The slogan ‘We hold watch over the Oder’ returns every few or dozen years, and although the political and social contexts change, it still evokes emotions. Their scale is no longer what it was when it was conceived—during the initial postwar period—yet it remains fraught with references that trigger broad historical connotations. The most important…
The beginning of Polish literary life in Szczecin was marked by the campaign of “cultural repolonization of the Recovered Territories,” also known as “literary settlement.” Prof. Erazm Kuźma, an eminent literary theorist and historian, considered this project to be “an artificial creation that disintegrated as quickly as it arose.” At the same time, he pointed…
The political and systemic transformations that occurred in Poland after 1989 manifested themselves in all major spheres of state functioning, including education. They concerned, among other things, the reorganization of the school management system, the development of institutional autonomy, the emergence of proprietary curricula, as well as new forms of general and vocational education. These…
Kazimierz Majdański was born on March 1, 1916, in Małgów near Kalisz, as the youngest of thirteen children of Rozalia and Józef Majdański. His family was deeply religious, so it came as no surprise to anyone that after graduating from the Pius X Gimnazjum (secondary school) in Włocławek and passing his matura (high school exit…
The beginning of the automotive history of the Stoewer company took place in March 1896. In that year, Bernhard Stoewer Sr. launched a factory under the name Stettiner Eisenwerke Bernhard Stoewer Sen., located on today’s Aleja Wojska Polskiego (back then Falkenwalder Chaussee). Initially, its production was based on metalworking machinery (lathes) and, additionally, bicycle…
On May 23, 1618, the Second (according to some researchers, the Third) Defenestration of Prague took place in Prague. Two imperial governors and their secretary were thrown out of the windows of Prague Castle (Hradčany), which triggered one of the bloodiest conflicts in early modern Europe, known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). This was…
Demographic and cultural transformations that took place in West Pomerania after 1945 constitute one of the most dramatic and complex chapters of Poland’s post-war history. Immediately after the war, the region became a melting pot where the remaining German population encountered Polish settlers. Alongside Poles, representatives of various national and ethnic minorities also arrived or…
A coat of arms is a graphic symbol placed on the field of a shield, created according to specific rules, symbolically representing its owner. However, we can only call such a graphic sign a coat of arms when it becomes hereditary, when a given person, family, clan, or city uses it continuously without changing it…
“When I began dealing with the affairs of the Szczecin Land, which was in the spring of 1945, I had just turned thirty-four. Behind me was a rather eventful life: prisons, the Bereza camp, emigration, service in the Soviet Army and the Polish Army. There was enough time for my views, in the light of…
Terror from the sky and the Nazi phantom factory in Police: how the Third Reich wanted to win the war with synthetic fuel from coal Introduction World War II left behind many non-obvious material traces embedded in the contemporary cultural landscape. Among the more intriguing are the remains of Nazi synthetic liquid fuel…
