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Paper short abstract

After Algeria’s independence war over a million European settlers departed. After WW II, Poland’s west absorbed parts of Germany. Comparing the afterlives of statues and architecture remaining from France and Germany draws on nostalgia, dissonant heritage, preservation and iconoclasm.

Paper long abstract

After the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962, more than a million former European settlers or “repatriates” (known in French colloquially as "Pieds-Noirs") departed Algeria en masse. The afterlives of their French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France, legally or clandestinely, as well as their French colonial architecture remaining in Algeria draw on colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm. After World War II, Poland’s borders shifted from east to west losing multiethnic eastern territories and in the west absorbing parts of Germany. Approximately 11 million ethnic German expellees (Vertriebene) went from Poland to post-war Germany’s Allied zones. In 2016, Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jensen co-edited a rare volume comparing these two groups, "Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives" (2016). Monuments and architecture offer visual records to engage with a dark past, whether that heritage is French colonial in Algeria or pre-war German. Although my focus is on contemporary Algeria (Slyomovics, "Monuments Decolonized," 2024), my paper compares current third-generation Algerian heritage practices with those in Poland as both countries continue to move and remove, vandalize and preserve their contested histories. I look at some recent cases in which expensive state and private sector projects in both nations affirm an appreciation and conscious appropriation of buildings and monuments related to colonial or pre-World War II heritage of Algeria and Poland respectively.