THE MODERN POLISH FRONTIERS 385to talk of Wroclaw. A German who prefers the German form no more implies
that modern Wroclaw is a German city, than the Poles who talk of 'Lipsk' and
'Dresna' imply that Leipzig or Dresden are Polish. Thirdly, it is important to
remember that neutral versions, in English or Latin, themselves contain a dis-
tortion of reality, and may well carry serious implications. 'Warsaw' is clearly
preferable to the native 'Warszawa' for scholars writing in English. But fully
anglicized items of this sort are extremely rare. Most English forms were in fact
taken from German or Russian usage, and became familiar to the Anglo-Saxon
reader in the past in specific conditions which no longer apply — 'Cracow', for
example, was borrowed from the German 'Krakau' in the distant days when the
inhabitants of the city were mainly German-speaking. Finally, it must not be
forgotten that all place-names take their validity from the purposes for which
they were invented. Within their own terms of reference, they are all equally
appropriate. Their propriety in any given situation can only be tested when the
historian inquires for what purposes they are to be used, and in whose interest.
All variations must always be kept in mind. Of one thing everyone can be cer-
tain. The cultural savages who have toured the records and the cemeteries of the
Polish lands, erasing Polish, German, Jewish, Russian, or Ukrainian names in
the hope of forcing many-splendoured reality to conform with their own
monotonous fantasies, are to be pitied. Censors, who eliminate offending place-
names from maps and records, in the pretence that the mode of the moment is
somehow the eternal verdict of history, are deceiving both themselves and their
charges. As in matters of more excitement, the reasonable man must always
conclude: Vive la difference^1.
Whatever may be said about the settlement of 1945, it cannot be doubted that it
was as final as any such political arrangement can be. Its finality did not derive
from the wisdom of its perpetrators, but from their ruthlessness. Frontier prob-
lems were not so much solved as destroyed. Throughout Eastern Europe,
national minorities who may or may not have been responsible for intercom-
munal tensions, were physically removed. From the point of view of modern
governments, and of the superpower which presided over the whole region for
nearly fifty years, the result was extremely tidy. But the human cost was terri-
ble.
For the historian, the 1945 Settlement presents a curious paradox. In reality,
it constituted a radical break with the past, a giant leap away from conditions
prevailing before the war, an arbitrary diversion of the historical stream. It was
a colossal feat of political engineering. However, in almost every East European
country, it was interpreted as the culmination of a natural historical process,
and was constantly rationalized by reference to distant historical events, real or
imagined. Everybody knows that History can be used to justify anything; but in
this case, the elaborate historical ceremonial, which the ideologists laid on to