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Part of Kierunek – Wschód! A personal discovery of Poland / Lud, 2016, t. 100

extracted text: Lud, t. 100, 2016

ALEXANDRA SCHWELL
Department of Cultural Anthropology
Hamburg University
Germany

KIERUNEK – WSCHÓD! A PERSONAL DISCOVERY OF POLAND

Having conducted ﬁeldwork among such diverse groups as anarchists, border
guards, expellees and ministry ofﬁcials in Poland over recent years, I have been
asked by the editors of “Lud” to come up with a not so much a scholarly, but
rather personal account of my experiences of doing ﬁeldwork in Poland. I am
grateful to “Lud” for the opportunity to reﬂect upon my personal Polish-German
history and my encounter with Poland and Polish anthropology. In effect, this
has become less a story about Polish ethnology and cultural anthropology, and
instead one about encounters, processes of learning and gradual development
on my – West-German – part. I will begin my personal account not with a ﬁeldwork episode but with the early encounters and imageries of Poland that framed
my expectations. These, I argue, were not particularly speciﬁc to me but mirror
a widespread attitude towards the Eastern neighbor.
Having been born in the mid-1970s in South-West Germany, Poland for me
was a strange place somewhere hidden behind the German Democratic Republic,
which in fact was yet another strange place. My parents and I had visited our
friends in East Berlin twice when I was a child, and I was convinced that during each of our visits it had been raining and the whole scenery had been grey,
foggy and misty. This memory was so vivid that I was in fact surprised when
a few years ago I accidentally found photographs from our visits to East Berlin
and our friends’ dacha and discovered that during each of our visits the sun had
been shining and we had had the most beautiful weather conditions. Memories
are framed, and in this case literally clouded, by cultural imageries and symbolic
geographies. Moreover, to perceive of the countries behind the Iron Curtain as
grey, sad and gloomy was nothing speciﬁc to me. Rather, many people of my
generation, who had few or no links to the “other side”, had no emotional attachment to the unknown “brothers and sisters” or the “lost territories” and therefore
did not share the phantom pain which many of the older generation felt. Our
imaginations about the lands behind the Iron Curtain were mostly informed by

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Alexandra Schwell

their memories and narratives and also by their fears and warnings, for example
about GDR border guards. Within this imagery, Poland, it seemed to me, had to
be an even grayer and foggier place than the GDR, with constantly drizzling rain
and inhabited by unhappy and bad-tempered people.
I ﬁrst set foot into Poland in 1995, when my cousin convinced me to spend our
holidays there. We took my parents’ car, a red VW Golf, which left my parents
convinced that they would never see their car back again. My father, a teacher,
even asked one of his pupils of Polish descent to write a note saying “For sale
due to engine damage”. He suggested sticking the note to the car window in order
to deter potential thieves. My cousin and I were too embarrassed to use the note.
Still, we were ourselves not unimpressed by prejudices and stereotyping. Harald
Schmidt’s “Polish jokes” – he was the host of a late night show in the 1990s
– were only a culmination point in a long German tradition of looking down
upon the Eastern neighbor. We spent a lovely time in Świnoujście and traveled
along the coast to Gdańsk, the former of which led me to the conclusion that it
is biologically impossible to pronounce Polish words unless having grown up in
Poland and having familiarized your tongue and vocal chords from earliest age
on. At least we were a good laugh for those Polish young men who taught us to
pronounce “Świnoujście”.
Three years later I was already in the midst of my studies of European ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin. One day a leaﬂet on the bulletin board
in the Department of European Ethnology caught my attention: “Who wants to
spend a semester in Poland or Hungary?”. Remembering my failed attempts to
pronounce Polish words years ago, I felt immediately challenged. The two Polish
cities on offer within the TEMPUS program were Warsaw and Poznań, and my
choice was pragmatically motivated: should this exchange semester turn out to be
a bad idea, it would only take me three hours to get home to Berlin from Poznań.
Moreover, Poznań seemed to me to be better suited to make friends due to its size
of 500,000 inhabitants, compared to the huge capital.
Due to the lack of other potential exchange students, I got the place; there was
only one other applicant, who was also successful. The grant included a more
than generous stipend which left those other students who also spent a semester
abroad green with envy. The amount of the stipend was probably in inverse proportion to the popularity of the Polish and Hungarian destinations at the time. In
fact I was often asked by friends and family why on earth had I chosen Poland
as a destination and not some nice warm country with a language where I could
make myself understood.
It was in 1997, in the semester prior to my ﬁrst academic visit to Poland, that
I ﬁrst met Michał Buchowski. He was a guest professor at the Department of
European Ethnology in Berlin at the time and his class included an excursion to
Poznań. Apart from the embarrassing fact that our student group failed to ﬁnd the
Old Town on the ﬁrst day, this excursion actually encouraged me to pursue my

