German Borderland Research Articles

Un/Certain Borderlands: Multimodal Discourses of Border Renaissance in Polish and German Media

Since geopolitical crises accelerate migration from warzones or places of forced cultural homogeneity, we can notice an increasing meaning of borders today in a changing society, not only in Western but also in Eastern Europe and in-between. At the same time, findings from interdisciplinary border research emphasize precarious phenomena of ‘uncertainty’ or ‘in-between-ness’ and hybridity, suggesting that borders have a ‘liminal quality’. In the emblematic case study on re/bordering at the German–Polish borderland, traits of a renaissance of the border and territorial un/certainty, mean irritation in space, cultures, and forms of belonging. In developing discursive practices in time such as symbolic and socio-spatial phenomena of demarcation, exclusion, and transformation, this report refers to empirical phenomena like the “Rosary to the border” and “LGBT-free zones” in Poland or the “Willkommenskultur” in Germany. It juxtaposes interpretive reciprocal patterns of borders, like ‘fear’ and ‘irony’ that weave a tapestry of un/certainty. These examples show how the Polish–German borderland is affected by re/bordering practices without necessarily being geographically close to it and therefore show its liminal quality.

Lessons from the Southern German Borderlands

Lessons from the Southern German Borderlands

Physical education and sports in Polish education in Germany in the years 1918–1939

Between 1918 and 1939, Germany had a Polish population of about 1.5 million. Most Poles lived in Silesia, East Prussia, the central part of the country, Rhine-Westphalia and the eastern borderlands. One of the forms of patriotic activity to avoid assimilation was physical education, sports, tourism and recreation, the gymnastic movement within the framework of the Gymnastic Society “Sokol”. An important role in this national activity was played by Polish education in Germany. Educational affairs were handled by the Union of Polish School Societies, established in 1922. Among many subjects, physical education classes and extracurricular sports activities were very popular. In the years 1918–1939, a real battle for Polish school in Germany with physical education classes and after school activities took place. This struggle affected mainly the Polish- German borderland and in this particular area the sport activities were also the most visible ones. Physical education had a utilitarian and a preventative role, but the Polish activists also laid an emphasis on the high standards of the physical education classes and after school activities that were very often educational and patriotic. All primary school students took part in obligatory physical education classes and additional after school activities. It should be noted that all students of Polish schools in Germany attended compulsory physical education lessons.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Transforming secondary education in the Belgian–German borderlands (1918–1939)

ABSTRACT Establishing and implementing rules that would teach pupils to become citizens became a crucial technique for turning those spots on the map of Europe whose sovereignty had shifted after the First World War into lived social spaces. This article uses Arnold Van Gennep’s notion that a shift in social status possesses a spatiality and temporality of its own, in order to analyse how principals of secondary schools negotiated transformation in the Belgian–German borderlands. It asks whether and how they were called on to offer training that would make the borderlands more cohesive with the rest of Belgium in terms of the social origins of pupils and the content of study, and examines the extent to which they were historical actors with room for their own decision-making on creating and abolishing a liminal phase, thereby leading secondary education through its rites of passage.

Co-creation of the green smart city concept. Analysis of the maturity of municipalities in the Polish- German borderland region

Co-creation of the green smart city concept. Analysis of the maturity of municipalities in the Polish- German borderland region

A border‐as‐tidemarks in the Polish–German borderland

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West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert

