When the Mnemonic Actors Become Storytellers. The Lore of the ‘Recovery’ in 1970s Poland

• Authors: Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska

Abstracts

EN

The article examines the memoirs of Polish soldiers who settled in the lands that Poland acquired after the Second World War, the so-called Recovered Territories. The author argues that these memoirs reflect different forms of conveying the stories about the ‘recovery’, i.e. the acquisition of the formerly German lands by the Polish state in 1945. Depending on the historical and political context, as well as the personal and collective experiences of the settlers, she identifies its two main forms: myth and lore. The myth involves stories that are considered authoritative and obligatory, while lore is a type of storytelling that involves stories that are considered flexible and optional by the people who tell or listen to them. She further analyses how the myth of the ‘recovery’ subsequently transformed over time into lore from the immediate post-war period up to the 1970s.

Keywords

EN

Recovered Territories; myth; lore; formerly German lands; Związek Osadników Wojskowych; Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla PAN w Warszawie
• Journal: Acta Poloniae Historica
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 128
• Pages: 181-204

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska

• Institute of Slavic Studies Polish Academy of Sciences

References

• Assmann Aleida, Między historią a pamięcią, ed. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (Warszawa, 2013).
• Curp T. David, A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960 (Rochester–New York, 2006), vii.
• Etkind Alexander, ‘Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany’, Grey Room, 16 (2004), 36–59.
• Grzechnik Marta, ‘Recovering’ Territories: The Use of History in the Integration of the New Polish Western Borderland after World War II’, Europe-Asia Studies, lxix, 4 (2017), 668–92.
• Kersten Krystyna, ‘Osadnictwo wojskowe na Pomorzu Zachodnim’, Przegląd Zachodnio-Pomorski, 2 (1964), 29–61.
• Mink Georges and Laure Neumayer (eds), History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Memory Games (Basingstoke, 2013).
• Service Hugo, Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (Cambridge, 2013).
• Sindbæk Andersen Tea and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Disputed Memory: Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (Berlin, 2016).
• Traba Robert and Rafał Żytyniec, “Ziemie Odzyskane/utracony Heimat”, in Robert Traba and Hans Henning Hahn (eds), Wyobrażenia przeszłości. Polsko-niemieckie miejsca pamięci (Warszawa, 2017), 237–59.
• Wawrzyniak Joanna, Veterans, Victims, and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland, transl. Simon Lewis (Frankfurt am Main et al., 2015).

Identifiers

DOI

10.12775/APH.2023.128.08

Biblioteka Nauki

28705373