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105

plan to study in Poznań the following semester. Michał later agreed to supervise
my M.A. and Ph.D. theses and we cooperated within our FP7 project on “Football
Research in an Enlarged Europe” (FREE) between 2012 and 2015.
The German-Polish border was only 60 km away from Berlin, but in our
imagined geography it was a world away. In fact, this distance was the basis of
a popular quiz Polish friends used to play with Western visitors. The image of the
Far East was extremely pervasive among almost all the people I knew, myself
included. Reading some of the almost classic accounts on the cultural construction of Eastern Europe many years later, I still feel strangely found out, such as in
Larry Wolff’s (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe or also Maria Todorova’s (1997)
Imagining the Balkans, to name but two.
While I had been positively surprised during my 1995 visit and also during
a later short stay in 1997, both visits had taken place in summer. Winter, I was
convinced, was expected to be harsh and deep; Eastern, almost Siberian. Since
my stay was supposed to begin in February, my mother urged me to buy a new
winter coat which would keep me warm during the long Polish winter. I guess all
of us had something like “Peter and the wolf” in mind when we thought about
winter in Poland. Well, surprisingly winter in Poznań turned out to quite unSiberian. Berlin winter and Poznań winter take place about 300 km apart from
each other, hence few differences could be observed (my super anti-Siberian coat
provided great service during a much later stay in the Canadian winter).
I left Berlin for my exchange semester on a cold and misty February morning
by train from Lichtenberg station. When the train approached the border, I nervously memorized my Polish survival words. While still in Berlin, I had attended
Polish classes for linguists that were also free of charge at the time for students
from other departments. After one semester I was able to recognize and translate
incredibly complicated grammatical forms, but unfortunately I was not quite sure
yet how to properly pronounce them. On the train to Poznań I had planned to
greet the border guard in Polish as an audible proof of my good will and openness towards the East. Needless to add that my well-prepared Dzień dobry! (good
morning) came out as Dziękuję! (thank you), when I ﬁnally handed my passport
to the Polish border guard. I felt incredibly stupid.
The Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the time did not
offer any classes in English, and since my and the two other exchange students’
Polish was far from sufﬁcient to follow classes in Polish, the department suggested
that we meet with members of the faculty each separately to discuss their research
topics, and the department organized a weekly class at the Department of Sociology
in English for us. We also joined a class on Polish history that had been organized
for a few US exchange students at the Department of History. I vividly remember
this history class, as it showed me quite plainly how little I had previously known
about Polish history and about the entanglements of Polish and German history.
As a West-German, I had obviously learned a lot about (West-)German national

