Images of Poland in the minds of Germans
If we wanted to be unpleasant, we could ask the author whether she has ever talked to a poorly-paid Polish nurse or was the guest of a young family in the Warsaw district of Praga, where four people are forced to share a room? Seriously however, the question arises as to whether well-intentioned positive media coverage is counterproductive, because negative reports from migrants, commuters and seasonal workers in Germany about life in Poland stand in stark contrast to such overblown publicity, and undoubtedly raise questions among many readers and viewers about the truthfulness and balance of the media.
Critical observation and well-founded criticism of one’s neighbours therefore often perform a greater service to friendship than saccharine compliments, even when this is still difficult for a country whose attitudes towards Poland have been traditionally arrogant or disparaging. Conversely, Poles often react to criticism from Germany with excessively sensitive, defensive reflexes that tend to betray a lack of self-confidence. This became apparent, for example, when the refugee crisis escalated in the summer of 2015. While Germany was prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of persecuted and uprooted people from the war zones of the world, Poland was blocking immigration. In Poland – and elsewhere – Germany was accused of moral imperialism and economically blackmailing the states of Eastern Central Europe, while the German public took note of the reactions beyond the Oder and Neisse with incomprehension and interpreted these as a sign of neonationalism, Catholic fundamentalism and provincial egotism. There the traces of a long-forgotten past seemed to break out once again like ghosts lurking in the cellar of the common German-Polish house that are just waiting to be served and fed.
What can we learn from all this? Despite many superimpositions, the perception of traces and the formation of ideas and images in the mind to a large extent depend on age groups, education and income. It makes a difference whether you are connected with your Polish friends via Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram and are thereby connected with people from the rest of the world, go to Polish rock festivals as a matter of course, prefer YouTube to national TV channels and when you have little or no interest in names like Otto von Bismarck or Gustav Freytag. Secondly, whether you regularly attend events on German-Polish history and culture, sit next to a lot of silver-haired gentlemen and murmur with approval when celebrating the latest translation of the novelist and Eastern European commentator, Andrzej Stasiuk, or discussing the latest educational trip to Galicia. Or thirdly, whether Poles are perceived as permanent “helpers” who clean “for us” for pocket money, and care for the aging population because their earnings can at least feed their families back home, something which is hardly possible to achieve from similar work in Poland, with the possible exception of Poles who work in local health resorts where they can pamper well-heeled German pensioners. Apparently three worlds, each with its own images, communication channels and reception rituals, yet connected with each other and suspended in a highly mobile cosmos of exchange, in which employment agencies, small craftsmen’s companies, tourist offices, institutes, cultural forums, universities, committees and associations have been working for years as “stereotype breakers” – each in their own way.
Without stereotypes, however, neighbourliness is unthinkable, especially in view of the current prosperity gap. The only question is how to deal with it, especially when you have been living “door to door” for so long and know each other’s quirks and idiosyncrasies to the point of exhaustion. In order not to avoid being suffocated by phrases, it is vital to have open discussions at eye-to-eye level, where all topics can be addressed and expressed without prejudice and feelings of inferiority or superiority – utterly free of any phony political correctness and without being offended by every second sentence. This is the only way to avoid premature interpretations caused by mental traces, reduce ingrained perspectives and “update” images in the head. Experience has shown that face-to-face meetings, such as those that have increasingly taken place over the past two and a half decades, seem to be the best means of achieving this. It is to be hoped that – despite cultural and economic differences – the resultant positive images will one day completely replace the many negative images listed above. That this is possible was beautifully demonstrated by a German student on an exchange visit to a Polish host family when his mother phoned to ask him if everything was going okay and he irritated replied: “Hey, mum! They live better than us ...!”
Matthias Barełkowski, Peter Oliver Loew, June 2018
