When the Allied 21st army group crossed the Rhine at the end of March 1945, the ground forces were closely followed by a number of so-called “Military Government Detachments”. During the occupation of...
For Germans Sonja Ziemann was “the great film star” and Marek Hłasko was only “her Polish husband”. For Poles he was “the great rebel author” and she was only “his German wife”. The best-known German/...
“Ob blond, ob braun, ich liebe alle Frau’n!” (“Blondes, brunettes, I love all women”) When this hit song conquered the streets and courtyards of Germany in 1935 Jan Kiepura was at the peak of a worldw...
Today Wilhelmsburg is a district in the middle of Hamburg. But in 1900 Wilhelmsburg was an independent parish where the proportion of Polish immigrants in the population rose to over 20% for a short t...
His ideas on composition influenced young composers at the Berlin Academy of Arts (until 2001, after that University of the Arts) for almost 20 years – Professor Witold Szalonek.
Artur Brauner, one of the most important figures in German and international film in the post-war period, was born in Łódź in 1918, the son of Polish Jews, Moshe and Brana Brauner. His father was a su...
In the early 1980s no less than seven aircraft belonging to the Polish airline PLL LOT were hijacked to Tempelhof airport in what was then West Berlin.
“Myśliwska” was officially opened on 1st December 1990. The initiator and manager was the Polish artist Witold “Witek” Marcinkiewicz, who had been living in Berlin for years and had realised his dream...
Wanda Landowska is generally regarded as the person who revived classical harpsichord music. She is one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century.
Halfway through her painting course Karina Smigla-Bobinski gave up the two-dimensional media in order to experiment with light and video installations. From then on space has been her favourite place ...
A few months after the Kraków painter Wojciech Kossak arrived in Berlin in 1895 he wrote to his wife: “I have to make a fortune“. Within a year he managed to find a patron in the form of the German Ka...
Krzysztof Meyer was born in 1943 in Krakow, where he lived until he moved permanently to Germany in 1987. For more than half a century he has been composing vocal and instrumental music for orchestra,...
