Facts, but specified another facts

I've read "Opp" as a kind of continuation of what you started in "Kaiś". Right?

We stay in a akin world, but the subject is changing. The Earths recovered, which I called in my book Odzania, were just a pretext for me. It's not a biography of these lands, it's not a classical story. Just as in "Kajs" Silesia was an excuse to tell about how identities are created, so in "Zedzania" German lands are an excuse to look at how memory is constructed and deconstructed. In both books I tried to translate local experience into universality language.

In terms of form, I wanted to challenge myself from "Kajś" and question myself. I didn't want to get into a broken railroad and compose the same book about another place. Especially erstwhile writing about the Recovered Lands, as I compose about them - not only about the first post-war years, but drawing the communicative about them to the present - you gotta find a form for this story.

The difference between the erstwhile book and this book is besides that in "Kajś" I was mainly curious in autochthons, the Silesians, and in "Odzania" I focused not on those who stayed there, but on those who arrived there. There truly wasn't anywhere else where a fewer million people abruptly "disappeared" and millions of fresh settlers appeared. This is the largest demographic experimentation in European history.

So let's just say, what's this Talk?

We deficiency a word on Polish post-German lands – on Polish we have: Kresy. The most accepted word Earths recovered, but it is, as we know, propaganda. And I myself, for deficiency of a better word, usage it in the title of the book to inform readers where we will go in this book, but right on the first page I post the only footnote in the book in which I deal with the credibility of this slogan. So I came up with Odzania, due to the fact that first, it sounds fabulous, and second, I wanted to emphasize the differences between Poland, Poland and Poland, pre-war lands – and Poland, which is the recovery. Sure, not all German lands lie on the Oder, but it is simply a cultural term, not a geographical term. In order not to look far, the Czech Republic besides consists of respective historical lands: Moravia, Silesia and the Czech Republic, and we call them Czechs.
This arrangement of yours assumes Odreza and Wiślana. 2 separate worlds?

Not separate, but in many ways different. The communicative of these 2 most beautiful lands is told by the streams themselves. Look at the map, there you will find the fingerprints of Poland - this is the run of 2 of our largest rivers. Both flow from Silesia in Poland. Initially parallel and this is simply a metaphor of the urban-boleslav times. Then, however, Wisła turns sharply to the East - towards Lithuania and Russia, while Odra knows from the beginning what she is after, and mildly leans towards the West, towards German, Czech culture. Only hen, hen far distant Vistula turns back, turns to the West to the end of the way already with Oder, erstwhile again, after a metaphorical 1000 years, parallel. Both fall into the Baltic, but separately, on their own terms and most likely won't even meet there.
I like the word "Refining" crazyly, possibly 1 day it will dispel Earths recovered, although it must be said that this communist invention holds out amazingly strong in Poland. Was your journey on these lands planned or spontaneous?

I knew where and who I had to go, but there was quite a few spontaneity in my wanderings. Thanks to the success of "Kaiś" I was able to devote quite a few time to this book. I visited respective twelve towns, lived a fewer weeks here, a couple there. I would frequently get on a train on a train on a station and drive on the way to decide where I would get off. But the spontaneity of this hike was besides due to the fact that there is no instruction manual for these lands, as in the case of advanced Silesia, there is no catalog of mandatory subjects. I had to admit the subject with combat. So I wandered around writing a book, and just like in "Kajs" I did not collect materials to compose everything down at the finish line, but I wrote live, inviting readers to learn everything with me. I started writing at the minute where I like to start most - erstwhile the subject already turns me on, but erstwhile there are many things I don't know.
I was taught at school that the conflict of Cedynia was 1 of the most crucial in our history, but your book says that there was most likely no specified conflict at all. The past of the Recovered Earth spreads more willingly with authoritative historiography than another lands?

Postwar communist propaganda (often converging with the church) in relation to these lands continues to hold tight. In the book I effort to deal with myths about the land of milk and honey flowing, about the eternal Polish post-German lands, about the Piasts. all decision I came across the remains of those memory seals. I was shocked erstwhile I learned that the last Piasts in Lower Silesia were already German-speaking Protestants and they called each another Die Piasten or that there truly is no evidence that the conflict of Cedinia had always taken place. For years there have been attempts to fill a gap between the planet and the anti-world, between the post-war past of "recovered" cities and what utilized to happen there. Around 1989, what I called the Revolved Revolution, or the large Recollection, began to exercise from memory. all decision they gotta get along with each other, as they want to remember their small homeland, where they are frequently the 4th or 5th generation. The classical example is the University of Wrocław, which in 2011 had to decide whether to celebrate the 2 hundredth anniversary or to admit that it existed since 1945. The attitude of people on these lands to the past is constantly changing. The most difficult, as was said in the USSR, to foretell the past.
You compose that in Polish culture, as is said about going to the mountains, you always mean Tatras, not Sudeta, going to the sea means usually Pomerania Gdańsk, not Western Pomerania. Why is that?

