In the 20th century, Germany and Poland had one of the most difficult relationships between neighbours in Europe.

Poland’s rebirth as a nation state in 1918 came about largely at the expense of defeated Germany at the end of the First World War. The Second World War began in 1939 with the German attack on Poland, followed by a barbaric occupying regime in Poland whose measures included the planned expulsion of the Polish population from the western areas of Poland that were incorporated into the German Reich, the annihilation of the Polish leadership and the genocide of European Jews. In Central Europe the war ended with a displacement of the German-Polish border to a line not far from Berlin and a new expulsion and resettlement, this time of the German population from the eastern German territories awarded to Poland by the Great Powers in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam in compensation for the eastern parts of Poland annexed by Stalin in 1939.

The recognition by Germany of the Oder- Neiße border was a triple jump occurring at twenty-year intervals. Recognition came first from the GDR in 1950, then the Federal Republic in 1970, and finally united Germany in 1990. The process of approach, reconciliation and finally partnership between Germany and Poland has, moreover, been one of the essential elements of the peace and unification process in Europe over the last few decades.

The process began with a “friendship” between the GDR and People’s Poland that was enjoined from above and never commanded any very deep support in the two societies. The first foundations were laid in the Federal Republic and Poland by the struggle for Willy Brandt’s new “Ostpolitik” in the mid-1960s, and the message from the Polish bishops to their German colleagues in 1965, containing the sentence “we forgive and ask for forgiveness”. And with the birth of the citizens’ movement “Solidarnosc”, the process of reconciliation finally won the solid intellectual and social support that paved the way for acceptance of German unification in 1989-90.

The 1991 Treaty of Friendship linked the two countries by a network of close political, economic, social and cultural ties. And for all the historically grounded animosities, prejudices and suspicions, the German-Polish community of interests formulated in 1989 by Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Krzysztof Skubiszewski held throughout the 1990s. United Germany took on the role of advocate for Polish interests and actively pursued Polish accession to NATO and the EU. In Poland, in turn, anti-German aversions slowly dissolved. Approval ratings for the overpowerful German neighbours, who had been consistently eyed with distrust, rose a few points year by year and in the mid-1990s turned from negative to positive. Which is not to say that feelings on both sides are not prone to recurrent disturbances, egoism and misunderstandings in bilateral relations.
The problems began as early as the beginning of the 1990s, when German plans for a crossborder zone of German–Polish cooperation were interpreted in Poland as kid-gloved attempts by the Germans to regain lost territories. Moreover, the fact that German investments in Poland were initially concentrated almost exclusively in formerly German areas aroused further distrust. On the German part, in turn, the old fear of a “deluge from the East” kept resurfacing, for example, when the visa requirement for Poles was abolished on 1 April 1991. Similarly, during Poland’s EU accession negotiations, many German trade unionists and politicians wanted drastic restrictions on the generosity of terms for Polish workers seeking employment in Germany.

Though more than ten years have passed since the historical watershed, nightmares still persist: in Germany there is the image of divisions of Polish workers lining the border with screwdrivers in their pockets, ready to march in after Poland’s entry into the EU and dismantle the entire German labour market by dumping wages. In Poland there is the spectre of strategically organised troops of expelled Germans armed with old land registers not just making off with western Poland but also, by making a show of their sufferings, trying to turn Germany from a country of perpetrators into a country of victims. On this view, the dispute about the Benes Decrees and the museum of expulsion in Berlin are symptomatic not just of a renationalisation of the internal political mood in Germany but also of German attempts to achieve psychopolitical dominance in East-Central Europe.

Though these diffuse fears and suspicions have repeatedly been in public evidence in recent months, the German-Polish community of interests is built on a strong foundation of visions and projects that point the way for the future. Some of them involve the very border region that even now still gives rise to strong feelings in both countries, feelings that are not merely a product of historical conditioning.

One of these visions was the German-Polish “Oder Alliance”, which was outlined in a Polish initiative in 1999 in conscious emulation of the German-French Rhine Alliance. This idea first showed up in the press, was then taken up by the Polish President and finally drafted and put on a firm basis in a joint article by the Foreign Ministers of Poland and Germany, Prof. Bronislaw Geremek and Joschka Fischer.

