Over centuries, the mutual existence of German- and Polish-speaking communities formed expansive cultural borderlands stretching down from the southern Baltic coast across frequently moving, and at times aggressively enforced, political dividing lines. The long-contested Oder-Neiße border would only finally be resolved as part of the negotiated arrangements for German (re-)unification in 1990. Before then, this uneasy border had shaped not only broader German-Polish relations in the aftermath of the Second World War, but also the complex intercultural relationship between the then newly constituted socialist partner countries of Poland and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). GDR political rhetoric saw this changing relationship played out at – and across – the new phenomenon of the “Friedensgrenze” or “peace border”; the new political order thus sought to counter and simultaneously ignore any evidence that “borders are memories of past and present violences etched into social landscapes,” as Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2012) assert.
The relationship which emerged between the GDR and Poland proved an uneasy one, frequently based on lingering negative stereotype and national narrative, what Ludwig Mehlhorn (2001) terms a “forced friendship” characterized, he argues, by mutual ignorance and lack of communication. This frequently found cultural expression in restricted imaginings of “the Other”; Elżbieta Dzikowska (1998), for example, argues that, throughout the GDR’s existence, the literary portrayal of Poland by East German 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 between citizens of the two countries remained an uneven one, shaped inevitably by historical realities of political dominance and cultural suspicion.
The debate led by Parker and Vaughan Williams in 2012 sought to broaden the interdisciplinary base of Critical Border Studies. Literary studies, too, can deepen understanding of the cultural significance of borders, not least by exploring Mark Salter’s concept of the “performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through practices” in works set within cultural borderlands. 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 country’s existence, challenges traditional GDR depictions of the German-Polish relationship and offers a dynamic exploration of personal, cultural and political “bordering and de-bordering” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams). In examining Höntsch’s representation of Poland as an alternative (contemporaneous) political reality to the GDR as the embodiment of “socialism on German soil,” the article explores 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). Finally, the article provides a critical discussion of Höntsch’s engagement with the very fluidity of narrative boundaries in her conscious exploitation of diverse genre forms and narrative voices, language and intertextuality.