Department of History and International Relations

This paper analyzes, how Polish identity politics after World War II in the former German East (the so-called Polish “Regained Territories”) are reflected in the reconstruction and town planning of two major cites at the Baltic: Gdańsk / Danzig and Szczecin / Stettin.
Both city centers were nearly completely destroyed in 1945, and their former German population was replaced by new Polish inhabitants. Despite the similar starting points, the reconstruction followed different rules, which shall be presented in this paper as two different types: In Szczecin, the Old Town was replaced by modernist tenement houses, whereas the historical center of Gdańsk (the so-called “Main Town”) was carefully reconstructed, first of all with regard to the street facades. Behind the facades, however, new apartments for workers were erected.
The differences in dealing with the historical town structures shall be explained by a similar approach to identity politics: In both cases, the reconstruction was closely connected with the intention to legitimize the Polish character of the cities. In Szczecin and Gdańsk, history as well as modern social politics were used in this regard, but with different functions. In Szczecin, historical reference was constructed first of all to the Slavic dukes and settlements, whilst in Gdańsk the “Golden Age” of the Noblemen’s Republic (16th - 17th century) was stressed.
In addition, the reconstruction in both cities was based on the rejection of the Prussian and bourgeois fin-de-siècle architecture. Thus, despite the obvious contrasts in the reconstruction policies, both cities can be compared with regard to the cultural Polonization politics of the post-war era. This becomes even more obvious by the fact that the post-war development followed in some aspects the town planning and monuments’ protection of former German plans of the pre-1945 period.
However, the situation changed significantly during the 1980s, when the ideological schemes were replaced by locally shaped identity discourses competing with the nationalist discourses of the post-war era.

Public commemoration of World War II resembles the giant Tur Tur from Michael Ende's novel " Jim Button " : The farther it is, the bigger it appears. In the first years after 1989, the re-emergence of national identity discourses in East Central Europe and the striving for integration into western political structures were both based on a departure from Soviet narratives of World War II and thus parallel running. Discussions about lessons from the past, however, did not end with NATO and EU enlargement. Instead of an end of history one sees on the contrary that rather diverging political strategies are built upon contested collective memories in East Central Europe during the last years. Besides legal arguments derived from World War II are still alive as well. This presentation will focus on those discourses related to World War II, first of all in Poland and the Baltic states that have an impact on recent political strategies. Here, debates on the Holo-caust, on national victimhood and collaboration are addressed as major points. The paper concludes with a discussion whether such discourses tend to prolong older lines of conflicts, whether they reflect functionalist strategies of acquiring an " entry ticket " to Western political structures, or whether they contribute to new, transnational forms of commemoration and cooperation.

Voluntary associations are a major topic of historical research on nation building and civil society in Europe. This paper focuses on the associational sphere in the Baltic provinces of Tsarist Russia and tries to outline the impact of associations on modern societies in this region. The first section addresses the legal and social frameworks of voluntary associations, followed by a sketch of developmental trends in the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. The next sections discuss the role of voluntary associations within the concepts of civil society and cultural nation building. Slightly different from conventional functionalist na- tional discourses, it is argued here that, in the perspective of cultural history, voluntary associations con- tributed considerably to the emergence of the region of North Eastern Europe, a region shaped by close cul- tural contacts and inter-ethnic relations within the Baltic Sea region as well as by the strivings of the small nations to inte...

Politics of History (Geschichtspolitik) has become a major catchword in the Polish public discourse since 2000, when the debate on the wartime murder of the Jews from the town of Jedwabne began. Since then a politicized culture of remembrance has developed in Poland, which is most visible in various new and internationally proclaimed historical museums.

This article examines the social protest movement against the socialist regime in the Baltic port cities of Szczecin and Gdańsk, in particular between 1970 and 1981. It intends to discuss the impact of these strikes on the formation of a regional and national political culture, which is widely connected to the concept of civil society, in a longer perspective. While Szczecin, after the bloody clashes with the regime’s law enforcement in mid-December 1970, saw a longer-lasting period of strikes, which led
to an intervention by First Secretary Edward Gierek, these protests remained limited to the community of workers and did not yet challenge the rule of the Polish United Workers’ Party. They contributed, however, to the formation of a local Polish identity from below. However, in Gdańsk and, in a broader perspective, in the entire Polish Tricity (consisting of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot) a close cooperation between workers and intellectuals emerged during the 1970s, which proved to be decisive during the
strike of August 1980. In Szczecin, the similarly strong strike movement of summer 1980 lacked the national (and international) resonance of the protests in Gdańsk. In addition, the political impact and the collective commemoration (as well as the scholarly research) of the workers’ protests in the case of Szczecin remained mostly a local issue even after the fall of the socialist regime. Which stands, once again, in sharp contrast to the situation of Gdańsk.

