Table of contents

1. The architecture of the Third Reich in Poland—dissonant heritage?

2. Nazi architecture and the concept of dissonant heritage (dissonantes Erbe)

3. The asymmetry of cultural memory (Erinnerungskultur). Polish and German problems with dissonant heritage

Publisher
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Kraków, Poland 2021

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academic editors
Żanna Komar
Jacek Purchla

translation and proofreading
Jessica Taylor-Kucia

academic reviewers
Małgorzata Omilanowska
Agnieszka Zabłocka-Kos

editor-in-chief
Paulina Orłowska-Bańdo

cooperation
Magdalena Machała

ISBN 978-83-66419-22-3

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The architecture of the
Third Reich in Poland—dissonant heritage?

Jacek Purchla

Our attitude to the past is no longer rooted in pietism towards monuments; today it is shaped by a culture of memory as a system of the collective memory of a society. This is far more than the theories of Max Dvořák and Julius von Schlosser on Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte.[1]

The cult of the past, so deeply rooted in European tradition, is today evolving into our ‘duty of memory’, memory both individual and collective. The tragic experience of the nations of Central Europe in the twentieth century was such that this ‘duty of memory’ presents a particular challenge. The Holocaust, changes to so many political borders, ethnic cleansing, and totalitarian ideologies were all factors in causing the processes of restoring, constructing, and entrenching collective memory initiated after 1989 to transform Central Europe into a vast battlefield of memory—with Poland at its epicentre. One major factor in this battle is cultural heritage, and within it tangible heritage.

Cultural heritage is not only the process of constant reinterpretation of the past and its instrumentalization for contemporary aims; it is also the subject of conflicts (as the example of battlefields demonstrates) and controversies—between states, nations, religions, social groups, regions, and many other categories of stakeholders. John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth even go so far as to claim that all heritage is by definition a forum for debate and controversy.[2]

Dissonant heritage is a particular problem in Central Europe, where in the twentieth century political borders shifted faster than cultural ones. Conflicts of memory, non-memory, and the issue of dissonant and unwanted heritage are all part of the Polish experience of the twentieth century. Independence meant not only creating new state symbols, but also toppling testimonies to foreign domination and eradicating them from the collective memory. Particularly drastic forms of destruction of ‘alien’ symbols were seen after 1918 in the territories of the former Prussian and Russian partitions. In Poznań, for instance, all Prussian monuments were demolished in 1919, including the statue of Otto von Bismarck on what is now Mickiewicz Square.[3] While at that point such ‘turnover’ of monuments was something of a sign of the times across Central Europe,[4] the ‘Bismarck-Türme’ in the lands of the Prussian partition constitute a chapter of their own in the history of dissonant heritage. In the lands of the German Empire (and beyond its borders—even on other continents), around 240 such ‘Bismarck towers’ were erected at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of them in the territory of the Second Polish Republic (i.e. Poland after its restitution in November 1918).[5] The best known of these is the Bismarck tower in Mysłowice, Silesia, erected in the immediate vicinity of ‘Three Emperors’ Corner’, the point at which the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires in their 1871–1918 borders met. The stone beacon, over 20 metres high, was sited on a rise at the confluence of the Black and White Przemsza rivers. Following its ceremonial opening in 1907, the tower rapidly became a tourist attraction and a significant landmark in the topography of the three empires’ borderland region. When in 1922 it found itself in Polish territory, it was renamed the Freedom Tower and adorned with a bas relief portraying the insurrectionist Tadeusz Kościuszko. In the 1930s, however, it was demolished at the behest of the Silesian governor Michał Grażyński, and the stone used in the construction of Katowice cathedral.[6]

Symbols of Russian imperial domination in the lands of the former Russian partition elicited far stronger emotions. Many Russian Orthodox churches erected by the tsarist authorities as a symbol of Russian rule and an instrument of Russification fell victim to the Poles’ rush to throw off the yoke of the partitions and to ‘de-Muscovitize’ Poland’s towns and cities after World War I. After 1918, Orthodox church architecture vanished from the skylines of cities including Kalisz, Lublin, Płock, and Włocławek.[7] The most drastic example of a conflict of memory was the demolition of the monumental Orthodox Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky on Saski Square, in the heart of Warsaw. It had been built in the years 1894–1912 on the initiative of general governor Yosif Hurka to plans by Leontii Benois, who was chosen as its architect by Tsar Alexander III himself.[8] Even though the Orthodox cathedral had been intended as a ‘symbol of Russian rule for all time’,[9] its demolition in the years 1924–1926 provoked turbulent debate and protests from intellectual circles. Among those who voiced their disagreement was Stefan Żeromski, who proposed that the ‘unwanted building’ be converted into a museum of the martyrdom of the Polish nation.[10]

The disputes and conflicts of memory of the Second Polish Republic period were almost entirely eclipsed, however, by the scale of the tragedy of World War II in the Polish lands. The Yalta order and its political consequences, which included another shift in the country’s borders and several large-scale ethnic cleansing drives, further complicated the problem of its dissonant heritage. The new definition of this issue in the postwar Polish reality essentially equated unwanted heritage (ungewolltes Erbe) with the ‘struggle against all things German’. One good illustration of the scale of anti-German emotions was the expectations of the Polish delegates from Masuria to the first Lublin convention of the Association of Architects of the Republic of Poland (SARP), who in November 1944 called for the ‘abolition, demolition, eradication from the face of the earth of all former Teutonic castles, so that no trace of them be left, and their memory be lost’.[11] The list of sites that fell victim to this mode of thinking is long, and still awaits verification. It includes both medieval monuments and nineteenth- and twentieth-century heritage. One especially drastic manifestation of this ‘struggle against all things German’ was the mass destruction of German cemeteries in the western and northern regions of the People’s Republic of Poland. This continued into the 1970s, even in such large cities as Gdańsk and Wrocław.

Modern heritage management theories draw attention to issues including the disinherited, since any action in the field of heritage can engender problems for groups subjected to aggression or exclusion, or ignored.[12] Heritage of the disinherited and uninherited heritage are both ‘products’ of the tragedy of the twentieth century: the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing. One prime example of this phenomenon is Wrocław, the largest city not only in Europe, but anywhere in the world, in which World War II caused a total population exchange.[13] After 1945, Wrocław became a polygon of major conservation projects in a bid to reconstruct the ruined city; a true laboratory of heritage as memory and identity. This is something far more complex and delicate than monument conservation. For the first Polish settlers who arrived there, the ruins of German Breslau were enemy heritage. Over the ensuing decades the thinking of successive generations of Vratislavians around their new small homeland underwent a major evolution: from treating it as enemy heritage, and an alien city, to accepting it as their own and recognizing its universal values. The example of Wrocław can help us better to understand the power and importance of intangible heritage, our memory and identity, and also the dynamics of the process that is heritage.[14]

It is thus vital that we draw a clear distinction between two terms that are often—wrongly—used interchangeably: ‘monument’ and ‘heritage’, and also between two paradigms: the philosophy of protection and the philosophy of heritage. Heritage, in contrast to the traditionally defined monument, need not be beautiful. This is why Auschwitz is today the most legible symbol of the heritage of atrocity in the world (and is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List), and the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw is a prime example of dissonant heritage.[15]

The contemporary benchmark in state heritage protection policy in Europe may ultimately be expressed in the form of a few fundamental principles. Salient among these is the equation of the terms ‘cultural assets’ and ‘cultural heritage’, and the creation of the expression ‘our common heritage’. This may prevent the threat of selective protection of historical substance along ideological or political lines.[16] But what is the reality like?

The most intriguing example of dissonant Third Reich heritage in Kraków is Wawel.[17] Building no. 5 in particular, such a dominant in the Wawel Hill landscape, was the subject of discussions and design studies, and the overall plans for its development were approved by Hans Frank himself in March 1941.[18] In spite of the stigma of dissonant heritage and its politically incorrect pedigree, building no. 5 in its form as the Verwaltungsgebäude der Kanzlei Burg survived unaltered as Wawel’s Third Reich heritage throughout the People’s Republic of Poland and for well over a decade into the country’s Third Republic period. It was only in the years 2006–2009 that Hans Frank’s chancellery underwent spectacular alterations. The declared aim of this most recent chapter in the ‘struggle against all things German’ was ‘to remove, at least partially, the stigma of German activity on the hill and improve the architecture of such an important, representative site’.[19] More than sixty years on from the fall of the Third Reich, there is no longer space for the Verwaltungsgebäude der Kanzlei Burg at Wawel in view of its special status as a site of Polish collective memory. It was the opinion of the Polish conservators of the royal residence that architectural heritage from the Third Reich did not fit with the construct of national memory that was the ‘sacred hill of the Poles’. It was controversial, the more so that a site of such importance to the nation as Wawel is a constituent element of the national identity. In this way, Wawel as laboratory of Polish collective memory has also become a touchstone of our attitude towards the heritage of the Third Reich. Are its material remains in Poland destined to remain dissonant heritage, and should they really be erased from memory?

This is one of the questions that we are asking today. Have we matured to the answer? What is important is that we at the International Cultural Centre have matured to asking it. It was first articulated during a conference entitled ‘The Dissonant Heritage of the Third Reich in Poland’, which we organized in partnership with the Munich Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in December 2018. We asked it at the ICC not because our seat on Kraków’s Main Market Square was altered in 1940 to serve Hans Frank as the NSDAP headquarters for the whole General-gouvernement (General Government).[20] We asked it because the ICC itself grew out of Poland’s 1989 transformation precisely in order to tackle difficult issues in dialogue with its neighbours. And our book entitled Dissonant heritage? The architecture of the Third Reich in Poland was born out of the same philosophy. It contains both the fruits of that 2018 Kraków conference and specially commissioned texts.

