Photographs of a divided landscape. The Polish-Russian border in East Prussia

After World War II, East Prussia, which had been German until then, not only experienced an almost complete population exchange, but was also divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. This created one of the strangest borders in Europe: artificial, largely drawn with a ruler, strictly guarded, and almost impassable. Following the liberalization of border traffic in the second decade of the 21st century, the region has recently experienced another negative turn due to global political developments.

Poland responded to the changed situation after Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022-2023 by constructing an electronic border barrier approximately 200 kilometers long. In addition to the border fence that has existed since the Soviet era, it now forms another artificial element in the East Prussian landscape, further reinforcing the peripheral location of the southern part of East Prussia within Poland and the European Union.

The exhibition is the result of a journey undertaken by journalist and regional researcher Dawid Smolorz and photographer Thomas Voßbeck in October 2023. Their journey took them from the Curonian Spit to the Polish-Lithuanian-Russian border triangle east of the Rominter Heath. With text and images, the exhibition presents snapshots of the Polish side of this European borderland, but also offers a glimpse into its past.

Dawid Smolorz (Gliwice), born in 1971 in Hindenburg/Zabrze (Upper Silesia), works as a regional researcher, freelance journalist, translator, author, and co-author of popular science publications on Upper Silesian and Central European topics. His articles have appeared in Warsaw's Gazeta Wyborcza, Katowice's Dziennik Zachodni, the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk portal, and Wochenblatt, the newspaper for Germans in Poland, among others. In cooperation with the House of German-Polish Cooperation in Gliwice/Opole, he initiates projects on regional topics. Based on personal experience, Smolorz considers borders to be an extremely exciting topic, both those that currently exist and those that no longer exist, those that are permeable and those that are strictly guarded. What makes them special, he says, is that they are all places of separation and encounter at the same time.

Thomas Voßbeck, born in Leipzig in 1969, has been working as a freelance photographer for more than 25 years. In various photographic projects, most of which he realizes in collaboration with Dawid Smolorz, he focuses primarily on German-Polish themes. In 2009/10, this resulted in a book and exhibition project on the historical industrial architecture of the Upper Silesian industrial area, entitled “Structure and Architecture. The Post-Industrial Cultural Heritage of Upper Silesia.” In collaboration with the Herder Institute and the Silesian Museum in Katowice, the trilingual book and exhibition project “Upper Silesia from the Air” was realized in 2016/17, combined with the creation of numerous current aerial photographs of this cultural region.