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Alexandra Schwell

history, but also about French, British and US history (the Russian revolution was
omitted by my right-wing history teacher, who refused to talk about Lenin). This
Polish history class opened up an entirely new perspective of European history, and
it was embarrassing proof of how little knowledge about, and interest in, Central-Eastern Europe existed on “our” side of the continent.
I was lucky that at the time there were very few exchange students in Poznań,
and I lived in a dormitory where few people spoke English. Both the Polish students and also later the anarchists, whom I researched, quickly and, I have to add,
very patiently, integrated me, both in linguistic and in social terms. Although
I and the other exchange students did not attend classes, we took part in other
activities, such as the inicjacja, the departmental party for ﬁrst-year students.
The Polish students’ self-ironic play with elements from anthropology and ethnology and the playful and creative way that also forged their departmental identity
made a lasting impression. Generally, the Department of Ethnology and Cultural
Anthropology seemed to speciﬁcally attract students who were alternative, creative, unconventional, and open, and many students were proud to emphasize
these speciﬁcities as something that distinguished them from other academic disciplines. This kind of self-image felt familiar for me as a Berlin student of smalltown Swabian descent.
I came back to Poznań two years later with an ERASMUS stipend to conduct
ﬁeldwork for my M.A. thesis among Polish alternative culture and anarchists in
and around the “Rozbrat” squat. During my ﬁrst stay I had been struck by two, for
me, seemingly incompatible facts: Why would Polish anarchists insist on a preferential and courteous treatment for women while on the other hand claiming
equality and freedom for everyone? Why would Polish anarchists, punks, and
other alternative groups fervently reject certain behavioral patterns, social structures, and institutions, but adhere to others that to my mind were deﬁnitely oldfashioned? This irritation lead me to research Polish alternative culture’s relation
to traditional values, which was later published in German in a book Anarchie
ist die Mutter der Ordnung (Schwell 2005). Not only did I conduct participant
observation and interviews with various actors, but I also followed their narrative
legitimizing strategies and dug deeper into Polish history. I was fascinated by the
power of historical narratives of a long-gone Rzeczpospolita, the noblemen of
the szlachta, the way of life of the “Sarmatians” (all of which I had, again, never
encountered in history classes in school), and the way they were used to formulate ideas, create imageries and inform actions in present everyday life and political actions.
Many Germans of my generation have grown up feeling uneasy when being exposed as German when travelling abroad, and particularly in neighboring
countries, most of which had suffered tremendously during the Second World
War. Poland, which had lost about one ﬁfth of its population during the war,
where more people than anywhere else in Europe were killed in German con-

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centration camps, to me felt like an even much more sensitive place than, for
example, France where my parents had so often urged me not to talk too loudly
in German in public. Moreover, while France and the French were generally considered equal and civilized in public discourse, Poland and Poles were subject to
popular jokes, displaying Poles as stupid, thieves, and generally inferior. A German orientalizing gaze towards Poles was dominant, drawing upon historical
stereotypes and prejudices. The only difference to classical orientalism was probably that it lacked orientalism’s ambiguous dialectic of affection and rejection
– there was little desire towards the East, only expressed in a patriarchal gaze on
East-European prostitutes.
In light of this historical legacy, I was surprised how little recent history
played a role in everyday interaction with me. Only once was I yelled at for being German in a pub in Poznań by a drunkard, but German-Polish history never
inﬂuenced my interactions with friends and colleagues or interfered with my
ﬁeldwork. I largely ascribe this to the fact that I engaged in the endeavor to learn
Polish. Western Europeans, it seemed to me, who attempted to learn the language,
were a rather uncommon sight, and I was often asked by locals for my “good
reasons”. Did I have family in Poland? Had my family emigrated from Poland?
Why else would I want to learn the language? I had the feeling that I had already earned some kind of respect for engaging in that difﬁcult task. Many Poles
I met would dwell on a self-imposed inferiority and a self-deprecatory attitude
on the one hand and a celebration of the self, Polish creativity, and lust for life on
the other hand. While the former often adopted the pejorative image of an alleged
East-European “civilizational incompetence” and popular stereotypes about Poland or the East in general, the latter seemed to be an explicit negation and rejection of the very same Western stereotypes. This “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld
1997) also appeared in the archetypes of the nieudacznik and the kombinator,
two self-images which I found to be effective in a later research among ofﬁcials
in Warsaw dealing with EU matters (Schwell 2015).
In 2004 I was offered a job to conduct narrative biographical interviews with
elderly people who had been expelled from the “Kresy” or other former Polish
territories to Silesia after World War II. I conducted hours of interviews with
these people in Silesia who told me their life stories. The project was led by
the Institute for Saxonian History and Ethnology in Dresden and funded by the
Saxonian Ministry of the Interior. These people had lived through unspeakable
horrors, they had suffered from both German and Soviet occupation, had been
deported to Siberia or had survived the Holocaust hidden behind a dresser. All of
them had managed to come to the “Ziemie Odzyskane” and had lived in a house
that had previously belonged to Germans. It was most striking for me that there
was no bitterness towards me, and the Germans in general, in their accounts. All
agreed that “they had to leave their home, just like we had to leave ours”. They
all greeted me with great hospitality, sometimes with food, liquor and vodka. For

