During the Second World War all universities in German-occupied Poland were closed and scientific activity of any kind was prohibited to Poles and Jews. While underground teaching is a well-known subject in Polish historiography, clandestine research remains relatively understudied. Friedrich Cain’s ground-breaking monograph, based on a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Konstanz in 2018, fills this gap by looking at occupied Poland from the perspective of the history of science. Challenging the conventional view of clandestine research as a form of resistance that was primarily motivated by patriotic feelings, Cain decentres the narrative of the Polish underground state by focusing on the material, corporeal, personal and social rather than political contexts of conducting scientific work in occupied Poland without official access to libraries, laboratories and archives. The author’s transdisciplinary approach draws upon a range of theoretical concepts borrowed from diverse thinkers, such as Primo Levi, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. The book is divided into three parts, each devoted to a different scientific field.

In Part I Cain painstakingly reconstructs social scientific research practices in occupied Poland. The author unearths in the wartime writings of Polish sociologists an interesting perspective that complicates the simple dichotomy of resistance and collaboration. Cain introduces here the idea of “living as if” (Leben als ob) – a translation of the Polish phrase “życie na niby” – as one of the key concepts of his monograph. The term was originally used by the sociologist Stanisław Ossowski to analyse the mutual exchange of social fictions between the occupiers and the occupied and the resulting duplication of moral judgments. In an interesting polemic with Jan Tomasz Gross, for whom the development of parallel Polish and German social spheres was a sign of positive resilience1, Cain points out that contemporary social scientists emphasised the negative consequences of dividing social life into multiple spheres with different norms and values. The blackmailing and denouncing of Jews by their Polish neighbours was seen by them as an example of this double moral standard.

Unfortunately this part of the book focuses almost entirely on Ossowski and the hair-splitting analysis of his wartime texts is at times tedious to read. Cain could have instead devoted more space to the Oneg Shabbat project in the Warsaw ghetto which is only briefly mentioned (pp. 106–107). The historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his associates conducted interviews, gathered socioeconomic data and collected a vast range of sources documenting Jewish life in occupied Poland. The preserved material has been published in Polish and partially also English translations by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and is now available online together with the scans of original documents.2 This unique historical material could have been used to reconstruct everyday practices of social scientists and activists involved in the Oneg Shabbat project.

Part II explores the “medical grey zone” (p. 199) in which Polish and Jewish researchers were forced to operate under Nazi rule. Cain focuses on the Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl who in occupied Lwów directed typhus immunisation research for the German army and on the Jewish physicians who conducted a clandestine hunger disease study inside the Warsaw ghetto. These two episodes are well known to historians of medicine and in his own analysis Cain relies heavily on previous scholarship by Paul Weindling and Charles Roland3, although he was apparently not able to consult Miriam Offer’s recently published monograph on medicine in the Warsaw ghetto.4 Nonetheless, Cain is undoubtedly the first scholar to conceptually link typhus and hunger research to both German biopolitics under the Nazi regime and underground science networks in occupied Poland.

In Part III Cain focuses on everyday scientific practices of Polish physicists, such as Stefan Pieńkowski who was the rector of the underground University of Warsaw. The analysis centres on the concept of “threshold institutions” (Schwelleninstitutionen) which are defined by the author as spaces where German occupiers interacted with Polish scientists despite mutual proscriptions against such contacts. German need for local expertise and Polish desire to access confiscated facilities resulted in a paradoxical situation where only those institutions that were sanctioned by the Germans, such as Pieńkowski’s Physical Measurements Laboratory, could provide the necessary cover for underground activities. Cain argues that in “threshold institutions” research and teaching could be done in relative safety, political meetings could take place, and financial support from the Polish government-in-exile could be processed without raising suspicion. Officially working for the Germans and secretly following orders from the underground state, Polish scientists in “threshold institutions” treaded the dangerously thin line between resistance and collaboration.

Cain’s overall argument is sometimes difficult to follow due to the disjointed structure of the text. For instance, the key concept of “threshold institutions” is mentioned throughout the book but is only defined in Part III. The analysis of clandestine medical teaching in Warsaw in Part II would have made more sense if it were integrated with the account of the development of the underground university network in Part III. In turn, the lengthy discussion of Erwin Ding-Schuler’s typhus immunisation experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp (pp. 269–272) could have been entirely omitted from the book, especially because Cain relies on outdated interpretations and cites incorrect numbers of victims.5 A common misconception repeated by Cain is that the world-renowned microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld was the pre-war director of the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw (pp. 245 and 279). In fact, until May 1940 this post was held by Gustaw Szulc, while Hirszfeld headed the Department of Bacteriology and Experimental Medicine. Furthermore, Józef Stein and Anna Braude-Heller, the directors of the two Jewish hospitals in Warsaw, did not perish in the summer of 1942 (p. 329), but were murdered during the Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943.

Despite these minor flaws, Cain has produced an erudite analysis of clandestine research in occupied Poland which has the potential to revolutionise Polish historiography of the Second World War by challenging the dominant narrative of the underground state and transcending the dichotomy of collaboration and resistance. The concept of “threshold institutions” is an especially important contribution with ramifications beyond the history of science. It could well be used in other contexts, for example to analyse day-to-day activities of local government bodies, health services, police forces and fire departments.

Notes:
1 Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society Under German Occupation. The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944, Princeton 1979.
2 Pełna edycja Archiwum Ringelbluma. Tomy i dokumenty źródłowe, in: Central Jewish Library, <https://cbj.jhi.pl/collections/749436> (28.02.2022).
3 Paul Julian Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945, Oxford 2000; Charles G. Roland, Courage Under Siege. Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, Oxford 1992.
4 Miriam Offer, White Coats Inside the Ghetto. Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust, Jerusalem 2020.
5 For the most recent analysis of typhus experiments in Buchenwald, see Paul Weindling / Ryan Alexander Farrell, Joachim Mrugowsky, Erwin Ding-Schuler, and Typhus Vaccine Research at “KL Buchenwald, Post-Weimar”, in: Paul Weindling (ed.), Fleckfieberforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Joachim Mrugowskys Fleckfieber-Abhandlung und seine Tätigkeit als Hygieniker der Waffen-SS (Acta Historica Leopoldina 76), Halle (Saale) 2021, pp. 105–214.