Memory of independence. A gap-filling exercise

An early 20th century photo of Breslau (Wrocław), a city that was German until after the Second World War. Source: Neue Photographische Gesellschaft Berlin Stegliz (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Even though local and state officials can promote these celebrations and assure the official narrative and symbolism, the societal reception of the commemorations will remain largely outside their control. What is more, even as early as today, it is safe to assume that this reception will be highly unequal across Poland – such an outcome seems almost intuitive. After all, how to prepare a holistic, inclusive narrative about independence and statehood – notions so closely intertwined with various layers of local and personal identities – for a country that had significant parts of its borders reshaped, populations displaced and lands taken away over seven decades ago?

Complex task

For the communities of Szczecin, Wrocław, Olsztyn and many others located on the so-called Recovered Territories –  the former lands of Eastern Prussia and eastern parts of Germany that Poland gained after the Second World War – the commemorations of the 100 year anniversary will be a very complex and uneasy task to carry out. The vast majority of these cities, as well as many other ones, have been governed by Polish authorities for no more than a fraction of their overall history, and they still maintain distinct architectural, societal and economic features indicating their urban consanguinity with Germany. Even today, this differentiates them from other parts of Poland. From a purely chronological perspective, therefore, the notion of Polish independence as a collective good has much stronger roots in Warsaw than in Wrocław, in Kraków than in Szczecin, and in Kielce than in Słupsk.

Thus the two questions that persist and need to be asked are: firstly, whether it is at all possible to create a narrative commemorating independence that is inclusive enough to embrace such a diverse multitude of identities? Secondly, is it even desirable to attempt to develop one? The underlying tension expressed through these two questions stems from the unavoidable clash between the types of categories that are here at play. Understood from legal and historical points of view, terms such as independence or sovereignty are very rigid and unilateral. A city, a community, a land parcel cannot belong to two countries at once. Consequently, a collective of human beings living within an area cannot, as a whole, identify itself as located within the confines of a multitude of sovereign entities. Therefore celebrating independence, or the memory of regaining it, cannot be plural, at least from a legal angle. From a sociological perspective, however, the matter at hand presents itself as completely the opposite. Nationhood is a much more fluid concept, and so is identity. When the two concepts mix together, it oftentimes becomes clinically impossible to single out particular national identities among members of a borderland community. Drawing on the works of Benedict Anderson, it could be argued that the imagined community of the Recovered Territories is significantly different compared to that of central, eastern and southern Poland.

A similar critical decomposition can be conducted with regard to collective memory, a notion of paramount importance in the context of the independence commemorations. “Collectivities have memories, just like they have identities,” wrote the American sociologist Jeffrey Olick in his famous essay “Collective memory: The Two Cultures”. Moreover, collective memory is not only inherently plural, or, as Richard Kravitzek put it, polyphonic, but also multidirectional. The latter term, particularly popular and prolific in the Polish school of memory studies, as illustrated in the works of Barbara Szacka and more recently Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, is perhaps the most important for the entire debate over the ways of commemorating independence.

The multidirectional nature of memory allows for its development alongside numerous paths simultaneously. In simpler terms, the creation of narratives related to one particular historical event or phenomenon does not exclude a parallel creation of narratives concerning a different fragment of the collective past. From this angle, collective memory is a building under construction, of which different wings can be developed, expanded and built over at the same time. An expansion of the memory of independence therefore does not need to be synonymous with abandoning other commemorative efforts.

Zero-sum memory

In the Polish literature on memory – most recently exemplified by Paweł Dobrosielski’s book Spory o Grossa (The disputes over Gross), examining the shape and dominant discursive trends in the public debate following the publications of Jan Tomasz Gross’s books – a concern is frequently expressed that collective memory is a type of zero-sum game. Its expansion in one particular direction indispensably leads to negligence or even erosion of all other dimensions. However the most recent publications on the Polish memory politics, to name only Rafał Stobiecki’s works on the role of historians in debating politics of history and Marcin Napiórkowski’s book on the memory of the Warsaw Uprising, suggests otherwise. Eventually, from a more practical perspective, the last two years in Polish memory politics and the mnemonic strategy of the Law and Justice government show that the conflict over memory can be simultaneously expanded in various directions at the same time and touch upon different layers of history with comparable, if not identical, intensity.

Finally, it is crucial to address the question of participation. As involvement in events such as the commemoration of a state’s independence is very much a matter of belonging – to a community, a nation or a country – how does one construct a narrative of the anniversary of regaining independence in areas that have no physical traces of that struggle? That vacuum of actual memory does not only touch upon the members of the community (since hardly any participants of the original events will be alive), but also the spatial dimension of interpretation. Technically speaking, not a single building standing today in Wrocław had been a part of independent Poland a century ago. Any buildings in these two cities that are a hundred years old belonged to a different country. It is thus not just the community, but most of the sources of its local identities that cannot fully claim a continuous century of “Polishness”. This is, however, not to say that a memory of the struggle for independence cannot emerge there.

In the field of sociology of memory, multiple theories and conceptual frameworks address the issue of memories that are somehow artificial, that is, they do not correspond to any actual historical events located within a specific time and space. One such concept is the notion of post-memory, developed by Marianne Hirsch, and it is particularly useful to understand how the century of Polish independence can be successfully celebrated even in the Recovered Territories. Post-memory refers to a phenomenon in which individuals begin to develop memories of events they have not taken part in themselves, but ones which past generations of their communities or families have.

