Wrocław’s Dwarfs – Cultural Heritage and European Memory Inclusion

Von: Jana Stoklasa

In the 20^thcentury, the urban space of what was once named Vratislav, then Breslau, and since 1945 Wrocław was profoundly shaped by the legacy of Nazism, the Holocaust, forced expulsion, real socialism, and violent ethnonationalism. The city’s difficult past is one of the examples of a territory where, within a short period after World War II, the complete mainly German population of the second-biggest German city at that time was violently expulsed and exchanged with a mainly Polish population. This ethnic cleansing was a process that took place until 1947, simultaneously the Polish state and the pioneer community who had then acquired the urban space started to search for territorial legitimization. The narration underlined the city’s primeval pre-German territorial origin as a part of Poland’s “Regained Lands” –referring to the auto-stereotype of Poles as World War II victims. Since the fall of communism, these historical wounds of Wrocław’s nationalized urban space have been subject to revisitations in which cultural heritage plays a strategic role. Hence, the concept of cultural heritage helps to transform the enigma of the past as a process of forming a transnational European identity here. The revisitation of the city’s difficult past consist of different approaches that include the historical experiences connected to the forced expulsion and resettlement of the mainly German and Polish population between 1944 and 1948 into one European memory framework and thus, represent attempts to heal the traumatic past of World War II in a European way.

After the collapse of the Communist system – when the social communication space was freed from censorship – new approaches to the city’s historical context started. For the first time since World War II, the historical wounds of Wrocław’s nationalized urban space were allowed to be revisited. The city’s authorities and young elites decided to pursue a form of history politics that encompassed references to the city’s multicultural roots, also relating to the German past, and an image of multicultural diversity started to be projected on the city’s monoethnic heritage. Hence, to create a collective sense of belonging to Europe again means in Wrocław’s specific case to mourn its lost cultural diversity[1] in the first place, as the violent and forced population expulsion in Wrocław was part of mass deportations and the so-called westward shift – the resettlement of estimated 12-17 million people all across Europe.

After these forced resettlements that took place between 1945 and 1947, in most cases, vast areas of multi-ethnic borderlands that had been typical of Eastern and Central Europe before World War II turned into monoethnic states. Cultural and national diversity, which had been the hallmark of what Hannah Arendt called “the belt of mixed populations”, virtually disappeared in most communist states. Nowadays, there seems to be an urge to re-populate these so-called historical hubs of some borderland regions like the cityscapes of Wrocław, Lwów in Western Ukraine, or Chisinau in Moldovia and mourn their lost cultural diversity. Other borderland regions like West Bohemia in the Czech Republic, where the German part of the population was violently expulsed, do not seem to follow this approach of re-populating their city scapes with little figures like Wrocław’s dwarf statues.

However, in recent regional museum expositions in the Czech Republic, light is also shed on the forced expulsions of the German population after World War II. Hence, awareness is raised for this “collective guilt” as a burdening part of history of those whose ancestors stayed in the given region.

Promoting Wrocław as the Meeting place is based on the myth of multiculturalism and together with the promotion of the Dwarf symbol these promoting strategies help create “smooth” narrations of the city’s difficult past. These coping strategies as ways of mourning the absence of the “others” are characteristic of the city’s reconstruction by young cultural elites after 1990. Given Wrocław’s monoculturality, elevating its inhabitants’ open-mindedness towards Europeanization as well as attracting international investors. This is an important aim and also constitutes a moment of functional use of the past in which what is declared as cultural heritage serves for purposes of the present. The residents here believe – contrary to their actual history and their proper convictions – in the multiculturalism of their city, which helps form a positively connoted local identity as historically valid.

Since 2014, after the Majdan Revolution, the migration of an estimated three to four million Ukrainians to Poland further supports this self-image. In this sense, in 2016, strategically implementing the city’s image as a multicultural meeting place from within became the main purpose of Wrocław’s year as the European Capital of Culture. All in all, the self-presentation on the international level is perceived as successful and emanated in winning the title of European Best Destination 2018.  

On the way to winning this title, little dwarf statues played a decisive role. The need to fill the symbolic grey emptiness left in Wrocław’s urban space was solved by ornamenting the public space with little bronze dwarfs looking like fairy-tale entities protecting and helping Wrocławians as acts of civic magic. This trend first emerged in the 2000s, when dwarfs in the form of small anthropomorphic statues popped up in the streets. By now the dwarf symbol became the city’s label which is distributed on numerous products for tourists and sold in multiplicity and various forms. Companies, hotels, and other institutions in the city quickly began to create their own dwarf. Some artists even specialized in manufacturing dwarfs for private customers. The dwarf became an important source of income and a recognition feature that other cities like Kraków with its dragon would also like to implement. The practice of what I call “dwarfing Wrocław” inculcates certain economic values and consumerism as norms of behavior. Furthermore, the creation of a myth about kind dwarfs plays an important role: The myth consists of a fairy tale for children in which the dwarfs secretly help the citizens – and to do so they hide all over the city. This story became an enormously successful narration and today acts as part of mass tourist entertainment. Hunting what today are over 600 dwarfs with a map and an app and photographing them is very popular among tourists and local children. However, all of them lack any reference to their historical origin: What on first impression looks like extravagant branding is actually a reference to the Orange Alternative, an anti-communist underground movement in the 1980s. Yet, in today’s narratives, the political-historical meaning of the dwarf as a symbol that helped lay the foundations of democracy is not explicitly forwarded.

