"As if the time stopped" : "Journey of the land of childhood" and "poetic realism" of Horst Bienek in the context of research on memory

The aim of this article is to analyse the novel Podróż w krainę dzieciństwa by Horst Bienek in the context of memory studies. It indicates how mnemonic conceptions are intertwined with the issue of the reminiscence and correlated with the writing technique called "poetic realism" by the author himself. The analysis is based on both the "cultural memory" theory introduced by Jan and Aleida Assmann and Maurice Halbwachs’ theory on "collective memory". The memory issues are strongly associated with the question of identity as well as with the manner of presentation of the urban space. In this view, one may expand the research by means of connecting the individual memory with the various texts of culture known to Bienek. Such an approach to Podróż w krainę dzieciństwa sheds new light on the literary output of the writer from Gliwice and provokes thoughts on the way the memory functions, not only in Bienek’s reminiscent novels, but also in his other works