Stanisława Bieniasza i Henryka Sekulskiego zmagania z brzemieniem niemieckości
Stanisław Bieniasz’s and Henryk Sekulski’s Struggle with the Burden of German Reality

Summary/Abstract: In this article, examples of the literary work of two Polish authors: Stanisław Bieniasz and Henryk Sekulski are presented. Bieniasz and Sekulski are contemporaneous writers who spent partof their life in Germany. In their books they illustrate the Polish immigrant community in East and West Germany in the 1970s and 80s. Bieniasz was a Silesian who portrayed his experiences in North Rhine-Westphalia, while Sekulski came from a small village in eastern Poland and lived for several years as an unskilled worker in Leipzig in the GDR. In these different Germanys their culture and customs were confronted with a new, strange world. Their observations bear witness to the failure of many Polish people to live in Germany as citizens on equal terms. The mainly pessimistic views of Bieniasz and Sekulski are contrasted with Günter Grass’s journalistic essay on the unification of Germany and with the analysis of the German soul by the French author: Bernard Nuss.

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