Noch ist Polen nicht verloren! Germany, Poland – and Ukraine?

Seweryn Pieniężny (left) at work at the Gazeta Olsztyńska newspaper. Photo from the Polish National Archive.

The place where Seweryn’s defiance and resistance played out before his arrest and murder was not on the world stage of, say, Berlin, Warsaw or Moscow, but instead on the periphery. Always immaculately dressed, Seweryn, the son of the publisher of the Polish-language Gazeta Olsztyńska newspaper, which was founded in 1886 in the Prussian provincial town of Allenstein (today Olsztyn), was a prolific activist for the rights and self-determination of the Polish minority in his small, conservative German hometown.

Unfamiliar histories

Seweryn took over his father’s business in 1918 and continued to publish the newspaper, which also operated a Polish-language publishing house and bookshop. He wrote regular columns in the Warmian dialect in the Gazeta and was a founding member and leader of the local branch of the Union of Poles in Germany, the main minority organisation of Poles before 1939. Seweryn also became active in the underground resistance after the Nazis rose to power in 1933. Together with the consul of the 2nd Polish Republic in Allenstein, Bohdan Jałowiecki, Seweryn recruited a group of young men from the Union of Poles, my grand-uncle Franz among them, to become spies for the military intelligence of the Second Polish Republic. Today, he is remembered throughout Warmia-Mazury and Poland, even though his legacy was first monopolised by the communist Polish authorities after 1945. Interestingly, they were seemingly happy enough to use a bourgeois figure that had published a Catholic-conservative newspaper as an example of Polishness in the so-called “recovered territories”.

In Olsztyn today, the former German “Wilhelmstrasse” carries his name, as do streets in Koszalin, Ostróda, Iława and Kętrzyn. The red-brick publishing house of Gazeta Olsztyńska, destroyed in November 1939 as a so-called “eyesore” by the Nazi authorities and replaced with a public toilet, was rebuilt in 1989 as a museum, and the former town of Mehlsack (literally “bag of flour”) carries his name: it is Pieniężno today.

In Germany, to which he addressed his last words, Seweryn and his actions are virtually unknown. This seems to be symptomatic when you look at German-Polish history and the relations between the two countries today. Many Polish places and their shared history are unfamiliar to a wider German public, and if they are ever featured in the media their story is often oversimplified or branded into something that will appeal to the German mainstream.

As Arkadiusz Łuba, a journalist and critic who also hails from Olsztyn but has lived in Berlin for the last 17 years, told me, “Olsztyn, a provincial town after all, plays no role in Berlin. There was once a seasonal flight between Berlin-Tegel and Olsztyn-Szymany airport, but it was more about bringing Polish migrants or the former German inhabitants and their descendants back as visitors to Mazury. Olsztyn is located in Warmia and was not the main focus even of this flight connection. In German reporting, whether in print or on the radio – I rarely watch TV as I don’t even own one – there is actually very little about Olsztyn. If there is, then there is nostalgic reporting about Mazury [the German “Masuren” is often branded as a romantic getaway and place of longing].”

“That can also be applied to the whole of Poland in Germany,” Łuba adds. “When it comes to European tourism and culture, Germans are more orientated towards the west and the south. You can see that best now with the Ukraine boom, which is big now as interest has risen with the war. As if there hadn’t been Ukrainian films, theatre, literature and music before. In that process, Germany is squandering the chance to truly and openly take an interest in Central and Eastern European culture, to open itself up to it. Because of the war, it is only Ukraine. But there is also Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania and so on. It’s a pity, really.”

Asymmetry

Together with other writers and academics from Germany and Poland, Łuba has dissected German-Polish relations in a recent issue of Osteuropa (“Eastern Europe”), a longstanding scientific journal, one of the few if not the only German-language scientific publication dedicated to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The general sentiment is that there is an asymmetry, or maybe even an imbalance, in German-Polish relations today, an imbalance expressed both in language and the (perceived) lessons learnt from the past. German has remained the lingua franca for German-Polish relations, from basic communication between partner cities to political statements, to the language used in applications for cultural funding from Germany. For many in Germany, especially some political leaders and public intellectuals, their country has learnt from history thanks to its Erinnerungskultur or culture of memory: Germany has comprehensively “come to terms” with its National Socialist history and can now act from a position of moral superiority (blanking out the fact that right-wing violence across Germany is increasing constantly and that with the AfD a nationalist party with fascist members is now in the German parliament).

This sense of moral superiority, combined with the tendency to only ever look inward and overestimate the importance of Germany culturally, politically and economically, does not only mean an imbalance in the interactions with its direct neighbour to the east, but also widely influences public discourse. This is not only considering historical topics like the recent call for reparation payments for the Second World War from the Polish government, but also themes like LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, abortion access, the treatment of refugees, and the backing of Ukraine. The full and continued support that Poland offers to Ukraine and its people – which has albeit slightly decreased in recent months also due to pressure on the housing market in Poland – seems baffling to those in Germany, who lack an understanding of the long history of Eastern European countries that have experienced first Russian and then Soviet occupation.

In addition, the constant, hysterical anti-German rhetoric that politicians from the Law and Justice party (PiS) and aligned Polish media have adopted recently only adds to such an imbalance and provides plenty of justification for those who want to argue for German moral superiority. It is often only these ideas and topics that are reported in the German media and these subsequently influence the view of Poland as somewhat backwards, as Łuba highlights in his analysis of German and Polish political cartoons in Osteuropa. The myriad examples of excellent German-Polish dialogue and continued cultural interaction and collaboration that happen on smaller, local and cross-border levels are hardly ever reported on. This brings me to a third layer of imbalance, one that I encounter often in my work: an imbalance in locality.

