German Politics and Society

Since the end of the Cold War and the reconfiguration of the map of

Europe, scholars across the disciplines have looked anew at the geopolitical

and geocultural dimensions of East Central Europe. Although geographically

at the periphery of Eastern Europe, Germany and its changing discourses

on the East have also become a subject of this reassessment in

recent years. Within this larger context, this special issue explores the

fraught history of German-Polish border regions with a special focus on

contemporary literature and film.1 The contributions examine the representation

of border regions in recent Polish and German literature (Irene

Sywenky, Claudia Winkler), filmic accounts of historical German and Polish

legacies within contemporary European contexts (Randall Halle, Meghan

O’Dea), and the role of collective memory in contemporary German-Polish

relations (Karl Cordell). Bringing together scholars of Polish and German

literature and film, as well as political science, some of the contributions

also ponder the advantages of regional and transnational approaches to

issues that used to be discussed primarily within national parameters.

Film history marks the various transformations in the material and imaginative relations between Germans and Poles in the postwar era. This article explores how film—the primary contemporary vehicle for imaginative communities—has played an important role in envisioning various spatial relationships, as well as the political and cultural shifts in the general population of Germany, West and East, and Poland. The article surveys the representation of flight and expulsion from the East first in the fictional feature film and then in the documentary genre. It then turns to contemporary productions that offer new visions of contemporary German-Polish relationships. It considers different strategies of filmmaking, such as big budget historic event films, the melancholic frame of expellee videos, the contemporary interzonal film, among others.

This article discusses the portrayal of German-Polish relations in Robert Thalheim's 2007 film Am Ende kommen Touristen. Situated within present day Oświęcim, Poland—more commonly known as Auschwitz, the historical site of Nazi perpetration—Touristen shifts viewer attention toward contemporary concerns surrounding historical memories of Auschwitz and the present day transnational encounters at the memorial site. This article discusses memory constellations as well as the intercultural and intergenerational issues depicted in the film. By showing how the past still continues to affect contemporary relationships between Germans and Poles, the film calls for continued engagement and dialogue to work through the shared past in the European present. This article furthermore discusses the status of Touristen as a “third wave” Holocaust film that distances itself from cinematic, historical reconstruction on a visual and narrative level by rather focusing attention on the pieces of the past that continue to affect contemporary German-Polish relationships.

This article examines post 1989 Polish literary production that addresses German-Polish history and border relations in the aftermath of World War II and participates in the German-Polish dialogue of reconciliation. I consider the methodological implications of border space and spatial memory for the analysis of mass displacements in the German-Polish border region with particular attention to spatiocultural interstitiality, deterritorialization, unhomeliness, and border identity. Focusing on two representative novels, Stefan Chwin's Death in Danzig and Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night, I argue that these authors' attention to geospatiality, border space, and displacement forms a distinct characteristic of Polish border narratives. Chwin's and Tokarczuk's construction of interstitial border spaces reflects a complex dynamic between place, historical memory, and self-identification while disrupting and challenging the unitary mythologies of the nation. With their fictional re-imagining of wartime and postwar German-Polish border region, these writers participate in the politics of collective memory of the border region and the construction and articulation of the Polish perspective that shapes the discourse of memory east of the border.

This article analyzes Sabrina Janesch's 2010 novel Katzenberge through the lenses of Heimat and spatial theory. Katzenberge, which is told from the perspective of the third generation (i.e., grandchild) of expellees, narrates the story of Polish flight out of the Polish-Ukrainian border region of Galicia into the German-Polish border region of Silesia. I argue that Katzenberge chronicles a generational shift in relationships to the verlorene (lost) Heimat from the expellee generation's static view (Heimat as the physical territory itself) to the third generation's more fluid conceptions (Heimat as memories, stories). The purpose of this article is to illustrate changing ways of engaging with the verlorene Heimat over time and particularly to show the role that literature plays in facilitating and explaining these changes while also opening up new avenues of understanding both across generations and across German-Polish national borders.

This paper seeks to investigate the role played by memory in the Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV) professed attempts to enter into dialogue with Polish society. It also seeks to assess why on occasion mutual recrimination continues to tarnish the wider framework of German-Polish relations and explain the reasons for this phenomenon. The initial focus lies with explaining the continued importance of key, often disputed, elements of the historical encounter between Germans and Poles. To complement this analysis, the latter part of the article considers whether the BdV and its associated organizations have contributed to the wider process of German-Polish reconciliation, or whether the activities of the BdV act as a brake upon full resolution. The paper argues that although in recent years the BdV has attempted to make a positive contribution to German-Polish relations, its chances for success are constrained by its inability to move away from positions that are themselves the product of memory.