In the People’s Republic of Poland period, the Third Reich was a subject ignored by scholars and banned by the censors. In the Polish context, then, Piotr Krakowski’s book Sztuka Trzeciej Rzeszy (The art of the Third Reich), published by the ICC in collaboration with Irsa, was a pioneering move to break this taboo.[21] In it, however, Professor Krakowski did not touch on the issue of Nazi architecture in Poland. Today, over a quarter-century later, we therefore want to go further—the more so that this architecture was addressed in major German studies as long ago as in the 1990s. One important and informative outcome of this research is the groundbreaking study by Niels Gutschow entitled Ordnungswahn. Architekten planen im „eingedeutschten Osten” 1939–1945, published in 2001.[22]

A bountiful specialist literature has grown up around Third Reich urban planning and architecture, above all—understandably—in German and English. Recently, this is also a field that has started to interest a growing group of Polish scholars at several universities. Their studies have addressed not only Wrocław and Szczecin after 1933, but also other Polish cities, including ones that in 1939 were incorporated into Reich territory, such as Poznań, Łódź, Toruń, and Oświęcim, as well as Kraków and Warsaw.[23] In 1945, then, post-war Poland comprised regions that had been part of the Second Polish Republic, but also territories that had previously been an integral part of the German Reich. This fact itself creates a research perspective that is unique in Europe. In the future it would also be worthwhile to work together with Poland’s eastern neighbours—Belarus and Ukraine, for instance—to analyse those parts of the Second Polish Republic that as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact came under Soviet occupation in 1939. It was ‘only’ in 1941, after the German aggression on the Soviet Union, that these regions became the subject of further Nazi visions and plans. This applies above all to the Białystok district, which was subsumed into East Prussia, and ‘Distrikt Galizien’, with its capital in Lviv, which in 1941 became part of the General Government.

German subjugation plans and Nazi genocide policy, which paticularly in Poland were directly linked to the occupiers’ urban planning visions, caused the entire output of the Third Reich’s architects to be qualified unequivocally as ‘heritage of atrocity’. Nonetheless, this must not lead to the entire issue being passed over and ignored in the study of twentieth-century art in Poland—which also covers German urban planning visions for Polish cities. The majority of these never went further than the design stage, and the structures actually built by the Germans between 1940 and 1944 have become part of the landscape. It is thus worth taking a closer look at these projects.

The need to undertake and pursue systematic research extends both to the few pieces of monumental architecture left behind by the Third Reich in Poland and to sites immanently connected with the history of the Holocaust. Sites of memory have an particularly important role to play in the ‘heritage game’. As catalysts of collective memory and identity that have endured for generations, comprising both material and intangible elements, these have become part of our social, cultural, and political mores.

Third Reich architecture is one facet of the wider issue of dissonant heritage, but a particularly dissonant one, and this is the reason for the especial difficulty inherent in its study. It is important to recognize and articulate the exceptional status of Poland in respect of Third Reich architecture. In the lands that were within the borders of the German state prior to 1939, the Third Reich had already developed an impressive building stock in the 1930s. This included not only the characteristic architecture of major centres such as Wrocław, Szczecin, Opole, Gliwice, Bytom, and the Free City of Gdańsk. The heritage of the Third Reich as one element of its identity in the German lands prior to 1939 comprises town halls, the seats of authorities and administrative bodies of various levels, court buildings, military compounds, railway stations, schools, etc., scattered throughout localities of all sizes in Silesia, Pomerania, and Warmia and Masuria. Among them were also sites of symbolic importance to the ideology and propaganda of the Third Reich, such as Annaberg (Góra Świętej Anny) and Tannenberg (Olsztynek), as well as model Nazi training centres like Ordensburg Krössinsee (Złocieniec), and ambitious, large-scale infrastructure investments including motorways, canals, and sporting facilities, among them the Olympic stadium in Wrocław. This is undoubtedly a reflection, and even a significant element of the heritage of the Third Reich that predates the aggression against Poland, and an intriguing chapter in the history of the relationship between architecture and ideology, and the totalitarian political system. Poland is also dotted with numerous ‘monuments’ to the bloody German occupation, however, many of which are material illustration of the category ‘architecture and crime’. In the Polish territories taken by the Wehrmacht in 1939 we have evidence of the colonial aspect of the Nazis’ plans for the former Second Republic of Poland. This includes not only built projects but also plans and designs that offer confirmation of Hitler’s criminal intentions, both in territories within the Second Republic that were subsumed into the Reich in 1939, including cities such as Poznań, Katowice, Łódź, Toruń, Ciechanów, and Oświęcim, and in the General Government, where one key issue was that of Krakow’s undesired capital status. The contexts in which particular structures were erected also varied, as did the commitment and attitudes of German (and Polish) architects and urban planners in their execution. The discovery of this stock and its diversity is burdened with the stigma of the crime symbolized by the Holocaust and masterminded by Hitler from his military command centre at the Wolfsschanze near Kętrzyn.

Thus the area of the urban planning solutions and architecture left by the Third Reich in the territory of post-war Poland cannot be confined to research founded solely on traditional art historical techniques. I firmly believe that the key to plumbing the essence of this issue is an approach based on cultural heritage theory. Not inventorization of artefacts alone, but an interpretation of them that tackles their taboo, will help us to formulate conclusions and develop a cohesive stance on the heritage left by the Third Reich in Poland.

How, then, can we formulate our research postulates today? What are the objectives and directions of the studies currently being conducted in many centres in Poland? In the first place we see a need for dialogue, cooperation, and geographical systematization of research. The diversity of functions and architectural genres that fall within the scope of our scientific interest invites the obvious question: to what extent and in what areas should the dissonant heritage of the Third Reich be protected? This book is an attempt to find answers to this and many other questions. I hope that it constitutes a worthy record of the newest fruits of the work of Polish and German academics on the architecture and urban design of the Third Reich inherited by post-war Poland, and inspires broader reflection on the phenomenon of dissonant heritage.

1. Jacek Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedzictwo–Pamięć’, Zagadnienia Sądownictwa Konstytucyjnego nr 2 (4) (2012): p. 62. [back]

2. John E. Tunbridge and Gregory John Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage. The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: Wiley, 1996), passim. [back]

3. Witold Molik, ‘Straż nad Wartą. Pomnik Bismarcka w Poznaniu (1903–1919)’, Kronika Miasta Poznania nr 2 (2001): pp. 91–108. [back]

4. See e.g. Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorny, Pomniky a zapomniky (Praha: Paseka, 1996); Zdeněk Hojda, ‘Pomník—svatyně národa’, in Sacrum et profanum. Sborník příspěvků ze stejnojmenného sympozia k problematice 19. století, edited by [K vyd. připravili] Marta Ottlová and Milan Pospíšil (Praha: KLP, 1998), pp. 54–64; Csaba Kiss, Lekcja Europy Środkowej. Eseje i szkice (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2009), pp. 151–157. [back]

5. Günter Kloss and Sieglinde Seele, Bismarck-Türme und Bismarck-Säulen. Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Petersberg: Imhof, 1997), passim. [back]

6. Sieglinde Seele, Lexikon der Bismarck-Denkmäler: Türme, Standbilder, Büsten, Gedenktafeln (Petersberg: Imhof, 2005), p. 282; Rafał Makała, Nowoczesna praarchitektura. Architektoniczne pomniki narodowe w wilhelmińskich Niemczech (1888–1918) (Szczecin: Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2015). [back]

7. Piotr Paszkiewicz, ‘Spór o cerkwie prawosławne w II Rzeczypospolitej. „Odmoskwianie” czy „polonizacja”?’, in Nacjonalizm w sztuce i historii sztuki 1789–1950, edited by Dariusz Konstantynów, Robert Pasieczny, and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1998), p. 228. [back]

8. Piotr Paszkiewicz, Pod berłem Romanowów. Sztuka rosyjska w Warszawie. 1815–1915 (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1991), pp. 115–120. [back]

9. Ibidem, p. 115. [back]

10. Ibidem, pp. 196–201. [back]

11. Marta Leśniakowska, ‘Polska historia sztuki i nacjonalizm’, in Nacjonalizm w sztuce…, op. cit., p. 44. [back]

12. Peter Howard, Heritage. Management, Interpretation, Identity (London–New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2003), pp. 211–212. [back]

13. Gregor Thum, Obce miasto Wrocław 1945 i potem (Wrocław: Via Nova, 2005), passim. [back]

14. J. Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedzictwo–Pamięć’, op. cit.: pp. 63–64. [back]

15. Jeremi T. Królikowski, ‘Metamorfozy architektury imperialnej—od soboru na placu Saskim do Pałacu Kultury i Nauki’, in Kultura i polityka. Wpływ polityki rusyfikacyjnej na kulturę zachodnich rubieży Imperium Rosyjskiego (1772–1915), edited by Dariusz Konstantynów and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1994), pp. 273–279. [back]

16. J. Purchla, ‘Naród–Dziedzictwo–Pamięć’, op. cit.: p. 64. [back]

17. This subject is addressed more broadly in the article: Jacek Purchla, ‘Wawel – dziedzictwo kłopotliwe?’, in Velis quod possis. Studia z historii sztuki ofiarowane Profesorowi Janowi Ostrowskiemu, edited by Andrzej Betlej et al. (Kraków: Towarzystwo Naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2016), pp. 491–498. [back]