Since 1989 there have been many concrete German-Polish initiatives in the border region, in economic, ecological, cultural and infrastructure domains.We have outstanding examples such as “Viadrina”, the Europa University in Frankfurt/ Oder, we have German-Polish business and culture days, we have friendly relations between the mayors of many municipalities and towns on either side of the border rivers. But we also have batons and organised gangs, in 1997 we had a German-Polish “bread war” waged by bakers and trade unionists in Frankfurt/Oder.We have intolerable traffic jams on the external frontier of the EU and we are confronted daily by latent fears and antipathies.
More than ten years after the turning point, the perceived results of German-Polish neighbourhood in the two countries are full of contradictions. A Pole may see the former GDR in terms of “flourishing countryside”. But he will often fail to see just how empty of people this region is. A German, conversely, will perceive on the Polish side of the border an incalculable hive of activity, but he misses the force and substance of a modern economy in the 21st century.

In both countries the initial EUphoria has diminished after ten years of transformation. And in the decisive phase of accession negotiations, it is now fashionable in Poland to be a eurosceptic. To be sure, many people like to compare German-Polish reconciliation with German – French reconciliation, but the differences are enormous. In recent generations, Germany and France have been more or less equally matched competitors, whereas Germany and Poland are unequal, asymmetrical competitors and partners, with a ratio of about ten to one between their respective economic potentials. The ranks the countries occupy in the consciousness of their neighbour are also diametrically opposed. While Germany and the Germans are an essential factor for the Poles, and every Polish school-leaver is required to have a fair knowledge of German (and Russian) history, because this is part of Polish history, the Germans feel at liberty to obliterate almost all traces of Polish history from their consciousness and knowledge. The consequences are often depressing.

But nor does the Polish historical memory make it exactly easy to build up a fruitful perspective for a German-Polish future; after all, the Polish historical consciousness rested for decades on a philosophy of history that spoke of a “thousand years of struggle between Germany and Poland”. In terms of historical outlook, the constellation that arose for Germans and Poles in 1945 was quite absurd. In Poland people talked about the “right to hate”, while West Germans asserted a “right to the (lost) homelands”, without any attempt to understand the feelings of their Polish neighbours.

The Poles wove themselves a national mythology that ignored not only the German history of Lower Silesia, Pommerania and East Prussia, but also the fact that there was a strong positive German presence throughout Polish history, in the political, economic and cultural spheres. For many Poles, the problem of regional historical identity is especially delicate in the formerly East German provinces. For several years now there has been a veritable “passion for archaeology” among younger Poles. Young writers imagine the German history of their home towns – Gdansk (Danzig), Walbrzych (Waldenburg) or Slupsk (Stolp) – and attempt to invent a prehistory for their houses, districts and villages, so as not to live in a historical vacuum. They deplore the fact that their museums of local history and culture are empty and faceless, in part because the artefacts were destroyed in the war or carried away into the west by fleeing Germans in the winter of 1944/45 or into the east by the Russians as “booty” in 1945, in part because the authorities of People’s Poland reduced them to the meagre traces of Polish or Slavic presence in these regions. Now the young enthusiasts are trying to fit out regional history by organising tradition parades, held on various homeland days, drawing on all aspects of the regional history, i.e. including the German elements. Members of the “Borussia” cultural society in Polish Allenstein (Olsztyn) are documenting the authentic German, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish,Tartar and of course also Prussian history of East Prussia. And they are proud of the fact that they are supported in their efforts by Germans expelled from their homelands.

Just as the Poles have a “German problem”, the problem of their – predominantly economically – dominant neighbour and its history in Poland, the Germans for their part have a “Polish problem”. It consists, among other things, in the fact that in the 20th century it was precisely the neighbour who was not even noticed any more who twice ultimately was the beneficiary of the “bid for world power” undertaken by Germany. The most painful territorial losses in 1919 and 1945 went not to the victorious Great Powers – France and the Soviet Union respectively – but to a “Nobody” Germany had not reckoned with at all. And this “Nobody”, just six years after being flattened by German tanks in September 1939, advanced almost to the gates of Berlin: no question about it, this went against any kind of “pecking order”.

