Uprooting and Taking Root: War and Post-War Pomerania in Selected Literary Works

Perceptions of home place are influenced by experiences over time and across space. Pomerania, the region stretching along the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, has a complicated history, with borders changing multiple times and populations consisting of a range of ethnic groups. This paper asks how the region of Pomerania is presented in selected German, Polish, and Kashubian literary work describing the years shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II. Focus is placed on the dramatic events of that period portrayed from a child’s perspective, with emphasis on how sense of place and understanding of culture influenced one another in those years of immense change. The texts discussed here range from novels by highly acknowledged prosaists (Stefan Chwin and Günter Grass), through memoirs by non-professional authors, to a collection of originally oral interviews. The first section of the paper provides an outline of the history of Pomerania in order to give a background the pre-war Nazi period, the war years, and the forced post-war migrations, when uprooting and of the pre-war population of both Pomerania and Eastern Poland took place. The survivors were forced to take root in a fully different geographical, ethnic, and political environment. The Methods section explains the criteria for the choice of research materials, and the subsequent sections are devoted to analysis and comparison of the literary sources, followed by a conclusion.