18. Jacek Purchla, Miasto i polityka. Przypadki Krakowa (Kraków: Universitas, 2018), p. 122. [back]

19. Jadwiga Gwizdałówna, ‘Wawel podczas okupacji niemieckiej 1939–1945. Prze-miany architektury. Echa architektury nazistowskiej’, Rocznik Krakowski t. 77 (2011): p. 144; eadem, Architektura Wawelu w czasie okupacji niemieckiej 1939–1945 (Kraków: Zamek Królewski na Wawelu, 2019). [back]

20. Żanna Komar, ‘Metamorfozy’, in: Rynek Główny 25. Dzieje jednego adresu, edited by Jacek Purchla (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2019), pp. 112–126. [back]

21. Piotr Krakowski, Sztuka Trzeciej Rzeszy (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 1994). [back]

22. Niels Gutschow, Ordnungswahn. Architekten planen im „eingedeutschten Osten” 1939–1945 (Gütersloh–Berlin–Basel–Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001). In the 1990s, Janusz Dobesz undertook a study of the heritage of the Third Reich in territories that became part of the Polish state in 1945, in the form of a monograph of Wrocław architecture dating from the period 1933–1945. Cf. Janusz L. Dobesz, Wrocławska architektura spod znaku swastyki na tle budownictwa III Rzeszy (Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza Politechniki Wrocławskiej, 1999). [back]

23. One important deliverable of these studies is the collective work compiled and edited by Karolina Jara and Aleksandra Paradowska and published in Poznań in 2019, which offers an overview of the current state of research in Polish art historical and architecture circles into the legacy of the Third Reich in Poland. Cf. Karolina Jara, Aleksandra Paradowska, eds., Urbanistyka i architektura okresu III Rzeszy w Polsce (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2019). English version available online: www.kunsttexte.de, Ostblick, Archive, Ausgabe 2019.3 [accessed 10 June 2020]. [back]

Nazi architecture and the concept of
dissonant heritage (dissonantes Erbe)

Christian Fuhrmeister

Christian Fuhrmeister, assistant professor, initiates and coordinates research projects at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. His work mainly focuses on the art, architecture, and art history of the 20th century (from Max Beckmann to war cemeteries, National Socialist art, and provenance and translocation research). In 2013 he defended his post-doctoral dissertation on the German military office for the protection of art in Italy in the years 1943–1945. He lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

This short paper sets out to offer a general reflection upon the implications of the concept of ‘dissonant heritage’ for dealing with (traces, fragments, remnants, and ruins of) Nazi architecture. Perhaps these considerations can contribute to the development of an academic perspective as well as the formation of a certain moral attitude concerning those buildings that are present and visible on the territory of today’s Rzeczpospolita Polska.

In a certain sense, one can argue, all cultural heritage is profoundly dissonant, as it is the product of genuinely asymmetrical power relations. At no point in human history can we speak of a perfectly balanced, multilaterally acclaimed production of culture for the benefit of all. Culture is, by definition, the product or by-product of a society with a distinct social, economic, and military order. As such, culture has almost always been partial and partisan, biased, unfair, unjust, one-sided. It is discordance that has always shaped cultural heritage most radically, not accordance. It has always been military or aristocratic rulers, political or administrative governors, religious leaders, wealthy merchants and bankers, and other powerful individuals or groups with actual or assumed authority and superiority who have decided upon the production, distribution, and reception of culture, cultural artefacts, and cultural heritage, and they have always done so alone, without consultation or counsel, and of course without asking for approval.

Consequently, all heritage is, in a sense, fundamentally dissonant, representing some voices while suppressing others.[1] So why is the concept of dissonant heritage such a relatively new phenomenon, discussed only since the 1990s in broader academic circles? Why is it meaningful, helpful, and needed?

One key reason is that most efforts to conceptualize the relevance of cultural heritage adopt a fundamentally affirmative approach, holding that a given settlement is characteristic for the colonial impetus of the early inhabitants of its region, or that a building embodies the key traits of the local people, or that the collective identity is easy to see in the way a certain motif in art or crafts has remained virtually unchanged over the centuries, and so forth. Here, heritage—and by that, the past in general—is seen as positive in the sense that it is a manifestation of a certain (sometimes fictitious) collective or national identity. Essentially,

history has been gathered up and presented as heritage—as meaningful pasts that should be remembered; and more and more buildings and other sites have been called on to act as witnesses of the past. Many kinds of groups have sought to ensure that they are publicly recognized through identifying and displaying ‘their’ heritage.[2]

The history of monument protection proves that this attitude has been formative and decisive;[3] the belief that heritage thus serves a unique and distinct social purpose—fostering pride and self-esteem, built on an autochthonous tradition—was ubiquitous for centuries and is still very widespread.

Dissonant heritage, by contrast, acknowledges that the past is, more often than not, a history of conflicts, pain, problems, losses. This renders identity building—in the sense of Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition (1983)—while not completely impossible, much more problematic and constantly demanding. The concept of dissonant heritage produces a specific understanding of the past, and its acceptance requires a specific mindset. As such, it is a critical concept—partly because ‘politics of the past’ (Vergangenheitspolitik, i.e the way a particular image of the past is developed, transmitted, and communicated[4]), ‘politics of memory’, and ‘identity politics’ need to be reflected upon, analysed, interpreted, and understood. As a matter of fact, seen in this perspective, all cultural heritage is nothing but a materialization of much larger world views, indeed concepts and manifestations of (changing) definitions of mankind. Consequently, remembering as such has been called dissonant: Whose memories and whose heritage are addressed, and whose memories and heritage are not represented at all?[5]

That said, the problems associated with dissonant heritage are intricately linked to ‘uses of the past’, as they mirror historical and current conflicts of ownership, patrimony, and cultural heritage. Again, this is a matter of narratives, and these are usually shaped by the dynamics of present-day attitudes, beliefs, and convictions. ‘Putting the past to use’ can take various forms: affirming or reaffirming collective identities, evoking or enforcing national identities; attributing meaning, dignity, nobility, and also commercial or market value; strengthening regional or ethnic affiliations and traditions in a competitive, non-inclusive way; controlling, shaping, and defining present and future concepts of collective identity.

It is within this larger field of—ultimately political—definitions, evaluations, and assessments that both concepts: cultural heritage and dissonant heritage, are situated. For good reasons, dissonant heritage has outpaced other denominations like difficult, dark, or uncomfortable heritage: it is more precise in acknowledging the diversity of perspectives, and it accepts these differences as a given. In their seminal study Dissonant Heritage. The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict—published in 1996 and written during the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) and the collapse of the Apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994—John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth have also highlighted the specific problems associated with what they call ‘heritage of atrocity’, linked to human trauma and suffering. The Nazi architecture in Poland is certainly associated with this type of ‘deliberately inflicted extreme human suffering that can be called atrocity’. They state that ‘the dissonance created by the interpretation of atrocity is not only peculiarly intense and lasting but also particularly complex for victims, perpetrators and observers’.[6]

This assessment is entirely correct, and it poses a number of problems—for politics and administrations at large, at the national level, on the level of federal states and municipalities, for institutions of cultural heritage like offices for the preservation and protection of monuments and historic buildings, and for the humanities in general and art and architectural history in particular: What elements of the past deserve preservation, investigation, and analysis? What is included and what is excluded from both the canon and memory? Why preserve the architecture of a concentration camp, why that of an extermination camp? If the collective identity is built on successful transformation (after all), then why bother with what has been overcome?

Hence, looking at Nazi architecture from the perspective of dissonant heritage inevitably boils down to questions of definition and control, of shaping an image of the past, of interpretation and the construction of narratives—in short, to ‘power struggles involved in negotiations over collective memory’.[7] In turn, analysing these processes of attributing meaning to Nazi architecture in the past 75 years ultimately provides ‘a deeper understanding of how postwar German society has dealt with the Nazi legacy’. [8] In doing so, current concerns, present fears and assumptions, recent experiences, and latest developments invariably influence our perceptions of processes that ended long ago, and of those of their products that remain visible and tangible today.[9] It is vital that our analytic framework (our frame of reference) take account of this dynamic complexity of feedback (Rückkopplung) processes, of permanently overlapping, multilayered, intertwined, and interdependent interactions.[10]

A case in point is, not surprisingly, the regular or continuous resurfacing of corresponding debates in Germany. Looking only at 2019 and 2020, I want to briefly mention three debates or discourses. The first is the issue of ‘Rechte Räume. Bericht einer Europareise’, published on 24 May 2019 in the journal Arch+ Zeitschrift für Architektur und Urbanismus, and comprising reports on the ‘spatial politics of right-wing populism’ (and, by consequence, their relation to historical examples of fascist and Nazi architecture). This instigated a heated discussion in the press, prompting the publication of a separate, 24-page supplement, Arch + features 96, in October 2019, assembling and documenting the reactions to the original piece. The second was the minor media storm that blew up around plans to extend the small museum in the house and studio of Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950) in Jesteburg, south of Hamburg, due to the fact that, according to some critics in the press, the artist’s affiliation with ‘völkish’ ideas and ideologies had not been properly addressed.[11] The third and final example is that of the debates concerning the sculptures in the Berlin Olympic Stadium, ignited by the article ‘Weg mit diesen Skulpturen!’ (‘Away with these sculptures!’) by Peter Strieder in Die Zeit (Nr. 21, 14. Mai 2020: p. 43). From 1996 to 2004 Strieder (b. 1952) was responsible for urban development in Berlin. His article culminated in the suggestion that the entire area of the former Reichssportfeld be ‘denazified’ (entnazifiziert) by stripping it of all sculptures, frescoes, murals, and by clearing away the ‘Maifeld samt Führertribüne’ and transforming it into a ‘lively park for sport and leisure’ (‘zu transformieren in einen lebendigen Sport- und Freizeitpark’). Strieder’s arguments provoked many letters to the editor and further opinionated articles,[12] including a report in The Times (29 May 2020) by David Crossland, entitled ‘Berlin split over calls to bulldoze Aryan statues at Hitler’s stadium’.

