Recht auf Heimat. Literackie echa górnośląskiej turystyki ojczyźnianej
Recht auf Heimat. Literary Echoes of the Upper-Silesian Homeland Tourism

Summary/Abstract: The notion of Recht auf Heimat (right to homeland), popular in the 1950s, was one of the most important postulates of Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen (Charter of the German Expellees). The assumptions of this document have never been fully implemented; first and foremost, the return of the expellees to their native lands has been impossible. Since the re-settlement in the abandoned territories was, for various reasons, out of the question, an attractive, and often the only possible, form of encountering one’s home country, were excursions, which Anna Borne and Andrzej Doliński referred to as “homeland tourism.”Adopting criteria of a small-scope theory, the article analyzes literary echoes of the Upper-Silesian homeland tourism on the example of memoirs whose authors originated from Gleiwitz: Horst Bieniek, Wolfgang Bittner and Wolfgang Bukowski. The Recht auf Heimat postulate and the poetics of Vertreibungsliteratur provide the context for the considerations. The main objective of the article is to answer the question in what way homeland tourism exerted influence on forcibly repatriated writers and how it shaped the image of the visited places.

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