Before they were twins: population upheaval and the making of post-war cities

Historically, Dresden and Breslau functioned as the administrative, religious and economic hubs for their respective regions. Although the Piast dukes of Breslau had died out by the early fourteenth century, the Silesian capital presided over a powerful Catholic archdiocese, the spread of the Reformation, a thriving Jewish community, academic life at a leading university and economic networks far and wide. Although Leipzig was historically larger and economically more important, Saxony’s capital was always Dresden: residence of Wettin electors who, at the end of the seventeenth century, became kings of Poland under Augustus the Strong. Like Breslau, Dresden was tri-confessional: dominated by Lutheranism, but home to Catholics (the dynast himself converted to become king of Poland) and Jews. Hence, both cities featured an architectural medley of spires belonging to various branches of the Jewish and Christian faiths. And while in Breslau this skyline reflected from the shores and islands of the Oder (Polish, Odra) river, Dresden earned renown as ‘Florence on the Elbe’: a jewel of primarily Baroque architecture from the heyday of Saxon rule over Poland.

The epochal shift in territory and population during and immediately after Nazi rule brought about a cataclysmic transformation in both regions and their historic capitals. Kristallnacht decimated each city’s monumental reformed synagogue and initiated the total destruction of Jewish life. Then, although both Breslau and Dresden survived almost unscathed until the very end of the war, the firebombing of Dresden on 13–15 February 1945, and the bombardment of Breslau as a ‘fortress city’ from 13 February through to the end of the war, left both cities among the most devastated in the world. Some of the refugees who fled from Breslau reached Dresden right on time for the firebombing. As the wild flight gave way to Allied-approved expulsions that summer, German refugees continued to pour into the Soviet occupation zone of post-war divided Germany. Referred to as ‘resettlers’ (Umsiedler) in early state parlance, many of them reached the ravaged Saxon capital with what little they had managed to carry with them. Told to surrender their pasts, they were to contribute their labour and skills to the classless socialist experiment. Meanwhile, Poles who had lost their homes amid Nazi brutality or through the Soviet annexation of about a third of pre-war Polish territory arrived in the shattered landscapes of an historically German city and were told they were pioneers reclaiming a built heritage stolen from their nationally Polish ancestors.Footnote ⁴

As the Iron Curtain steadily solidified, 7.5 million ethnic German refugees from pre-war Germany’s lost eastern territories found themselves in post-war Germany’s western zones, while 4.3 million landed in the eastern, Soviet zone; Germans from the East were also overrepresented among those who fled over the future German–German border, sometimes only years, even months after reaching the Soviet zone.Footnote ⁵ In the areas that would become West Germany in 1949, Germans from the East were given the politically charged designation of ‘expellees’ (Vertriebene), which implied both the ‘expulsion from Paradise’ and the inherent, lasting injustice of the ‘flight and expulsion’ that had just taken place. The West German government and a host of expellee political leaders (many with Nazi pasts) adopted what became an inherently contradictory approach to expellees and their vaunted ‘right to the homeland’ (Recht auf die Heimat) and right of return (Recht auf Heimkehr) to the spaces they had lost.Footnote ⁶ On the one hand, extensive efforts to economically integrate expellees reinforced in their minds that their displacement was permanent, and that they should take advantage of the material assistance they had been given to move on and rebuild their lives in the West. On the other hand, the West German government financially supported the commemoration of the lost territories as an integral part of Germany, and expellee political leaders asserted that the millions they claimed to represent were sitting on their suitcases, just waiting to exercise their right of return.Footnote ⁷ In fact, already within the first decade after the war, expellees increasingly consigned themselves to the unpleasant reality that they would not be returning.Footnote ⁸

Key to the officially fostered commemorative process were Patenschaften. Unlike twin cities (Partnerschaften), in which municipalities across borders forge mutual ties between their respective societies and populations, in taking on a Patenschaft a West German ‘godfather city’ established a sponsorship role for a specific expellee community it ‘adopted’ from the lost German East. For example, Cologne formed a Patenschaft with expellees from Breslau in 1950. Henceforth, the city of Cologne sought to provide expellees with a sense of ‘surrogate Heimat space’ in the West.Footnote ⁹ In addition to the creation of a Heimat gathering space and archive (today called the Breslauer Sammlung), publication of a ‘Heimat book’ documenting Breslau’s history and allegedly timeless ties to Cologne and establishment of Breslauer Square (still a prominent space behind the central train station), the ancient Rhenish metropolis sponsored regular gatherings of Breslauers, who reminisced about the world they had lost and explored their godfather city as a means of finding rootedness in the West. This intimate personal exchange took place in the shadow of pitched political speeches, in which expellee leaders sought to use Patenschaften as a way to keep alive territorial revisionist claims against Poland.Footnote ¹⁰

