1939. The beginning of World War II in Polish and German memory

The 70th anniversary of the beginning of WWII provides the opportunity to remember the events of 1939 and put them into a contemporary socio-political context, both in Poland and in Germany. We aim to examine the discourses of both countries around these shared collective experiences and to identify dominant narratives. We will investigate which aspects of 1939 are most often recalled and in what way, and what meanings are currently attributed to them. These dominant narratives will provide the reference point of our work. However, our main focus will be on individual, autobiographical memories of ‘ordinary’ Poles and Germans recalling (at different times and in different contexts between 1939 and 2009) their experiences and memories of that time. The interviewees will comprise two groups: 1) those who lived and experienced 1939 in Warsaw or lived along the Polish-German borders, and 2) inhabitants of the Polish Eastern Borderlands which were annexed by the Soviet Union in September 1939. Our German partners will focus on the narratives of inhabitants of Berlin and Germans from the Polish-German borderlands. We will create four compilations of „sources“ regarding 1939 – one for each case study. A Polish-German students’ seminar will be organised in Warsaw for the critical examination of this material and the discussion of different perspectives.

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Project team

• Roland Borchers
• Lars Breuer
• Piotr Filipkowski
• Tanja Kinzel
• Dagi Knelessen
• Katarzyna Madoń-Mitzner
• Marta Pietrzykowska