10 - Discrepant Narratives: The Impact of Transborder Theater Festivals on Communities at the German-Polish Border

Summary

THE IMPORTANCE OF A SHARED CULTURE (and language) in the “imagining” of a collective identity at the national level is well argued, not least by Benedict Anderson in his seminal study of nations as Imagined Communities. In his discussion of “multilevel citizenship and identity,” including at the European and regional levels, Joe Painter similarly argues the importance to the political process of a sense of “emotional identification with the wider community developed through cultural affiliation,” and specifically through participation in “everyday and popular culture.” The European Commission’s 2007 Agenda for Culture accordingly “affirms the central role of culture in the process of European integration” and states that its first objective is “to promote conversation between cultures.” Inherent in each of these political and scholarly statements is the idea of cultural impact. In the changing European context, cultural production is being employed to specific social and political ends in an attempt to break down boundaries between nation states and promote a sense of “European-ness.” Border regions play host to much of this cultural production as they constitute, according to geographer James Wesley Scott, the “laboratories of cooperation and/or post national political community” in which the idea of Europe is subject to experiment. Cross-border cultural events and projects in border regions, many of which are EU-funded, are thus based on the premise that they should have a certain “impact” upon their audiences, namely that they should change those audiences’ perception of the border communities in which they live. To cite Katrin Kohl’s essay in this volume, these events are “concerned above all with effect in the public space.”

But to what extent do cross-border cultural events achieve their intended “effect” on the ground in border communities? In their groundbreaking ethnographic study of “divided communities” along the former Iron Curtain, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and a team of scholars from across Europe found notable discrepancies between the “official” narratives of European “integration” and the personal, experiential narratives of families living at this border. This chapter focuses on similar discrepant narratives surrounding two regular cross-border theater events staged in such divided communities situated immediately on the German-Polish border (that is, in towns split by the drawing of the Oder-Neiße Line in 1945), where centuries of conflict culminating in the wars of the twentieth century have inevitably left their mark.