The officially territorial revisionist aims espoused under the auspices of most Patenschaften made them suspect to East Bloc regimes, notably Poland and Czechoslovakia, and further burdened West German efforts to create Partnerschaften with East European cities, sometimes with the same cities whose expellees they supported through Patenschaften. Such a strikingly different context must be kept in mind in the late 1950s environment – the heyday of Patenschaft creation in West Germany – when East German Dresden was twinned with Wrocław, which Poland framed as the capital of its Recovered Territories. Unlike the booming Patenschaft environment, West German Partnerschaft ‘sister-city’ programmes were largely restricted in a Westerly direction (especially with France) before the mid-1970s. Even in East Germany, the creation of Partnerschaften only picked up as the West German Patenschaft movement made the first signs of winding down in the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹

For German refugees from former eastern Germany who found themselves in the Soviet zone, the official ideological departure point for considering the lost territories could not have been more different. After the 1950 Treaty of Görlitz/Zgorzelec, the East German state officially recognized the Oder–Neisse border with Poland and prohibited any public reference to the lost territories. The very term ‘expellee’ was denounced as stemming from revanchist militarist fascists in the West, and by 1950 even the euphemisms of ‘resettler’ and ‘new citizen’ had all but vanished from official parlance. What was more, East German leaders upheld the 1950 treaty as proof that their polity had sufficiently reconciled with Poland, with the result that German ‘guilt’ for Nazi crimes was irrelevant and thus absent from official sister-city discourse.Footnote ¹² Nonetheless, just as West German expellees did not embrace and espouse the ideological dogma of territorial revisionism their leaders put forth in their name, so too were East German resettlers hardly prepared to surrender their old identities as East Prussians or Silesians.Footnote ¹³ In the first place, even in the 1950s many of the roughly 4 million remaining resettlers were still ‘foreigners’ to the natives of Saxony and Mecklenburg and sustained interest in their former homes. Second, although contrasting political contexts influenced the sort of atmosphere within which each group could talk about the past, Michael Schwarz is right to observe that resettlers were not the ‘exposed, helpless objects of the political decisions of a Soviet-unified Socialist dictatorship’, but instead regularly manoeuvred to discuss their sense of loss in whatever way they could.Footnote ¹⁴ For instance, resettlers in Dresden nourished their sense of victimhood during officially sanctioned mourning rituals surrounding the firebombing by Anglo-American ‘terror bombing’. Although Dresden’s old town functioned as a dramatic lapidarium of ruins to evoke nostalgia and loss, the jagged fragments of the Frauenkirche quickly became the foremost site for commemorating German victimhood. Like native residents, Dresden’s resettlers could use this exceptional context to express their melancholy at the loss of an idealized world of the past.Footnote ¹⁵ Set apart by the limits of economic integration and undaunted by official taboos when they met in private, they ruminated on the world they had known just across the border and pondered how to see it again. After 1959, some resettlers started to satisfy this desire under the auspices of Dresden’s twinning with Wrocław.

The twinning of Dresden with Wrocław

Dresden was twinned with Wrocław just before East Germany entered the Fédération Mondiale des Villes Jumelées (FMVJ) in 1960. By 1965, SED district leaderships in East Germany had concluded 16 solidarity pacts with counterparts in Poland, second only to the 17 pacts with Czechoslovak districts; all of these served as a basis for official contact, delegation exchanges and twinning agreements.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite such activity, however, the East German leadership shrank before concluding any sister-city accord that, as Ingo Bautz observes, lacked ‘a high foreign policy and symbolic value, as well as demonstrable practical usefulness’.Footnote ¹⁷ Only when Brandt’s Ostpolitik sought (at first in vain) to twin West German cities with East Bloc counterparts did the German Democratic Republic (GDR) aggressively use sister-city connections to advertise East German superiority to its Cold War competitor and thus attempt to blunt Bonn’s growing influence in the East Bloc. As Christian Rau shows in his contribution to this special issue, by the 1970s the SED regime twinned its cities in earnest to compete with West Germany. This paralleled the trend Maria Pasztor and Dariusz Jarosz have illustrated based upon extensive archival research, namely that the Polish communist regime twinned Polish cities with counterparts across both blocs to further the 1956 Gomułka thaw.Footnote ¹⁸ The result, Markus Pieper adds, is that East German–Polish sister-city relations both mirrored official bilateral relations and facilitated contacts along with the transfer of ideas and goods.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, as Ingo Bautz concludes, international tensions and domestic politics within the nation-state overwhelmingly determined whether twinning proceeded and to what extent it remained active.Footnote ²⁰

