Introduction

This special theme issue brings together eight articles whose principal concern is the representation of Poland and German-Polish relations in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century German literary texts as well as in Jan Klata’s theatre project Transfer! (2006). The works cover a period of thirty years – from Jeannette Lander’s Die Töchter (1976) and Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) to Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (2003) and the Oder_Rhein: Grenzen im Fluss anthology (2007). Informed by a variety of theoretical approaches ranging from narratology and theories of memory to contemporary border theory, all articles share with comparative imagology, the study of national autostereotypes and heterostereotypes and their interdependence, an interest in the discursive representation of the “other.” As Joep Leerssen says: “The study of national images is in and of itself a comparative enterprise: it addresses cross-national relations rather than national identities” (29). In order to avoid hermeneutical pitfalls, both Carsten Gansel and Pawel Zimniak emphasize the importance of combining imagological and narratological approaches in their contributions to this issue. This strategy is particularly helpful in the case of texts that seem to confirm old stereotypes about Poland and the Poles while in reality they are undermining and deconstructing these very images. The fact that a younger generation of writers, the so-called Enkelgeneration, presents a different image of Poland than previous generations is significant within this context. As Gansel notes: “Wenn [Marcel] Beyer oder Dückers sich so deutlich von den etablierten Autorengenerationen absetzen und dabei auch der Erinnerung einen anderen Status zuweisen, dann ist dies letztlich ein Indiz für Veränderungen im kollektiven Gedächtnis” (259). Thus, collective memory and how it has changed over time play an important role in all the texts.

Current German perceptions and images of Poland are framed both by century-old stereotypical images of Poland as a backward and chaotic society as well as by recent political developments. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, German-Polish relations quickly improved when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Poland’s Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki agreed to what was effectively a commitment to the Oder-Neiße Line on 16 December 1991. Poland joined NATO in 1991, became a member of the European Union in May 2004, and was granted Schengen status in 2007. Also, the reality of Poland as the most populous of the ten new member states of the European Union, the fact that the Poles have become one of the largest ethnic minorities in Germany, as well as the growing importance of the Polish economy for Germany, have contributed to increased German interest in Poland and the Poles. This interest is reflected in the recent publication of a number of monographs and collections of essays about Poland, Polish history and culture, as well as in the popularity of books conveying cultural know-how about Poland to the average German. Among these books are Izabella Gawin’s KulturSchock Polen (2004), Radek Knapp’s Gebrauchsanweisung für Polen (2005), Brigitte Jäger-Dabek’s Polen: Eine Nachbarschaftskunde für Deutsche (2006), Stefanie Peter’s Alphabet der polnischen Wunder: Ein Wörterbuch (2007), and Steffen Möller’s Viva Polonia: Als deutscher Gastarbeiter in Polen (2008), some of which made it to the top of the German bestseller list. Contemporary Polish writers like Andrzej Stasiuk, Olga Torkaczuk, and Dorota Masłowska also have large audiences in Germany.

But despite entry into the EU with all its political, economic, and cultural ramifications for the two countries, Poland remains one of Germany’s least-known neighbours. The border between Germany and Poland has shifted several times over the centuries – during the past 400 years, Austrian, German, and Russian empires partitioned the region of Poland four times – and it continues to exist, though no longer as the frontier of Europe. As Jörg Dürrschmidt observes, “the border is [still] marked by one of the harshest language barriers in Europe. Polish language competence is almost nonexistent on the German side” (248). Over the last few years, there have been numerous attempts to remedy Germans’ lack of knowledge...