Danzig oder Das verlorene Paradies. Vom Herauserzählen und vom Hineinerzählen
Danzig or Paradise Lost: On Recounting In and Recounting Out

Summary/Abstract: For a century and a half, the town of Danzig / Gdańsk has been an object of constant writing and re-writing of history. Germans tried to “recount” Polish history out of the German present, and Poles similarly attempted to excise German history from the Polish present, especially after 1945 when the Germans had to leave Danzig, which turned into Gdańsk. The paper argues that those multiple “recountings” were connected with all earlier ones and prepared the ground for several narrative changes. For example, the German mourning for the lost city after the Second World War nearly literarily repeated manifold poems from the years before. Or Poles consciously “recounted out” the “colonial” German past, even if their forced construction of a Polish local narrative did not make sense without the former. Since the 1980s Polish authors have themselves discovered the “colonial” German history as a context for their own search for a contextual change. Maybe in the near future Gdańsk will lose its colonial grip on local literature, since more and more writers focus on social or economic problems, forgetting about the predominant history.

• Details
• Contents