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Accepted Paper:
West Pomeranian Palimpsest: Deconstructions, Reconstructions and Experiments.
Monika Golonka-Czajkowska
(Jagiellonian University)
The turbulent history of the West Pomeranian city Kołobrzeg is intensively processed by the social imagination of some current residents. Centuries-old German legacy becomes a laboratory in which local history enthusiasts deal, in their own way, with difficult fate of the place in which they live.
Paper Abstract:
How to reinvent a city with several hundred years of foreign, turbulent history, adapting its public image to the completly different political interests of its new inhabitans? What is happening in this type of places with the so-called difficult heritage (in its material and intangible dimensions)? There may be many individual and social stategies for dealing with such problems, as evidenced by various social practices undertaken in many cities in western and north-western Poland, which were part of Germany until 1945. In the case of Kołobrzeg (German: Kolberg) the proces of new social rooting, which began with the arrival of the first Polish settlers in the spring of 1945, is currently undergoing another phase related to fundamental political changes in this part of Europe after 1989. The former image of the harbour „recovered/liberated” by Polish army is giving way to the image of vibrant, European tourist center on the Baltic Sea. This situation favors the economic development, but at the same time it provokes various local agencies and groups of residents to look for new forms of identity. These imaginations and practices naturalize the connection with the city, among other things, by exploiting in various ways the ethnic, political, economic and religious baggage left behind by German residents displaced after war.