After establishing a treaty of friendship through socialism in June 1957, Wrocław and Dresden took on the very first GDR–Polish Partnerschaft in May 1959, just months after Coventry became Dresden’s first sister city. Officially, they were paired due to their comparable size, industrial profile and cultural institutions, all with the goal to support the ‘building up of socialism’.Footnote ²¹ Cultural exchanges were co-ordinated by each city’s respective communist party leadership, and East German worker delegations often consisted of leading SED party functionaries. Similar expectations were laid out in Dresden’s special relationship with Leningrad and Ostrava: the ‘development of friendship and co-operation through Städtepartnerschaften’ was to be in keeping with the notion that ‘the deciding preconditions for the further growth of the strength of the international influence of socialism is and will always be the unity and cohesion of the socialist lands [and] their interconnectedness with the USSR’.Footnote ²²

Henceforth, the Silesian and Saxon capitals exhibited annual celebrations of the other’s culture, portrayed mainly through the industrial achievements of socialism. In 1960, a Polish photo exhibition in the Dresden Semperoper celebrated the reconstruction of Wrocław.Footnote ²³ After the Dresden–Wrocław Partnerschaft was reaffirmed in 1963, both sides renewed their commitment to regular party-approved trans-border exchanges.Footnote ²⁴ From 1971 onward, the ‘Wrocław Cultural Days’ took place in November in Dresden. By 1972, the Polish restaurant ‘Wroclaw’ had opened on the Pragerstrasse in Dresden, and an exhibition celebrating ‘30 years of Lower Silesia (Dolny Śląsk) in the People’s Republic of Poland’ appeared in Dresden’s cultural palace.

The Dresden–Wrocław twinning was conceived amid a particularly hostile East German–Polish state dynamic. This was a ‘forcibly ordered friendship’, Ludwig Melhorn argues, in the context of what Sheldon Anderson may overstate as a ‘Cold War in the Soviet Bloc’.Footnote ²⁵ On a personal level, Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka mutually loathed the neighbouring country’s response to de-Stalinization; Gomułka could not abide Ulbricht’s stolid adherence to Stalinist repression, while Ulbricht publicly denounced Gomułka’s populist marriage of communism with nationalism as counterrevolutionary. Compounding Polish reservations, East German recognition of the Oder–Neisse border in the 1950 Treaty of Görlitz fell flat as East Germany pushed full blame for Nazism onto West Germany.Footnote ²⁶ Rapprochement between Erich Honecker and Eduard Gierek – each the successor to a monolithic party leader – peaked with the unparalleled border opening in January 1972, which allowed visa-free travel between the two countries as something of a pressure valve for populations hemmed in by Cold War borders.

In many ways, the Dresden–Wrocław twinning paralleled this context of ‘forcibly ordered friendship’, as it coincided with aversion at the highest levels of both regimes. Even as interstate relations reached their best levels during the Cold War, Daniel Logemann records enough tension and superficiality in the case of Leipzig’s 1973 twinning with Cracow to argue that there was little meaningful rapprochement at the official level, concluding: ‘official propaganda certainly stressed the brotherly co-operation with socialist neighbours, but generally hollow platitudes were seldom followed by sustainable outcomes’.Footnote ²⁷ Hence, it was at the grassroots level, as East Germans vacationed in Cracow and Poles consumed in Leipzig, that one might speak of transnational interchange as a ‘successful project’.Footnote ²⁸ If this was a sort of ‘Eigen-Sinn’ – an influential yet ambiguous concept about wilful individual self-direction and self-interest – it should not be read as active dissent from socialism.Footnote ²⁹ Much as Mateusz Hartwich observes that East German tourists ventured to the Riesengebirge mountains, not to dissent, but to vacation and escape repressive state observation,Footnote ³⁰ Dresdners (especially resettlers) took part in the sister-city programme, not to resist socialism, but to defy a state taboo on discussing the lost German East. Seldom for any dramatic political reasons, they talked about their lost Heimat to deal with their own sense of uprootedness and seek some semblance of closure. In sum, even if sister-city programmes were locked into the shifting international political morass, and even if individual East German resettlers were not seeking to defy the political status quo, the recent past bled through official pronouncements about the value of sister-city interchange. And rather than lacking personal agency, participants manoeuvred themselves to serve their own interests and, sometimes, even to serve in the cause of trans-border understanding. In particular, trans-border interchange under the auspices of the Dresden–Wrocław Partnerschaft often served to expose the buried traumatic past of Nazi atrocities, forced migration and the lost eastern Heimat.

