Beyond Bloodlines: Olga Tokarczuk on the Identity We Create

olga_tokarczuk_gettyimages-1702154961.jpg, default, Olga Tokarczuk, photo: Lorena Sopena / Europa Press via Getty Images

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‘Who am I?’ is a question that requires work, not just a passport. Speaking at the Tu jest Polska congress in Wałbrzych, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk explores the ‘transgressive identity’ born from the ruins and melting pots of Lower Silesia – and why our true ancestors are anyone who tended the land before us, regardless of the language they spoke.

The Nobel laureate's speech was given on 15th December 2025. Many thanks to the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation for permitting to have it republished here. The title and lede come from Culture.pl's editors.

I was born a dozen or so years after the war in Sulechów (Züllichau), on the northern fringes of historical Silesia. For the first decade of my life, I lived in Klenica (Kleinitz) in the Lubusz Land, and later in Kietrz (Katscher) in Upper Silesia. Later, I left for six years to study in Warsaw. It was a journey not only to a different climatic and environmental zone, but also to a realm of linguistic nuances I had never known before. Subsequently, I returned to Wrocław (Breslau) and Wałbrzych (Waldenburg), eventually finding my place in the vicinity of Nowa Ruda (Neurode).

My father came from the borderlands of Galicia and Podolia, while my mother was from the Świętokrzyskie region. The cultural differences between them, their distinct customs, were quite visible and frequently resurfaced, becoming the cause of misunderstandings or even squabbles. So I knew from the beginning that people can be different, but still capable of loving one another. There were times when I had to choose which cause to support – whether to look at a matter from my mother’s point of view or my father’s. I remember the grief I felt when, in the 1970s, my father lost his eastern accent. What I missed most was that beautiful, stage-like, back-of-the-tongue ‘l’, which turned into a flat ‘ł’.

When I visited my grandparents during summer holidays as a child, I was convinced we were travelling to a neighbouring country across the border. I was surrounded by a different architecture, the earth smelled different and was drier, the vegetation seemed less lush – at least that’s how it seemed to me. People spoke some sort of child-threatening dialect (usually, what we don’t understand seems threatening), they dressed slightly differently and ate different things for dinner. I remember how shocked I was to see that the inscriptions on the gravestones were in Polish. Until then, I had believed that German was the language of cemeteries. I thought this language had been invented as a special vocabulary used specifically to record the past and the history of our dead.

Indeed, I was travelling for the holidays across some invisible border that cut through the railway tracks somewhere near Kalisz or Skalmierzyce.

Returning was equally interesting – I remember that feeling of reaching the nest. Tall, ruined buildings, cobbled streets, regularly-trimmed rows of trees along the roads, garden paths lined with bricks, decorative facades, palaces turned into schools or state farms, and vast, centuries-old parks. Our lives were composed of all these old objects, signs written using Schwabacher fonts, staircases with openwork steps. And of the people around us. For example, my nanny was named Gertruda Nietschke, she was an autochthon and spoke Polish poorly, yet I loved her unconditionally. It was thanks to her that I ate pumpkin soup as a child and a special dish which – as I later discovered – was called ‘Silesian Heaven’.

I am a Pole, deeply immersed in the Polish language and culture, but I am also a Lower Silesian.

Recently, in a fascinating interview, Norman Davies reminded us that after the war, several old recipes for Poland were clashing into each other. In one – the professor cites the concept of General Władysław Anders – Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Jews and Germans were full citizens of the Republic of Poland alongside Poles. Davies says: ‘Anders himself was born into a German, Evangelical family. One must remember that people of very different national identities served in the Polish Army of 1939. Among the defenders of Westerplatte, one could find many Ukrainians.’ I would add that Polish citizens – representatives of national and ethnic minorities – fought not only in all the wars Poland waged but also in all the uprisings we usually call ‘national’.

To quote further: Anders ‘strove to ensure that all citizens of the Republic of Poland could join his army, regardless of ethnicity, language or religion. The NKVD, however, wanted to allow only ‘Poles’ to leave, understood as Catholics who spoke Polish. Despite this resistance, Anders managed to lead people of very diverse national identities out of the USSR, with the exception of the Germans. Due to obvious reasons, the USSR wouldn’t allow it.’

The second idea for Poland was entirely different. In this concept – which, interestingly, mirrored the Soviet attitude toward Anders’ army – a Pole was a Polish-speaking Catholic. This idea, belonging to Roman Dmowski and the pre-war National Democracy party, was adopted and creatively modified by the Soviets and Polish communists.

