After the Second World War, the German city of Szczecin became the Polish city of Szczecin. This upheaval was accompanied - as in Breslau and Danzig - by a complete exchange of populations. Against the competing German and Polish visions resulting from this situation, the German-Jewish history before 1945 was completely ignored - both in Germany and Poland - by historical research and the public until the 1980s. In Poland, it was attributed to German history and not perceived from a perspective focusing on the victims of Nazi rule. In West Germany, the Jewish inhabitants of Stettin were not regarded as expellees, because they had disappeared from the city already before the end of the war and had been murdered or had emigrated. Only the Jewish post-war immigration of Eastern European survivors of the Shoah to Szczecin has received greater attention in recent years.
Against this background, a topography of Jewish life in Stettin before the deportation of the Jewish population from the province of Pomerania in February 1940 is being created at the University of Greifswald in cooperation with the University of Szczecin, with financial support from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The goal of the topography is, on the one hand, to record and geographically document the places of residence and work of Jewish residents and Jewish institutions in Stettin. On the other hand, this data is to be linked with information about the deportations in 1938 ("Polenaktion") and 1940 to the General Government. A link between Jewish life in Stettin and the Shoah is formed by the card index of identification cards for Jews (“Kennkarten”) issued in 1939–1940, which has been preserved in Szczecin.
The project takes up desiderata of research on Jewish culture and history in East Central Europe and connects to projects already developed for Vienna or Wrocław, for example. Within the framework of this project on the topography of Jewish life in Szczecin, a publication with selected contributions is planned.
Topics of the contributions may include:
- Jewish life in Stettin until the end of the Second World War: social, religious, cultural, economic aspects
- Fate of the Jewish inhabitants of Stettin since 1933 in the city and after the deportations in 1938 and 1940 (exclusion, expropriation, expropriation, emigration, deportation, murder)
- Fates of survivors of the Shoah from Stettin
- History of individual Jewish persons/families
- Forms and media of remembrance of Jewish life in Szczecin from an international perspective
Scholars interested in contributing to this project are kindly requested to send in an abstract (max. 3000 characters) and a short CV (max. 1.000 characters) by June 30, 2022, to: hackmann@uni-greifswald.de (in German, English, or Polish).
Subsequently, a working meeting (in hybrid form) will be organized in Szczecin, where the proposals will be presented and discussed. A contract for work on the planned research contribution will be concluded with the authors who will participate in the project. The expected deadline for submission is June 2023.
A conference to present topics and first results is planned for spring 2023.