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some, these interviews opened old wounds which made them cry during our conversations, others had found a way to narrate their story as if it belonged to somebody else, only sometimes disrupted by personal and very emotional confessions,
such as when one man who grew up in what is today Ukraine said, very quietly:
“I am still terriﬁed when I suddenly hear someone speak Ukrainian in public
behind my back”. But there was also the old Ukrainian man who at ﬁrst was too
afraid to tell his story as it felt to him like an unauthorized counter-narrative to
the ofﬁcial narrative, but felt relieved when he was ﬁnally able to talk. Similar
interviews were conducted in Saxony with Germans who had to ﬂee from Silesia.
The results of the research project were published on an audio CD entitled Dieser
Schmerz bleibt (“This pain remains”) (2004). My Polish interlocutors’ empathy
towards their German counterparts, their joint feeling of mutual suffering that
could have united their fates, had made a lasting impression on me.
My Ph.D. research brought me back to Poland in 2003, but this time it explicitly included a German-Polish dimension. Just as in my previous research,
I took the inspiration for my Ph.D. topic from life itself. Traveling back and forth
between Berlin and Poznań, I had often observed German-Polish border guard
teams jointly checking travelers on the train. Some of these teams apparently got
along very well and also talked and joked together while waiting for the train.
Others, on the other hand, seemed to spend most of the time wishing they were
somewhere else. Why was that so? Who had ordered them to cooperate? What
was the rationale behind that cooperation? And how did that rationale translate
into practice?
I was granted permissions by both German and Polish border guard agencies
to conduct ﬁeldwork. Interestingly, the German border guard agency, the Bundespolizei, was much more reluctant than the Polish Straż Graniczna, which only
asked me to not conduct research on undercover teams. Apart from that, the Polish senior ofﬁcers were very open and cooperative. The German side, however,
proved to be much more difﬁcult. Finally, a letter from the then president of the
European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Gesine Schwan, lead to success. It turned out that the then president of the German border guards was full
of mistrust, both with regard to my potential ﬁndings and towards his very own
border guards.
The German-Polish border guard cooperation proved an exciting and dynamic ﬁeld to study. Very little had been written in cultural anthropology, and only
slightly more in other disciplines, such as political science and sociology, about
cross-border police cooperation. I entered the ﬁeld at a particularly sensitive and
stimulating moment: my ﬁeldwork took place more or less between 2004, when
Poland joined the EU, and 2007, when Poland joined the Schengen area and stationary border controls were abolished in favor of mobile controls and increased
intelligence. Polish-German border guard cooperation, which already looked
back upon a long history that dated back to the 1970s, had never been as intense