Dresden delegations to Wrocław

On the surface, exchanges between the two communist parties reveal mainly two-dimensional attacks on West German imperialism and militarism, overwhelming interest in ‘progress’ in Poland’s new Western Territories and a glaring lack of discussion about the region’s German past or expelled inhabitants.Footnote ³¹ Through deeper reading, however, the roughly bimonthly East German delegations across the Oder–Neisse border to visit factories and museums and take part in cultural events touched on the recent past. In the first place, East German visitors to the formerly German metropolis of Breslau walked on a palimpsest cityscape: a layered urban parchment on which Polish rulers and inhabitants inscribed new meanings upon existing landmarks. Immediate post-war Polonizing frenzies had indeed scratched away German inscriptions as thoroughly as possible, but a wide array of architectural monuments remained intact or were painstakingly restored as testament to a supposedly eternal Polish past.Footnote ³² Restoration highlights included the Romanesque chapel of St Martin on the Odra islands, façades on the four sides of the market with their Renaissance gables, the historic university ensemble with its golden Baroque tower and contours and the Prussian-era neoclassical opera designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans (the son of the architect of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate). Moreover, reconstruction efforts on supposedly national-Polish churches on the Cathedral Island in 1946 included an allocation of 708,464 zloty to renovate the neoclassical bishop’s palace due to its ‘character as an historic monument’, even though it dated solidly to the Prussian era.Footnote ³³ Hence, notwithstanding official rhetoric that a nationally Polish reconstruction was gripping the once-German city, a great deal of the architectural legacy returned, which German visitors easily recognized from their own memories of Breslau.Footnote ³⁴

In the second place, roughly one quarter of participants in the 1960 delegation had been born in Breslau, Guben or some other city just across the border in the lost German East; that the majority of participants, notably leaders, were seldom from the territories was proven by their regular ignorance about the region’s heritage, their inability to spell former German names when they opted not to record Polish-language place designations and their credulity when Polish guides recounted the region’s ancient Polish history.Footnote ³⁵ Anniversaries such as the joint 15th anniversary of the ‘Liberation from Fascism’ in 1960 formed a typical cause for sending a delegation from Dresden to Wrocław.Footnote ³⁶ In this instance, leading Görlitz communist Alfred Janietz unwittingly exploited a chance to pass through Legnica, formerly his birthplace of Liegnitz, on the way to Wrocław as part of the delegation.Footnote ³⁷

Amid discussions that took place during an exchange, the difficult recent past of forced migration regularly bled through rhetoric about socialist friendship. In a typical programme, a 1963 ‘friendship visit’ of 260 delegates and 140 guests from the Dresden and Leipzig districts to explore reconstruction and agricultural developments in Wrocław and its surrounding district emphasized the struggle to ‘defend the Oder–Neisse Peace Border’ and assail ‘West German imperialism and militarism’ without ever mentioning the wartime heritage of ethnic cleansing emblazoned in some of the participants’ memories in ways that gave their visit particular resonance.Footnote ³⁸ When Dresden party leader and Stasi informant Rolf Otte commented during a 1959 trip to the Wrocław art museum that an overabundance of Polish romanticism left out works unrelated to the Polish nationalist liberation movement, ‘our [Polish] friends gave the opinion that twentieth-century Polish art had not produced contemporary works that dealt with the national liberation struggle’. In reality, there could have been little twentieth-century Polish art produced in a city and region that until 1945 had been overwhelmingly German-speaking, and Otte was unnerved to observe that curators had painstakingly excluded any reference to a German artistic heritage. Twentieth-century Polish art, thus, could only be featured in a special exhibition of very recent works by Polish artists.Footnote ³⁹

The quandary was, if anything, even more intense in the city historical museum, which sought and failed to feature the nineteenth-century worker tradition. As Otte observed:

Although Otte averred that the German visitors were not qualified to judge why this history was missing from the Polish historical narrative, he breached the taboo that ‘the overwhelming portion of our [Polish] comrades, like the majority of the current Silesian population, comes from the region around Lwów (Lemberg). Thus there are hardly any contributions to local history.’Footnote ⁴⁰

More ghosts from the recent past appeared in reports about cultural ensembles. As soon as the sister-city agreement was signed, it was decided to send a cultural ensemble from the Wrocław region to Dresden to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the GDR; likewise, an ensemble from the Dresden region was to perform in the formerly German towns around Wrocław.Footnote ⁴¹ This was the VEB Steel and Rolling Mill ‘Joliot Curie’ ensemble from Riesa, whose regular trips into Lower Silesia took place under the banner of ‘German–Polish friendship’.Footnote ⁴² The ensemble’s name was itself tied to Wrocław: French communist-physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie had served as the first president of the Soviet-dominated World Council of Peace, which had held its initial meeting in Wrocław in 1948. From 22 to 28 June 1959, the Riesa ensemble performed in front of thousands of Poles at locations the East German performers typically referred to with German names (such as ‘Waldenburg’, rather than Wałbrzych).Footnote ⁴³

Polish audiences did not always appreciate all the ensemble’s songs, since at first benign lyrics took on a potentially nefarious undertone in light of the recent past. For instance, although the tune Heimat wir lassen dich nicht (Homeland, we won’t leave you) had been written by the stalwart East German Socialist Realist musician and musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer, delegation officials discovered after the first concert that ‘the programme required a change, because the song Heimat wir lassen dich nicht was not properly understood by the audience and was met with unrest’. Polish listeners were likewise unnerved by the song ‘Thank you, Soviet soldiers’, which included the raising of a Soviet flag.Footnote ⁴⁴

