Patrycja Scheibner

Patrycja Scheibner holds two Master’s degrees: one in German Studies from the University of Wrocław and another in Intercultural Studies: Germans and Poles in Europe from Kiel University. She completed internships at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies as well as at the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
Furthermore, she worked as a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute on the German-Polish history textbook project “Europe – Our History”, and at the European Forum for Reconciliation and Cooperation in History and Social Sciences Education. Alongside her academic work, she taught German as a foreign language.
Since April 2025, she has been a research associate at the graduate program “Family Matters. Figures of Allegiance and Release” at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she is writing her doctoral dissertation on the topic:

Silesian Family Histories: A Comparative Study of the Novels by Joanna Bator and Ulrike Draesner.

How can the history of a Lower Silesian family in the 20th century be told when neither family nor nation can be relied upon as stable entities? The most recent works by Joanna Bator, “Gorzko, gorzko” [Bitterness] (2020/2023), and Ulrike Draesner, “Die Verwandelten” (The Transformed, 2023), can be read as examples of a new kind of family narrative set against the backdrop of the major political transformations of the 20th century in the German-Polish-Silesian context.
At the center of each narrative are four generations of female protagonists, who remain closely connected through various mechanisms of transmitting wartime traumatic experiences. Due to the shifting power structures in Lower Silesia after 1945, these women undergo a forced transformation of their originally German-Silesian identity into a Polish one across generations and must adapt to a new cultural reality. They face the consequences of flight and expulsion without ever having physically moved. In this way, these constructed families transcend national boundaries in a unique manner and become the site of social and historical developments.
Bator and Draesner draw on the motifs of transgenerational trauma, intergenerational family memory, and transnational identity in their prose. They adopt an autofictional perspective, break with the traditional family model, and create a polyphony of narrative voices. A literary and cultural analysis of their works enables an exploration of the family as a site of both connection and disconnection—especially along the axes of origin-future, identification-alienation, collectivization-subjectification, and repression-return.