You say Guben, I say Gubin...
A town divided by the German-Polish border
The imposition of the Oder-Neisse Line in 1945 as the border between Germany and Poland divided several towns and cities that had previously been entirely within Germany. The eastern sections were emptied of their population and repopulated by Poles, many of whom were looking for a new life after being forced out of their homes in what had been eastern Poland before the boundary changes. Frankfurt an der Oder and Görlitz are both German towns with a suburb on the Polish side while Kostrzyn can be seen as a Polish town with a somewhat detached German suburb. But the split settlement of Guben/ Gubin is a genuinely half-and-half town sitting astride the Lusatian Neisse, its 36,000 people divided more or less evenly between Germany and Poland. Guben/ Gubin was an early adopter of cross-border co-operation between Polish and German local authorities. It happened to need a new sewage works in the 1990s, and the two authorities worked together to open a new facility (on the Polish side) that opened in 1997. Relations between the two still seem particularly close, even given the generally good working relationships between local authorities along the border. The logic that a town of 36,000 can deliver services more cheaply and efficiently as a unit than as two much smaller towns seems incontestable, even leaving aside the wider benefits of friendly human relationships across the border line. Guben/ Gubin hosts offices of the EU-funded Euroregion Spree-Neisse-Bober which straddles the border at this point and encourages all sorts of cross-border projects such as school exchanges, funding for grassroots initiatives with a joint Polish-German dimension and language learning for public officials on both sides.
Town Hall and Parish Church, Gubin – the central square of pre-1945 Guben (photo LSB)
The pre-1945 centre of the town is on the Polish side of the river but it was comprehensively trashed in the closing months of the war and more or less left to rot during the decades afterwards; a very perfunctory and boxy town centre was built a little to the south of the old town centre. The ruined Town Hall was rebuilt in 1986 and houses a community centre and a library for Polish Gubin, and reconstruction has begun more recently on the town’s old parish church as an explicitly Polish-German joint project run by charitable church projects in both countries, with the aim of making the church a venue for meetings and co-operation between Poles and Germans in the divided town. There is still a lot to do – the tower was officially opened in 2013 but the main body of the church is still a ruin and work seems to have slowed down. But there is no shortage of Polish-German co-operation in the town. The Neisse is crossed not only by the main bridge which was the focus of the pre-1945 town, but also by a peaceful green park spanned by footbridges. This ‘Neisse terraces’ area, formerly a derelict industrial zone, links to a river island where there is open air theatre when the season permits. I had to check to see whether it was technically in Poland or Germany (it is just in Poland) – it is impeccably bilingual, its column in honour of Goethe bearing both languages at its base. The town’s twin authorities are proud of this blurred line: “The Nysa’s function as a border line is a thing of the past. It has become a unifying element now.”[1]
The whole Neisse region has suffered in the past from its border position, but that seems to be managed as well as possible in Guben/ Gubin at least – there are places further upriver where the damage is still much worse. It has other severe social and economic handicaps, notably the fact that it is a crashed-out textile town. Guben made hats and clothes, and the town and the region prospered with 19th century industrialisation. Four large textile firms were based in the town, with enormous mills and factories either side of the Neisse. New fashions kept appearing as late as 1944, which brought it home to me quite how insulated the population in the east of Nazi Germany had been from the privations of war until very late on.
Guben received a new lease of life with the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in 1949. Communism made it a model town; it was known for a while as Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, after the DDR President who was born in the eastern (now Polish) side of the town. A large modern chemical works was established in the west of the town to produce a substance called ‘Dederon’. Dederon was the East German (DDR…) branding for what was known in the US and UK as nylon. Guben’s textile industry adapted to the new technology, producing cheerfully coloured Dederon clothes that were not dissimilar to western fashions at the time, but it was living on borrowed time and the last Guben clothes were made in 1997. The Dederon factory is now a museum of the textile industry of Guben. It was closed for a staff function when I visited, but a gentleman let me in to have a look around the display cabinets and the pattern books, and was kind enough to guide me around and speak in slow, simple German so that I was able to keep up. The staff and volunteers gathered around the table were a happy mixture of German and Polish, and mostly older people, which I took to be a positive sign of the bonds that link the twin towns at person-to-person level as well as those that exist because of official encouragement.
Dederon fashions in the Guben textile museum
While the historical legacy of the textile industry is obviously in good hands, the economic, social and physical legacy is not so harmonious – a feature Guben shares with former textile towns across Europe including those to be found either side of the Pennines in northern England. There is low pay, unemployment, an ageing population and the sour disappointment that fuels far right politics (the vote share for the AfD was 25 per cent in German Guben in 2017). It feels sparse because of its falling population and the empty spaces and derelict industrial buildings in both halves of the town, particularly down by the river that used to supply the power for the mills. The mill buildings are too big for most potential uses, but one large complex has found a strange new purpose which we’ll consider in the next post.
[1] Information board in Gubin, viewed 11 October 2018, with English translation slightly corrected by the current author.