Even more embarrassing, spontaneous arguments had arisen during the trip about the Oder–Neisse border. Compelled to acknowledge the taboo of forced migration, the delegation group leader insisted to his SED superiors that of course his performers had ‘given clear, politically correct arguments about problems like the Oder–Neisse border, the nature of circumstances in West Germany, as well as German–Soviet friendship’. However, he also revealed that two Polish workers had told him: ‘one day Adenauer is certainly coming here’, and resettlers performing in the ensemble may have prompted some of the anxiety on both sides. In light of such misconduct at the concert, the Polish secretary of propaganda and culture in Wrocław, Wiesław Derych, soon complained to East German SED authorities that ‘many uncertainties arise among the Polish people concerning the finality of the Oder–Neisse border’. He advised publication of an official East German statement in Polish and German that East Germans were not militarists like West Germans, because he feared that ‘this uncertainty about the border is such that many Poles take a wait-and-see attitude and are therefore less active in building up’ Poland’s new Western Territories. Of course, the transnational musical exchanges were not just a negative experience: after a Polish ensemble from Sobótka performed two Polish national dances for their counterparts, the two groups exchanged numerous ‘addresses and gifts’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nonetheless, the acrimonious personality of the German delegation group leader, whom performers ridiculed as ‘dictator Maes’, even got on Derych’s nerves. After almost excessive discussion of German–Polish co-operation and friendship, Maes declared that a Polish worker had told him that in two hours they had experienced more political enlightenment than in the entire year, an assumption the final report noted that ‘comrade Derych opposed with justifiable sharpness. He asserted that, thanks to the political work of the United Polish Worker Party, the first preconditions were created for the friendly reception of our ensemble in Poland’s Western Territories.’Footnote ⁴⁶

Later trips evinced greater caution from the organizers. For its May 1960 trip in honour of ‘the 15-year anniversary of the Polish Western Territories’, the Riesa ensemble’s list of songs changed radically to feature more innocuous tunes like the ‘dance of international solidarity’ and ‘song of Warsaw’. The group played twice in Wrocław, and once in ‘Jelenja Gora’ (Jelenia Góra), ‘Polanicy’ (Polanica-Zdrój), and ‘Walbrzych’ (Wałbrzych).Footnote ⁴⁷ Likewise, the Riesa ensemble’s concerts for the 20th anniversary of ‘liberation’ by the Red Army in 1965 featured works by Gershwin, Wagner, Khachaturian and Beethoven that both sides perceived as unrelated to the traumas that had gripped the region two decades ago. Nonetheless, the past could not be avoided once the ensemble had crossed from Saxony into Silesia. They performed in the ‘Hala Ludowa’, the massive, domed Jahrhunderthalle designed by the famous German architect Max Berg in 1913; they climbed to the ‘Schneekoppe’ in the mountains behind Jelenia Góra, some of them hiking along very familiar paths from their childhoods; their performances in Wałbrzych and Legnica (which still had considerable indigenous German minorities) elicited far more substantial crowds than in Wrocław itself, despite its much larger population; they were harassed repeatedly about ‘the Problem of the Oder–Neisse Border’; and twice on their tour, in Wrocław and Jelenia Góra, they reported that ‘swastikas were smeared through the dirty outer surfaces of our bus’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his report, the group leader asserted that of course every participant had known that most Poles did not hate Germans.

Due to their repeated visits, ensemble members witnessed Polish achievements in reconstruction. Celebrating how ‘in its free time the ensemble had the opportunity to visit the beautiful and renowned historical sites such as the cathedral island, Halle Ludowa, etc.’, a 1965 report celebrated

The official report thanked their Polish hosts, who had given them the chance to collect such ‘numerous, great impressions and reflections [and] beautiful memories’.Footnote ⁴⁹ By the 1970s, inspection at building sites – especially apartment blocks – became a common tour highlight in Wrocław and Dresden alike.Footnote ⁵⁰

