Historical Culture and Territoriality: Social Appropriation in the German-Polish Border Region in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Border areas and regions characterized by their multicultural past, as exemplified by Germany’s former eastern region and Poland’s western region today, are experimental fields for changing “territorial regimes.” This term refers to the individual and collective relationship to a politically structured territory, defined here as historical territory, i.e. as a geographical system of historically evolved relations. In the following, the changing forms of subjective identification of the territory situated in this area of tension between Germany and Poland are discussed. The present contribution aims to clarify the changing modes of social appropriation of territories, especially border territories. In other words,