ABSTRACT
Traces of Lost Others: Memories of Vanished Urban Communities in Contemporary Polish Literature
The urban experience of contemporary Polish writers is defined by the ghosts of vanished others. Writing on cities in Poland in the post-communist period has been preoccupied with dealing with the traces of these others, with evoking and/or exorcising their ghosts. In cities such as Gdańsk and Wrocław, contemporary writers such as Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Inga Iwasiów and Marek Krajewski are faced with an urban heritage that is overwhelmingly German, while in cities such as Warsaw, Kraków or Łódź the specters of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the traces of the ghettos still loom large in the imagination of writers such as Andrzej Bart, Mariusz Sieniewicz or Piotr Paziński. These are not the only lost others that appear in the contemporary Polish literary cityscape – a recent novel by young writer Łukasz Saturczak deals with the Ukrainian heritage of Przemyśl. The paper will argue, through reference to several of the writers mentioned above, that Polish authors treat their cities as memory texts that demand careful interpretation and re-inscription. The defining feature of these texts, however, are the uncanny, almost-erased traces of lost others that persist in the urban space and thus in memory.
