Scholarship on German-Polish relations after Hitler has increasingly explored the role of non-state actors. Among the highlights, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz and Marek Zybura feature German cultural elites in their collection Mein Polen…deutsche Polenfreunde in Porträts (2005). In Reisen in die Vergangenheit? (2015), Corinna Felsch assesses human-level interchange in Poland by East German members of Aktion Sühnezeichen, West Germans supported by the Bosch Foundation, and expellees documented in Heimat papers. Pertti Ahonen's classic analysis of West German (FRG) expellee political organizations in After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945–1990 (2003) devotes considerable attention to how prominent journalists turned the FRG conversation toward a pro-Polish stance and against expellee political positions such as border revision.
Inserting herself into this crowded field, Annika Elisabet Frieberg reconstructs the reconciliatory narrative forged by a handful of FRG media elites and members of the state-approved Polish Catholic “Znak circle” opposition. Influential beyond their numbers, Frieberg's FRG media icons include Die Zeit editor Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Stern editor Henri Nannen, Westdeutscher Rundfunk director general Klaus von Bismarck, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporter Hansjakob Stehle, and television reporter Jürgen Neven-du Mont. Her Polish subjects include Tygodnik Powszechny editor Jerzy Turowicz and contributors Stefan Kisielewski and Mieczysław Pszon, historian Władysław Bartoszewski, Więź editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Wrocław Bishop Bolesław Kominek. Referencing the FRG and Polish press, German archives, and interviews from the mid-2000s, Frieberg argues that the creation of Znak in 1956 helped FRG journalists gain a foothold in Polish elite circles and exploit their media influence to steer FRG society in a conciliatory direction.
After Frieberg's first chapter explores early networking efforts in 1956, Chapter 2 features FRG journalist encounters with Polish elites through the late 1950s and early 1960s. For instance, Stehle befriended Znak members and published numerous articles and books that undermined German victim tropes, overcame negative stereotypes of Poland, and rejected border revision claims demanded by expellee organizations. Chapters 3 and 4 recount how FRG television and radio figures attained Polish contacts and broadly disseminated pro-Polish messages. Because only the most rightwing expellees made the press, Frieberg argues, “the expellees, especially those connected to the Landsmannschaften, became more and more firmly associated with antidemocratic violence and revisionism” (120). Chapter 5 summarizes the landmark Polish and FRG bishops’ letters and Protestant expellee memorandum of 1965. After Chapter 6 explores how media lobbying influenced Ostpolitik, Chapter 7 looks at how media elites celebrated their achievements by the 1990s, downplaying dialogue with Polish communists and emphasizing a common Christian and European heritage.
Two themes stand out within Frieberg's findings. First, the persons involved in these personal relations were not ordinary people, but “a highly influential network of Polish and West German intelligentsia and media personalities” with strong ties to leading political actors (2). Not unlike their Znak contacts, FRG reporters in Poland also engaged in a degree of self-censorship, as “the communists’ visa and accreditation policies vis-á-vis western journalists” made them “cautious of publishing inflammatory or hostile content” (75).
Second, “the great focus on developing and maintaining state relations” prompted Frieberg's FRG media elites to ignore the domestic unpopularity of the Polish state by the 1960s, which ultimately limited “healing between the two societies” (206). For instance, Stehle's optimistic account of post-1956 Poland “continued to inform knowledge of Polish communism into the late 1960s, even though the circumstances it described had changed” (60). By the time state-level reconciliation peaked in the late-1960s, media representations had ossified into a standard repertoire of conciliatory phrases with “limited societal participation in the dialogue” (155). Although Znak lost influence and the Polish regime purged perceived enemies (notably Jews) in 1968, FRG media sustained a positive narrative about reconciliation and even regime leaders like Władysław Gomułka in the name of improved relations (173). The reconciliation narrative also reinforced the concept that homogenous nation-states are natural and ideal for peacemaking, underplaying the suffering wrought by forced migration.
Frieberg successfully reconstructs how FRG media and Polish Znak elites produced a narrative of reconciliation that both paralleled and overlapped with state-level actors. As such, this study offers useful information for specialists. Her declaration that “models of peace-building need to extend beyond state relations into broader layers of societies and into multiple groups within those societies” (17) should inspire further scholarship to delve through broader layers of German-Polish public interchange. Beneath the veneer of “peace at all costs,” which in Frieberg's analysis gained sway through the 1960s, a vast cast of characters (also in East Germany and abroad) was also seeking peace, often in humble ways that never made the big papers.
