Doxa and Memory, or Poland Is Born and Falls in “Recovered” Towns

This chapter demonstrates how the state-crafted pioneer myth and the emergent doxa of post-Germanness functioned as competing frameworks for legitimizing settler identities in Powiśle and Lower Lusatia. Drawing on diaries, local museum displays, and contemporaneous pamphlets, I first show how the “heroic pioneer” narrative naturalized the Polonization of formerly German towns. I then trace the gradual re-emergence of German material traces—architecture, cemeteries, toponyms—as a heterodox, “found memory,” revealing the limits of the official doxa. Through close reading of visual postcards and municipal planning records, I argue that these overlapping memory practices crystallized distinct modalities of moral capital and demonstrated the field-specific processes by which certain pasts were valorized or silenced.