Przegląd Zachodniopomorski

Novelists and reporters in the Polish Western Territories after 1945 had a dual ideological task. In addition to implementing communism according to the Soviet model, their texts were to discursively seize the new lands. That meant “making them Polish” in the public consciousness at an express pace, while simultaneously negating the German past. Reportage, a non-fiction genre on the borderline between literature and journalism, was trustworthy and credible thanks to being close to reality. As such, it was also attractive to political national communist propaganda. Although reportes’ strategies were different, they differed only in shades. Reading their texts from today’s perspective makes it possible to identify common tactics, which led to creating a new cultural memory, a new identity. The article aims to shed light on the complicated situation of reportage after 1945 in Polish Szczecin. Specifically, the talk focuses on the reportage’s entanglement and discursive practices aimed at “seizing” the memory of the formerly German city and “creating” a new Polish memory of Szczecin. The literature analyzed includes the group of reportages devoted to Szczecin, written during the Polish People’s Republic. The methodological inspiration is twofold. On the one hand, it comes from contemporary interdisciplinary research on the Western Territories and theoretical reflection on memory media, and on the other: from the social and cultural specificity of reportage.