The public appearance of national movements in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is closely connected to Gorbachev's attempt to reform the Soviet Union through the politics of perestroika and glasnost. The evident similarities of these mass movements in their agendas and trajectories result from the parallel political history of the Baltic nations with the Soviet annexation in 1940 and the renewal of their independence in August 1991. Apart from this general framework the single movements show path dependencies, which are based on different social and cultural developments and shaped by the diverging scale of Russian-speaking immigrants during the Soviet period. In fact, after August 1991, the term 'Baltic' may serve only as a regional term for analytical purpose, as it does not mark an essentialist coherence within these movements. This paper focusses on the origins and trajectories of the Baltic national movements between 1986 and 1992, when they ceased to exist as social movements after their success in restoring political independence. The origins of the 'popular fronts' (Rahvarinne in Estonia, Tautas fronte in Latvia) or 'movement' (Sąjūdis in Lithuania) are connected first with the support of perestroika, second with public historical debates about the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact and Stalinist repressions, and third with the restoration of national symbols of the prewar republics. Music performances and festivals, and in particular the 'Baltic chain' on 23 August 1989 mobilized large parts of the population of the three then Soviet republics and shaped the image of the peaceful 'singing revolution'. Since spring 1990 divisions appeared within the independence movements between the rather reform-oriented popular movements and more radical nationalist groups striving for immediate full independence and the restoration of the prewar nation states. These cleavages deepened after the restoration of national independence in August 1991, first of all on issues of legal restoration, language laws and de-Sovietization and largely shaped political debates in the three Baltic states in the following decades.

Die symbolische Aneignung historischer räume im östlichen Preussen. nAtionAle unD regionAle strAtegien Jörg hackmann Abstract the paper discusses different appropriation strategies applied to the same historical region of east Prussia. by dating the beginning of the symbolic appropriation to the early 19th century, the author reviews the strategies, first applied by germans and Poles, and later also by lithuanians and russians, to make east Prussia or their respective part (Warmia and masuria, lithuania minor, and the Kaliningrad oblast) their own. this is demonstrated by several periods, starting with the situation before 1914, the First World War, the interwar period, and the second World War, when east Prussia still existed; and finishing with the postwar period and the changes after 1989. A distinction is made between national and regional east Prussia appropriation strategies, as well as different levels of the process, i.e. publicistic (literary) and practical.

The Baltic Sea Region as a Historical Region: Klaus Zernack's Concept of North Eastern Europe The article presents and discusses the historiographical concept of North Eastern Europe which has been coined by the German historian Klaus Zernack (1931-2017). Firstly, the article looks into the origins of the term, which date back to the nineteenth century, and stresses the significance of the research on the multicultural region of Old Livonia conducted by the Estonian-German historian Paul Johansen. His findings turned out to be crucial for shaping Zernack's understanding of the concept of North Eastern Europe, which is discussed in the second part of the text. Zernack first referred to the term in his research on early modern Swedish-Russian diplomatic relations, but in various articles published subsequently he expanded his understanding of North Eastern Europe to comprise the multicultural history and political entanglements of the whole Baltic Sea region. The third part of the article discusses the impact of Zernack's notion. In contrast with the influence he had on shaping the historiographical concept of East Central Europe within German scholarship, North Eastern Europe as a historical region has not gained similar traction among scholars. This may be explained by three factors. Firstly, the Baltic Sea region has once more become a more convincing geographical term, also in international scholarly discussion, especially when compared to Zernack's deliberately artificial term. Secondly, the notion of Norden, in particular since the 1990s, has expanded to incorporate the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and thus started, at least partly, to compete with North Eastern Europe. Thirdly, the concept of North Eastern Europe has been ambiguous by a reference to, on the one hand, only the eastern part of the Baltic Sea region and, on the other hand, to this whole region. Thus, North Eastern Europe proves to be an epistemologically stimulating notion that, however, is more difficult to handle outside scholarly debates.