In a nutshell, these three recent—unrelated—debates neatly indicate the current state of affairs (in Germany): Nazi ideology and architecture—whether in its more or less original state, or in slightly modified, heavily altered, or almost completely changed form—remains the fundamental touchstone for establishing a post-totalitarian position vis-à-vis the past. Today, easy, simple, reductive views meet with ardent responses, and are challenged and refuted. But the outcome is open, and it remains a permanent task to develop a responsible attitude. The heritage of atrocity is inextricably linked to geospatial configurations like buildings and infrastructures. The idea of dissonant heritage—which always includes stewardship of remnants and remains of the influences of foreign forces and powers, and of the debris of occupation regimes—seems to be a very useful concept, especially since it poses vital questions about establishing and maintaining (collective and individual) identity in a fundamentally dynamic, migratory, shifting, unstable world without security or stability.[13]

1. Cf. Višnja Kisić, Governing Heritage Dissonance. Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 2016), pp. 54–57. [back]

2. Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage. Negotiating the Nazi past in Nuremberg and beyond (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 1. [back]

3. Cf. Ingrid Scheurmann, Konturen und Konjunkturen der Denkmalpflege. Zum Umgang mit baulichen Relikten der Vergangenheit (Köln–Weimar–Wien: Böhlau, 2018). [back]

4. The classic example is Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (München: DTV, 1996). [back]

5. Cf. the call for papers: ‘Dissonantes Erinnern. Umkämpft, verhandelt, ausgegrenzt: Erinnerungen an den Nationalsozialismus, den Holocaust, den Zweiten Weltkrieg und seine Folgewirkungen, 29.10.2020–30.10.2020 Duisburg’, in H-Soz-Kult, 15.11.2019, www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-41783 [accessed 14 Sept. 2020]. [back]

6. John E. Tunbridge und Gregory J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage. The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 94 and 95. [back]

7. Dan Stone, review of Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage, op. cit., Museum and Society 8 (1), March 2010: pp. 61–62, here p. 61. [back]

8. Paul B. Jaskot and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany’, in Beyond Berlin. Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past, edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 1–21, here p. 2. [back]

9. Interestingly, in their introduction, ‘Europe, Heritage and Memory—Dissonant Encounters and Explorations’, Iris van Huis, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, and Liliana Ellena jointly state that ‘contemporary challenges’ were what prompted them ‘to analyze, interpret, and rethink’, in Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Luisa Passerini, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, Iris van Huis, eds., Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–20, here p. 9. [back]

10. An instructive example of how changing commemorative master narratives of memory and counter-memory influence the way dissonant heritage is perceived is provided by the archaeologist Gilly Carr in her article ‘Occupation heritage, commemoration and memory in Guernsey and Jersey’, History and Memory. Studies in Representation of the Past (Vol. 24, Issue 1, Spring-Summer 2012): pp. 87–117. [back]

11. Of the national newspapers and magazines, two that should be mentioned are Die Zeit and Der Spiegel; many relevant facts are mentioned in the collective review by Rolf Keller of Gudula Mayr, ed.: ‘“Über dem Abgrund des Nichts”. Die Bossards in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’ (= Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard; 17), Jesteburg 2018, and Gudula Mayr, ed.: ‘Johann Bossard. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Programmatische Schriften und Reiseberichte’ (= Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard; 16), Jesteburg 2018, in ArtHist.net, 20.04.2020 (https://arthist.net/reviews/22957, accessed 14 Sept. 2020); cf. https://www.bossard.de/bossard-84/forschung.html. [back]

12. See e.g. Hans Kollhoff, ‘Lasst die Skulpturen stehen!’, Die Zeit, Nr. 22, 20. Mai 2020: p. 54; Volkwin Marg, ‘Aufklärung statt Skulpturenstreit’, Die Zeit, Nr. 23, 28. Mai 2020: p. 46; and various letters to the editors in that issue: p. 16. [back]

13. In this regard, work in the heritage field might profit from reflections on memorials and documentation centres, see e.g. Volkhard Knigge, ‘Tatort – Leidensort. Friedhof – Gedenkstätte. Museum. Notizen für eine KZ-Gedenkstättenarbeit der Zukunft’, in Schriften der Kurhessischen Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft, Heft 3 (Kassel: Kurhessische Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1999), p. 23: ‘Nicht Sinnstiftung kann deshalb die Aufgabe von Gedenkstätten sein, sondern Arbeit an der Gewahrwerdung der Unselbstverständlichkeit des Guten, gefaßt etwa als Unselbstverständlichkeit von Freiheit, Menschenwürde, Toleranz und Demokratie. So gesehen verweist Gedenkstättenarbeit nicht auf wie immer verfaßte historisch-politische Geborgenheitskonstruktionen – die am Ende immer mehr oder weniger ideologisch und entmündigend sind – sondern auf unteilbare Werte und Menschenrechte, d.h. auf Zerbrechliches und Verspielbares, insofern Werte und Menschenrechte nur wirklich sind, insofern sie gelebt und gesellschaftlich akzeptiert und praktiziert werden.’ (‘Therefore, the task of memorial sites cannot be to create meaning, but rather to work on the awareness of the non-self-evident nature of good, for example as the non-self-evident nature of freedom, human dignity, tolerance, and democracy. Seen in this light, the work that is being done in the context of memorial sites does not refer to the usual historical-political constructions of security—which in the end are always more or less ideological and incapacitating—but to indivisible values and human rights, i.e. to the fragile and playable, in so far as values and human rights are only real, in so far as they are lived and socially accepted and practised.’) [back]

The asymmetry of cultural memory
(Erinnerungskultur). Polish and German
problems with dissonant heritage

Robert Traba

Robert Traba, professor of social sciences and historian working at the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Founder (1990) and for many years the chairman/editor in chief of the Olsztyn-based periodical Borussia. Founder and director (2006–2018) of the PAN Centre for Historical Research in Berlin, honorary professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2007–2020 co-chair of the Polish-German Textbook Committee. His main areas of research interest are cultural history, social memory, and the borderlands of Central Europe. His most recent publications are The Past in the Present. The Construction of Polish History (2015), Die deutsche Besatzung Polens. Essays zur Erinnerungskultur (2020), and (ed.) Niedokończona wojna? „Polskość” jako zadanie pokoleniowe (The Unfinished War? “Polishness” as a Generational Task) (2020).

What is dissonant heritage? The publishers and authors of this volume all set out to define it on the basis of their own research experiences and cultural competencies. After Gregory J. Ashworth, and in emulation of the practices of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków, dissonant heritage can be treated as a situation in which there is a lack of cohesion between a given group of people and heritage considered to be theirs: inherited from their forebears or promoted as a component value of their identity.[1] Dissonant heritage is a legacy characterized by disharmony in the interpretative strategies developed by those valuating it.

We in Poland are not alone in our issues with the process of inheritance as active engagement with a recognized and accepted cultural canon comprising artefacts, material objects, and intangible models once belonging to ‘others’. These latter may either confirm our tradition or—due to the judgments of history, wars lost or won, revolutions successful or failed, or political systems founded or foundered—present us with axiological dilemmas. What can be inherited? What can violate a cultural space already formed? What can present—whether realistically or merely apparently, in our imaginations—a threat to the cohesiveness of our nation, social group, confessional body, or regional community?

Among our neighbours to the west, the Germans, the issue with heritage is of a different character.[2] Their difficult heritage consists above all in their confrontation with their own perpetration, with their own heritage of the rule of the criminal National Socialist system. Reverberating in the background are also the echoes of their settlement of accounts with the colonial and imperial legacy of imperial Germany. The mainstream in politics and the majority of society vehemently reject the heritage of Nazi Germany. One significant site in the present-day topography of Berlin connected with the Germans’ commemoration of their own National Socialist crimes is the city’s most popular monument and documentation centre (which attracts some 1.2 million visitors every year): Topographie des Terrors at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Nonetheless, as the German-Israeli historian Marianne Awerbuch (1917–2004) said in the popular daily Der Tagesspiegel in 1998, in fact the whole of Germany is a monument to the commission of crimes under National Socialism.[3] If there is dissent, it is over the ways in which the fascist past should be de-ideologized in the contemporary landscape, and how protection may be extended to sites which came into being between 1933 and 1945 but are nonetheless of significant artistic value.

In this volume, which focuses on the problematic character of material heritage, my aim is to examine the subject from the perspective of cultural memory (Erinnerungskultur) without limiting myself to artefacts recorded in the cultural landscape. The natural asymmetry of cultural memory in Poland and Germany also prompts reflection that goes beyond the dissonant Nazi heritage that is the inspiration for this volume. Why? In Poland this category of heritage is not a problem, because it is invisible, in the sense that it merges with what is colloquially referred to in the common perception as ‘formerly German’, above all in the ‘Recovered Territories’ in the west of the country. Only occasionally does it ignite discussions (as in the case of Wawel), but these are largely eclipsed by debates on heritage.

My reflections are structured around two research categories/perspectives developed over many years: cultural succession, and reading the landscape as one of the forms of applied history. In this case they are interwoven in the Polish-German history of mutual influences.

Germany

I shall make reference only to examples of events, from a range of areas of public life, in which I was personally involved in the period 2016–2018, when I worked at the Centre for Historical Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and the Freie Universität Berlin.

