Project

The main aim of the project is investigating the interaction between collective memory and collective identity of a local community in the context of dynamically changing cultural landscape in Poznań. The urban landscape will be narrowed down to researching memory about liquidated and closed cemeteries. The project focuses on the real lived experience (Halbwach’s social memory) as reconstructed on the basis of semi-formal and informal discourses (focus interviews and below-the-line comments on information websites). An analysis of public discourse (newspaper articles, city information websites) will facilitate the understanding of the changes in the cultural cityscape and their influence on the construction of collective memory. A combination of the public sphere (newspapers and individual interviews with the city elites) and the semi-private focus interviews will allow the researchers to analyse several layers of collective memory, the oldest – from the interwar period and the 1939-1945 occupation; the rebuilding of Poznań after war damage; the city development in the People’s Republic of Poland and from the period of dynamic transformation after 1989. The reconstruction of official knowledge is necessary for the contextualization of memory and collective identity of the city inhabitants and their situatedness in the cultural landscape.