For over 30 years, the Borussia Foundation in Olsztyn has successfully promoted German-Polish dialogue on an ultra-local level. Borussia is a group of writers, artists and teachers founded in 1990 and dedicated to the research of German East Prussian heritage and cultural dialogue. Since 2013, they operate from the former Jewish Tahara house, the first ever designed by famous local architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), which is now a centre for intercultural dialogue and named the Mendelsohn House. Borussia not only engages with the German past but also organises a variety of contemporary cultural activities. The Mendelsohn House hosts free readings, concerts and exhibitions and Borussia also organises youth camps, bringing together young people from all over Europe for workshops around the themes of peace and reconciliation. The foundation has been recognised for its work widely on both sides of the Oder, but even here the current public debate in Germany is a cause for concern. As the Director Kornelia Kurowska told me: “I wonder what damage the rhetoric of those in Germany who express simplistic positions of pacifism without acknowledging Russian aggression has on German-Polish relations. These positions are often adopted by those who have no knowledge of the realities in Poland and Ukraine, but of course the constant repetition of their positions in the German media is noted here in Poland, with bafflement and frustration.”

Misreading

There seems to be a widespread inability in Germany to look at oneself from the position of others and to accept the intricacies of history and memory and their influence on the present. The fact that many of the German-Polish interactions and dramas of the past, like the fate of Seweryn, played out in places that are a part of Poland today, seems to mark these events as internal Polish affairs. But it is not only the perception of place in the past that is the problem. For some in Germany everything east of the Oder river today is still lumped together as “Eastern Europe”.

When I was a writer in residence in Olsztyn in 2019, many friends and family visited me there, often making it their first visit to Poland. All of them expressed surprise about the amenities and progress of Olsztyn with its old town, modern trams, shopping centres and the University of Warmia and Mazury, with its 45,000 students and staff. It seemed to me as if the stereotypes that have long survived in Germany, stereotypes of the so-called “Polnische Wirtschaft” or “Polish management”, a euphemism for mismanagement and bribery, or of former communist countries being dominated by bad infrastructure and pre-cast concrete buildings, still influenced how my visitors viewed the city of Olsztyn – and Poland overall.    

That misreading of the locality does not only apply to Poland, but to Germany itself. As opposed to the mostly unified response of former Warsaw Pact states to Russia’s aggression and imperialism, states that have experienced Soviet oppression in the past and where there is no doubt as to who is perpetrator and who is the victim, support for Russia is extremely high among the population of German federal states on the territory of the former GDR. Here, decades of Soviet-German Freundschaft (friendship) propaganda, followed by decades of tales of Wandel durch Handel, “Change through Trade”, and the very real jobs created thanks to the Nord Stream pipeline and terminals, have seemingly widely erased the memory of the NKVD camps that existed here between 1945 and 1950 where over 40,000 people perished.

I miss the big gestures that would allow more positive headlines in both Germany and Poland and provide an incentive to understand each other’s places and history better. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty between France and Germany, 60,000 free tickets will be made available in the summer of 2023 for young people from Germany and France to explore the neighbouring country. For the time being, while stories of “Polish joggers” and the “Fourth Reich” are being told in Berlin and Warsaw, grand gestures like this will not be possible, and positive interactions between Germany and Poland will remain on the periphery. But here, they flourish.

Far away from all the “Mazury romanticism”, German and Polish rail operators DB and PKP have recently announced more trains on the Berlin-Warsaw route and even introduced a second intercity line from Berlin to Przemyśl via Wrocław and Kraków. Since 2016 there is a “Culture Train” (which can be used with regular tickets) between Berlin and Wrocław, which engages passengers through bilingual readings, music, performances, an on-board library, and visual arts exhibitions. The German translation of Karolina Kuszyk’s non-fiction book Poniemieckie (Former German), which explores the Polish views and experience of the so-called “recovered territories” of Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia, remains in the book charts of the German Der Spiegel magazine for its sixth week at the time of writing. This clearly shows that there exists an interest in Germany in the intricacies of the other bank of the Oder. 

In Olsztyn, where the stern face of Seweryn stares at passers-by from his monument in front of the Olsztyn Graphic Works building, members of Borussia, like historian Robert Traba or Kornelia Kurowska, are regularly consulted by the city administration. The same administration has recently created a small memorial park for a former German Protestant cemetery that was discovered during the construction of a new urban train station. The people that were interred here are listed on memorial walls and the few headstones recovered were set up again – an outstanding fact considering that headstones and grave enclosures of abandoned German cemeteries were often used as building materials immediately after 1945.

If small gestures like this are possible in the periphery, I hope that Germans will, encouraged by Russian aggression and the response of Poland and other countries to that aggression, be able to move from an inward view to a much broader one. They might be surprised at what they can find on the periphery, for good or bad, but it will definitely help them understand that not everything revolves around Germany. Besides cultural and historical reconciliation, there are even indicators for further, future-proof collaborations here that would have completely flabbergasted Seweryn: the Polish city of Zamość, one of the main gateways from Poland to Ukraine, has since early February been defended by a battery of German “Patriot” anti-aircraft systems. In a recent interview with the main German news channel Tagesschau, the commander stressed the excellent collaboration with the Polish forces on the ground.

Marcel Krueger is a German non-fiction writer and translator living in Ireland, who explores themes of memory, identity and migration through family history and his own existence as an emigrant. He is a former fellow of the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe and in 2019 worked as the official writer-in-residence of Olsztyn in northern Poland, a region to which he remains closely linked.

Germany, history, Poland, Polish-German relations