German-Polish history has recently made its way back into the German and Polish arts and culture sections. The occasion was the controversy surrounding the book "Polnische Bürgermeister und der Holocaust: Besatzung, Verwaltung und Kollaboration" by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, whose research was supported by the GHI Warsaw through a fellowship.

Our research associate Christhardt Henschel has published two articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Der Stich im Herzen”, April 22, 2026, and „Das Generalgouvernement war kein Staat mit deutsch-polnischer Verwaltung", March 4, 2026), in which he comments on the book and the current media debates.

Henschel also asked why the remembrance cultures in both countries often fail to find common ground and noted: “[…] while many Germans tacitly assume the victims’ willingness to reconcile and have long since imagined themselves to be in the phase of having received absolution, parts of Polish society feel that they have not even been able to properly articulate the war experiences passed down in their families to the Germans.”

In another article in the Polish weekly Polityka, he, together with Aleksandra Paradowska and Robert Parzer, demonstrates the profound architectural legacy that Nazi rule left behind in Polish cities and the wide range of approaches to dealing with it.