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and visually tangible as between 2004 and 2007. I was lucky that I could be of use
for both the Germans and the Poles. Many of them had worked together, patrolled
the border together, and stood side by side at the control post for hours, without
being able to communicate more than a minimum of words and sentences that are
necessary for a very basic border guard understanding (drugi pas, stop, proszę
paszport…). With me in the car or the control box, they suddenly were able to
ask everything that they always wanted to know about the colleagues from the
other side.
While my previous research among anarchists and alternative groups in
Poznań was ﬁrst and foremost informed by my own irritations, research among
border guards at the German-Polish border was different. Not only did it add an
international dimension to my ﬁeldwork, more precisely, a binational and a European one. The world of border guarding was generally strange to me, and by
participating in Polish-German encounters and translating their questions and
conversations, I learned what border guarding meant for each of them, which
differences existed between them, how different perspectives were negotiated,
or even failed to be reconciled in some instances. I learned about security and its
importance for processes of Europeanization, but I also learned about how orientalizing practices and power relations also impact upon those individuals most
willing to engage in cooperation and, sometimes, even friendship. I learned how
external factors shape personal encounters, how historical legacies and pre-existing stereotypes may be negotiated by committed individuals, but how ﬁnancial
asymmetries, working conditions, institutional differences, and institutionalized
mistrust obstruct most attempts to foster understanding. To escape the orientalization of the Poles proved, in fact, difﬁcult for both sides. It was not so much
pre-existing stereotypes and prejudices that were obstacles to understanding, but
the way they interacted with these external factors. Nevertheless, I was lucky to
ﬁnd in my ﬁeldwork border guards from both sides of the Odra who put a lot of
effort into the development of trust on a personal and not only cooperative basis.
Speaking Polish was indispensable throughout my ﬁeldwork, and besides the
linguistic element it was a source of knowledge and insights in itself. The mere
fact that I tried to learn and speak the language granted me credibility with regard
to the seriousness of my endeavor, both among Polish anarchists and German and
Polish border guards. It was a tool to make myself understood and understand
others, but also to fulﬁll a role in these people’s lives. Just as they were experts of
their ﬁelds, whose knowledge I tried to gain insight into, my knowledge of Polish
allowed me to fulﬁll a function for them. Until I moved to Vienna, I helped my
Polish interlocutors and friends from the Federacja Anarchistyczna to establish
and keep contact with Berlin anarchists. Also the border guards, many of whom
had been skeptical at the outset, welcomed my presence, arguing that “you can
tell the superiors what is going on down here”. The Polish border guards in particular lived in constant fear of their superiors and emphasized that it should by

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no means be possible for their superiors to ﬁnd out what they had told me. But
also the Germans said they too felt powerless to voice concerns. My research,
both sides hoped, would communicate problems to superior ofﬁcers in an environment which ﬁrst and foremost tried to make an impression of reconciliation,
of efﬁciency, of absolute protection, of friendship, or of European security to the
EU, the national governments or the local populations. It was published in a book
entitled Europa an der Oder („Europe at the Odra”) (Schwell 2008).
The East-West asymmetries that so often lie at the center of many of my research
projects have always been inscribed in my ﬁeldwork encounters, my own position,
and German-Polish collaboration and cooperation in more general terms. For my
Ph.D. research I was glad to be accepted as a “Europa Fellow” at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and this German-Polish Ph.D. program was
hosted by the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice. Viadrina University was proud to
present itself under the symbol of German-Polish cooperation, and I was happy
to be accepted to such an international environment. German-Polish cooperation
at Viadrina, however, turned out to be wishful thinking for the most part. Few
members of the faculty spoke Polish, few dealt with German-Polish or Polish topics. While on the Polish side in Collegium Polonicum more faculty members spoke
German, many perceived of asymmetries that they felt to be expressed in ﬁnancial, linguistic and cultural terms. Many German colleagues were reluctant to visit
the other side of the river Odra, few went further into Słubice than the Sphinx and
Odra restaurants or the London Pub. Luckily, there were also others who shared
a commuters’ ﬂat in Słubice or engaged in cross-border research, cooperation
and friendship.
The academic life I encountered at Collegium Polonicum was very different
from the small world of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Poznań, which, moreover, I had only encountered from an exchange student’s perspective. Academia in CP was much more formalized, traditional and
constantly trying to keep up to an imagined Western ideal which the immediate
West itself, Viadrina, was not able to fulﬁll itself. Ph.D. students were much less
independent and autonomous in their research, and the generous funding from the
German Ministry of Education and Research turned out to be a problem for some
of my Polish co-doctoral students as it showed too big a gap in Polish academic
salaries.
My job as an assistant professor at the University of Vienna entailed a greater
geographical distance and less opportunity for long-term ﬁeldwork. Moving from
the geographical border to the border function and bureaucratic handling, I attempted to deepen my understanding of Schengen enlargement and the wider
Europeanization process within an anthropology of the political by conducting
interviews in Polish state agencies of internal security such as the National Border Guard Headquarters, the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, and the
Police (see Schwell 2015, 2016). To date, my most recent ﬁeldwork in Poland