Discussions about Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit and Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1 ormore generally-about the "return of history" to public debates, have produced such an amount of scholarly and essayistic works since the 1980s that is almost impossible to overview. "Coming to terms with the past" has been a major battlefield of German debates for decades and has gained even more public attention since the Historikerstreit in the mid-1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet block, notions of coping with the past have broadened significantly in political and judicial terms. Vergangenheitspolitik has proven to be a more precise term for practical political as well as judicial activities that intend to contain the impact of past crimes and injustice. Past politics as a specific way of coming to terms with the past implies to be closely related to the aftermath of dictatorship in collective memory as well as in history and memory politics. 2 In East European societies, the major concern of past politics has referred to injustice in non-democratic systems in general, with a strong focus on socialist rule. In such a broad reading, past politics is no longer limited to the German debate, but has become a subject of international discussions too. 3 In Germany however, debates concerning the GDR are clearly separated from the discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung that refers to the Nazi past, and tendencies of re-nationalizing German history have been critically observed. 4 All three aspects of the (West) German discussion-coming to terms with the past as a major issue of public discourses, past politics in judicial terms and tendencies of re-nationalizing historical narratives-shall serve here as a foil for analyzing East European developments. This article shall outline recent changes of public and historiographical discourses on the Second World War, with a focus on Poland and the Baltic States. After a brief look at postwar perceptions it addresses the impact of the revolutions 1989-1991 and analyzes then in particular how the Holocaust became the key element in the social memories related to World War II. My argument is that in East Central Europe a transnational perspective on the war has emerged, which has challenged national discourses of victimhood as well as traditional Western perceptions of the war and its consequences in Eastern Europe. Without any doubt, there is on the one hand a public interest in discussing the connection between Nazi and Stalinist past as well as comparing their impact in those societies that had experienced both regimes. 5 On the other hand, mémoire collective is becoming increasingly transnational and globalized. 6 Here, the changing notions of the Holocaust, which Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have analyzed, have become crucial. 7 The guiding questions focus on the relation between World War II and the five decades of dependence until 1989 in collective memory, to internal and external influences on recent debates and finally to the question to what extent the Holocaust has become a kind of "foundation myth" of a new Europe in the societies of the former Soviet hemisphere. 8

Discussions about Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit and Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1 ormore generally-about the "return of history" to public debates, have produced such an amount of scholarly and essayistic works since the 1980s that is almost impossible to overview. "Coming to terms with the past" has been a major battlefield of German debates for decades and has gained even more public attention since the Historikerstreit in the mid-1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet block, notions of coping with the past have broadened significantly in political and judicial terms. Vergangenheitspolitik has proven to be a more precise term for practical political as well as judicial activities that intend to contain the impact of past crimes and injustice. Past politics as a specific way of coming to terms with the past implies to be closely related to the aftermath of dictatorship in collective memory as well as in history and memory politics. 2 In East European societies, the major concern of past politics has referred to injustice in non-democratic systems in general, with a strong focus on socialist rule. In such a broad reading, past politics is no longer limited to the German debate, but has become a subject of international discussions too. 3 In Germany however, debates concerning the GDR are clearly separated from the discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung that refers to the Nazi past, and tendencies of re-nationalizing German history have been critically observed. 4 All three aspects of the (West) German discussion-coming to terms with the past as a major issue of public discourses, past politics in judicial terms and tendencies of re-nationalizing historical narratives-shall serve here as a foil for analyzing East European developments. This article shall outline recent changes of public and historiographical discourses on the Second World War, with a focus on Poland and the Baltic States. After a brief look at postwar perceptions it addresses the impact of the revolutions 1989-1991 and analyzes then in particular how the Holocaust became the key element in the social memories related to World War II. My argument is that in East Central Europe a transnational perspective on the war has emerged, which has challenged national discourses of victimhood as well as traditional Western perceptions of the war and its consequences in Eastern Europe. Without any doubt, there is on the one hand a public interest in discussing the connection between Nazi and Stalinist past as well as comparing their impact in those societies that had experienced both regimes. 5 On the other hand, mémoire collective is becoming increasingly transnational and globalized. 6 Here, the changing notions of the Holocaust, which Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have analyzed, have become crucial. 7 The guiding questions focus on the relation between World War II and the five decades of dependence until 1989 in collective memory, to internal and external influences on recent debates and finally to the question to what extent the Holocaust has become a kind of "foundation myth" of a new Europe in the societies of the former Soviet hemisphere. 8

Based on the discussion about the role of ethnic history(Volksgeschichte) as a methodically innovative approach in German historical research after 1918, this article examines the relationship of ethnically and regionally oriented approaches in the historiography of ...