Though Hirsch’s work has been primarily centred on the families of Holocaust victims, the notion of post-memory can easily be transplanted into the debate over commemorating Polish independence. Sociology of memory gives an affirmative answer to the question of whether areas as Recovered Territories can be successfully merged into a nationwide commemorative narrative. The practicalities of such a process, however, are a completely different issue.

Future-oriented

Local government leaders and municipalities face a difficult and complex challenge. While the culmination of commemorative efforts is to take place on November 11th 2018, the entire year is dubbed the year in which Poland remembers its struggle for independence. As a result, various individual events leading up to the Independence Day also become worthy of exceptional commemoration. That makes it a year-long effort in which it is immensely difficult to maintain an inclusive narrative and avoid the politicisation of memory. Eventually, the historical tensions and complexities are not the only ones to be taken into consideration. Present-day compositions of the local population are also important in many cases. Such as the one in Wrocław, where over 11 per cent of the population is now made up of Ukrainians, while other minorities also begin to be deeply rooted in the city’s societal landscape. The commemorations should also account for that. Thus, the narrative should focus on the future as well. The past, present and, most likely, the future of the Recovered Territories, for instance, are marked by ethnic heterogeneity and the co-existence of members of different ethnicities, origins and identities.

A prospective orientation of the narrative built over independence commemorations appears to be among the most constructive and useful strategies that could potentially be implemented. Some specific examples are already implemented, such as in the case of Słupsk, where the mayor, Robert Biedroń, has been very vocal about his approach to the centennial anniversary of independence. As the city has no historical continuity within the borders of the Polish State, the commemorations will focus on the future, and the central theme will be on women’s rights – an issue that is relevant to the present and not just buried under pompous declarations of historical remembrance. Similar declarations were made by local governments from Sopot, Świdnica, Ostrów Wielkopolski and other municipalities from the Recovered Territories.

Be that as it may, the pre-war absence from the Polish statehood is not the only identity-related obstacle to building an inclusive narrative of independence. The Polish State post-1944 was not exactly a manifestation of a sovereign entity and numerous areas located on the Recovered Territories later became the primary deployment locations for Soviet troops stationed in Poland – Legnica in Lower Silesia and the entire area of Western Pomerania being on the forefront of this category. The German heritage of these lands, followed immediately by the overarching presence of the Red Army, successfully inhibited not only a smooth integration with the rest of the country in terms of building a coherent identity, but also labelled the areas as “not fully Polish”, or, more specifically, “not fully controlled by the Polish government” for almost half a century. Meanwhile, other parts of Poland were undergoing a complex, nation- and identity-building process, as a result of the tragic outcomes of the Second World War and the disappearance of entire classes and layers of society, including Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians as well as large parts of the aristocracy and intellectual elite.

Window of opportunity

Edwin Bendyk, one of Poland’s leading social scientists and public commentators, is therefore right to point out that many of the cities located in the Recovered Territories suffer from “the curse of eternal beginning”. Forced on constantly reinventing themselves and proving their belonging, most of these communities would struggle to have their identities somehow solidified, transformed into something rigid and amorphous. In his essay on the difficulties of commemorating independence in the western parts of Poland (Polityka 8/2018), Bendyk rightly observes that 2018 gives room for a window of opportunity for many cities in the area to open (or, in some places, re-open) a debate on pressing issues of societal development. Issues, one might add, of which Polish urban areas are not short of by any means.

Bendyk lists, among others, the post-industrial transformation, new urban identities and depopulation caused by migration to other countries and large cities. This taxonomy, however, needs to be expanded to include climate change and pollution, transnational co-operation between regions, the internationalisation of education, the integration of economic migrants and an effective response to Poland’s growing insertion into the globalised economy. All these policy-making areas not only lie within the competences of local governments, but are also dimensions in which voters do expect their politicians to act and deliver. In sum, the year in which Poland celebrates a century of its independence can present a myriad of opportunities locally. In an election year, it is a chance not to be missed.

All of the above discussed scenarios will, however, prove useless or impossible to carry out if the commemorative initiative is hijacked by those who would use it as tool of exclusion. Recent initiatives in the memory of history and politics of many countries in the Central and Eastern Europe region have shown that over the past number of years, memory continues to be an issue of nationhood. As evidenced by the most recent statements on memory politics, delivered on the commemorative events of the anniversary of March 1968 by the present-day Polish government officials, subscribing to a certain, oftentimes dogmatic, monopolistic version of collective history is treated as a crucial determinant of one’s worthiness as a member of a nation.

Memory becoming a tool of partisan struggle is by no means a new phenomenon. Memory as an instrument of societal exclusion, however, is not only a recent emergence but also a cause for concern. Therefore, it is crucial to remember that if Poland is to be really “infinitely independent”, it needs to recognise and celebrate each and every member of its nation equally, no matter where their roots are.

Mateusz Mazzini is a doctoral candidate at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and formerly a visiting doctoral scholar at University College London. His research project focuses on the collective memory of the non-democratic past in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

1918, Poland, Recovered Territories