Elbing vs. Elbląg. From contested land to decolonial representations

Elisa-Maria Hiemer

doi:10.18778/2299-7458.12.07

Authors

Elisa-Maria Hiemer Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2299-7458.12.07

Keywords:

Western Territories, resettlement, German-Polish relations, urban history, mental maps

Abstract

Territorial shifts after World War II entailed critical demographic changes: Germans were expelled from Elbing; Poles from the eastern territories were supposed to take their place in Elbląg. Personal and national narratives had to be created from scratch. The article explores different forms of texts and maps – memoirs, tourist guides, literature, and an exhibition – to scrutinise different city and neighbourhood narratives from German and Polish standpoints. Besides analysing the central motifs and narrative strategies that rely on an urban visualisation of memory, it rejects the popular notion of a palimpsest in favour of a decolonial perspective on urban space. Proposing a way to imagine a city beyond nation-based concepts can stimulate reconsidering hierarchic city structures.

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Author Biography

Elisa-Maria Hiemer, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg

Elisa-Maria Hiemer is a postdoctoral researcher and project leader at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, Germany. She concentrates on the intersection of literary sciences and history in topics including Polish-German relations, memory, and gender studies, focusing on narrativisation. Besides Autobiographisches Schreiben als ästhetisches Problem (Harrassowitz 2019), she edited The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction with Jiří Holý, Agata Firlej, and Hana Nichtburgerová (De Gruyter 2021). She is currently finishing a book on sexuality and abortion in interwar Poland.

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