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took place in Poznań in 2012 within the framework of the FREE project during
the European Football Championship in Poland and Ukraine. This short ﬁeld
trip took place in close cooperation with Michał Buchowski and Gosia Kowalska. The FREE project, inter alia, explicitly sought to scrutinize Eastern Europe
as the Blind Spot of European Football, thereby reﬂecting wider social forces
and asymmetries across Europe (our research has been published, amongst other
places, in the FREE book series with Palgrave Macmillan, see Alpan, Schwell
and Sonntag, eds., 2015; Schwell, Szogs, Kowalska and Buchowski, eds., 2016).
I very much hope that there will be many other opportunities for such collaborative efforts in the years to come. However, it is those two big obstacles, which
probably will sound very familiar to many, that have been preventing me from
conducting large-scale ﬁeldwork in Poland in the recent years: time and money.
The university systems in Austria and Germany rarely allow for, or even support,
ﬁeld trips that would deserve the name.
To conclude, Poland has been with me ever since my ﬁrst visits as a student.
It is with me as a language which I have learned to love, but which also keeps
getting more and more complicated the more I learn. Polish society, politics, and
culture, within the wider ﬁeld of Europeanization, continue to be important ﬁelds
of research for me. I have been involved in many kinds of cooperative efforts with
colleagues in Poland over the past years, such as reading and commenting on each
other’s papers, summer schools, as a participant in Warsaw or as a teacher in Sopot, co-organizing a panel at EASA with Anna Horolets, a teaching exchange with
Agnieszka Kościańska, an excursion to Warsaw with Viennese students that would
not have been possible without Helena Patzer, Ewa Klekot, Anna Horolets and Agnieszka Kościańska, the excellent cooperation within the FREE project with Michał
Buchowski, Gosia Kowalska and their wonderful team, and all the many others that
I do not have space here to mention. Last but not least, Poland also means places to
visit and places to come back to; it means friends and memories, and it means that
I can be sure to always ﬁnd sofas to crash on in Poznań, Ząbki, Warsaw, Gdańsk
and many other places.

REFERENCES
Alpan B., Schwell A., Sonntag A. (eds.)
2015
The European Football Championship: Mega-Event and Vanity Fair, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dieser Schmerz bleibt…
2004
Dieser Schmerz bleibt. Lebenserinnerungen vertriebener Polen und Schlesier, Audio CD, Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde e.V.
(ISGV).

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Herzfeld M.
1997
Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation State, New York, London:
Routledge.
Schwell A.
2005
Anarchie ist die Mutter der Ordnung. Alternativkultur und Tradition in Polen, Münster: LIT.
2008
Europa an der Oder: Die Konstruktion europäischer Sicherheit an der
deutsch-polnischen Grenze, Bielefeld: transcript.
2015
Negotiating the Imagined Geography of Europeanness in Polish State Bureaucracies, “Anthropological Journal of European Cultures” 24: 2, pp. 128-149.
2016
When (In)Security Travels. Europeanisation and Migration in Poland,
“European Politics and Society” 17: 2, pp. 259-276.
Schwell A., Szogs N., Kowalska M., Buchowski M. (eds.)
2016
New Ethnographies of European Football: People, Passions, Politics, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Todorova M.
1997
Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolff L.
1994
Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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