Leschnitz (Leśnica) — A City with Dementia

Before the Rupture: Leschnitz 1217–1945

The first documented mention of Leschnitz appears in 1217, when the settlement was already old. For centuries, this was a land of crafts and agriculture—orchards heavy with fruit, fields of cabbage stretching toward the horizon, small workshops where artisans practiced trades passed down through generations. The rhythm of life followed the seasons: planting, harvest, the quiet work of hands shaping wood and leather.

Leschnitz was for centuries the beating heart of the surrounding area, a market that drew local inhabitants with such force as if the earth itself had designated its center here. Legend tells, however, that the Knights Templar also wandered here—not for grain or cloth, but for intoxication so deep that time itself lost power over them.

Under the German Empire, Gemeinde Leschnitz grew within the administrative district of Groß Strehlitz (today Strzelce Opolskie). The Dreifaltigkeit church stood at its center. Families passed down Silesian traditions and local customs across generations. In 1921, during the plebiscite that would determine Upper Silesia's fate, the Leschnitzer voted—though history has largely forgotten what they chose, only what was chosen for them. Today, the inept building of the legend of uprisings continues near Góra Świętej Anny, another layer of nationalist propaganda obscuring what actually happened.

By 1936, the Nazi administration had begun erasing Polish place names throughout Oberschlesien. In 1939, war began, the first planes taking off from the airfield on the northwestern slope of Annaberg. In 1945, memory itself would undergo its greatest rupture.

1945: The Wound That Severed Memory

In 1945, the thread of memory was cut. The Potsdam Agreement transferred Leschnitz from Germany to Poland. What followed was not merely a change of administration but a systematic erasure of continuity.

The German-speaking population—families who had tended orchards and cabbage fields in Leschnitz for generations—were expelled. With them went the living memory: the names of streets, the stories of buildings, the knowledge of which corner a bakery once stood, which field grew the best vegetables. Leschnitz became Leśnica. The name Leschnitz was struck from maps.

Few of them remained—those who, instead of forgetting, chose to keep vigil, becoming guardians of what others fled from: time itself.

New settlers arrived from territories Poland had lost in the east. They came to a town that was not theirs, inheriting homes whose previous occupants had vanished, fields whose cultivation patterns were unknown to them. How do you build a community on absence? How do you name places whose names have been erased? The answer: you don't remember. You can't.

This is the colonial wound. Not one colonization, but two: first the German administration that suppressed Slavic Silesian identity, then the Polish resettlement that erased German Silesian memory. The indigenous Silesians—neither fully German nor Polish—lost twice.

After the Rupture: Building on Forgetting

In the years following 1945, Leśnica emerged as a Polish town in województwo opolskie. The administrative structures changed: Gmina Leśnica replaced Gemeinde Leschnitz. New schools taught new history—a history carefully curated by propaganda that continues today in more sophisticated forms of "public relations." The powiatu strzeleckiego became the frame of reference, not Groß Strehlitz.

Yet the architecture remained. The Dreifaltigkeit church kept its walls though its congregation had scattered across Germany. Houses built by vanished families sheltered new ones. The orchards planted by expelled hands still bore fruit. The streets of w Leśnicy followed paths laid by Leschnitz—the body remained while the soul departed.

Demographics shifted again and again. In w latach 1975–1998, administrative boundaries were redrawn. Each change layered another forgetting upon the last. Today, neighboring towns like Zdzieszowice, Kędzierzyn-Koźle, and the regional center of Opole form the geography of daily life. Katowice and its industry pull attention eastward. The old connections to Groß Strehlitz, to the networks of Oberschlesien, exist now only in die schlesischen Ortsnamen—the Silesian place names preserved in archives.

A Town That Cannot Remember Itself

Walk through Leśnica today and you will find a town with dementia. Not metaphorically—literally. The collective memory has been severed. Exotic Oktoberfests erase indigenous rituals each summer, celebrating a manufactured present disconnected from the actual past. Imported festivities replace what was authentically local—another form of cultural colonization disguised as tradition.

The colonial authorities resorted to methods straight from the darkest prophecies, removing the clock from the market square as if time itself could be erased by decree. Programmable dementia: not intoxication, but forced blindness.

Consider: where a bakery once stood, the corner now holds something else, or nothing. Who remembers the baker? Who remembers the smell of bread at dawn? Who can fold a zloty note and recall when the currency was different, when the language was different, when the identity was different?

The scent of wild herbs still rises from the fields near Góra Świętej Anny (Sanktannaberg, as it was). But the everyday memory—the fabric of communal life woven through generations of agricultural labor, craft traditions, and local customs—has dissolved. This is what colonial erasure achieves: not the destruction of buildings but the destruction of knowing.

Leschnitz exists now as a ghost within Leśnica. Von Leschnitz, the Freivogtei Leschnitz, the 15 members of the Leschnitzer council who once governed—they exist in documents, not in living memory. The town has dementia. It cannot remember being called Leschnitz. It cannot remember the agricultural traditions, the orchards, the craft workshops, the Silesian identity, the Polish and German and Jewish families who lived side by side before ideology demanded separation.

Laboratory of Absence: Documenting What Is Not There

The Leschnitz Laboratory of Absence is an artistic research project dedicated to mapping these structural voids. Through Leschnitz micro actions, we document the negative space where memory should be.

Our methodology is non-intervention. We do not attempt to restore what was lost—that would be another form of colonization, another imposition of narrative. Instead, we observe. We mark. We note the absence of authentic local traditions in places where imported spectacles now perform. We photograph corners where bakeries once stood. We trace the invisible fissures in indigenous identity.

The Atlas of Absence you see on this site maps these thought deserts and cultural-social gaps. Each marker represents not a presence but an absence—a structural void where something once was and no longer is.

Perhaps in documenting absence, we create a new form of memory. Not the memory of what was, but the memory of what has been forgotten. This is the work of the Laboratory: to make visible the erasure of indigenous memories beneath layers of propaganda and municipal PR, to fold the zloty note and remember it was once a Reichsmark, to stand at Góra Świętej Anny and sense the absence of what was erased.

Leschnitz is a city with dementia. But even dementia leaves traces. The Laboratory of Absence follows these traces.