Sources (Un)Recognised. New Research on Urbanism and Architecture of the 'Third Reich‘ in Occupied Poland/Źródła (nie)rozpoznane. Nowe badania nad urbanistyką i architekturą ‘Trzeciej Rzeszy’ w okupowanej Polsce

[Workshop language is Polish.]

Research into spatial, urban and architectural planning under National Socialism for the so-called 'new German East' has intensified in recent years. However, it is due to the historical circumstances that the sources research is based on are usually of German provenance and therefore represent the perspective of the planners who were in the service of the occupying power. Moreover, since only a few of the planned projects were realised, we are largely dealing with a planning history. The actual construction and urban planning practice on site, as well as the direct and indirect consequences of the planning for the inhabitants and the appearance of the urban space in the occupied territories, often remain in the background and are rarely analysed.
The workshop addresses these deficits. It is the first in a series of events in which new analytical strategies and methodological approaches will be discussed - approaches with which the National Socialist planning activities and the associated practices can be systematically linked to the history of the occupation and the occupied and which allow the various forms and dimensions of direct, forced and also indirect interaction between the occupied and the occupying power to be analysed and described. The contributions and discussions at the workshop will address this problem by subjecting the sources to critical revision - be they built objects, printed sources or archival documents, or various forms of visual artefacts. What new, different questions can be asked of the sources? What methodological implications/problems arise from the new questions? Where are the limits set by the sources and what possibilities are there, for example in interdisciplinary co-operation, to explore these limits anew?

The workshop is a cooperation of the University of Kalisz (Dr. Makary Górzyński), the University of the Arts, Poznań Dr. (Aleksandra Paradowska) and the Nordost-Institute in Lüneburg (Dr. Katja Bernhardt). It is the second edition of the "Kaliskie seminarium historii urbanistyki i miast/Kalisz Seminars on the History of Urban Planning and Cities".

It takes place at the City Museum of Turek (Polen), which preserves an extensive collection of documents - photographs, planning documents, maps - from the time of the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War.