Does “The Neighbours” Tell a Story of Neighbours?: The Cinematic Vision of the Bydgoszcz September 1939

Piotr Zwierzchowski

Abstract

Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski’s 1969 film The Neighbours was made to remember the events which took place in Bydgoszcz 30 years before, at the turn of August and September 1939. The Poles called the events a sabotage of the German minority while the Germans called it a massacre of the town’s German civilians. Suddenly neighbours turned against their neighbours, and the historical dispute over who was the persecutor and who was the victim remains unsolved till today. Zwierzchowski stresses the potential the subject matter of the film offered to the director. A prewar Bydgoszcz was a cross-cultural town of Poles and Germans. Thus, the complicated and ambiguous relations between the communities could have served as perfect material for analysis. However, the film went into an entirely different direction. Instead of fathoming the complexity of the neighbourly relations he oversimplified them and reduced to a black and while stereotype of good and evil, with the former always assigned to the Poles and the latter to the Germans. Zwierzchowski says that The Neighbours was meant as pure propaganda, that is anti-German propaganda typical for the Poland of the 1960s. The dichotomic divisions and the film’s stereotypes were part of the then prevalent stream of Anti-Germanism which strictly propagated the view that Germany was Poland’s everlasting enemy. Thus, the time of the making of the film in the sixties offers not so much distance to the story told but rather imposes a ready concocted ideological interpretation.