Ghostly Presences: Heritage, Ruination and Fixing the National Landscape in Pomerania After 1945

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article examines the process of cultural adaptation of resettled persons concerning the cultural landscape and heritage. It is based on the example of the formerly German territories annexed to Poland after World War II (the Recovered Territories). The author analyses, how the unfamiliar elements of the cultural landscape were culturally reinterpreted and handled by the authorities and the new inhabitants. She focuses on the inscriptions of everyday use and studies their handling as spatial practices of resettlement which redefine ownership, belonging, and the past of the resettled territory (the arrival into the territory, stripping the landscape of the marks of its former identity, and imposing a new national identity). The study covers both top-down and bottom-up strategies of spatial adaptation analyzing them as instances of symbolic and physical violence inflicted on the past identity of the territory. The main forms of such violence, cultural reconstruction of heritage and physical ruination, had the effect of integrating the elements of the pre-resettlement culture into the post-resettlement one as ghostly presences: its illegible and subversive elements.