On 3rd October Germany celebrates the 24th anniversary of reunification. On that occasion we would like to remind how the attitude of Poles towards Germans has changed in the last twenty years.

For over twenty years the CBOS has monitored the changes in attitudes towards other nations, including Germans. In that period attitudes towards our Western neighbour have improved significantly. In comparison to 1993 the proportion of interviewees declaring sympathy towards Germans increased from 23% to 39% and proportion of those declaring aversion decrease from 53% to 30%.

It is likely that nowadays attitudes towards other nations, including Germans, are shaped in greater extend by personal experiences and in lesser extend by stereotypes as it was in the past. As our research shows in the last two decades the proportion of the Poles who travelled abroad increased significantly, and Germany is not only a popular destination of Polish economic migration but also the most popular destination of foreign holiday trips (19% of those travelling for recreational reasons abroad).