Over centuries, the mutual existence of German- and Polish-speaking communities has created expansive cultural borderlands stretching down from the southern Baltic coast across frequently moving political dividing lines. In the twentieth century, the long-contested Oder-Neiße border only became finally and apparently conclusively fixed as part of the negotiated arrangements for German (re-)unification in 1990. This uneasy border had shaped not only German-Polish relations in the aftermath of the Second World War, but also, and in particular, the complex intercultural relationship between the then newly constituted socialist partner countries of Poland and the German Democratic Republic, played out at – and across – the new phenomenon of the so-called “Friedensgrenze” or “peace border.” This relationship, based frequently on lingering negative stereotype and national narrative, became what Ludwig Mehlhorn (2001) terms a “forced friendship” characterized, he argues, by mutual ignorance and lack of communication. This finds cultural expression in restricted imaginings of “the Other”; Elżbieta Dzikowska (1998), for example, argues that, throughout their country’s existence, the literary portrayal of Poland by GDR writers remained locked in the past, with Poland depicted more frequently as a locus of past loss and personal memory than as contemporary political ally. The relationship, too, remained an uneven one, shaped inevitably by historical realities of political dominance and cultural suspicion. This paper investigates to what extent, in her semi-autobiographical novels Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1989), the East German writer Ursula Höntsch, unknowingly writing in the final years of the GDR, challenges such depictions. It explores how Höntsch ultimately presents Poland as an alternative (contemporaneous) political reality to Ulbricht’s and later Honecker’s manifestation of “socialism on German soil,” based on a parallel fusion of Soviet ideology, national tradition and critical positioning. Finally, it demonstrates the limitations of externally imposed geo-political borders in shaping identity and controlling individual agency within contested spaces of cultural and communicative memory (Jan Assmann, 1988 and Aleida Assmann, 2016) and reveals how Höntsch explores the very fluidity of narrative boundaries through her conscious exploitation of diverse genre forms and narrative voice, language and intertextuality.