From Stettin / Szczecin to Stecin / Szczettin: Hybrid Mnemonic Narratives in a (new) Border City

The redrawn German-Polish borderline and the almost total population exchange after World War II changed the German city of Stettin into the Polish Szczecin, directly situated at an almost impermeable border. In the early post-war years, the radical social and cultural cut of 1945 was not accompanied by convincing strategies of Polish symbolic cultural appropriation. Only after the workers’ protests in 1970/71 a sense of local identification developed, based on a mélange of the post-war development of Szczecin with a historical narrative of regained Slavic space. With the associations of former German inhabitants closely keeping to their memories of pre-1945 Stettin, mnemonic narratives were on the one hand clearly divided along national boundaries. On the other hand, however, Polish memories tended to be hybrid, in particular since the 1980s with plans to reconstruct the so far void site of the medieval Old Town at the Odra river (Podzamcze). This “retroversion” and the accompanying debates already before the end of the socialist regime broadened Polish discourses about the city and its past towards a transnational post-memory of the pre-1945 past. Since then, various competing mnemonic narratives may be identified. Apart from the hardly any more noticeable German expellees’ perspective, the narrative of the Polish “pioneers” of 1945 is also losing relevance and is replaced by hybrid constructions of the city’s history. Recently, the politics of de-communization adds another layer of contested memories to the debate.