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"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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Picture gallery
A City Inside the City
Some disdain it as an enclave of a consumerist, unthinking middle class. Others sing its praises and consider it a one-of-a-kind urban development project. No other urban district in Poland has been written about and discussed as much as the Miasteczko Wilanów. But where do the roots of this discussion lie? What part do literature and other art forms play in the reproduction of those narratives? And what does the reality behind the stereotypes and urbanistic homages actually look like?
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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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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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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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Between Polish Metropolis and Provincial Prussian Town
The period of Prussian rule in Warsaw has traditionally received little attention and is usually interpreted as an early climax of Prussian-German expansionism in Poland. Yet it was also a time when, under the influence of the Enlightenment, a number of important educational initiatives developed in the city.
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Capital of the Saxon Garden Baroque on the Vistula River
The cartographic drawings of Warsaw from 1730-1762, preserved in the Dresden and Warsaw collections, illustrate the architectural garden city where the artistic ideas of the Saxon Baroque were crystallized. These exceptional documents bear testimony to a golden era where the urban landscape and cultural life of the city grew and flourished, stimulated by the patronage of the Saxon royal court, the great families of the Polish nobility, and the cooperation of Polish and Saxon craftsmen and artists.
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Map and text
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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Documentation center
Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation
The Documentation Center offers exhibitions, a library and a testimony archive, tours, workshops and events. The Center provides information about the causes, dimensions and consequences of displacement, expulsion and forced migration in the past and present. Particular focus is on the displacement...
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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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Forgotten, but not lost
The seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 led to a major wave of migration out of Germany. Over 500,000 people left the Third Reich, among them numerous artists and cultural professionals. The exhibition presents works by artists in exile who came from former West Prussia and other...
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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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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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Podcast
Hanna Schygulla
The actor Hanna Schygulla was 30 years old when she first met Gottliebe von Lehndorff in 1973. The scene of the encounter: the artists' colony in the old Peterskirchen vicarage, east of Munich. They lived there for thirteen years, their apartments backing onto each other. Despite their age difference, they had many things in common, not least the experience of losing their homeland. In the podcast, the years they shared at Peterskirchen come back to life.
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Biography
Hannah Wadle
In 2009, Hannah Wadle settled in Sztynort to do research for her doctoral thesis – and stayed for a whole year. Gradually, her cautious explorations turned into familiarity and what began as a purely academic interest became a dedicated personal commitment to the town and its people. She learned to see the Lehndorff manor house from many perspectives. In 2017, she founded a cultural festival, and since then the palace has come to life every August.
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In the Enemy's Viewfinder – German photo-journalists in occupied Warsaw 1939-1945
During World War II, around 700,000 residents of Warsaw lost their lives. Almost the whole Jewish population was murdered. By 1945, Warsaw had become a ruined and almost deserted city. The photographs on show come from observations through the “Enemy's Viewfinder”, that is, through the lenses of...
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Jewish Postcard Publishers and the Imagery of the Urban
In numerous cities across eastern Europe, Jewish publishers enjoyed notable success on the newly established postcard market. This article presents a socio-historical background of this topic and asks whether their social positioning influenced the depictions of the urban world they chose to feature on their postcards.
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