The Oder–Neisse frontier, delineated in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, illustrates the profound and ultimately successful reconfiguration of Europe’s borderlands—from a “bloody border” to a symbolic bridge. Emerging from Stalin’s strategic ambition to secure a buffer zone for the Soviet Union, the Oder–Neisse boundary was formalized during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. Its implementation was accompanied by the mass expulsion of Germans from the region and the resettlement of Poles—many uprooted from Soviet-annexed eastern territories—into the so-called Recovered Territories. Polish Western Borderlands Studies, institutionalized at the Instytut Zachodni, provided scholarly legitimation by portraying Silesia and Pomerania as ancestral Piast lands, thereby consolidating Polish sovereignty and countering German revisionist narratives. For decades the border embodied Cold War division, yet initiatives of reconciliation—most notably the 1965 exchange of episcopal letters of forgiveness and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, culminating in unified Germany’s recognition of the frontier in 1990—transformed its meaning. Today, institutions such as the European University Viadrina attest to the reimagining of a once violent frontier as a transnational space of dialogue and cooperation.