Reviewed by: West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert Kristin Poling West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. Astrid Eckert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+422, black & white illustrations, endnotes. $105.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1906-9005-2. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-1975-8231-2. In her book on West Germany's eastern borderlands, Astrid Eckert recounts the story of a tourist visiting the border in 1964, who, on being shown where East Germany lay across the Elbe River, cried out, "Why, there is no Iron Curtain!" (95). For this tourist, and not her alone, the global significance and powerful iconography of the Iron Curtain had shaped her expectations and obscured the reality of the border. The German-German border's very prominence as a Cold War frontier made it harder to see. From behind that powerful metaphor, Eckert seeks to restore the 1,400-kilometer border to visibility with all its complexity and materiality, its regional specificity, and its natural environments. Her project, drawing on extensive research in diverse archival and print sources, is to write the history of West Germany's borderlands as a place that provided homes for both people and nonhuman natures, existed before 1949, and continued to exist after 1990. The results are richly rewarding, as a study of the Federal Republic, a contribution to border studies, and an example of an integrated approach to environmental history that incorporates culture, politics, and economics. Unlike other landmark studies focused on the materiality and local experience of the German-German boundary, such as Daphne Berdahl's Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (1999) and Edith Sheffer's Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (2011), Eckert does not zoom in on a single exemplary place to illuminate the dynamics of the border. Instead, she takes as her subject the entirety of the 40-kilometer-wide strip defined as the "zonal borderlands" and eligible for federal borderland aid. Through her six thematic chapters, Eckert shows that while proximity to the German Democratic Republic gave the West German zonal borderlands a unified identity, the border remained a heterogeneous landscape. It included open land and rural areas, but also major cities from Lübeck to Hof. The strip intersected with the Harz Mountains, the Drömling wetlands, the Bavarian forest, and several major rivers, including the Elbe and the Werra. Through borderland [End Page 88] aid (chapter 2), border tourism (chapter 3), environmental diplomacy (chapter 4), landscape and wildlife management (chapter 5), and the controversy over a planned-but-never-built nuclear waste disposal center at Görleben in the northeastern corner of Lower Saxony (chapter 6), West German policies and attitudes set apart the borderlands as an exceptional zone, reflecting attitudes toward division and toward the German Democratic Republic. Eckert also shows, however, the ways in which Cold War politics and culture butted up against the materiality of the region's landscapes and features. The Iron Curtain comes and goes, both shaping and shaped by the environments it traversed. Throughout the book, Eckert attends to how the exceptional conditions of division were grounded in prewar circumstances. In one memorable example, she recounts how the language, planning expertise, and visual iconography used to describe the German-German boundary in the 1950s referenced the loss of territory after World War I. Gruesome metaphors of mutilation on the "bleeding border" resurfaced, and spatial planners like Gerhard Isenberg studied the economics of the newly drawn borders of 1919 in an attempt to better understand the borders of 1949. Justifications for borderland aid even directly referenced the precedent of Osthilfe, the aid provided by the Weimar government to bankrupt Junkers in East Prussia—a reference perhaps all the more telling for its inaptness, since the earlier relief program had aimed to shore up large agricultural estates and had ended in scandal (56–57). The value of Eckert's long-term view is especially evident in the chapters dealing with environmental issues. While inter-German environmental diplomacy made environmental concerns more visible and salient for...

Smart Integration

Abstract The article is devoted to smart integration taking place on the Polish–German borderland and, more precisely, the border between the Lower Silesian Voivodeship and the Saxony Länder, which, according to the author, is the result of an evolution of forms of transfrontier cooperation of territorial self-government units. It will analyse the conditions for the emergence of forms of cooperation in the transfrontier area and their evolution in European experiences to date and, after 1990, also with the involvement of Polish territorial self-governments.

The So-Called 2015 Migration Crisis and Euroscepticism in Border Regions: Facing Re-Bordering Trends in the Danish–German Borderlands

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of Euroscepticism on regional cross-border cooperation between Germany and Denmark. It demonstrates that Euroscepticism, while absent from local mainstream politicians, had already caused civic unrest in the 1997 attempts to construct a return to history Euro-region Schleswig. It resulted in a re-scaling of the Euro-Region to Region and Schleswig to “Sønderjylland/Schleswig”, omitting any reference to Europe, European identity or a commitment to a closer European union in the relevant agreements. Border controls, on the agenda in 2011 and again since 2015, have demonstrated the institutional weakness of cross-border politics when faced with determined initiatives from the national center. Furthermore, the Eurosceptic Danish People’s Party had its best results in the border precincts both at the latest European and Danish national elections. Euroscepticism, even though difficult to measure on a regional level, seems to have been an ever present underneath current despite a political rhetoric of successful cooperation and cross-border reconciliation. The Danish-German case’s development might be more distinct, but nonetheless representative for European border (and cross-border) regions. While European metropolises develop into thriving cosmopolitan post-nation state societies, this is not necessary the case at Europe’s borders, where categorization and bordering remain common social practices by the large majority of national borderlanders with only a small portion of transnational borderlanders or ‘regionauts’ getting involved in border crossing social practices on a larger scale.

Divided Village: The Cold War in the German Borderlands. By Jason B. Johnson. Routledge. 2017. x + 233pp. £110.00.

Divided Village: The Cold War in the German Borderlands. By Jason B. Johnson. Routledge. 2017. x + 233pp. £110.00.

Belonging to the nation: inclusion and exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951, by John J. Kulczycki, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2016, 416 pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 978-0674659780

There is a considerable literature analyzing the Polish–German borderlands during World War II and its aftermath. Much of this scholarship has highlighted the manner in which populations were recon...