In 2016 I was party to a dispute initiated by the well-known German historian Martin Sabrow of the Humboldt University in Berlin. From the local level in Hannover, an echo of the issue spilled over into the popular weekly magazine Der Spiegel.[4] The issue in question was the renaming of Hinrich-Wilhelm-Kopf-Platz in Hannover, the capital of the province of Lower Saxony. Kopf was the first post-war minister president of Lower Saxony, and a leading politician from the Social Democratic Party of Germany with significant services to his city and region. His slogan on his poster in his first campaign for election to the provincial parliament (Landtag) was: ‘I am a socialist because I am a Christian!’ He died in 1961, at the height of his fame as a respected politician, local government activist, and proponent of the development towards democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany. Only in the early twenty-first century did research reveal that under National Socialism not only had he supported the Nazi regime, but he had also been government trustee for resettlement of the Polish Jews and confiscation of their property in the occupied General Government. While there is no evidence that he took anyone’s life, he did play an active part in the criminal apparatus. A scandal erupted. Kopf’s grave in the municipal cemetery was stripped of its honourable status, and the square that bore his name was renamed after the outstanding philosopher Hannah Arendt, a decision with which, at the time, I concurred. Martin Sabrow was of a different opinion. He held that appropriate information on Kopf’s ‘forgotten’ activity should be added to the sign, but that for the rest, ‘die Demokratie muss aushalten’: a mature German society should have to deal with confronting its difficult past every morning. I still believe it was right to delete Kopf Square from the map of Hannover, because, as the recent successes of the right-wing party Alternative for Germany show, learning from history in this way does not always have positive consequences for the present or the future. In our times, of the devaluation of the word and the domination of hypermedial content (meaning ‘anyone can write anything on the internet’), democracy is not always able to withstand through dialogue the torrent of information noise that floods the space.

The decision taken by the Viennese authorities in the case of Karl Lueger (1844–1910), a great mayor of the city and the creator of the modern Viennese metropolis, was different. In the early twentieth century Lueger communalized a range of basic public services that had previously been private, and thus expensive—from gas and electricity supply, through public transport, to funerals. It was he who laid the infrastructural foundations for the ‘red Vienna’ of the 1920s. At the same time, he was one of the architects of modern anti-Semitism, and also whipped up public opinion against immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia to such an extent that the emperor refused to endorse his nomination to the post of mayor. Around 2010 a dispute erupted over the commemorative plaque founded in his honour in the 1930s. The plaque was not removed, but a transparent Perspex plaque was mounted over the original (laudatory) inscription, detailing his ignominious anti-Semitic involvement. Moreover, in 2012 the Karl-Lueger-Ring leading to the main building of Vienna University was renamed.

Two more controversial examples are commemorations which for years generated a level of resistance that precluded their unveiling in the urban space. The Memorium Nuremberg Trials museum (Memorium Nürnberger Prozesse), which operates as part of the Verbund der Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, and the site of the Katzbach camp in Frankfurt am Main, offer a reflection of problems not so much with heritage recorded in the landscape as with the generation and reinforcement of ‘heritage of atrocity’ (Ashworth). The history of the foundation of Memorium from the perspective of the Allies, the victims, and their descendants might seem simple: the first trial of Nazi criminals, as a kind of legal redress for the victims and as a warning to successive generations, should at the same time serve as a purge of democratic German society. In many circles in Germany, however, the Nuremberg trials were for decades seen as a form of humiliation, an example of enforced justice. The museum was not founded until 2010, after a decade of long, often turbulent debates.[5]

Public opinion in Frankfurt am Main, in turn, is still not convinced about commemorating the Katzbach camp established towards the end of war in the former Adler works in the city.[6] Of its more than 1,600 internees, most of them Poles, barely a few dozen survived. If any of its victims are commemorated, it is the Jews who were murdered there. At the end of the war, however, the largest group of prisoners in Katzbach were insurrectionists from the Warsaw Rising, and their fate is absent from the public debate. After the war an awkward silence fell in Frankfurt. The Adler works resumed output immediately. Its director, Ernst Hagemeier, underwent the de-Nazification process without a hitch, and in the years of the economic miracle was awarded the Cross of Merit of the FRG. Not until 1985 did two local historians, Ernst Kaiser and Michael Knorn, together with a youth group from the Gallus district of the city, start to delve into the history of the Adler works (their book, Wir lebten und schliefen under den Toten, came out in 1994). This civic movement in time spawned the amateur Gallus Theater, and eventually the city of Frankfurt reacted. In 2018, seventy-three years after the end of the war, the Bauer Institute launched research on the site.[7]

Poland

Today, Polish problems with dissonant heritage determine above all attitudes towards the legacy of communism (which is statutorily forbidden heritage) and relations to the ‘not our’ national tradition and monuments to which the Polish state, by virtue of territorial changes and the tragedy of World War II and the Holocaust, has become the legal successor. These are today Polish in respect of the territory, but in cultural terms belong chiefly to the pre-war Jewish citizens of Poland, or were created in the Polish-German borderland region which before 1945 was part of Germany or was occupied by Germans/Prussians as colonizers.

In the institutional dimension, the Polish semantic expression of stories about the past, and Polish cultural memory, are ‘exclusively national’ across the board, from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, through the National Heritage Institute, to the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). What does this mean? In the context of the primary legislation, which determines the normative character of the Polish cultural space, the nation may formally be said to be represented/created not only by ethnic Poles but also by representatives of other nations who were citizens of the Polish Republic. The constitution of 2 April 1997 formulates this as follows:

[…] we, the Polish Nation—all citizens of the Republic, both those who believe in God […] and those who do not share this faith […], grateful to our forebears for […] the culture rooted in the Christian heritage of the Nation and universal human values […].

Thus on paper, only that which was imposed by force or, as in the case of part of the German heritage, became part of the Polish state after the 1945 border shift, is ‘not ours’. In practice, however, this ‘ours’ tends to be interpreted in a narrow sense, close to the ethnic definition of ‘Polishness’. Among the Others whom for a long time we were unwilling to accept as part of this common tradition were our immediate neighbours, the Jews. At present we are restoring them to memory, and this is a new phenomenon. The process began about a quarter-century ago. The Kraków district of Kazimierz is an example of how Jewish heritage is even undergoing a pop-culture festivalization, which means that there is demand for it in the pop-culture dimension. But another phenomenon is also worthy of note: for almost two decades, central Poland has been seeing the establishment of centres of cultural dialogue, museums, and cultural centres in the abandoned synagogues of its former shtetls. Perhaps the most interesting example of this current is the ‘Świętokrzyski Sztetl’ Education Centre and Museum in Chmielnik.

The aspect of heritage most debated of late, however, is statutorily forbidden heritage. This is regulated by the ‘Decommunization’ Law of 1 April 2016. Pursuant to this legislation, the names of public facilities may not ‘commemorate persons, organizations, events, or dates symbolizing communism or any other totalitarian system, or propagate any such system in any other way’ (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland/Dz. U. RP 2016, item 744). The act was passed by the lower house of the Polish parliament unanimously (with one abstention). It gave the IPN the sole competencies to rule whether or not a given object/namesake symbolized or propagated the communist system. Local authorities were given a period of twelve months to implement the changes suggested by the IPN. Failure to do so would give the voivode with territorial jurisdiction the competency to change the namesake of a given institution. This solution was designed to ensure the efficacy and immutability of the decision. Among the monuments that disappeared were not only ones wrongly memorializing unworthy party functionaries or pseudo-heroes of communist rule, but also others commemorating eminent figures such as Ludwik Waryński or collective heroes who fought to liberate Poland and the wider Europe from the totalitarian dictatorships of German National Socialism (the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies) and fascism (the soldiers of the International Jarosław Dąbrowski Memorial Brigade, known as the Dąbrowszczaki, who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War). They were superseded by commemorations of members of the anti-communist underground, among them soldiers of the Holy Cross Brigade who collaborated with the Germans, including controversial individuals such as Józef Kuraś, pseudonym ‘Ogień’, or Romuald Rajs, pseudonym ‘Bury’, who was charged with crimes against civilians in the Podlasie region.[8]

In many circles, chiefly those of young activists drawing on leftwing traditions, this act was received as an attempt to remove left-wing namesakes from the societal consciousness and hence to enable the right to win full hegemony in the Poles’ space of memory. According to research by Jakub Wysmułek, the dominant interpretation of this law is connected with the perception of decommunization in the broader context of the actions taken by the IPN to date, above all when taken together with the simultaneous inclusion in official historical policy of nationalist elements, e.g. honouring the actions of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ), or commemorating the ‘cursed soldiers’ (żołnierze wyklęci), i.e. glorifying en bloc the entire post–war independence-focused and anticommunist underground. Wysmułek’s study of the reactions in society to the removal from the topographies of Warsaw, Gdańsk, and Olsztyn of streets named for the Dąbrowszczaki uncovered protests so strong, of such generational solidarity, and uncorrelated with any party, expressed chiefly in the filing of lawsuits, that the IPN (or the voivodes) were forced by binding verdicts to retract their decisions.[9]

While in Germany figures such as Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg have the status of cult heroes among some groups, but are seen as negative, or at least controversial, by others, nobody removes images of them from the public space. In Poland, by contrast, they are almost universally regarded as elements of an alien, communist heritage, which by force of law cannot function publicly. And yet this blanket ban obscures important information such as the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century Friedrich Engels was one of the most ardent defenders of the right of the Polish state to exist, and Rosa Luxemburg actively defended speakers of Polish from forced Germanization.[10]

The above examples showing the differences in understanding of difficult heritage in Poland and in Germany reveal the extent to which we function in separate, national systems of cultural memory despite communicating in a range of dimensions of public life, whether through international organizations or by means of meetings at the European or global level. Memory is a product of national discourses and national traditions. From the outset, then, dissonant heritage has an entirely different place in the two countries’ national systems of cultural memory.

