Building Literary Bridges Across the Oder

Oder und Rhein sind Grenzflüsse. Sie überwinden zunehmend ihren trennenden Charakter und werden zu verbindenden Elementen eines zusammenwachsenden Europas. Auf einer literarischen Bootsfahrt sollten europäische Perspektiven, Gemeinsames und Unterschiedliches, Chancen und Differenzen für ein breites Publikum sinnlich erfahrbar gemacht werden. Die Flüsse Oder und Rhein sind die buchstäblichen Träger dieser kulturellen Aktion.

(Oder_Rhein 2004)

In May 2004 Professor Lothar Jordan, director of the Kleist Museum in Frankfurt (Oder), a town situated immediately on the German-Polish border, organized a cross-border literary project called Oder_Rhein: Grenzen im Fluss: Literarische Bootsfahrten (in Polish: Odra_Ren: Rzeki graniczne. Rejsy literackie; in Dutch: Oder_Rijn: Grenzen op drift. Literaire boottochten). The principal aim of the project was to bring German, Polish, and Dutch writers together to reflect on borders (national, cultural, linguistic, and natural) and the future of a newly expanded Europe. Jordan, who moved to Frankfurt (Oder) from Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2002, was inspired by his experience of German-Dutch literary and cultural exchange on and across the Rhine to stage a similar event at Germany’s eastern border with Poland. He, like many politicians and border scholars (e.g. Bort 3–4; Scott, “Dutch–German Euroregions”), is of the opinion that cross-border actors at the German-Polish border could learn much from the successes of initiatives at the more open German-Dutch border. In organizing the Oder_Rhein project, Jordan took the east-west exchange a step further by staging two consecutive literary boat trips, first on the Oder and then on the Rhine, in early summer 2004. The project was thus timed to coincide with Poland’s accession to the EU in May 2004 and the concomitant transformation of the Oder from outer to inner border of the European Union, although considerable restrictions on border-crossing and river traffic were to remain in place until December 2007, when Poland was finally granted Schengen status.

Thirty-one well-known authors from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and the Ukraine were invited to participate in the event. All the invited participants had some link, either biographical or through their writing, to the border regions, and several are themselves cultural “mediators” or “border crossers,” since they also work as translators or as academics teaching and writing about “foreign” literatures. During the trips, they gave readings and participated in workshops and discussions, both on board and in schools, universities, community halls, and cultural centres in the towns and villages in which they stopped. They were also encouraged to use the time to write new pieces inspired by their experiences, which were published in an anthology edited by organizers Lothar Jordan and Regina Wywroll in 2007. In addition it was hoped that the participants would establish new contacts or even forge working relationships that might lead, for example, to new translations appearing in one or more of the three working languages of the project (German, Polish, and Dutch).

Both the Rhine and the Oder trips were integral to this cross-border, European project, but the latter is the most interesting, as it was the first of its kind on this particular border river, which has constituted the frontline in the renegotiation of volatile German-Polish relations since 1945. Following German reunification and the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, this borderland, together with other areas straddling the former Iron Curtain, has been used and studied as a “laboratory” for post-1990 east-west integration (cf. Scott, “Wider Europe as a Backdrop” 11; see also Meinhof), a laboratory in which cross-border cultural initiatives are believed to play a particularly important role in bringing the ideals of European reconciliation and integration closer to the people (see, for example, Lekyo 15).

This article focusses on the Oder trip and the literary texts that emanated from it, with special attention to those that deal specifically with the river border and with German-Polish relations. The fact that such an event was necessary is revealing in itself. It suggests that there was until then a lack of dialogue between German and Polish authors. The pioneering cruise created a space for discussion, reflection, and cultural...