Identyfikacja regionalna mieszkańców pogranicza polsko-niemieckiego

According to the author about a half of the Polish-German borderland inhabitants are “the winners” of the systemic transformation, they are pragmatic individualists and materialists. In their case identification with any other person than themselves and members of the closest family is rare. The otherhalf are members of enclaves and “tribes”. Solidarity, which may be found in their system of values, is however limited to their “fellows of the same mind”, thus it has a particular character. These are the “losers” of the transformation. The feeling of material deprivation, their identification particularism generates and enhances a reluctant attitude to the reconstruction of the German cultural heritage in the Polish western borderland. According to the author, the reconstruction of this heritage creates the feeling of non-obviousness as to the possession of the western borderland, thus evoking a negative attitude to everything that is German or, generally, ethnically “strange”. The first ones treat land in a materialist, instrumental manner (as “plots of land” for development), they may recognize it as a subject of a profitable transaction, not making it the subject of a moral dilemma whether the achievement of their interest reduces the economic strength of the Polish state. For the other ones, land has got a symbolic value. In the Author’s opinion, the inhabitants of the western borderland, though in many objective aspects similar, are not subjectively close to one another. Dichotomously divided, they create a territorial group, not a community. On account of the individualistic, pragmatic and materialistic orientation of one half of the inhabitants, in this paper the Polish – German borderland is called a space of identification vacuum, whereas on account of the enclave-like and tribal orientation of the other half of its inhabitants it is called a space of identification failure.

West German Borderland Aid and European State Aid Control

Abstract This article focuses on one of the most persistent regional aid programmes in West German history, the so-called “zonal borderland aid” (Zonenrandförderung). The programme supported regions along the 1,393-kilometer long inter-German border that divided West and East Germany during the Cold War. The article seeks to explain the increasingly fraught relationship between borderland aid and European state aid control in the 1970s and 1980s. The intervention of the Directorate for Competition (DG IV) against borderland aid begs an explanation since the Treaty of Rome (1957) had granted a specific exemption for aid to these regions from the competition policies of the Common Market. The article makes the general case that regional state aid is a key component of structural policy alongside sectoral aid. It argues that interest politics prevented a sober needs assessment of the West German border regions, turning Zonenrandförderung into funding by habit, not by need. This left the European Commission as the only institution that could mount a credible challenge to an ossified sense of entitlement in the affected regions.

Borderlands of the Countryside. Dilemmas of the Quality of Life – Experience of the Polish Transformation

Abstract This study is a reflection on the quality of life of the countryside dwellers in the Polish–German borderland. It has been assumed that the assessment made is conditioned by the consequences of changes within the functioning of the state borders. Based on the findings from the research conducted in 1993 and 2010, an analysis of the changes of social reality in the place of the countryside dwellers’ residence was made, followed by an attempt to define determinants of the attitude of the countryside dwellers towards given social, economic and political aspects of the reality, as assessed and expressed by them.

Cartophilia. Maps and the Search for Identity in the French–German Borderland

Cartophilia. Maps and the Search for Identity in the French–German Borderland

Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands

Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds, <i>Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands</i>

Rejecting a ‘fortress Europe’: how German borderland films of the early 2000s foreshadowed trajectories at European borders today

This article revisits German borderland films made in the early 2000s to investigate how they anticipate today’s migration politics in a transformed European Union with constantly shifting borders. The contribution focuses on Vanessa Jopp’s Vergiss Amerika/Forget America (2000) and Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter/Distant Lights (2003) in an analysis of cinematic representations of borderlands, Germany and Europe during a time when the EU prepared its expansion into the East in 2004. From a temporal distance of more than a decade, these films exemplify early self-reflective and critical views of a Europe that has become a fortress with heavily patrolled borders despite today’s heavy migration flows in a transnational era. Both films are cinematic reflections of socio-political, economic and aesthetic trajectories in the new Europe. This article argues that, in spatial terms, Vergiss Amerika and Lichter depict the idea of modern Germany as the EU’s emerging powerhouse and Europe’s image as Eldorado for migrants as highly deceptive concepts. Both borderland films look critically towards Berlin in anticipation of future developments in Germany and within the borders of the European Union with feelings that are fuelled with hopes, anxieties, disillusionment and rejection.

Changing Border Regimes, Mining, and Cross-border Labor in the Dutch–Belgian–German Borderlands, 1900–1973

In this article the incidence of cross-border commuting to the mining districts in the Belgian–Dutch–German borderlands, known today as the Euregion Meuse-Rhine, will be related to the impact of state borders in different periods. Cross-border labor was closely related to changing border regimes based on uneven economic development, (un)familiarity, and the policy impact of powerful institutions like the state and the church. The main argument is that after the First World War in Dutch Limburg a conscious policy to control the labor force and bind them to mining in the region was relatively successful. Discrepancies in wages and employment opportunities led to border-crossing during restricted periods and for specific groups of workers only.

Memories of ethnic cleansing and thelocalIron Curtain in the Czech–German borderlands

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with thelocalIron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent thelocalIron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that thelocalCzech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities’ common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.