Lest resettlers should exploit the exchange for personal reminiscences, SED authorities vetted ensembles that passed into Poland under the auspices of the Partnerschaft. While seeking to confirm the loyalties of leaders in an East German Sorb ensemble before its 1959 tour, the comrade in charge was asked to make sure ‘that former resettlers who are part of the ensemble today won’t not use this trip as a way to satisfy any kind of private desires or interests’.Footnote ⁵¹ Over the course of its four-day trip, the ensemble (comprised chiefly of members for whom Sorbian was not their first language) passed through sites either misspelled or given German designations such as ‘Hirschberg’, ‘Wrowlaw’ (where they were to play in the ‘Jahrhunderthalle’) and ‘Bad Salzbrunn bei Waldenburg (im Kurpark).’ Some 25,000 people – most of them likely from the town’s considerable German minority – came to hear the concert near Wałbrzych, in contrast to no more than 6,000 in Wrocław and Jelenia Góra combined. German attendance was further evinced when, amid singing the German-language hymn ‘Brother attend to the Red Banner’, enthused railway workers in the crowd started to sing along spontaneously. This contrasted with concerts in Jelenia Góra and Wrocław, where Polish functionaries sought to translate the lyrics into Polish or even ban them, because they were in German, Sorbian and Russian, rather than in Polish. Ultimately, Polish programme translators, one of them an actor from the local theatre, even sought to eliminate any references to socialism and friendship with the Soviet Union. Only after cries of outrage from the audience could they sing the original version which contained such references.Footnote ⁵² Here again, censorship could be hard to carry out on the ground amid audiences weary of having fragments of history routinely excluded.

Censorship could also go the other way, such as when an ensemble from Wrocław performed in Dresden in 1959; perhaps here there had been concerns about explicit references to Polish territories with so many resettlers likely in the audience. The plan had been to sing Maria Koterbska’s Wrocławska Piosenka, ‘The song of Wrocław’, a contemporary Polish hit wherein ‘in the form of a streetcar ride through Wrocław, reconstruction and new achievements are displayed’. Also featured was ‘Warsaw, city of peace’, a new ‘song that has spread all over Poland singing of the reconstruction of Warsaw and the will of its residents for peace’. East German party officials crossed both the Wrocław and Warsaw songs off the list, leaving only revolutionary worker hymns that were far less in tune with contemporary Polish culture.Footnote ⁵³

Another repeated point of anxiety for East German travel planners was the apparent inability of Polish artists and onlookers to differentiate between the two German states: a concern that often coincided with further evidence that the heritage of recent violent population policies could not be suppressed amid blithe narratives about socialist friendship. After 110 Polish musicians visited Dresden in 1959, the SED report complained that ‘they don’t consider West German militarism to be as dangerous as we do’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Fistfights even broke out when a translator (a Polish Jew who knew German) failed to recount everything his Polish associates had said and even insulted them. When the translator was expelled back to Poland, ‘he did not want to board the bus, because in his opinion the ensemble reproached him for his Jewish heritage, something that was absolutely not the case. Then he boarded it after all and in tears bid his farewell to Dresden and the ensemble. Even after his dismissal, he tried to retain contact with some who accompanied [the ensemble]’, an outrage that led the German leadership to commence an immediate discussion with their Polish counterparts, wherein they recognized ‘our reasons for dismissing’ him, not because of apparent racial discord that had arisen, but ‘due to the good work of the new translators’. Black market trade in coffee and cigarettes, and the dismissal of another translator for his ‘political’ lapses, further reveal that, in their ‘particulars’, German–Polish cultural encounters could never free themselves from an unresolved past or illegal material proclivities.Footnote ⁵⁵

Although later trip reports largely excluded such details, a Dresden Bezirk cultural secretary expressed his annoyance in 1965 that a Polish ensemble that played in Dresden for the Day of World Peace was of poor quality, leading his department to advise that ‘cultural exchange in 1966 should no longer be executed so often; rather, exchanges by cultural groups and ensembles should only coincide with political highlights, in order to guarantee that only really good ensembles are put into action’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, exchange writ large was about to expand.

Out of control: twin cities and visa-free travel after 1972

As the push for visa-free travel triumphed in January 1972, the Partnerschaft touted its place as a trans-border conduit for understanding, and leaders encouraged the people of Saxony to visit western Poland. The very highest officials plugged the better relations between East Germany and Poland; party leaders Eduard Gierek and Erich Honecker met in Frankfurt an der Oder to great acclaim to celebrate coming economic and cultural interchange on both sides, and in October 1972, Dresden and Wrocław celebrated German–Polish Cultural Days.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the context of interviews he conducted about 1970s Leipzig and Cracow, Logemann observes that a select few East Germans became ‘crazy about Poland’ (polenverrückt); although they first ventured to Poland for political reasons, fascination with Poland could follow (including the desire to learn the language and even to take tours there).Footnote ⁵⁸ Certainly, official propaganda sought to instil a sense of Polonophilia. A 1973 report on the sister-city relationship lauded that: ‘information about the city of Wrocław in Dresden attracts an ever increasing number of residents in our city who use the possibility of visa-free travel to get to know the Polish city on the Oder’.Footnote ⁵⁹ After chronicling the ‘metre-high heaps of ruin’ at the end of the ‘criminal fascist war’ but never mentioning that the city’s ‘imperialist heritage’ had in fact been German, a 1976 newspaper report in the Sächsische Zeitung noted: ‘perhaps you yourself have already taken some vacation days or a weekend to visit our sister city?’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The raw statistics are indeed staggering. In 1972 alone, 10 million Polish citizens visited the GDR, 4.5 million of whom entered Bezirk Dresden; and 6.6 million GDR citizens travelled to Poland, 2.5 million of whom heralded from Bezirk Dresden. Although 1972 was a peak, this overall trend of bustling interchange continued until 1980.Footnote ⁶¹

