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How did understandings of Europe change and evolve after the Second World War? During this time, two Polish exiles, Jerzy Stempowski and Andrzej Bobkowski, discussed and redefined their ideas of Europe in the pages of Kultura , the Polish émigré review. This book explores the tension between the concept of Europe and the experience of exile.

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As Europe experienced tumultuous change after the Second World War, two Polish exiles, Jerzy Stempowski (1893-1969) and Andrzej Bobkowski (1913-1961), discussed and redefined their ideas of the continent in the pages of Kultura , the Polish émigré review. Highlighting the changes in their writings about "the West", "the East" and "civilization", this book pieces together the evolution of their own self-understanding as Europeans, the overlooked shifts of accents along with silences and falsifications. By following these two writers´ accounts of the events that led them from Poland and Ukraine to France, West Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Latin America, this study shows the tension between changing discourses and individual lives, between the wider concept of Europe and the experience of exile, emigration and belonging.

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CONTENTS: What About Us? Polish Exiles from Kultura and the European Dilemma - Changing Images of Europe in the Writings of Stempowski: A General Overview - Anger and Disenchantment with the West: Jerzy Stempowski as a Political Exile - An Eastern European Writing about Germany and Austria in 1945 - Metaphors of Provincialization: Postwar Essays on Europe - Continuity and Rupture: Classical Self-Fashioning and Farewells to Europe - Personal Rebellion against Europe: Autobiographical Texts from 1945 to 1955 - Reassessments of Occidentalism in Sketches with a Quill - Obliterating Interwar Europeanism: Postwar Corrections in Sketches with a Quill - From Distant Lands: Travels to America in Kultura - Occidentalism and Its Discontents.

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´In a feat of careful research and textual analysis, Mikolajewski captures the way these Polish exile writers moved physically and existentially across the chasm of the Second World War, adjusting their views to the massive shifts in politics and society the war entailed. In the case of Bobkowski, his wartime anti-Semitism was an element he never fully confronted. This book makes a valuable contribution to the study of modern Polish literature and modern European intellectual life.´ (Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History, Yale University, co-translator with Grazyna Drabik of Andrzej Bobkowski, Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940-1944)

´A great exploration of ambiguities of Polish cultural identity.´ (Janusz Korek, Stockholm University)

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Lukasz Mikolajewski is a junior professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, specializing in intellectual history. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the European University Institute.

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