The main object of this article is to present the history of the establishing legal regulations in Poland concerning additional place names and other official signs in the languages of national minorities. This process has been always very difficult, because as it teaches the experience of many European countries, it affects issues related the national identity, the role of the national language in the state and the tradition of recognizing linguistic diversity in a given country. In the article, I will try to show that the introduction of such regulations in Poland has been with the one hand an important, perhaps even historical, change in the functioning of the Polish society and administration which consisted of official admission of other languages into the public sphere thus violating the dominant tradition of Polish language dominance in the country. From the other hand, the presence of a minority place-names indicates a change in the way in which minority groups publicly present their ethnic identities. It takes place not only through maintaining national cultures and learning the mother tongue but also through increased visual presence in the public sphere.

Teresa Willenborg’s book is devoted to analysis of the situation of the German population of former German territories which were granted to Poland in 1945 basing on diplomatic conferences of great powers: USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Willenborg focuses on experiences of Germans who decided to remain in their hometowns and villages. The subject of her interest is here mainly a term of becoming ‘foreign’ and ‘solitare’ in their own homeland after 1945. Thanks to usage of various Polish and German sources the author managed to stress the fact, that the history of post-war expulsions and national minorities often requires a transnational approach.

The anniversaries of the 1970 Warsaw and the 1990 2+4 Treaties give occasion to revisit the matter of minority protection in German-Polish relations. The interwar system established a problematic unevenness that tainted its acceptance, particularly from the Polish perspective. After 1990 the minority issues achieved an increased, albeit moderate, relevance in German-Polish relations. To some extent the 1991 Polish-German Treaty on Good Neighbourly Relations and Friendly Co-operation retains the unevenness of the inter-war period, as Art. 20(1) recognizes a German minority in Poland, but refuses to acknowledge a Polish minority in Germany. However, currently the thorniest issues concern various situations related to the “Silesians” in Poland, which the Polish government does not recognize as a protected minority under the European Council Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.