ABSTRACT
The German concept of Hinterland – referring to “the land behind”, backcountry or countryside – was allegedly first used in 1888 by George Chisholm in his Handbook of Commercial Geography. But the phenomenon of Hinterland alludes not just to the “land behind”, but also the “mind behind”. The Polish Hinterland – anchored in strong nationalist-Catholic traditions – has been traditionally a source of exasperation, despair and bad conscience among the Polish intelligentsia. The accurate reconstruction of the relationship between the humanist outliers and the Hinterland is a tricky heuristic challenge. The Hinterland’s ruling ideology is populism: the celebration of the people, of the unpolitical, the heartland, which thrives on perceptions of politics as corrupt, elites as treacherous and strangers as a mortal threat. The awakening of the Hinterland is an amalgam of multiple, political, economic and cultural forces. All the various framings of the power of the Hinterland, feature one leitmotif: the alleged wickedness of the intellectual and political elites.
