Remembering and Remapping Breslaff: Resurfacing German and Queer Topographies in Contemporary Polish Literature

This article focuses on the role of contemporary Polish literature in bringing back that which has been repressed under communism: the Germanness of the so-called “regained territories”, i.e. territories that became Polish due to the changes of national borders after the Second World War, as well as the marginalized queer life. I discuss two novels that feature the city of Wrocław, formerly German Breslau: Marek Krajewski’s Death in Breslau (1999) and Michał Witkowski’s Lovetown (2004). My analysis draws parallels between bringing back the German past of the city and remembering queer life during communism in fiction. Marek Krajewski situates the plot of his highly popular crime novel in Breslau in the 1930s. By doing so, he fictionally recreates the former German city which allows the reader to rediscover its past and foreign layer. Michał Witkowski’s prose performs a similar task by describing parts of the city that were central to queer culture but hidden from the experience of the “general public” under communism. I argue that remembering takes effect through remapping and that this literary remapping destabilizes the narrative about Polish culture as a homogeneous block of monolingualism, Catholicism, and heteronormativity. Furthermore, the fictional topographies of the German Breslau and the queer Wrocław alter the existing geospace by overlaying a suppressed otherness onto it.