Sudeten: Erinnerung reinterpretiert

Abstrakt

The obelisk, placed at the corner of today’s Kościuszki and Daszyńskiego streets in Kłodzko, originally commemorated Friedrich Wilhelm von Götzen, a Prussian general and hero of the Napo­ leonic Wars. After World War II, this monument was reinterpreted; Borussian symbols were removed from it, including the emblematic eagle taking flight and the visage of von Götzen himself, and replaced with a hammer and sickle and a red star. As a result, it became one of many so­called monu­ ments of gratitude to the Red Army. After the political changes in 1989, the dilapidated obelisk, with its red with the red paint already flaking off, was covered with sheets of bluish glass with the logo of Powszechny Zakład Ubezpieczeń (the oldestt surviving Polish insurance company) attached. And thus, in a second bout of this peculiar process of up­cycling, the new ultra­capitalist reality of the Third Polish Republic regurgitated the former Prussian symbol, repurposing it to fit its current needs.

The above example, although it comes from the foothill area, from the Nysa Kłodzka valley, flowing through the very centre of one of the most important Sudetes valleys, perfectly encapsulates the subject of this article. An attempt was made to discuss a number of examples of the appropriation of various objects from the mountains themselves and giving them new meanings. One of them is the former Bismarck Tower at the top of Wielka Sowa, which for some time was named after General Władysław Sikorski, and eventually gained the same patron as the Main Sudetes Trail, i.e. Dr. Mieczy­sław Orłowicz. The remaining examples come from the land of Silesian and Kłodzko—which at the present day translates to: Polish—Sudetes. They also include objects located in the Czech and Moravian parts of the mountains. Through them, the processes of appropriating and taming these “post­German” mountains in the period of 1945–1989 were illustrated. The second part of the article points out the manifestations of rediscovery, processing, and assimilation of the German past of these lands that ap­ peared after 1989, and more strongly after the disastrous flood of the millennium in 1997.