ABSTRACT
The redrawn German–Polish border and the almost total population exchange after the Second World War fundamentally changed the German city of Stettin into the Polish Szczecin, situated directly on an almost impermeable border. Szczecin was a city at the periphery of the People’s Republic where people felt insecure until the 1960s. The new sense of local identification was created on a historical narrative of a regained Slavic space. However, the associations of former German inhabitants closely keeping to their memories of pre-1945 Stettin, mnemonic narratives were clearly divided along national boundaries. The German memory scarcely noticed the post-war development, whereas the Polish historical discourse went back to a blurred Slavonic, pre-German history, but ignored the Prussian-German history and its urban structures. Since the 1980s Polish mnemonic narratives have tended to become hybrid, especially with plans to reconstruct the still void site of the medieval Old Town on the Odra River (Podzamcze, suburbium). This “retroversion” and the accompanying debates have broadened the Polish discourse about the city and its past to a transnational post-memory of the pre-1945 past.
