Introduction: Contextualizing Flight and Expulsion in Bienek's Upper Silesia

In response to geopolitical upheaval, geographical regions assume special significance in literature and other cultural texts. One prominent example is Horst Bienek's tetralogy, which focuses on the formerly German city of Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia (today Gliwice, Poland). The four novels, published between 1975 and 1982, are Die erste Polka (The First Polka), Septemberlicht (September Light), Zeit ohne Glocken (Time without Bells), und Erde und Feuer (Earth and Fire). These Gleiwitz novels create a literary topography of a German-Polish border region that was at the center of twentieth-century political and military conflicts, epitomized in multiple border changes following the First and the Second World Wars.

Against the backdrop of some of these momentous historical events, Bienek's novels capture life on the German side of the Upper Silesian border region during and right after the Second World War. The tetralogy portrays the social fabric and German-Polish identity of this region while at the same time chronicling the forces that threaten its special multiethnic and transnational character. From a historical perspective, the four novels are thus a case study of the destructive dimension not only of National Socialism but also of nationalism and the fiction of ethnically homogenous nation-states.