Jacob Mikanowski: belief

Transcript context

…Is there a future of any kind for Germanic culture and influence in Poland? As you know, Wroclaw was once Breslau; a lot of the achievement in that city came from people with Germanic origins growing up speaking German. Is that somehow inevitable, given where Germany and Poland are? Or, again, that’s been wiped out: it’s just simply never coming back; Germany’s depopulating; bye-bye Germanic influence in Poland in any direct sense. What do you think? I think the Germanic influence comes from Poles living and working in Germany, and especially Silesians. Silesia, that part of Poland that’s on that side: people there, a larger percentage of them have German or mixed-German roots. There’s an area in the south that had a larger number of Germans stay. (Most Germans left or were forced to leave.) There’s some influence. But the bigger thing is that [in] that border area, people really go to Germany and Switzerland, Austria to work. People from eastern Poland: the pattern has been to go to the UK and France and Belgium, or America. The influence, I think, comes from return migration and cross-border travel. Germans aren’t going that much back to Poland. People with roots — and there are a lot of Germans with roots in both northern Poland and western Poland — they go: they see the old church, the old cemetery, the old house. A lot of that stuff is actually intact. There’s nostalgia tours. But they’re not moving back very much. I think it’s from — what contexts are, what influences are — are from labor migration. Why is the best Polish folk art from southern Poland?…

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