due to the influence of the minority culture. Advocating the mixing of cultures is therefore
dangerous for minorities, and this is also true for Sorbian culture and especially for the
language.
Alicja Nagórko
Kresy - A Typical Example for the Mixing of Cultures?
The Polish word Kresy ‘frontier’ is generally applied to the former Eastern border regions that
were continuously reduced in size - a mythical open region that is not found on maps any more
but that stayed alive in Polish culture and in the national consciousness. Polish literature is
indebted to the Kresy for many important authors: the greatest poets of Polish romanticism as
well as the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz originate from there.
The author tries to explain why Kresy as a toponym could be applied to Poland’s Eastern
frontier but not to the Germano-Slavic border regions. Only the Eastern frontier was a border of
civilisation, a “bulwark of Christianity”, because the neighbour to the Southeast was the empire
of the Tatars and Turks. It was a sparsely populated area with a characteristic landscape quite
unlike the one to be found in the industrialised West.
The answer to the question posed in the title is negative. A substratum-adstratum-model is
opposed to the melting-pot theory. Its functioning is demonstrated by the language variant
predominantly used there, viz. the so-called polszczyzna kresowa. It shows that even in a
border situation language and culture can retain their national identity.
Martina Pitz
A HISTORY OF THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE OF A LINGUISTIC BORDER REGION. REFLECTION
OF A ‘MlSCHKULTUR’? AN INQUIRY INTO LlNGUSTIC DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE 13th
AND 14™ CENTURY IN THE LORRAINE DOMINION OF BOULAY/BOLCHEN
The influence of the French-German language boundary during the High and Late Middle Ages
on the political-administrative, economic and cultural regions (traversed by and partly created by
this boundary) of Eastern Lorraine (situated between two cultures) has not yet been thoroughly
examined from a philological perspective. Whether the existence of two linguistically different
areas at the time had any distinct effect on the linguistic proficiency and behavior especially of
the Lorraine nobility is a question that has likewise remained unanswered. Did this linguistic
boundary really function as a dividing line for the two cultures, as has often been claimed, or
did the border area actually facilitate cultural exchange? Historians tend to turn towards written
findings for clarification. However, an academically sound critical reappraisal of the history of
the written language in the border area between the Saarland and Lorraine remains to be
undertaken. Employing a corpus of 134 original documents concerning the Boulay/Bolchen
dominion (situated directly at the language border) and dating from 1283 to 1350, this paper
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