The unification of Germany in 1989/90 and the transfer of the real capital ten years later from the Rhine almost to the Oder have also changed the perspective on German-Polish neighbourhood. It is no coincidence that the idea of a German-Polish “Oder Alliance” saw the light of day in the year in which the “Berlin Republic” was born. It was an assertive response to the new intellectual and political constellation in Germany. At the same time, it also has quite pragmatic roots. These roots can be sought in the great Oder flood in 1997, when once more – as at the time of the “Polish craze” in the 19th century or the “aid packet campaign” during martial law in 1981 – a spontaneous aid initiative arose in Germany to help Poland in trouble. Out of this initiative came the idea of a joint regulation and modernisation of the Oder. However, the idea of close cooperation in the border area goes beyond short-term emergency programmes. It is a philosophical and historical vision of a far-reaching German–Polish symbiosis in the border region and beyond. The underlying considerations are broadly European in character: that this, the interface between Germany and Poland, which was a tectonic rift that shook the whole continent in a series of political crises in the 20th century, was the very place where a deep-rooted closely intermeshed German-Polish community must be born.

And here again the experience of the solution found to the German–French quarrels after the war is the inspiration. The nucleus of the EEC was the Montan Union, the common management of the key industries – coal and steel – that had still been the symbol of national political power before 1939. The mutual renunciation of this status symbol and the linking of the key industries of France, the Federal Republic and the Benelux countries laid the foundation stone for the unification of Europe.

So what could be the basis of a German– Polish Montan Union – a de facto foundation stone of the EU after enlargement to Eastern Europe? It could no longer be based on coal and steel, because their status will be still lower in the 21st century than it is now. Nor on agriculture, even though this area now seems as much of a sore point for the national psychology as the coal mines and steelworks were half a century ago. The objective we must strive for is an economically strong region that would make Mecklenburg–Western Pommerania in Germany and Eastern Pommerania in Poland, Brandenburg and Great Poland, Saxony and Lower Silesia into an engine for development in Central Europe. A kind of regional Silicon Valley, with Berlin, Dresden and Rostock on one side and Szczecin, Poznan and Wroclaw, extending as far as Warsaw, Gdansk and Cracow, on the other side.

At present this may still be regarded as a mere fantasy, since – in spite of massive transfers, totalling far in excess of a billion marks – it has not even proved possible to develop the former GDR as a whole into a favourable site and a technology park for the third modernisation. The border region would have to be a matter close to the heart of those responsible for economic, educational and spatial planning policies. They should establish the most up-to-date ecotechnologies in Cottbus, Bautzen and Schwedt, or in Walbrzych, Olesnica and Pila.Yet the crucial role will be played by culture and education. The “Oder Alliance” must begin in the mind, must signify a reorientation in the consciousness of neighbours who have not always found one another very appealing, a reorientation that involves adaptation to one another, the reciprocal attuning of their local cultural and educational policies, to put it pointedly, by creating here along the border a space for a deep, well-considered, functioning osmosis.

“The Polish–German border region, more than others, can and should be an area for cooperation, modernisation and innovation”, wrote Bronislaw Geremek and Joschka Fischer in their joint paper. “The history of Europe is full of examples of regions hampered by structural weaknesses that have advanced to the forefront thanks to well-considered economic, educational and social policies.”

The success of German–Polish cooperation had an impact far transcending the borders of our countries in the 1990s: it had a stabilising influence on the whole region to the east of Poland. The Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Lithuanian dialogues followed the pattern set by the German–Polish dialogue. At no other border can the European idea be so spectacularly confirmed, but this can also be the place where the idea breaks down. Even if the impression may have arisen lately that national egoism is again gaining the upper hand, the significance of German–Polish joint initiatives in the border area is obvious.

In spite of this, the public mind is occupied more with the past than with the future, and this is not just the case in Poland and Germany. Whether the focus is on the tug-of-war about the Benes Decrees or the museum of European expulsion or the restitution of Prussia in the Federal Republic, on the eve of the EU’s enlargement to the East, which will determine the future of Europe for generations to come, the past is a burning issue once again. The American historian and winner of the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize Fritz Stern has spoken of Germany’s “second chance” and emphasises that Germany can only take this second chance in the company of its neighbours immediately to the east.