Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as a (hi)story of the peripheral European city of Wałbrzych/Waldenburg

Authors:

• Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska

Abstract

This article discusses Wałbrzych (in German, Waldenburg), a city located in Poland, ten kilometres away from the Czech Republic, as a peripheral space within a national and neo-liberal narrative. It looks into the way Joanna Bator’s novel Dark, Almost Night (2012) describes Wałbrzych for her readers, as she conjures up a paradoxical image of a place whose complex past challenges a homogenous vision of the Polish national identity and national history, but which, at the same time, remains deeply anti-liberal, economically backward, and dependent on the country’s economic centre – represented in the novel by Warsaw. It is argued that such discrepancies reflect the subversive status of Poland’s western peripheries as undermining both the foundational myth of the Polish post-war state (1947–89) and the success narrative of the Polish neo-liberal transformation.