“The human suffering unmapped”. Joanna Bator’s prose on Wałbrzych in the context of Polish post-resettlement literature of the 1990–2010s

The article is devoted to the depiction of Wałbrzych in the prose of the modern Polish writer Joanna Bator (b. 1968), referring to the generation of children of migrants to the Returned Territories. Driven by the need to re-root in the space of childhood from the perspective of post-memory, they turned to the fate of their ancestors and of former inhabitants of these territories, significantly enriching and expanding the literary geography of Poland. The historical trauma, to the therapy of which the work of these writers serves, is in fact a delayed trauma of migration. It is the experience of the children of people who built their homes on the ruins of lives (both their own and others’) and whose everyday life constantly revealed traces of the expelled Other. In other words, it was the experience of the Second World War. It was lived through not in reality, but in the form of destructive consequences for the psyche and identity. For various reasons, genuine artistic comprehension and realization of the autopsychotherapeutic potential of the unique space of the Returned Territories became possible only after 1989. J. Bator’s prose belongs to the second phase of this process, when the perspective of a nostalgic archaeologist who carefully searches, reads and glorifies the traces of the past (both German and Polish), is devoid of idealization and replaced by the perspective of rigid reflection on the doubling of historical trauma in the space of the Returned Territories.