#wajda

polish Dracula be like:

Wesele (The Wedding) by Andrzej Wajda from 1972. 

Based on Wesele by Stanisław Wzspiański from 1901.

After nearly a month and a half in Poland, one thing has really caught my mind’s eye: the completely different way of thinking on the common past. There is a big awareness of Polish culture, and not merely the ghost of Communism. In the streets of Warszawa the aftermath of the Second World War still lingers on every day.

On a superficial level this isn’t hard to understand: whole streets still haven’t been rebuilt (in certain blocks it is completely normally to see bullet hole-covered appartment buildings), and the Stalinist-Gothic of the Palace of Science and Culture dominates the skyline of the city. But more recent history has also left an indelible mark that further sharpens people’s political awareness. It was only 30 years ago that the country lived under a military dictatorship, after the December Coup of 1981 (a hideous situation, regardless of how ‘benign’ that coup was supposed to be). The revolution of Solidarność is only a generation old. Almost everyone who holds an influential or powerful position in Polish society today, is in one way or another linked to the trade union movement in the 1980s (Adam Michnik for example, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza; Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the rightwing-conservative PiS; ...).

The Polish people have a long tradition of resistance that goes back to the Polish partitions at the end of the 18th century. With figures like Tadeusz Kościuszko, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik and Lech Wałęsa, the country possesses an impressive pantheon of national heroes fighting for freedom. Characteristic of this Polish tradition is the relatively big importance of writers and artists in the struggle for freedom and independence. Between 1795 and 1918, especially after the failed uprisings of 1861-63, virtually all institutions supporting Polish culture and the Polish language were closed. Teaching Polish in middle and higher education became illegal in large parts of the former Commonwealth (an important exception is Austrian-administered Polish Galicia, but I am leaving that aside for this post). The twin pressures of Germanification and Russification were designed to assimilate the peoples of the Polish partitions to the dominant cultural/ethnic group of respectiviely the Prussian (later German) and Russian empires, wiping out any trace of their former Polish (or Ukrainian, Jewish, ...) heritage. Under heavy pressure of the censors of the three Empires it became impossible to discuss the Polish Question within the borders of the former Commonwealth, which resulted in Polish literature assuming a disproportionately important role in preserving the nation. Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Stanisław Wyspiański, Bolesław Prus, are just some of the names everyone in Poland knows because of their contributions to Polish literature - and therefore implicitly also to the struggle against foreign occupation and cultural homogenization.

This tradition was continued in the course of the 20th century, as the from 1918 newly-independent Second Republic had to cope with both Nazi- and Soviet-Occupation, and after that a Soviet-imposed Communist regime. Not only authors like Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Ryszard Kapuściński and Witold Gombrowicz, but also theatre artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski and Krystian Lupa, or film directors like Andrzej Wajda, can be seen as belonging to that tradition.

The developing distance and increasing isolation of art from society which we witnessed in the West, is something hardly to be found in Poland. When Tadeusz Kantor for example - in the best avant-garde tradition - pleas for an Artistic Fiction and the Autonomy of Theatre, he doesn’t mean that theatre is entirely isolated from the world in which it is produced. No artist can work in a vacuum. Instead, his concepts carry inside them a dialectic, where the autonomy of the arts, in transcending topicality, actually brings the arts closer to life by carrying out ideas and participating in intellectual debate. Autonomous art creates a space, which can also be political. In the art of Kantor for example a central concept is that of the memory, especially the presentation of memories that aren’t supposed to be there (such as the Polish-Jewish community), from a world that no longer exists: the Second Republic before the large ethnic cleansings of 1939-1948. Just like in Wajda’s Popiół i diament or Człowiek z żelaza, the choice of topic was in itself a big political statement of resistance, by presenting people, memories and narratives that were supposed not to exist.

Today Poland is a free country in the heart of the European Union, and in that capacity it is finally restored to its rightful place as a meeting place between East and West. At the same time the Polish intellectual tradition is under great pressure. While the Russian tanks might have gone, and even though the German Federal Republic is now one of Poland’s stauncest allies (not the least through NATO), Poland now (ironically?) seems to experience a whole host of internal problems. The might and authority of the Roman Catholic Church is unparalleled to anything known in contemporary Western societies. Homosexuality is treated not just as a sin, but as a physical illness. Abortion is de facto outlawed, and women’s rights are in some circles seen as mere theory (and a theory they reject, at that). Begging pensioners has been a normal part of Poland’s public space ever since the collapse of Communism, wages are deliberately kept low and working conditions are abysmal by any standard. The past few years Poland has been host to the largest far-right/neo-nazi demonstrations in Europe - a sad irony for a country that after 1945 has been almost exclusively white, Roman Catholic and Polish (an anomaly in Poland’s multicultural and multi-ethnic history). The current central government seems increasingly nostalgic for the power enjoyed by the one-party state between 1948-1989, and increasingly takes measures to muzzle dissent, turning the public broadcaster TVP into a propaganda station, while at the same time purging the arts - one of the few bastions of the Left in Poland - from most of its critical thinkers. The most remarkable to all these developments is that they aren’t forced by any foreign power: this repression is by Poles, for Poles.

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