Views from the German-Polish Border: The Exploration of Inter-national Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter

With the fall of the Wall and the unification of the two Germanics, the new country recovered its status as Europe's largest land and as the country with the most neighbors on its borders. Its neighbors, not always allies, share histories with Germany that are not always happy, such that Germany must continually situate itself geopolitically and politico-historically vis-a-vis these neighbors. Poland, immediately to Germany's east, has a similarly passionate relationship to its borders. For many years Poland experienced repeatedly forced annexations by German and Russian empires. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War raised and intensified old anxieties, especially along the Polish-German border.1 Over the last decade this border has been the site of intense geopolitical and cultural transformations. Unification in 1991 recodified the Oder-Neisse line as dividing Germany and Poland, but by 1992 European Unification drew a new line that turned this border from a national border into the demarcation of the European Union's new Eastern "frontier."2 Only a decade later, when Poland entered the EU as part of a larger Eastern expansion, the significance of the border was transformed yet again. It is thus noteworthy that in 2002, on the eve of the eastward expansion of the EU, two films emerged as separate and distinct projects that took as their setting the German-Polish border in the town of Frankfurt Oder/Slubice: Halbe Treppe [Grill Point] (Andreas Dresen) and Lichter [Distant Lights] (HansChristian Schmid). These two films mark a historic re-imagining of community and of territory at this significant moment of political union. They remind us that borders are not only lines drawn on maps. They are not simple spatial distinctions. They run through lives and cultures, structure economies, represent collective identity, and give rise to a particular form of "borderland." Whatever else they are, borders are first and foremost ideational before they are material. The imagining of community precedes the spatial political claims demarcated by borders.3 Closer examination of these films allows for reflections on representations of this border in particular and of borders in general. Border studies, as an emerging field of study, derives primarily from a consideration of the US-Mexican border, but the Polish-German border opens new understandings of the nature of borders. The Polish-German border is, to be sure, like the US-Mexican border, a site of illegal migration, smuggling, gross income disparity, cheap labor transfer-and centuries of national tensions with sometimes horrendous geopolitical consequences. Yet the Polish-German border, set in the context of the EU, represents a different type of transnational boundary. The boundary between Poland and Germany is a border that is being superceded by a relationship as yet undefined. As a relationship it certainly goes beyond binaries of interior/exterior, homeland/frontier. It is not such a surprise that Frankfurt/Slubice should serve as the setting of Halbe Treppe and of Lichter. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the divided city had become a central crossing point for trade from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Baltics with the European Union. As the year of a disappearing border, 2002 drew eastern countries into the spotlight. The cities of Frankfurt, on the German side of the Oder, and Slubice, on the Polish side, were originally a united city, the common history of which extends back at least 750 years to when Frankfurt received its charter. The building of a bridge across the river propelled Frankfurt into a key trading role in the middle ages, resulting in Frankfurt's elevation into the Hansa league of prosperous cities from that era. It was part of a region of Central Europe stretching down into the Balkans that contained a multi-cultural diversity of peoples and languages. In the 19th century, when the rise of Romantic Nationalism fostered a tendency toward territorial particularization and cultural isolationism, Frankfurt, nevertheless, remained a place of trade and diversity. …