse of objects completely unknown to them. Józefa Nogat admitted that in the barn, she found things ‘which I have never seen in my life: a mower, a tedder, a hay rake’ (1957/1963, p. 645). ‘I didn’t even know how to work with them’ – Antoni Delinowski added in another diary (1957). Aleksander Pietraszko, writing about a special kind of attentiveness that he developed after arriving in the village of Zatonie (now part of Zielona Góra): ‘At every pile of garbage I stopped and looked whether I could find anything useful’ (Pietraszko 1957/1963, p. 189). This displacement of things did not take place due to the turmoil of war, but was due to the decisions of new Polish settlers – things would be ‘kicked into the dustbins or become a toy for children’ (1957/1963, p. 189). In this way, Pietraszko found not only photographic tools – a tripod and an enlarger – but also valuable home appliances. In the diary, he presents himself as an expert on things, who can define and appreciate their value; find treasures in the trash. To illustrate this thesis, in the pages of the diary, he reconstructs a street scene:

As I walked a street one day I saw children pull an electric vacuum cleaner. I asked them what it was they were pulling.

—We are walking a dog—they said—but it’s bad, it growls. We can show you if you want, but it has to be plugged in first. Then it howls so bad it sparks.

—All right, I believe you—I said—but if you want I could give you a lot of money for it, because I need a doggy just like this. The children agreed and their parents were happy to sell the brand new vacuum cleaner to me, because they thought they’d have no use for it. (Pietraszko 1957/1963, p. 189)

Pietraszko notes that a ‘large part of the people’ (1957/1963, p. 189) did not recognise objects, did not know what they were used for and could not use them properly. However, we can say that the settlers recognised different physical properties of things. Not only children did recognise a potential toy with the vacuum cleaner. According to the diaries, a wooden wardrobe can be used as a boat on the lake (Będkowska 1957/1963, p. 610) or a German nightgown as an evening dress (Wojciechowski 1957/1963, p. 366). In this way, objects showed their susceptibility or openness to new uses, which Bill Brown defined as misuse-value. This way, misuse-value ‘captions the effectiveness of broken routine […] as an unanticipated mode of apprehending the world of objects anew’ (Brown 2015, p. 373). However, the learning of a new world of objects by Polish settlers was associated with overcoming the misuse-value. Hence, the process of homemaking in the Recovered Territories was related to gaining an understanding of the material surroundings and thereby transforming them into practical objects.

Conclusions

In this article, I proposed the concept of ‘hospitable things’, and argued that it could improve our understanding of the relationships between objects and subjects in the situation of migration in immediate post-World War II Poland. Although my analysis is based on materials from post-war Poland, the concept is not limited to that time and place. ‘Hospitable things’ depict the dynamic relationship between the postulated adoption of foreign objects and their hospitality – i.e. between the need to take care of things and the need to be taken care of by things (expressed in narrations about things that are open towards new inhabitants, awaiting their arrival). I interpret the appearance of this image in personal stories as a relevant way of dealing with things burdened by ethnic cleansing and territorial annexation. The concept of ‘hospitable things’ made it possible to objectify the emotions accompanying the experience of crossing the threshold of a house or a country. Equally importantly, it enabled the social legitimisation of such practices. Defining things mostly as tools draws attention to people as their users. This enables seeing oneself as a host taking care of abandoned things, keeping them safe from destruction and theft. From this perspective, the Recovered Territories and material objects compensated for the immigrants’ loss of home. Therefore, someone’s land and property acted as a substitute – people replacing what they no longer had. Perhaps that is why, when the original owners sold things, the act caused impatience and anger for Poles, as it was a double loss for them.

‘Hospitable things’, unlike people, stay in their places and open them (lands, countries, houses and doors) to newcomers. On the one hand, this unconditional acceptance of the other can help the foreigner overcome the feelings of insecurity and despair that accompany the experience of displacement. On the other hand, this acceptance also hides radical violence. ‘Hospitable things’ help the foreigner not only to take other peoples’ possessions but also to take other peoples’ places in a social structure (the fear that repeatedly reappears in the context of discussions about immigrants and refugees). The materials analysed in this article show that the categories of hospitality and inhospitality are not attached to particular types of entities – personal belongings, like clothes or bed linen, can be as hospitable as agricultural machinery. As such, the presence or absence of hospitality does not readily correspond with categories of privacy and intimacy. Some material objects are perceived to be more neutral; others, for some reason, are invested with emotion and additional meaning, but they do not always go hand in hand with the degree of their hospitality. Furthermore, ‘hospitable things’ always remain potentially hostile; they are not empty and vacant, but often filled with the malicious images of their former possessors. When, after the deportation of the Germans, the main character of Henryk Worcell’s story asks his wife about the necessity of confronting the inhospitable objects left by the Germans: ‘But what are we going to do? Where to begin?’, the answer comes: ‘From the broom, she said firmly. First, I sweep everything, sweep it, sweep it out! I sweep and scrub. Sand, soap, sidol’ (1970, p. 122).

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Shannon Lee Dawdy (University of Chicago) for her generous feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank the participants of the ‘War Frenzy: Exploring the Violence of Propaganda’ conference (2017) organised by the Programme in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Princeton University, as well as anonymous reviewers and editors for useful feedback that helped me improve the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre Poland under Grants: 2014/15/N/HS2/04027 and 2017/24/T/HS2/00326.

Notes on contributors

Agata Zborowska

Agata Zborowska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland.