{"title":"In den Häusern der anderen: Spüren deutscher Vergangenheit in Westpolen","authors":"Karolina Kuszyk, Bernhard Hartmann","doi":"10.5070/t714162204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162204","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135829042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the artistic rendering of post-German objects in Stefan Chwin’s 1995 novel Hanemann [Death in Danzig] through the lens of new materialism theories. In his depiction of the historical transformation of Danzig/Gdansk from a German to a Polish city Chwin applies two strategies: he centers portions of the narrative on objects and human-object entanglements and employs an imaginative child’s perspective which tends to view reality in animistic terms. In utilizing these narrative strategies, Chwin’s novel resonates with the works of the key representatives of the field of new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway). More specifically, their similarity lies in the employment of anthropomorphism to open human perception to a whole world of unnoticed activities and processes of the nonhuman that resemble those of the human. In the concrete context of post-World War II forced migrations, the writer presents both the displaced Germans and Poles—as well as the German material possessions— as active entities, who come into contact with each other with loosened, uncertain identities. The affects that the humans and the objects discharge or respond to involve them in mutually transformative relations. Thus, I argue that seen through the non-dualist and non-hierarchical ontology of new materialism, the human-object relations in Chwin’s novel reveal the reconciliatory potential of materiality, in particular its ability to level hierarchies and soothe animosity.
{"title":"The Reconciliatory Potential of Objects in Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig","authors":"Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova","doi":"10.5070/t714162195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162195","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the artistic rendering of post-German objects in Stefan Chwin’s 1995 novel Hanemann [Death in Danzig] through the lens of new materialism theories. In his depiction of the historical transformation of Danzig/Gdansk from a German to a Polish city Chwin applies two strategies: he centers portions of the narrative on objects and human-object entanglements and employs an imaginative child’s perspective which tends to view reality in animistic terms. In utilizing these narrative strategies, Chwin’s novel resonates with the works of the key representatives of the field of new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway). More specifically, their similarity lies in the employment of anthropomorphism to open human perception to a whole world of unnoticed activities and processes of the nonhuman that resemble those of the human. In the concrete context of post-World War II forced migrations, the writer presents both the displaced Germans and Poles—as well as the German material possessions— as active entities, who come into contact with each other with loosened, uncertain identities. The affects that the humans and the objects discharge or respond to involve them in mutually transformative relations. Thus, I argue that seen through the non-dualist and non-hierarchical ontology of new materialism, the human-object relations in Chwin’s novel reveal the reconciliatory potential of materiality, in particular its ability to level hierarchies and soothe animosity.","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135828619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is the introduction to TRANSIT 14.1's special section on the representation of borders and borderlands in the literary and cultural landscapes of Germany and Poland. We have brought together scholarship, excerpts from an essayistic historical study, a creative essay, a poem, and two translated chapters from a Polish novel that explore past and present German and Polish borderlands through the lensof their entangled history. Focusing on works from different time periods, ranging from the end of the Second World War until today, the contributions examine past and present German-Polish borderlands from diverse angles, situating them historically while also underlining their significance within a global future.
{"title":"Introduction: German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature and Culture","authors":"Karolina May-Chu, Paula Wojcik","doi":"10.5070/t714162190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162190","url":null,"abstract":"This is the introduction to TRANSIT 14.1's special section on the representation of borders and borderlands in the literary and cultural landscapes of Germany and Poland. We have brought together scholarship, excerpts from an essayistic historical study, a creative essay, a poem, and two translated chapters from a Polish novel that explore past and present German and Polish borderlands through the lensof their entangled history. Focusing on works from different time periods, ranging from the end of the Second World War until today, the contributions examine past and present German-Polish borderlands from diverse angles, situating them historically while also underlining their significance within a global future.","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135829644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nowa Amerika and Słubfurt are two related activist art projects that are set in the German-Polish borderland. Nowa Amerika is an imagined country, and Słubfurt its capital. This contribution introduces these projects and examines their underlying cosmopolitan principles and their strategies of reality construction and performance. The analysis highlights how Nowa Amerika intervenes in the borderland’s spatial and temporal reality and creates new narratives that challenge established political, cultural, and social boundaries. On the one hand, the projects engage critically with existing borders and produce a cosmopolitan vision for the borderland by playfully subverting the borders of the nation state: They remap the borderland as a shared space, for example, through the creation of new cartographies or by bringing people together to form cross-border networks within the local community. On the other hand, their decided focus on the present and future means that historical context is at times oversimplified or elided, thus blurring the cosmopolitan vision. This article invites thinking about the tensions and difficulties that are embedded in cosmopolitan projects, as well as the challenges and taboos in the relationship between Germany and Poland.
Nowa america和Słubfurt是两个相关的激进主义艺术项目，它们以德国和波兰边境为背景。现在，美国是一个想象中的国家，Słubfurt是它的首都。这篇文章介绍了这些项目，并考察了它们潜在的世界性原则以及它们的现实构建和表现策略。分析强调了“当代美国”如何介入边境地区的空间和时间现实，并创造了挑战既定政治、文化和社会界限的新叙事。一方面，这些项目与现有的边界进行批判性的接触，并通过颠覆民族国家的边界，为边境地区创造一个世界主义的愿景:例如，通过创建新的地图，或者通过将人们聚集在一起，在当地社区内形成跨境网络，他们将边境地区重新绘制为共享空间。另一方面，他们对现在和未来的关注意味着历史背景有时被过度简化或省略，从而模糊了世界主义的视野。这篇文章让我们思考世界性项目中所蕴含的紧张和困难，以及德国和波兰关系中的挑战和禁忌。
{"title":"Reimagining the German-Polish Borderlands in Nowa Amerika and Slubfurt1","authors":"Karolina May-Chu","doi":"10.5070/t714162194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162194","url":null,"abstract":"Nowa Amerika and Słubfurt are two related activist art projects that are set in the German-Polish borderland. Nowa Amerika is an imagined country, and Słubfurt its capital. This contribution introduces these projects and examines their underlying cosmopolitan principles and their strategies of reality construction and performance. The analysis highlights how Nowa Amerika intervenes in the borderland’s spatial and temporal reality and creates new narratives that challenge established political, cultural, and social boundaries. On the one hand, the projects engage critically with existing borders and produce a cosmopolitan vision for the borderland by playfully subverting the borders of the nation state: They remap the borderland as a shared space, for example, through the creation of new cartographies or by bringing people together to form cross-border networks within the local community. On the other hand, their decided focus on the present and future means that historical context is at times oversimplified or elided, thus blurring the cosmopolitan vision. This article invites thinking about the tensions and difficulties that are embedded in cosmopolitan projects, as well as the challenges and taboos in the relationship between Germany and Poland.","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135792987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the last two decades, flight and expulsion have emerged as critical topics in contemporary German literature and culture, with authors exploring narrative modes in literary texts that open transnational perspectives. Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003) and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge (2010) are examples of such texts, dealing with traumatic experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Second World War, while challenging exclusionary narratives. Both novels employ the railway journey, including places and objects associated with it such as the platform and the station, tracks and railcars, as a central motif. In the following, I will show the degree to which this motif allows for “multidirectional” (Rothberg) modes of “postmemory” (Hirsch) that transcend national borders and memory discourses. The railway provides a link between generations in both of the texts discussed. However, it also interlinks the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and Poles at the end of the Second World War with the experience of Holocaust victims. Can modes of postmemory in Jirgl and Janesch therefore be read as multidirectional, or do they simply equate distinct experiences, blurring distinguishing features of different groups’ suffering and historical contexts?
{"title":"Train Journeys in Postmemorial Narratives of Heimatverlust: Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge","authors":"Sabine Egger","doi":"10.5070/t714162196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162196","url":null,"abstract":"In the last two decades, flight and expulsion have emerged as critical topics in contemporary German literature and culture, with authors exploring narrative modes in literary texts that open transnational perspectives. Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003) and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge (2010) are examples of such texts, dealing with traumatic experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Second World War, while challenging exclusionary narratives. Both novels employ the railway journey, including places and objects associated with it such as the platform and the station, tracks and railcars, as a central motif. In the following, I will show the degree to which this motif allows for “multidirectional” (Rothberg) modes of “postmemory” (Hirsch) that transcend national borders and memory discourses. The railway provides a link between generations in both of the texts discussed. However, it also interlinks the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and Poles at the end of the Second World War with the experience of Holocaust victims. Can modes of postmemory in Jirgl and Janesch therefore be read as multidirectional, or do they simply equate distinct experiences, blurring distinguishing features of different groups’ suffering and historical contexts?","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135792991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article demonstrates how literary studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of borders, not least by exploring Mark Salter’s concept of the “performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through practices” in two interlinked works set within these cultural borderlands. In her semi-autobiographical novels Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990), the East German writer Ursula Höntsch, unknowingly writing in the final years of the country’s existence, challenges traditional GDR depictions of the German-Polish relationship and offers a dynamic exploration of personal, cultural and political “bordering and de-bordering” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams). Unusually for GDR literature, Höntsch presents Poland as an alternative political reality from which the GDR, still seeking to embody “socialism on German soil,” might learn. Taking as a starting-point the migrant experience of Höntsch’s protagonist and the subsequent cross-border friendship she develops, the article explores the limitations of externally imposed geo-political borders in shaping identity and controlling individual agency within contested spaces of cultural and communicative memory (Jan Assmann, 1988 and Aleida Assmann, 2016). The article concludes that Höntsch’s conscious exploitation of diverse genre forms and narrative voices, linguistic variation and intertextuality constitutes a creative engagement with the very fluidity of narrative boundaries that itself represents an exemplar of Salter’s border performativity.
{"title":"Contested Memory and Narrative within GDR-Polish Intercultural Landscapes: Ursula Höntsch’s Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990)","authors":"Jean Conacher","doi":"10.5070/t714162197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162197","url":null,"abstract":"This article demonstrates how literary studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of borders, not least by exploring Mark Salter’s concept of the “performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through practices” in two interlinked works set within these cultural borderlands. In her semi-autobiographical novels Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990), the East German writer Ursula Höntsch, unknowingly writing in the final years of the country’s existence, challenges traditional GDR depictions of the German-Polish relationship and offers a dynamic exploration of personal, cultural and political “bordering and de-bordering” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams). Unusually for GDR literature, Höntsch presents Poland as an alternative political reality from which the GDR, still seeking to embody “socialism on German soil,” might learn. Taking as a starting-point the migrant experience of Höntsch’s protagonist and the subsequent cross-border friendship she develops, the article explores the limitations of externally imposed geo-political borders in shaping identity and controlling individual agency within contested spaces of cultural and communicative memory (Jan Assmann, 1988 and Aleida Assmann, 2016). The article concludes that Höntsch’s conscious exploitation of diverse genre forms and narrative voices, linguistic variation and intertextuality constitutes a creative engagement with the very fluidity of narrative boundaries that itself represents an exemplar of Salter’s border performativity.","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135829054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Translation","authors":"Karolina May-Chu","doi":"10.5070/t714162201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162201","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135829646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay engages the borderlands region joining contemporary Austria, Germany, and Switzerland as a ‘central periphery’ in the heart of Europe. As a region in which multiple and varied notions of belonging have long stretched across the borders that animate our modern political maps, the most important borders shaping the inhabitants’ sense of belonging were often in their heads. By drawing on five eclectic museums in the region, where these notions of belonging are being articulated and produced, this essay underscores some of the region’s key characteristics that historians of nation-states have frequently overlooked, but ethnologists generally have not. It argues that directly engaging those characteristics offers us productive ways of globalizing European and German histories that scholars regularly ignore when considering the implications of provincializing or decolonizing them. It also argues that this process has the potential to upend the historiography centered on European nation-states and their empires.
{"title":"Lessons from the Southern German Borderlands","authors":"H. Glenn Penny","doi":"10.5070/t714162189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/t714162189","url":null,"abstract":"This essay engages the borderlands region joining contemporary Austria, Germany, and Switzerland as a ‘central periphery’ in the heart of Europe. As a region in which multiple and varied notions of belonging have long stretched across the borders that animate our modern political maps, the most important borders shaping the inhabitants’ sense of belonging were often in their heads. By drawing on five eclectic museums in the region, where these notions of belonging are being articulated and produced, this essay underscores some of the region’s key characteristics that historians of nation-states have frequently overlooked, but ethnologists generally have not. It argues that directly engaging those characteristics offers us productive ways of globalizing European and German histories that scholars regularly ignore when considering the implications of provincializing or decolonizing them. It also argues that this process has the potential to upend the historiography centered on European nation-states and their empires.","PeriodicalId":44861,"journal":{"name":"Urban Rail Transit","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135829642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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