A shared problem—a case study

Among the ninety-nine canonical Polish-German sites of memory there was no space for Adolf Hitler’s most important military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair, 1940–1944), sited on the fringes of what was at that time the German province of East Prussia. As the initiators of the project entitled ‘Polish-German sites of memory’, we construed loci memoriae as symbols, artefacts, or figures from the Polish-German space which have actively influenced the identity-forming processes in both countries and have thus become part of both the Polish and German concepts of cultural memory.[11] The Wolfsschanze was historically speaking too German, and in the medial sense almost global in significance, but not Polish enough, and this was a sine qua non condition of inclusion of a site in the category of Polish-German sites of memory. Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the organizer of the assassination attempt on Hitler in the war room on 20 July 1944, symbolically lost out to another site of memory, one inscribed into the Polish-German Treaty of Good Neighbourship (1991): the anti-Nazi opposition Kreisauer Kreis (Krąg z Krzyżowej) and its leader, Count Helmut von Moltke.[12] When in 2008 the project team was selecting the sites of memory, the American film Valkyrie (2008), directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise as Col. von Stauffenberg, was just hitting the screens. It attracted over ten million viewers in the cinemas, and was repeated hundreds of times on the internet and on television in both Poland and Germany, and probably millions more times worldwide. Valkyrie put the Wolfsschanze on the global pop-culture map. Notwithstanding the Poles’ negative attitude towards the site, every year more than 200,000 people, most of them domestic tourists, visit Hitler’s bunker in Gierłoż near Kętrzyn in the Masuria region. Could Hitler’s war room evolve from being a dissonant site to a joint challenge in the process of generating a shared body of Polish and German cultural memory, and what would this serve?

Anyone who has seen the Wolfsschanze will realize that the architectural gigantomania of this site (originally comprising 200 buildings scattered over an area of around 250 hectares, plus some 800 hectares of woodland and a dedicated railway station and airfield) and the figures associated with it will always command a group of curious aficionados of dark tourism and militaria, as well as ordinary history lovers, who will want to touch this authentic place, one of the command centres of the German Nazi war and crime machine. Today this site is dissonant not only in the Polish-German dialogue on heritage but even in its Polish-Polish strand.

This symbol of the command of a total war of attrition is in the territory of Poland, the first victim of German aggression in 1939 and the country which suffered pro rata the greatest loss of human life and material damage during the occupation. It is a further paradox of history that until 1945 these lands were part of the German province of East Prussia (Ostpreußen), which, pursuant to a decision taken by the Allied powers (above all Stalin) in Yalta and Potsdam, were incorporated into the Polish state as Warmia and Mazury. For the Germans, then, the region was an element of the verlorene Heimat (lost homeland), in both the real and ideological dimensions, while for the Poles it was part of the new ‘Recovered Territories’. Today it is one of the most attractive tourist areas of Poland, the ‘Land of a Thousand Lakes’, visited by thousands, mostly summer holidaymakers, every year.

On three occasions, in 1992, 1994, and 2004, on the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler, official Polish-German ceremonies have been held, attended by state and church delegations and members of the von Stauffenberg family. The most solemn of these occasions was that held in 1994, when the respective delegations were led by Rita Süssmuth, president of the German Bundestag, and Józef Oleksy, marshal of the Polish Sejm.[13] As the plaque unveiled in 2004 states, this Polish-German site of memory was not a direct reference to Stauffenberg but a more general ‘commemoration of the resistance movement against National Socialism’. Adam Krzemiński, a journalist with the Warsaw current affairs weekly Polityka and correspondent for the Hamburg-based Die Zeit, attempted to create an ideological ‘cradle’ for reconciliation on the basis of the resistance movement in Poland and Germany, i.e. the conspiracy that planned and carried out the attack on 20 July 1944, and the outbreak of the Warsaw Rising twelve days later. Cognizant of the incommensurability of the two events—on the one hand a few dozen assassins, and on the other the thousands who made up the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), 200,000 victims, and the razed Polish capital—Krzemiński nonetheless perceived a certain analogy:

The aim of both the German conspirators and the Polish insurrectionists was to show the world that they existed: that there were Germans who were not in thrall to Hitler, and that the Poles, despite being pushed around from one corner of Europe to another by their own allies, were sovereign in their decisions. […] And, though they failed, both gestures proved morally victorious.[14]

In 2004, when the political situation between Poland and Germany was tense due to controversy surrounding the commemoration of the expulsions, Krzemiński’s voice failed to win over the majority in public opinion in either Poland or Germany. The anniversary also brought to light von Stauffenberg’s colonialist views, which he had expressed in a letter to his wife at the beginning of the 1939 aggression on Poland:

The local population is an unconscionable rabble, a great many Jews and crossbreeds. In order to feel comfortable, the nation evidently needs the whip. The thousands of prisoners of war will in all certainty help to develop our agriculture.[15]

Indeed, Krzemiński himself, in a kind of auto-polemic, mused that in spite of the evident empathy on the Polish side, it would be hard to imagine any kind of mental Polish-German community at the Wolfsschanze:

While what the Germans see is a piece of their own history petrified in reinforced concrete, the Poles’ vantage point is an external one, as if they were surveying the entrance to Lucifer’s cave in Dante’s Inferno. This history is alien to us, even though it affected us directly. For it was here that the plan to raze Warsaw was hatched.[16]

The intervening fifteen years have seen no political will on either side for a joint undertaking to develop the site as a museum or other symbolic project.

Paradoxically, in spite of the overt propaganda emphasizing antiGerman accents, the most constructive period for the commemoration of the Wolfsschanze in Poland was the 1960s, following the thorough minesweep of the site. There was a small museum and a cinema, the best of their day, and a group of professional guides was trained (who have lost none of their competencies to this day).[17] Moreover, in 1968, a feature film was produced, a classic of the Polish film school, on the basis of the prose of Andrzej Brycht (1935–1998): Dancing w kwaterze Hitlera [A teadance in Hitler’s quarters], directed by Jan Batory (1921–1981) and scored by the eminent composer Wojciech Kilar (1932–2013). Since 1989 there have been two dominant trends: the impotence of the state and/or private commercialization. The State Forests (Lasy Państwowe), the owner of the site, have been left alone with the burden, with the effect that, although the ruins of the bunkers have been secured, the rest of the site resembles a cross between a half-hearted attempt at a museum (a reconstruction of the room in which the attack took place, and an exhibition on the Warsaw Rising) and an amusement park featuring various mutations of carved wooden wolves and soldier figures (in the botanical part of the site run by the Srokowo Forestry Management Commission [Nadleśnictwo Srokowo], not far from the entrance to the site of the bunkers, there is even a figure of Marshal Józef Piłsudski!), and the souvenir kiosk sells all manner of gadgets, from coats, T-shirts, and umbrellas with the ‘Wilczy Szaniec’ [Pol. wolf’s lair] logo, to themed mugs and playing cards.

Another reflection of the low-brow tawdriness of the site in its present incarnation is a dedicated amusement park, Mazurolandia, founded in 2009 a kilometre away in the direction of Węgorzewo, on the outskirts of the village of Pracz. Its website reads:

[…] we have rediscovered for you the ruins and underground parts of Hitler’s Garden, which was built at Wilczy Szaniec to supply Adolf Hitler with fresh vegetables. The Führer of the Third Reich was a vegetarian, and did not smoke or drink alcohol, so paradoxically, had he not been one of the greatest criminals of our world, he could have been called a promotor of healthy eating.[18]

Until recently, the culminating point was a reconstruction called ‘Walkiria’ (Valkyrie), a ‘breath-taking march-past through the streets of Kętrzyn. The participants are reconstructors who recreate historical units of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, the Red Army, and the Polish Army, complete with period military vehicles’.[19] According to the tourist company Tripadvisor, approximately as many visitors are satisfied with what Mazurolandia has to offer as are critical, though internet users’ reviews are predominantly unequivocally negative. I was moved by the opinion of one young couple:

Unfortunately, there is nothing of interest here. […] We went there as part of a visit to Wilczy Szaniec, where we went with our 3.5-year-old Son—interestingly, our child liked Wilczy Szaniec more than Mazurolandia. It is a place for children, so the opinion of our child is all we need:).[20]

In the virtual dimension nothing convincing by way of commemoration or viewing of the Wolfsschanze site has been produced, even on the German side. Across the border, attempts have been made to teach the soldiers’ civic stance;[21] several documentary films have been made, and a large number of popular works published. Among the ones that have attracted particular interest are those which reveal aspects of Hitler’s private life through the voices of former kitchen staff at his headquarters.[22] On the German, French, Mexican, and British Amazon sites, the most popular result for the search term Führerquartier, which dominates in German-language search engines, but as kwatera wodza (lit.: the leader’s [Führer’s] quarters) does not function in Polish, is the 1996 film Führerquartier Wolfschanze [!]. Befehlsstand in Ostpreußen (still available to borrow from some local libraries in Berlin in 2019!). The most curious thing about this production is that it is composed almost in its entirety of copies of original film and newsreel footage from the war, which show—uncommentated—the ‘glorious leader’ surrounded by European leaders visiting him at the Wolfsschanze, laud ‘German heroism’ during the war, and make reference to ‘the German preventative war against the Soviet Union’ and to Stauffenberg as a ‘traitor of the German raison d’état’.[23] The majority of user opinions praise it for ‘showing the truth about history at last’, and only one is unequivocally critical, accusing the film of neo-Nazi tendencies,[24] which are in fact blatantly evident.

