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Organizations
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Background article
"Wait till the Scots come!"
This old Prussian proverb exhorts us to be patient and wait for the right opportunity. But what does this have to do with the far north of Great Britain? The answer leads us to Gdansk. In the early modern era, the port city attracted numerous merchant ships from the Baltic region and beyond. Some even came from as far away as Scotland to seek their fortune there.
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1920 - A province disappears
The First World War was an important caesura in the history of the province of West Prussia. The cornerstones negotiated in the Treaty of Versailles ended the integration of West Prussia into Prussian territory and incorporated the region into the newly founded Polish Second Republic. This led to...
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A Breath of Valkyrie on the Baltic Sea. Nationalism and Romanticism in the Literature of East Prussia
What do a knight of the Teutonic Order, the Song of the Nibelungs and Hermann the Cheruscan have in common? They were all intended to legitimize the founding of the German Empire in 1871, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. This was a "unification from above" for which Prussia waged...
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Biography
A diary report of deportation and arrival
Joanna Konopińska recounts her deportation by the Germans during World War II and her arrival in Wroclaw after the end of the war in 1945 in her moving diary “Tamten wrocławski rok”.
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Agata, Dorota, Iwona, Jolanta
"What luck that we had this kindergarten!" All four say. That was in the early 1970s. Agata and Jolanta now live in Germany, Dorota and Iwona have stayed in Masuria. Lehndorff Castle, the "Pałac", was a place they all felt happy. In those stately rooms they had a feeling of security and comfort, they played among the old oaks, went swimming in the lake. It was a microcosm away from the adult world with its worries and traumas.
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Background article
Antje Vollmer
She is known as a Green Party politician and for her longstanding role as Vice President of the German Bundestag. After retiring in 2005, she became a freelance author. Her first book project “Doppelleben” (Double Life) tells the story of Heinrich von Lehndorff, one of the conspirators of the events of 20 July 1944 , and his wife Gottliebe. It is a moving biography of two young aristocrats that tells of their daring and their love.
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Biography
Artist and Art Figure
Monika Hunnius is generally known as a Baltic German author. She, however, saw herself as a musician – and was part of a network of musicians that extended all over Europe, to which Julius Stockhausen, Johannes Brahms, and Clara Schumann belonged as well.
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Bestandstyp
Holding
Bestandsbeschreibung Westpreußisches Landesmuseum
The collections of the West Prussia State Museum are aimed at audiences interested in cultural history, including local historians and school classes. The library and archive offer possibilities for in-depth study and can provide basic information for local history and family researchers.
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Biography
Bettina Bouresh
"I’m a typical post-war child," says Bettina Bouresh. Born in 1950, she grew up burdened with German guilt and the traumas of her mother's family, who had lived in Allenstein until 1945. She herself felt homeless for a long time. Until one day she found her place: in Masuria. Here she found a home – and in Steinort Palace her life’s work. Today she is vice-chairwoman of the Lehndorff Society.
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Commemorating Copernicus
Since the 19th century, numerous Copernicus monuments have been built around the world. Even today, new sites of remembrance honoring the astronomer emerge, especially in Poland. Each site has a unique agenda, narrative, and background.
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Musical rendition
Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Goes Around the World) / Die tote Stadt op. 12 – Glück, das mir verblieb (The dead city – Joy, that remained to me)
Hans May (music), Ernst Neubach (text) / Erich Wolfgang Korngold (music), Paul Schott (text) / Richard Resch (tenor), Lutz Landwehr von Pragenau (piano)
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Picture gallery
Emil Orlik
Emil Orlik (1870–1932) was one of the most famous and versatile Czech artists of the turn of the century. He was known primarily as a graphic artist and draftsman whose artistic work ranged between realism and art nouveau. His extensive oeuvre includes drawings of famous contemporary musicians and composers – whom Orlik also liked to show practicing their art.
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Encounters with a German-Polish cultural landscape
The history of West Prussia is very multi-faceted. It is an example of a cultural landscape on the Baltic Sea that has benefited from its advantageous location in the heart of Europe for centuries, but has also frequently become the political plaything of rulers. The permanent exhibition in the West...
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Biography
Eva Anna Therese Puschke
As far back as the 19th century, the Puschke family worked as teachers in Steinort and in the neighboring church village of Rosengarten. They played an important role in village life and had close ties to the noble Lehndorff family. The last teacher of the dynasty was Eva Puschke, a "lay teacher" in Rosengarten from 1940 to 1944. After the Germans were expelled, she lived in Hamburg. She left behind a suitcase full of family documents.
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Biography
Fritz Lamm: A diary as a companion during his escape in 1936
Fritz Lamm describes his escape from the Nazi persecution of Jews from Stettin via Switzerland and Austria to Prague in his previously unpublished diary.
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Gdansk in aerial photographs in the interwar years
In impressive photographs, the extensive aerial photo exhibition documents the Hanseatic city of Gdansk before the destruction of the Second World War.
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Background article
Gdansk’s “Soundscape” and Music Culture between 1800 and 1945
Can soundscapes of the past be reconstructed? What did cities actually sound like in centuries gone by? And do we associate certain sounds and soundscapes with the history of particular cities? This text introduces some possibilities of soundscape research, using the city of Gdansk as an example.
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Projekttypen
Editing project
Gedichte und Briefe aus der Verbannung (“Poems and Letters from Exile”)
In this edition project, all the poems Wolf von Aichelburg wrote in exile will be collected, along with precise details of how they were recorded and passed down, and accompanied, where appropriate, by the author's own statements or other contextualizing information.
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Image database
Image catalogue of the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association
In the online database of the Image Archive you will find the previously inventoried and digitized image materials from the collections of the Herder Institute as well as additional image sources from joint indexing and digitization projects with cooperation partners. Further analog and digital...
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Map and text
Important locations in Copernicus’ life
Nicolaus Copernicus rose to fame due to his interest in the stars. But where did he spend his life on Earth? Most of his sites of activity are found in present-day Poland, and many of them also relate to German history.
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