Oskar Halecki

• 1. Introduction

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  Oskar Halecki was born in Vienna on the 26th of May 1891, the son of a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, rose to the rank of lieutenant field-marshal. That military pedigree shaped none of the son's career, but it gave young Oskar an aristocratic bearing reinforced by the pince-nez he wore in his early years.

  By the time Halecki died on the 17th of September 1973, he had taught at universities on three continents, helped build the League of Nations' intellectual infrastructure, founded and led a Polish scholarly institution in exile, and advanced an argument about the map of Europe that historians still debate today. He spent much of his adult life in countries that were not his own, driven there by wars he could not stop.

  Who was this man, and why did he dedicate decades to a vision of Europe that most of his contemporaries had not yet imagined? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Scholar and Diplomat

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  Halecki earned his doctorate at the Jagiellonian University between 1909 and 1913, then spent a year as a research assistant to Bronislaw Dembinski in Warsaw before returning to study at the University of Vienna from 1914 to 1915. Poor eyesight disqualified him from military service during the First World War, but it did not slow his career. In 1915 he secured his first teaching post as a docent at the Jagiellonian, and in 1918 he moved to the University of Warsaw, where he was appointed to a chair of East European history.

  When the Armistice was signed, Polish officials placed Halecki in a role that suited his languages and his mind. He was appointed secretary general of a committee of experts attached to the Polish Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, giving the young historian a front-row seat at one of the most consequential diplomatic gatherings of the twentieth century.

  That experience opened a door to Geneva. In 1921 Halecki joined the League of Nations Secretariat and spent three years organising its Committee on Intellectual Co-operation. He then moved to Paris as Chief of the University Section in the league's Institute on Intellectual Co-operation, working across its various commissions for several years. The decade-long detour into international service delayed his return to scholarship, but it also gave him a practical understanding of how nations talk to one another that no university chair could have provided. He returned to his professorship at the University of Warsaw and served as dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1930 to 1931.

• 3. Exile and Institution-Building

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  Halecki was attending a conference in Fribourg when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. He chose not to return to occupied Warsaw. Instead he went to Paris, where he organised the Polish University in Exile and served as its president, taught at the Sorbonne, and edited the emigre periodical La Voix de Varsovie.

  When Germany invaded France in 1940, that refuge collapsed too. Stephen Mizwa and the Kosciuszko Foundation helped Halecki escape to the United States, where he spent two years as a visiting professor of history at Vassar College. The same Foundation had brought him to America once before, in 1938, when he gave over forty lectures at colleges and universities as a visiting scholar.

  His next project was larger. Halecki became executive director of the new Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, an institution conceived as an American outpost of the Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci. Bronislaw Malinowski served as its first president, and Halecki later led it himself from 1952 to 1964. From 1944 to 1961 he also held a professorship of Eastern European history at Fordham University, was affiliated with the University of Montreal from 1944 to 1951, and served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University from 1955 to 1961, contributing to the prestige of Columbia's Institute on East Central Europe. Even after his retirement in 1961, he taught at Loyola University in Rome, the University of Fribourg, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Good Counsel College through 1967.

• 4. The Argument About Europe

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  Halecki's deepest scholarly contribution was an argument, and it grew directly from his expertise on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He contended that Eastern Europe, distinct from Russia, was no less European than Western Europe, and that the two halves together formed one great European community sharing the same spiritual ideals and cultural traditions. His work advanced the gradual acceptance of the concept and name of East Central Europe as a meaningful category.

  His magnum opus was a two-volume history of the Jagiellonian Union, published in 1919 and 1920. That work laid the foundation for the broader thesis he would spend the rest of his career developing. Among the students he mentored were Thaddeus V. Gromada, Taras Hunczak, and Eugene Kusielewicz, scholars who carried his questions into subsequent generations.

  Much of his retirement was taken up with a biography of Jadwiga of Anjou, a medieval Polish queen whose reign was central to the Jagiellonian story. The book was published two decades after his death, a last contribution from a historian who kept working long past any conventional stopping point.

• 5. Honors and Controversies

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  Honorary doctorates came from the University of Lyon, the University of Montreal, De Paul University, Fordham University, and Saint Peter's College. Halecki also held the title of Papal Chamberlain and was Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Malta; he was Commander of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Commander of Saint Gregory, Commander of the Hungarian Croix de Merite, and Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur.

  In 1966 the Polish American Historical Association gave him its first Haiman Award for outstanding contributions to Polish American studies. After his death, the association established the Halecki Prize in 1981, awarded to recognise an important book or monograph on the Polish experience in the United States.

  Not all of his activities were uncontroversial. During the 1950s Halecki served on the so-called Committee of Ten in Scarsdale, New York, a group that claimed communist influence had entered the public school curriculum. That involvement sat alongside his Catholic activism and his academic career as one facet of a man who never separated his scholarship from his convictions. His wife, Helen de Sulima-Szarlowska, died in 1964, and the following year the Polish University Abroad awarded him its Doctor Honoris Causa, a distinction he received in 1973, the year he died.