Is it really worth the trouble?

And so I return to my question: what is the point of working on dissonant heritage in Germany and Poland, in particular the shared, material legacy of the Third Reich?

And by way of an answer, in order to draw attention to the mechanism of active citizenship, I return to the cases of Kopf and Lueger, which represent different strategies for tackling dissonant cultural heritage. Both strategies have their—different—logic. I still believe that it was right to remove the name ‘Hinrich-Wilhelm-Kopf-Platz’ from the topography of Hannover. The Vienna case aligns with my thesis that in democratic societies once erected monuments (with the exception of obvious variations along the lines of Hitler and Stalin) should be neither demolished nor removed. They are testimonies to their times and can/should stand as warnings to future generations. It was with this in mind that at the turn of 2006 I defended the decision that the ‘Bismarck stone’, which had for over a century commemorated the ‘iron chancellor’ and was unearthed quite by chance sixty years later, be left in situ in Nakomiady in Masuria (a few kilometres from the Wolfsschanze). This incident unexpectedly divided Poland into ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’, which bore no relation to the political divisions in the region.[25] For several years now I have been defending, both verbally and in writing, the ‘gallows’ in Olsztyn, a monument commemorating the liberation of the Warmia and Masuria region (originally known as the Monument of Gratitude to the Red Army), made in 1954 by the pre-eminent Polish sculptor Xawery Dunikowski (1875–1964). At first the local supporters of decommunization wanted it demolished; now, since it has been granted protected monument status, the city authorities and the IPN are locked in a battle over the wording of the inscription on the plaque that is to be installed alongside Dunikowski’s monument. I truly hope that ultimately a ‘Vienna-style’ pragmatism will win out.

There are hundreds of similar examples of ‘dissonant/forbidden’ heritage in Poland, the difference being that they are not part of the material legacy of the Third Reich. A suggestion for the resolution of the dilemma ‘for’ or ‘against’ their preservation was proposed in April 2016 by the historian of ideas Jerzy Jedlicki (1930–2018) in an open letter to the president of the IPN:

Think for a moment. As far as I remember that period, the Soviet Army fought in a coalition with Great Britain and the United States, and jointly with them defeated the murderous German Reich. Has the ‘national’ memory forgotten this? Do you not realize that had it not been for the Soviet offensive, the Germans would probably have won the war and we would to this day be a humiliated, enslaved province of Nazi Germany? Do you not know that in that war it was the Red Army that suffered the greatest, indeed incomprehensible loss of human life, much of it on Polish territory? Have you forgotten that the Polish Army also formed part of that army, and also paid a blood tribute? Let us at least be consistent: let us henceforth not commemorate the anniversaries of the liberation of Warsaw or any other cities, let representatives of the nations no more meet in Oświęcim on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp. […] yes, I know what your counter will be: the collusion in the division of Poland in September 1939, the vile murder of the interned Polish officers and civil servants, the deportations to the East, the breaking off of relations with the Polish government in London, the arrests of the Home Army veterans, the halting of the offensive in the summer of 1944 to let the Warsaw Rising bleed itself out, the NKVD round-ups, and the political subordination of the Polish authorities and the institution of the arbitrary will of Stalin and his successors. And I do not ask what is worse, for there is no common measure, but the national memory must preserve both accounts, for the one does not cancel out or annul the other.

The question of whether dissonant heritage should be preserved may also be answered with the voice of one Polish poet from the post-eye-witness generation—those who did not experience the war but have lived in the shadow of the memories or non-memories of their parents, who were victims or witnesses of World War II. In her autobiographical literary novel Mała Zagłada (A Minor Apocalypse), which addresses the extermination of the village of Sochy near Zamość in 1943, Anna Janko (b. 1957) writes:

After all, that—THAT terrible thing—none of it happened HERE… Not in Poland. That is a geographical illusion. The Great Extermination happened in Germany […]. In my view it would be best if the Germans took all the camps they left behind in Poland back to Germany. So that no-one would get it wrong any more. […] How difficult can it be these days, now that monasteries and palaces are moved to other continents. […] Why not move Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, how much work can it be?[26]

This is not a provocation, it is the voice of someone who lived for decades branded by the memory of her mother, the only one of several children to survive the massacre in Sochy. There were over a hundred such villages in Poland. This is a voice that should not be ignored, because it is a voice born out of human sensitivity, not political strategy.

Keeping the references to dissonant heritage in mind, it is worth looking at the issue from the perspective known as the history of mutual influences, for which Krzysztof Pomian has proposed the name ‘coupled history’.[27] What does this mean? It means that in writing a history of Poland or a history of Germany, I perceive these not as the outcome of the internal processes or teleological development of my ‘own nation’, but as the sum of what is my own in combination with the effects of external factors. In looking at the issue of memory culture in Poland and in Germany, what needs to be created is not bilateral rivalry but a transnational forum for dialogue. No history of Poland can be written without showing and explaining the influence of its neighbour to the west. And no history of Germany can be written without recognition of the influence on it of its neighbourhood with Poland. This postulate is close to the politics of memory that Aleida Assmann has called dialogic remembering, except that in my striving to implement it I place more emphasis on the need for us to supplement our mutual knowledge of each other.[28] Supplying that knowledge by making the necessary adjustments to school curricula and textbooks, and subsequently by implementing a policy of memory that is more empathic in respect of our neighbours, can create a polyphony of memory, which is the first step to creating a framework for a dialogical remembering of equal partners.[29]

Before we can begin to construct a European memory map, we need to process our bilateral relations. Inspired by the theses of Niels Gutschow’s lecture entitled ‘Architektura Trzeciej Rzeszy. Stan badań w Niemczech’ (The architecture of the Third Reich: the state of research in Germany),[30] I believe that the Polish-German (and also the wider European) dialogue on dissonant heritage and divided cultural memory should be based on rational categories that will enable each side to move out of the impasse of narrating solely from the perspective of their own experiences and needs in order to generate their own memory. For this to happen we need to compile a body of shared Polish-German knowledge. The first step towards achieving this aim was taken as a result of an intergovernmental project, which ended in June 2020, and in which the Joint Polish-German Textbook Commission participated as a non-governmental panel member. The fruits of the project are four volumes of the world’s second ever bilateral history textbook identical for both countries, Europa. Nasza historia/Europa. Unsere Geschichte (Europe. Our history), designed for general use in primary schools in Poland and Germany, pending approval by the respective education authorities.

From the perspective of the material legacy of the Third Reich in Poland and Germany, we are divided not so much by asymmetry as by the gulf of historical experience in World War II and the diametrically different positioning of this watershed in the functional memory of the residents of the two countries. Commemorative museums (Gedenkstätten) on the sites of former concentration camps and extermination camps remain a common challenge. The needs in terms of processing the past are different in Poland and in Germany. In Germany the initiatory experience is an understanding and narration in a communicative didactic language of the history of the country’s own crime of National Socialism. In Poland, whose society was the first mass victim of German aggression, the problem is managing the contextualization of the nation’s own suffering set against that of other Polish citizens of non-Polish ethnicity. No automatic, Polish-German transferral of pedagogical or didactic models can function without reference to this confrontation with the nation’s own past. In the German cultural memory many problems have been processed as a result of the creation of a temporal, and subsequently emotional, distance to the nation’s own role as perpetrator.[31] After 1989, original exhibition and teaching material was designed in some commemorative museums as part of a Polish-German cooperation programme. The space of educational activities is probably the forum for the most highly visible fields of joint activity and exchange of experiences between commemorative museums and Gedenkstätten.

1. Gregory J. Ashworth, ‘The memorialization of violence and tragedy: Human trauma as heritage’, in The Ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, edited by Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), pp. 231–244; cf. John Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996); Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2009); an overview of the subject in Polish from the perspective of the last thirty years is provided by the selection of articles by John Tunbridge, Zmiana warty. Dziedzictwo na przełomie XX i XXI wieku, translated by Aleksandra Kamińska (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2018). [back]

2. Cf. the now classic texts: Mario Rainer Lepsius, ‘Dziedzictwo narodowego socjalizmu i kultura polityczna w państwach-następcach „Wielkoniemieckiej Rzeszy”’, in idem, O kulturze politycznej w Niemczech, translated by Arkadiusz Żychliński (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2007), pp. 188–206; Jörn Rüsen, ‘Pamięć po Holokauście a tożsamość niemiecka’, translated by Izabela Sellmer, in Myślenie historyczne. Część I: Jörn Rüsen. Nadawanie historycznego sensu, edited by Robert Traba and Holger Thünemann (Poznań: PWN, 2015), pp. 305–325, and case studies including Gerhard Vinken, ed., Das Erbe der Anderen. Denkmalpflegerisches Handeln im Zeichen der Globalisierung (= The Heritage of the Other. Conservation Considerations in an Age of Globalisation) (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2015); Reinhard Bernbeck, ‘Materielle Spuren des nationalsozialistischen Terrors. Zu einer Archäologie der Zeitgeschichte’ (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017). [back]

3. Aleida Assmann, ‘Pamięć miejsc – autentyzm i upamiętnianie’, in eadem, Między historią a pamięcią. Antologia, translated by Justyna Górny (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2013), p. 182. [back]

