“Through Polish Eyes”: Polish-German Media Cooperation and the Border Question after 1970

The Polish-German dialogue about the border and borderlands question in the aftermath of the Second World War, entered a new phase with the West German-East European bilateral agreements engineered by Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr in 1970.  Suggesting that Polish and German national images were intricately connected with one another, particularly in questions concerning the borderlands, this presentation investigates how the establishment of official diplomatic relations changed the relations as well as both states’ national self-understandings as negotiated through the media.  I analyze the perspective of Polish and German correspondents and media experts on the “new” relations. According to them, the remaining points of contention between the People’s Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic included the border, the status of the borderlands but also the status of the remaining German minority in Poland.

The 1970s agreements ended a period of insecurity and instability in Polish-German relations with regards to the borderlands’ status, but they also made the ambivalent position of the multiple expellee populations in Eastern Europe finite.  Furthermore, the correspondents, who had worked unofficially throughout the 1960s to renegotiate Polish-German relations in a more positive light, were forced to take stock and rethink their own roles in these relations. In all of these negotiations, new ways to interactively establish national identities and defining national boundaries began to emerge after 1970 in the Polish and West German media, particularly on the radio.  These renegotiated national identities and boundaries were to have a legacy on Polish and German national identities and their interaction with one another during the remainder of the Cold War.