Karolina Partyga

My dissertation examines the relationship between the destruction of the Second World War and the possibilities of subsequent reconstruction through a seemingly unlikely hero: scrap metal. Yet, in the postwar wasteland of East Central Europe, metallic debris was a material with high stakes. Examining how Poles collected, searched for, and repurposed war waste from their territory and beyond to rebuild Poland, my dissertation shows Europe’s postwar reconstruction as a power contest over the material world. Burnt out tanks, skeletons of bombed buildings, and damaged railways had to be either cleared away or rebuilt – and the decisions about such salvage structured new power relationships between industrial professionals, communist activists, occupation armies, and displaced migrants. Scrap metal, moreover, was the primary resource to make the steel needed to rebuild bridges, cities, and factories. Hence, the material was coveted both in Poland and abroad, entangling the Polish clean-up in European contests over the entire continent’s reconstruction. In East Central Europe, where Polish borders were shifted 200 kilometers west, European reconstruction could not be a return to the past, but a reconfiguration, as Poles wanted to capitalize on Germany’s defeat to make the new European order one in which Polish industrialization could finally be launched. Telling the story of the contested material reconfiguration of the region, my dissertation offers a conceptual framework of “material politics” to explicate how knowledge of the material world became an intrinsic part of the imaginaries of justice, security, and development. It thus decenters communist ideology as the defining force of Eastern Europe’s postwar history, and exposes the role that logistics and materials played in the politics of reconstruction itself.