MIĘDZY POLSKĄ A NIEMCAMI. LITERATURA „EMIGRACYJNA”
BETWEEN POLAND AND GERMANY. “EMIGRANT” LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to Polish literature of the last twenty-year created in Germany (Janusz Rudnicki, Natasza Goerke, Brygida Helbig and others). Having assumed that it is impossible to read this prose as “emigrant” literature, the author attempts to interpret it in terms of (post)colonial criticism. The texts created by writers outside the country are thus treated as manifestations of Polish colonial and postcolonial consciousness, as a record of people subjected to colonial repression. Three problems lie in the spotlight: the narrative strategy of orientalization of Poland and Polish people (clearly visible in Janusz Rudnicki’s works), the question of the protagonists’ hybrid identity understood as an excess in relation to traditionally understood role of the victim and the significance of memory in overcoming the Polish-German trauma. The use of postcolonial instruments on the basis of emigrant literature does not only provide the evidence in the case of colonial entanglements of Polish literature but, first of all, it is an interpretative and esthetic proposal that helps to understand better the works discussed.

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