Professor Davies explains it this way: ‘They added the concept of Pan-Slavic solidarity and the recognition of the brotherly leadership of the Soviet Union. Then they resettled millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Germans. The remaining people were subjected to forced Polonisation to create a homogeneous nation that had never existed before. History was then falsified to convince Poles that their country had simply returned to its natural, historical shape.

This engineering allowed the USSR to justify taking Poland’s eastern borderlands (Kresy), which fell to different nations: Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians. Their countries entered into an arrangement dominated by the Russian Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the new, homogeneous Poles received new borders – shifted to the West, into “historically Polish” lands. An ideological explanation was manufactured, claiming this was a return to the borders of the year 1000. It was entirely arbitrary.’ The tool for implementing this decision was a forced, entirely new identity.

I remember as a child being subjected to this propaganda: I read newly written ‘ancient’ fairy tales about Bolesław the Brave’s valiant knights and lowly German henchmen, about a constant, eternal and somehow organic tension between Poles and Germans in this borderland. In their nationalist homogenisation, the purity of which was maintained not only through anti-German hysteria but also through anti-Ukrainian and anti-Jewish sentiment, the communists were essentially realising Dmowski’s vision, if not that of his entire national camp, including its most radical elements. Meanwhile, over the years and with successive generations, a new identity emerged. Only it was different from that dreamt-up National Democratic-communist one.

Let us consider whether, in the annexed lands, that Andersian-Giedroycian idea of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Republic did not survive in some form, one in which a Pole became not only the person steeped in the culture and heritage of Central Poland and not only the one from the borderlands with a completely different tradition of Polishness. A Pole also became the Jew who either had nothing to return to or did not want to return to his old places. A Pole became the resettled Lemkos and Ukrainians, the Roma who had settled here centuries ago and in crowds after 1945, and the Germans who were so tied to the land that they decided to stay – amongst them those who felt themselves to be Polish (sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it?). And also the Greeks and Macedonians who found shelter here after 1948 following the civil war, and the great multitude of repatriates from France, Belgium and Germany who believed in a better, more just young country in which they would build their future. In other words – the true pre-war Poland, that diverse and multi-ethnic one, magically recreated itself in Lower Silesia, the Lubusz Land and the northern territories as part of a bizarre geopolitical experiment.

But today, after three or four generations, something even more astonishing has happened. This mixture of peoples who arrived in the western territories after the war, this linguistic, cultural, religious and mental melting pot, has developed its own kind of identity within the deep processes of collective consciousness – one that is reluctant toward political, communist-nationalist propaganda and weary of its workings. I will add with a smile that this would not have succeeded to such an extent were it not for the women, who, after all, constituted a significant majority of the inhabitants of these lands in the post-war period.

The community that forged itself here from scratch, from the days of ‘The Law and the Fist’, has performed impressive work, giving the imposed social experiment its own face and character, refusing the mask that was attempted to be placed upon it through violence. Powerful forces of rebirth, renewal, assimilation, optimism and a creative attitude toward life meant that from the peculiar mixture of peoples walking the streets of these cities 80 years ago, what has emerged is an open society of Poles and Europeans, coherent in its passion. People who are at home. On their own. These traits allow us to look optimistically towards the future, even if it promises to be very turbulent.

And since we live in both space and time, the past of our places cannot be ignored. To have a sense of meaning and continuity, we also have to incorporate into our own experience the memory of the work and effort of the people who lived here before us, regardless of what language they spoke or what state structures they belonged to. In a cultural and spiritual sense, they are our ancestors too.

I have no trouble with this. On the mantelpiece in my house stand photographs of its previous German owners, who lived in it and, with great effort, carefully renovated it after even earlier residents – those who laid the first foundations in the rock several hundred years ago, during the time of the Thirty Years’ War. They are my family. Everything I’m talking about leads me to reflect on the emergence here, in the western and northern territories, of a kind of new identity, which I currently call a transgressive identity.

It is an identity more capacious and more extensive than the one given at birth. It goes beyond the inheritance of genes and the cultural heritage of ancestors. It is the result of a conscious and active being in the world, a dynamic participation in it physically, intellectually and emotionally. However, it is above all the result of one’s own work and reflection, constantly stimulated by the question: WHO AM I? It is created through a dispute with that which is imposed, rigid and unchanging. It does not imprison, but rather releases and opens one’s eyes. It is an identity that continuously examines other ways, models, modes and forms of existence, whereby it becomes a searching identity, as well as one that incorporates into itself the new, the unknown and the other. Its essence is a transformation that is intelligent, but also courageous. Today, we have an opportunity to reflectively answer for ourselves what these 80 years of recent history were, what we built, and what we had to lose. And who we are.

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