Hence, despite the fact that this urban image policy is considered to be a huge success in promoting the city, the process of dwarfing Wrocław is not uncontested. On one hand, Wrocław’s legendary dwarfs interlock with the collective memories of the inhabitants concerning the politically turbulent period of the 1980s and thus help to build a positive local identity. This, on the other hand, happens in a way that focuses on the economic aspects of a desirable lifestyle rather than educating on the past or forwarding the dwarfs’ politically-historical meaning.

With the beginning of the 1980s, and in particular with the onset of Martial Law in Poland, city walls all over Poland were covered by numerous graffiti. Symbols of Fighting Poland, logos of the Solidarity Union, and slogans manifesting the society’s dislike of the regime and the Soviet Union were very common among those works. Public order services attempted to remove them quickly, but new ones soon reappeared. Within this sociopolitical frame, the dwarf of the Orange Alternative was born in 1982. Wrocław’s art students had the idea of repainting those spots where the Military painted over the graffiti with the symbol of a dwarf. Painting over specific spots using the dwarf symbol quickly became a part of collective action against the communist regime that spread from Wrocław to other Polish cities. Some even consider it to be an artistic victory over the regime. Furthermore, during the protests of the late 1980s, thousands of people dressed up as dwarfs demonstrated in happenings the absurdity of the Communist regime. This form of creative opposition gave people the courage to face mental changes and overcome the political and economic crisis. Towards the end of the 1980s, the presence of the Orange Alternative and socialist surrealism played a major role in establishing the dwarf as a political symbol for peaceful resistance with humor in Poland. Its influence on Polish political protests is still present today.

Using the symbol of the dwarf as a coping strategy is not just part of facing the past in a kind of allegory or straightforward description that helps build a local identity by reconstructing certain aspects of the urban history. I rather consider this a way of filling the emptiness left after the homogenization of the urban space during the communist regime as a cultural accounting – in the sense that an account is given to the past. Furthermore, the so-called dwarfing of Wrocław helps to promote the city on a global scale strengthening its position on the global neoliberal market of intercity competition, enforcing its social integration within the European Union and also supporting its inhabitants’ identification with the urban place without emphasizing its difficult past.

Withstanding the “scary ghosts” associated with a disturbing experience in an unburied past in Wrocław is solved by conveying a comforting aura of well-being and innocence, hence emotionally detaching the cityscape from the collective past. However, the dwarfing practice also reflects that the given complexity of the loss resists coherent and thus understandable ways of representing it. This became especially evident in 2016 when Wrocław was the European Capital of Culture. Even though retelling the difficult heritage of Wrocław was a main part of the application for this title, during that year the municipality realized it was better to give up this goal as it turned out to be somehow not realizable. One has to consider that the Polish pioneer settlers in post-war Wrocław had to deal with the unknown and foreign space on their own and in rather schizophrenic conditions, because the authorities were denying and removing the city’s German character at the same time, while the new inhabitants were encountering it constantly— in the streets and at home.[2]

Somehow, this enigmatic process remains an unsayable part of the urban collective memory. Dwarfing Wrocław as an inclusive approach that was supported by local young cultural elites helped to present the city as an attractive place to the outside world, to create a pro-European urban image of Wrocław and increase the number of tourists from one to five million per year. Yet, the specific presence of German heritage remains un-manifested in the first plan. This might be due to the fact that attempts to underline the German history of the place have partly been perceived as crawling Germanization. However, in Wrocław’s case, cultural heritage mainly seems to serve as an instrument for societal re-integration in Europe and as a simultaneous anchor of the local identity.

[1] Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (ed.): Whose Memory? Which Future?: Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe, New York 2019.

[2] Kamilla Dolinska and Julita Makaro: Wrocław residents about the multicultural character of their city – “crawling Germanisation” or restoration of the German heritage?, p. 69f. In: Czajkowski, Pawel/ Pabjan, Barbara/ Zuber, Marcelina (ed.):Pamiȩć I przestrzeń. Forum Socjologiczne. Wrocław: WydawnisktwoUniwersytetuWrocławskiego 2016.