Of course, as tens of thousands of East German tourists (many of them resettlers) crossed the Oder–Neisse border, there was even less that could be done to control what they chose to see and do in ‘Polish’ spaces that propaganda inevitably failed to mention (but which every resettler knew) had been largely German just a few years before. And overwhelmingly, they were seeking out their lost Heimat spaces, consequently coming into contact with their new Polish inhabitants, and so encountering the recent past, regardless of what the official rhetoric had to say about it.Footnote ⁶²

Meanwhile, cultural exchange between the two sister cities continued to expand. Student delegations ventured to each sister city in early 1972; under the guidance of each party leadership, 45 industrial concerns and institutions in the Dresden and Wrocław districts entered into joint party organizational agreements; and from early 1970 onward, economic and technical co-operation, worker exchanges, children’s excursions, travel by vacationers, sport competitions and cultural collaboration flourished. In October 1973, 22 artistic events took place amid the second annual Wrocław District Cultural Days, visited by about 12,000 Dresden residents, some of them likely with origins in the sister city.Footnote ⁶³ On their June 1974 tour of Silesian cultural and industrial concerns, leading party officials (some of them resettlers and some of them Stasi informants) celebrated with their Polish counterparts that ‘the trip of the Dresden delegation was an expression of proletarian internationalism’ that solidified transnational friendship and the ‘deepening of reflections by workers in Bezirk Dresden’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Even more Poles travelled in the opposite direction, to East Germany. As an official report noted, the purpose of such visits was supposed to be cultural: ‘the urge increases to come to know the achievements of socialist construction (Aufbau), historical sites, cultural events and the beauties of the land’. Already in 1971, roughly 10 per cent of all Polish visitors flocked to see state art galleries.Footnote ⁶⁵ But far more swarmed in to buy scarce goods they could use or sell back home. Already in 1972, as about 10,000 Polish visitors crossed over each weekend, a Dresden party delegation in Wrocław warned the first party secretary of the Wojewód administration that, even though communists on both sides could agree ‘that the opening of the border equals tremendous progress’, they feared that Poles would strip the stores. With grim sarcasm, they noted: ‘we fear that some goods are getting bought up, but we in the GDR cannot demand that prices get raised, such as for pepper’. Here a note was pencilled in: ‘meanwhile this isn’t necessary anymore, it’s already all gone’. They concluded: ‘we cannot look on with indifference when farmers ride with their carts into the GDR to shop’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even as 1.5 million mark was invested to enhance commercial sites in Görlitz, emphasis continued on cultural offerings, tourist signage, Polish-language menus and possibilities for camping; but the fact that camping sites were regularly left unused further points to the fact that most Poles crossed primarily to shop, rather than to spend the night.Footnote ⁶⁷

Martial law in Poland following the Solidarity protests drastically reduced sister-city exchanges and ended visa-free travel; at the same time, Wrocław became a bastion for anti-communist resistance. When a professor from the Dresden Technical University visited the sister school in Wrocław at the end of September 1980, he witnessed a student-wide strike (supported by most of the school’s communist party members) that demanded higher pay, access to free media, free trade unions and condemnation of state corruption.Footnote ⁶⁸ The culprits, according to Stasi spies in Wrocław, were delegates from Western institutions like the universities of Kiel, Stuttgart and Giessen, German Academic Exchange (DAAD) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.Footnote ⁶⁹ A Dresden delegation in October 1980 was actually harassed: their first industrial tour was cancelled, the replacement could only be offered in Polish, their automobile was stopped three times by police who searched them for political tracts and their train was filled with Poles who had hidden East German marks inside candy packages while their children wore watches to be sold across the border. Three students, enrolled at Dresden’s Technical University, apparently skipped classes so they could buy shoes, boots and expensive clothing they could sell back home.Footnote ⁷⁰ After forcing all East German medical students in Szczecin to go home in autumn 1980, the Stasi advised bringing home the remaining 382 GDR citizens studying in Polish universities (74 of them in Wrocław), lest ‘the constantly intensifying enemy pressure and the influence of counterrevolutionary tendencies leave negative consequences in individual GDR students’.Footnote ⁷¹

