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Jarmo Jääskeläinen and the Experience of “Late Resettlers” to Germany
Abstract
This article examines Antonius the Emigrant / Antonius: The Resettler (1977), a documentary by Finnish filmmaker Jarmo Jääskeläinen, whose long career in Poland was marked by an exceptional degree of analytical distance and engagement with sociopolitical themes. The film addresses an underexplored aspect of Polish post‑war history: the emigration of autochthonous inhabitants of Warmia and Masuria to the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. While often framed as a “national minority” issue, the film reveals a more complex reality shaped by property ownership, rural socio‑economic structures, the legacy of collectivisation, and state policy toward individual farmers. Drawing on memory‑politics research and regional historiography, the article argues that Jääskeläinen exposes dimensions of migration that remained outside official discourse and were largely absent from Polish documentary cinema. Through its intimate portrayal of one family, the film illuminates broader mechanisms of marginalisation, displacement and identity in socialist Poland. Consequently, Jääskeläinen’s film emerges as an important testimony to the experiences of “late resettlers” and a critical reflection on Poland’s memory policy pursued in the communist period.
Keywords:
documentary film, Warmia and Masuria, migration, late resettlers, memory politics, Jarmo JääskeläinenDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.