4. ‘Historischer Exorzismus’, Der Spiegel Nr. 6 (2014), https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-124838582.html [accessed 20 June 2020]. The author’s response: Robert Traba, ‘Aura mit Rissen’, Der Spiegel Nr. 8 (2014), https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-125080757.html [accessed 20 June 2020]. For more on Kopf and the case of the mayor of Vienna, see Robert Traba, ‘Pomnikomania po polsku. Czego uczy spór o pomnik ks. Jankowskiego?’, Gazeta Wyborcza [online], https://wyborcza.pl/7,75968,24535770,pomnikomania-po-polsku-czego-uczy-spor-o-pomnik-ksjankowskiego.html [accessed 6 June 2020]. [back]

5. https://museen.nuernberg.de/memorium-nuernberger-prozesse/themen/erinnerungskultur/rezeptionsgeschichte/[accessed 6 June 2020]. The author’s guide on his visit to the museum in July 2018 was museologist and Memorium employee Dr Andreas Mix. On the subject of the reception and legal consequences of the Nuremberg trials, cf. Robert Traba, Katarzyna Woniak et al., eds., W cieniu Norymbergi. Transnarodowe ściganie zbrodni nazistowskich (Warszawa: ISP PAN, 2019). [back]

6. Katzbach – obóz widmo. Powstańcy warszawscy w Zakładach Adlera we Frankfurcie nad Menem 1944–45 (Warszawa: Karta, 2016), e-book: https://ksiegarnia.karta.org.pl/produkt/katzbach-oboz-widmo-powstancy-warszawscy-w-zakladach-adlera-wefrankfurcie-nad-menem-1944–45/[accessed 7 July 2020]. [back]

7. See Joanna de Vincenz, Powstaje miejsce pamięci o byłym niemieckim obozie Katzbach [online], https://www.dw.com/pl/powstaje-miejsce-pami%C4%99ci-o-by%C5%82ym-niemieckim-obozie-katzbach/a-43747010, [accessed 6 June 2020]. In 2018, together with historians and representatives of Frankfurt's civic organizations, I attended a conference there organized by the KARTA Centre. [back]

8. Mariusz Mazur, Antykomunistycznego podziemia portret zbiorowy 1945–1956. Aspekty mentalno-psychologiczne (Warszawa–Lublin: Bellona–UMCS, 2019), pp. 133–134 and passim. [back]

9. Jakub Wysmułek, ‘Dąbrowszczacy: między symbolem antyfaszyzmu a polityką antykomunizmu’, Kultura i Społeczeństwo nr 63 (2) (2019): pp. 133–161. [back]

10. Georges Mink, ‘Do hymnu wdarł się „obcy”… Polskość w kontekście europejskim’, in Niedokończona wojna? „Polskość” jako zadanie pokoleniowe, edited by Robert Traba (Warszawa: ISP PAN, 2020), pp. 55–70; Marta Dąbrowska, ‘Polska nie jest najważniejsza. Moralny aspekt rozważań Róży Luksemburg o państwie polskim, narodzie i naturze człowieka’, in ibidem, pp. 245–264. [back]

11. Robert Traba, Hans Henning Hahn, eds., Polsko-niemieckie miejsca pamięci (= Deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte) (Warszawa–Paderborn: Wyd. Naukowe Scholar, 2012–2016), vols. 1–4 (Polish) and vols. 1–5 (German), here: O czym (nie) opowiadają polsko-niemieckie miejsca pamięci, vol. 1, pp. 7–53 (= Wovon die deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte (nicht) erzählen, vol. 1, pp. 11–49); cf. Maciej Górny, Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba, and Hans Henning Hahn, ‘Polish-German Realms of Memory: A New Paradigm?’, Acta Poloniae Historica nr 106 (2012): pp. 155–167. [back]

12. Mateusz J. Hartwich, ‘Krzyżowa. Pacta sunt servanda!’, in Polsko-niemieckie miejsca…, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 451–461. [back]

13. Uwe Neumärker, Robert Conrad, and Cord Woywodt, Wolfsschanze. Hitlers Machtzentrale im II. Weltkrieg (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2000), pp. 176–177. [back]

14. Adam Krzemiński, ‘„Powstanie sumienia”. O niemieckim ruchu oporu’, Borussia. Kultura–Historia–Literatura nr 37 (2005): p. 144. [back]

15. Quoted after: Róża Romaniec, ‘Stauffenberg i Polska’, Deutsche Welle (2009), available online: https://www.dw.com/pl/stauffenberg-i-polska/a-4541936 [accessed 6 June 2020]. [back]

16. Adam Krzemiński, ‘„Powstanie sumienia”…’, op. cit.: p. 141. [back]

17. Another example of an excellent level of local history knowledge is the most popular guide to the site, released in thousands of copies and several reprints, written by a native Masurian: Jerzy Jantar [Gerard Skok], Wilczy szaniec. Dawna kwatera Hitlera (Olsztyn: Pojezierze, 1964). In 2005, the Summer Academy of the Polish-German Youth Exchange joined forces with Prof. Bodo von Borries to organize a workshop at the Wolfsschanze for the leaders of the Polish-German exchange project, which offered direct proof of the high standard of the local guides. A visit in 2020 reaffirmed this experience. [back]

18. http://mazurolandia.pl/ogrod-hitlera-iv-strefa-wilczego-szanca/[accessed 6 June 2020]. [back]

19. http://mazurolandia.pl/[accessed 6 June 2020]. [back]

20. https://pl.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g1600830-d6575223-ReviewsMazurolandia-Gierloz_Warmia_Masuria_Province_Northern_Poland.html#REVIEWS [accessed 6 June 2020]. [back]

21. Cf. Hans Dieter Borchardt, Tannenberg und Wolfsschanze. Ein militärischer Reiseführer (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Köster, 2006). [back]

22. Frank Thadeusz, in the weekly Der Spiegel, singled out one such publication for praise: Hitlers Diätköchin Constanze Manziarly „Der F. hat gut gegessen”: ‘Hirsebrei, Pilze, Quark mit Leinöl: Constanze Manziarly bekochte Hitler in den letzten Kriegsmonaten. Ein Historiker hat die Beziehung der beiden mit Hilfe handgeschriebener Briefe rekonstruiert’ (Millet, mushrooms, quark cheese with flaxseed oil: this was what Constanze Manziarly cooked for Hitler in the last days of the war. A historian reconstructs the relationship between the two on the basis of their handwritten letters.) Quoted after: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/adolf-hitlers-diatkoechin-constanze-manziarlya-1178610.html [accessed 7 July 2020] [unless otherwise stated, all quotations in English are translated from the German or the Polish by Jessica Taylor-Kucia—ed. note]. [back]

23. E.g. this review, written in Germany on 2 August 2009: ‘Das Stauffenberg–Attentat ist hier nur eine kurz erwähnte Fußnote, was ich als sehr angenehm empfinde, schließlich wird und wurde dieses Thema schon weiß Gott oft genug aufgekauft’ (Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt is only mentioned in brief as a footnote, which I find pleasant, because after all God knows it is a subject that has been bought often enough). Quoted after: https://www.amazon.de/F%C3%BChrerhauptquartier-Wolfschanze-BefehlsstandOstpreu%C3%9Fen-Premium/dp/B0028P6XTW [accessed 7 July 2020]. [back]

24. ‘Es ist schon peinlich anhören zu müssen, mit welchen fadenscheinigen Argumenten versucht wird, den verbrecherischen Krieg unseres ach «so sehr geliebten Führers» Hitler, wohl einer der größten Verbrecher aller Zeiten, zu rechtfertigen, von den Weisheiten der ewig Gestrigen, die in dem Film ihre unmaßgebliche Meinung glauben verbreiten zu müssen, ganz zu schweigen. Offensichtlich sind an der Herstellung des Films in erheblichem Maße Nazis beteiligt gewesen.’ (It is embarrassing to have to listen to the threadbare arguments employed in attempts to defend the criminal war of our oh ‘so beloved Führer’ Hitler, probably one of the greatest criminals of all time, not to mention the wisdoms of the diehards who consider themselves entitled to share their unrepresentative opinions in this film. It is evidently in large part Nazis who were involved in the making of the film). Quoted after: ibidem. [back]

25. Robert Traba, ‘Pamięć zapisana w kamieniu, czyli krajobraz kulturowy jako palimpsest’, in Dziedzictwo kresów – nasze wspólne dziedzictwo, edited by Jacek Purchla (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2006), pp. 273–280. [back]

26. Anna Janko, Mała Zagłada (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literatury, 2015), pp. 106, 107. [back]

27. Robert Traba, ‘Historia wzajemnych oddziaływań – (niedoceniany) paradygmat w badaniu przeszłości’, in Historia wzajemnych oddziaływań, edited by Robert Traba (Warszawa–Berlin: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014), pp. 7–20. [back]

28. Aleida Assmann, ‘Od zbiorowej przemocy do wspólnej przyszłości’, in eadem, Między historią a pamięcią…, op. cit., pp. 259–271. [back]

29. Robert Traba, Przeszłość w teraźniejszości. Polskie spory o historię na początku XXI wieku (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2009), pp. 82–87; Polsko-niemieckie miejsca…, op. cit., pp. 33–36. [back]

30. Delivered at the international conference ‘Dissonant heritage of the Third Reich in Poland’, organized at the International Cultural Centre in December 2018. [back]

31. Robert Traba, ‘Bilateralność kultur pamięci. Przypadek polskich muzeów martyrologicznych i niemieckich Gedenkstätten’, in Pedagogika pamięci. O teorii i praktyce edukacji w muzeach martyrologicznych, edited by Tomasz Kranz (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2018), pp. 25–66. [back]

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