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Car thieves and war criminals’ children – German-Polish clichés of yesterday. Today, Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice are once again growing together to form one city. Some hurdles have yet to be overcome. By Paul Flückiger

Magda and Tomasz lug two brim-full shopping baskets to the cashier at Rossmann. The couple come from Lubusz Land and took advantage of a visit to relatives in Słubice for a brief shopping tour in Frankfurt. “Cosmetics and laundry detergent are cheaper in Germany than in Poland. We’d be silly not to take a quick drive over the Oder Bridge,” they report. A lot of Polish can be heard spoken in the Lenné-Passagen shopping centre on Karl-Marx-Strasse, though it could not be called an onrush of shopping tourists.

This is entirely normal here, no different than in the border triangle on the Upper Rhine, I am told at the city’s tourism office. Here one thing is cheaper; another is less expensive across the border and whoever has the time simply drives over. The tourism professionals know their business. “Frankfurt and Słubice – European Twin Cities on the Oder” as a recently published joint high-gloss flyer advertises in German and Polish. In it, engaging photos gain sympathy for the two dissimilar cities – the district capital of Frankfurt with its almost 60,000 inhabitants and spruced up historic buildings on this side and its former suburb across the river, Polish Słubice since 1945, with its 17,000 citizens on the other side.

Some still hesitate to walk over to Poland

“I know Frankfurters who had never laid foot on the eastern side of the bridge,” reports Janina K, who has lived on the western side since 1997. She moved to Frankfurt an der Oder from Mannheim with her husband, a Silesian, to be closer to their Polish kin. The couple turned their backs on communist Poland back in the 1980s. According to the local statistical office, in late December 904 Polish citizens had their principal residence in Frankfurt, making them the largest group of foreign residents by far before the Ukrainians, Russians and Turks.

Janina’s neighbour Cieslawa W assumes that many Germans would consider the walk to Poland a kind of indignity. The fact that the sausages on the Polish side of the Oder taste better than on the German side just rubs some people the wrong way, the two older ladies agree. Yet Cieslawa W has nothing bad to say about the Germans. It was here in Frankfurt that the widow from near Łódź found her new love. “I was looking for work and instead found love,” she says with shining eyes. Słubice, where her sister lived, served as the bridgehead.

Even the VEB relied on labourers from Poland

At the end of the war Słubice, then the Dammvorstadt, was to serve as the bridgehead of the “Frankfurt fortress” for the defense of Berlin according to Nazi plans. In early 1945, the suburb was evacuated by force and armed, but was unable to withstand the force of the Red Army. In mid-April 1945, the retreating Wehrmacht blew up the Oder Bridge. In subsequent days, Soviet air attacks destroyed up to 90 percent of the Frankfurt city centre west of the Oder. The Potsdam Conference set the seal on the division of the city between Germany and Poland. After 1945, mainly Polish refugees from the regions of eastern Poland allotted to the Soviet Union were settled in Słubice; Frankfurt practically had to be rebuilt from the ground up.



Słubice subsequently sought its historic heritage in the Slavic settlement of Zliwice, which was founded in the mid-13th century on the eastern shore of the Oder. Frankfurt developed to become the primary electronics site in the GDR. The VEB Halbleiterwerk established in 1959 in the district of Markendorf also relied on Polish workers. From then on the factory busses crossed over the Bridge of Peace. After the 1980 formation of the Solidarność trade union in Poland, the border was closed off for the average citizens of both states; only the female Polish workers were still allowed to travel to Markendorf for their shift operations.

Stereotypes made understanding difficult

The Bridge of Peace – today renamed Stadtbrücke to avoid ideologies – has only really been able to endow reconciliation since the late 1990s, in the opinion of the Polish couple K. Stereotypes made understanding difficult – here in Germany the idea that all Poles must be thieves or drunkards, there the Polish conviction that all Germans are the children of war criminals. “One more generation and it will all be fine,” Janina K claims optimistically. Then our talk turns to the dozen or so German-Polish marriages among the neighbours on the centrally located Allende-Höhe and in the Pablo Neruda block of flats.

A little outside town the next pre-fabricated housing development is being polished up. Mayor Martin Patzelt hopes that thousands of Poles will move into the empty buildings in Frankfurt. He could even live with a Polish majority in the city, the CDU politician and pragmatic mayor claimed at the beginning of the new millennium after the city had lost more than one fourth of its 88,000 pre-reunification populace. Patzelt’s dream has failed in the meantime in spite of a major housing shortage in Słubice. “Our rents were too high for the Słubicers,” was the succinct explanation from city hall. “The Germans would rather tear down houses than rent them cheaper to Poles,” Cieslawa W says with surprise.

Broken off cement sheets, oozing insulation: right by the Oder Bridge, the abandoned border crossing on the German side is falling into decay. On the Polish side, right behind the bridge the first cheap cigarettes are on offer in two modern glass kiosks. Pedestrians arriving from Frankfurt usually head to the left and turn onto ul. Jedności Robotniczej (Street of Workers’ Unity), which leads past hairdresser's shops – Słubice is said to have the highest density of hairdressers in Poland – to the taverns and supermarkets of the city centre.

To Słubice for plastic surgery

Dry cleaners, tailors and beauty salons offer their services in two languages as well as dentists and specialists for plastic surgery. “Even Germans from Frankfurt am Main come to Słubice for surgery,” a native boasts. Polish newspapers can also be easily purchased at the kiosk for euros and in German. In Turkey, he is able to make orders in Polish – as hospitality – but in Frankfurt just 250 meters away only in German, the head of the Collegium Polonicum recently complained at a tourism conference.

Polish hospitableness has also drawn hundreds of Germans to Słubice according to the officials. 1,291 German citizens – many of them to obtain driving licenses it is whispered in Słubice’s city hall – were registered as residents here in mid-February, only six of them moved permanently from Germany to Poland. At the “Big Polish Bazaar” on the edge of town by the Oder, things have already slowed down by early afternoon. Fishing rods, tobacco and basket ware, sweets and baked goods are still on sale.

Three Frankfurt residents hastily seek out a specific cigarette dealer. “His prices are the best,” Matthias claims and directs his co-workers conspiratorially through long rows of barred selling booths. “Can’t help it, but it’s always cheaper than at home,” the three Germans reason. The temporary grounds hold 600 sales booths and snack bars while next door the recently burnt down bazaar is now being soundly rebuilt. Nonetheless, the good old days of border trade are over, reports watchman Jan M. “The roubles only roll at the weekends when the Berliners come.”

The article was first published in the Goethe-Institut magazine Illusion der Nähe? Nachbarn in Europa ( PDF).