By 1983, interchange picked up again under considerable party guidance, such as when a leading Wrocław party official visited Dresden with the goal of ‘deepening co-operation between party organizations, state organs, social organizations and each district’s industries and corporations’.Footnote ⁷² As Poles struggled to pay for goods ten times as expensive as in 1975, they hoped that a visit by Honecker might restore visa-free border traffic.Footnote ⁷³ Under the auspices of the Partnerschaft, Dresden and Wrocław took measures that year for ‘bilateral vacationer exchanges’ under exhaustive state oversight that mandated the words ‘vacationer exchange’ written onto the traveller’s passport.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pressure for cross-border movement had reached such a point by 1988 that each regime had accepted ‘the deployment of Polish workers in the GDR without valid [work] contracts’, in addition to 10,000 commuters legally permitted to work in border districts.Footnote ⁷⁵ By 1987, Polish students in Berlin overwhelmingly supported Solidarity, disregarded the communist party as inconsequential and regarded the Polish economic outlook as so hopeless that they desired to work in the ‘Third World’, rather than return to Poland.Footnote ⁷⁶ By August 1989, a Wrocław delegation in Dresden for the GDR’s 40th anniversary alarmed East German officials when they showed open sympathy for Solidarity, despair about the Polish economy and conviction that the communist monopoly on power had to end.Footnote ⁷⁷

Epilogue

Although throughout the Cold War East German authorities denounced West German Patenschaften for their official revanchist intentions, their own Partnerschaften were also mythologizing the past and present, here with emphasis on an ideological-socialist future. And although officially the end of communism meant that ‘sister-city relations between Dresden and Wrocław [could] shape themselves free from ideological indoctrination of a party’,Footnote ⁷⁸ some narratives such as Dresden’s all-encompassing victim trope have sustained continuity and even strengthened. Already in February 1990, Wrocław city president Stefan Skapski took part in the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden.Footnote ⁷⁹ Meanwhile, the Partnerschaft also conformed to serve the new prevailing rhetoric: European integration and understanding in the border region where reunified Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet.Footnote ⁸⁰ Stories of Polish resistance to communism became a new mainstay for Wrocławian identity, to be shared with the sister city. The 1980s ‘Orange Alternative’ had lampooned tyranny when Wrocław residents had dressed up in dwarf costumes; this had not only been memorialized through the construction of over 200 bronze dwarves across Wrocław, but also through the gift of a bronze ‘sister-city dwarf’ (Partnerschaftszwerg) – complete with the Wrocław city coat of arms – for exhibition by the Dresden city hall in honour of the 55th anniversary of the city twinning in 2014.Footnote ⁸¹ Wrocław’s new official identity trademarks it as a chameleon city that happens to change its identity every so many decades and unites German, Polish and Jewish heritage. In a typical report, the Dresden Amtsblatt celebrated Wrocław’s 1000th anniversary in 2000 as an ancient Slavic city which, after a vibrant medieval history (with lengthy description), ‘belonged to the German Reich until 1945’ (barely expounded upon) before ‘belonging again to the Polish state since the end of World War II’, as if momentary possession by a medieval Polish duke could somehow be continuous with the post-war nation-state.Footnote ⁸² Although no longer officially a taboo, an official recounting of the sister city’s history still failed to mention post-war ethnic cleansing. This relativizing of the caesura from 1938 to 1948 has also been enshrined in the sister city’s post-Cold War parlance through exhibitions and cultural festivals, such as in official descriptions of Wrocław’s 2016 status as European cultural capital.Footnote ⁸³ Hence, it is questionable to what extent ‘reconciliation’ based upon explicit discussion of ‘German crimes in World War II or the resettlement of the German population’ has in fact come to dominate official discourse, even though such themes are no longer officially censured as under communism.Footnote ⁸⁴

Regardless of the ongoing construction of new official narratives, the sister-city programme still allows former residents to interact with the spaces of the lost German East and witness the Polish spaces they have become. Since 1997, Wrocław University and the Technical University of Dresden have sustained a partnership that includes student exchanges and field trips, and high school students have taken part in shared trans-border summer programmes – all on the basis of collaboration that has existed between the Technical University of Dresden and Wrocław technical school since 1963.Footnote ⁸⁵ To encourage further Saxon tourism, in November 1996 the city of Wrocław presented itself at Dresden’s tourism conference.Footnote ⁸⁶

Though laden with a great deal of socialist rhetoric, the Partnerschaft programme unintentionally became a way for Germans and Poles to meet in the ethnically cleansed spaces of Wrocław, for German exiles from Breslau to encounter Polish delegations in their new area of settlement in Dresden and for old Breslauers (whose status as resettled people was officially censured in East Germany) to return ‘home’ to their city, witness what it had become and sometimes find a measure of closure after their loss. Though certainly the exchanges yielded their fair share of pain, angst and old hatreds, the twinning of Dresden with Wrocław nonetheless evinced potential to transcend contemporary rhetoric and compel Central Europeans to encounter, and possibly confront, the traumatic recent past.