A Community of Nostalgia: Identity, Landscape, and the German-Speaking Minority in Gdansk, Poland (2009)
Undergraduate: Brett Sturm
Faculty Advisor: Chad Bryant
Department: History
In 1945, Gda?sk, the centuries-old port on the Baltic Sea, was incorporated into Poland by the Potsdam Agreement. For the first time in its history, the city long known as Danzig—a center of German trade and cultural life—was inhabited by an overwhelmingly-Polish majority population. Subsequent emigration, Polonization campaigns in the 1940s and 50s, and over fifty years of state-socialism have produced a Gda?sk which betrays, today, very little of its not-so-distant, German past.
My SURF project is a study of the German-speaking minority in modern Gda?sk—a group of mostly-elderly Danzigers who refuse to quit their native city—and the vestiges of German identity which survive to the present day. Utilizing theoretical and secondary literature as well as oral history conducted in the field, its approach is holistic, looking to language, history, memory, and landscape as ingredients capable of defining the remnants of a fading, local culture.