Poland is enlarged, our imaginarium - the selection of anniversaries, readings, iconography - is shaped by Wiślania and consists mainly of the experience of Poland in pre-war borders, together with Lviv and Vilnius. Lviv and Vilnius 78 years after the end of the war inactive organize Polish imagination more than Wrocław or Szczecin. I'm not saying it's bad to be good, but I know that we request at least 1 book on the list, which would tell about the experience of Odzania – specified as Olga Tokarczuk's "House of the Day, home of the Night". The past of Odzania is besides poorly known, besides in Odzania itself. This is later translated into concretes, e.g. into immense disparities between the financing of the protection of monuments in Lower Silesia, where there are many more recorded monuments than in central and east regions.


This is besides seen in the various disputes you compose about. Whether it's about Günter Grass in Gdańsk or a loud dispute over the patron of the school in Wałbrzych.

At the school in Wałbrzych, they wanted to choose a fresh patron, and the management did something that is seldom done - she asked about the opinion of students, parents and employees. It was possible to choose between John Paul II of Galicia, St. Faustina Kowalski of legislature and Princess Daisy - an English aristocrat married to the German Hochberg family, a woman at the Prince's Castle, deserved for the city. By an overwhelming majority, Daisy won, which many in the city did not like. It was an interesting case, due to the fact that there was a tension between the national memory, "wiślanska", and the local, "opening". And, as you can see, people did not consider Daisy English or German, but as a slobber, they pierced the symbolic wall of 1945. This is besides a good example of the fact that disputes in Odzania are universal, repeated in many another regions. The Tale of Odrenia is simply a communicative of memory problems.
Another problem with that memory is its appearance.

Of course, there are those who have deepened their cognition of the Odzania, and those who have stopped on pre-war postcards that after 1989 have made a staggering career. Most people then saw for the first time how local streets, parks and squares looked like before their grandparents and grandparents arrived. The only problem with postcards is that they show these worlds from a better profile, and there are no judaic pogroms or social inequality. The beautiful pictures lied to this "lost world" and made us overestimate the pre-war German towns to this day. After decades of reactive action by the policing, they were later frequently reactive, supposing.
One thing doesn't change, as the Words vote. The difference between Odzania and Wiślania is visible to the bare eye.

Several friends even wrote to me during the last electoral evening that Odrzenia defeated Wiślania, but specialists who survey electoral preferences at lower level - municipalities and districts - point out that the image is simply a small more complicated. I do not do organization politics, but I compose in the book a bit jokingly that the biggest political dispute in Poland is between the 2 politicians embodying Odzania and Wiślania. On the 1 hand, we have Donald Tusk, Gdańsk autochthon and Kaszuba, and on the other, Jarosław Kaczyński, Warszawiak, whose household biography included the Warsaw Uprising or the National Army.
Did the sense of temporaryity have a fundamental impact on the formation of the Resurgency?

At first, yes, it made it harder to take root. But on the basis of conversations and memories, I see that the sense of temporaryity on a mass scale ended faster than we want to remember – somewhere in the mid-1970s. Of course, even after 1989 there were those who were afraid of returning Germans, but there were Polish Silesians or Germans who were waiting for it. Incidentally, this fear of German revisionism was felt differently among the Kresovians, who had no place to return, and who constituted a "recovered" definite minority, or otherwise among settlers from another regions, most of which were from Wielkopolska, Podkarpacie or Lublin.
Another dominant communicative is that Wrocław was settled by the lions. This story holds very tight until today.


The Lviv were only a fewer percent of the fresh residents of Wrocław, and a large part of them were besides residents of the Lviv suburbs, not bourgeoisie or intelligence. Wrocław was a popular city before the war, many settlers were needed - Lviv and Vilnius together had less residents than Wrocław itself. The story about Lviv Wrocław came from the fact that Lviv's intelligence and specialists had a crucial part in the start-up of Wrocław, were overrepresented among students, engineers or tram drivers.


You call the cities of Odzania the most beautiful in Poland. You are delighted with "Polish blocks located on German law" and "the improvement of architecture". Why the crush?

Look, I know that Reading isn't Monica Bellucci in the space of the world, it's not apparent beauty, but I'm constantly delighted. The outdoor space is intriguing, irritating, stimulating. How can they not impress the blockage in the vicinity of Renaissance castles, 19th-century houses of the colour of angry blood collided with pavilions and squares that arose from bombings or arsons, and want to impersonate urban planners' plans. I don't know any another place where his communicative would be so clearly written.