For decades after the war there was a fear that the Germans would return. Although Lower Silesia and its capital Wroclaw had been freed from the ‘clutches’ of the German Reich and its historical ‘drive toward the East’, one could never be totally sure. People were still sitting on packed bags, both metaphorically and literally speaking; bags that had been packed in a time when one had been forced to leave the East and relocate to the so-called kresny.

Yet, “The Germans didn’t come.” The exhibition of the same name opened in December 2014 in Wroclaw’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, MWW). However large the German population might have been, it didn’t take much to imagine that Wroclaw had once had a German population. They had left behind various objects. These objects were called poniemieckie (post-German things). A strange feeling lingered in this somewhat ghostly city one had been forced to move to.