The Past in the Present: The Construction of Polish History

Combining material from his two previous books (2006, 2009), and articles published in 2013, Traba aims to bring coherence and continued relevance to his dialogue about history. He seeks as well to enrich the discussion of the history of Poland, Germany, and Polish-German relations with his thesis of using the lingua franca of contemporary historiography as he promotes the construction of a new Polish history. With interests in collective memory, applied history, regional history, particularly the Polish-German borderlands he analyzes recent disputes over Polish historiography. Seventeen chapters are divided into three parts: Polish dilemmas: practice and theory; Poles and Germans: theory; Poles and Germans: the empirical world. Chapters are: two dimensions of history; history as a space for dialogue; Poland’s Kresy (eastern borderlands; constructing memory; Stefan Czarnowski and the continued relevance of his theories in contemporary historical thought; “the other side of memory”; realms of memory in the context of German-Polish relations; Quo Vadis regional history?; cultural memory-communicative memory; Golo Mann; on Germans “mine” and “not mine”; in search of a “portable homeland”; Warmia/Ermland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; collective memory and cultural landscape; “you glorify the foreign, but you do not know of your own”; the “landscape after battle”; “it was only a film!." Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)