Protests and Patriotism
A petition is currently circulating among Polish Studies scholars regarding the fate of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk (click here for background on the scandal). The text of the letter is below, and I urge everyone who agrees with its message to join this protest by emailing the organizers, John Connelly and Christian Osterman. The fundamental issues involved are of vital importance, and I enthusiastically agree that the international community of Polish Studies scholars must speak out. That said, I think the letter also raises some issues that merit further consideration and discussion.
Here is the text of the letter:
We emphatically protest plans to discontinue the World War II museum in Gdańsk, Poland’s northern Port city, known to people everywhere as the birthplace of Solidarity. A huge exhibition is almost ready for visitors, reflecting years of hard work as well as expenditures of many millions of dollars. To close it now would constitute a grave injustice, unprecedented in the democratic western world.
The exhibition shows indelibly the costs Poland bore as the first nation to say no to Hitler, but also highlights Poland’s contributions to victory on innumerable fronts: military, diplomatic, intellectual and moral. Each episode is treated in dispassionate professional terms, and will make Poles proud of the nation’s heroism, but also of its willingness to confront difficult questions that emerge from its past. The museum does justice to the history of a people that has suffered under regimes of propaganda and distortion, and knows perhaps better than any other that truth sets us free.
Foreign audiences will flock to this museum because it is about World War II across the globe. But precisely its global reach permits visitors to encounter inspiring deeds of Poland’s past on a background in which they can be seen and understood. For example we perceive the heroism of Poland’s enormous and complex underground resistance only by seeing it contrasted to movements in other places. In how many places were people willing to die for the sake of poetry?
We urge Poland’s elected leaders to permit the WWII museum to open on schedule; any interruption in its work will count as tragedy in the eyes of all who study the past and all who care about Poland’s future.
I want to emphasize again that I sincerely respect the authors of this letter. I commend them for organizing this protest, and I share their anger and incredulity that the museum is threatened. Nonetheless, I am not sure that this is the best approach.
Were I not familiar with the situation in Poland, I would assume from reading this protest that the museum was threatened with closure by a group of lefty cosmopolitans who wanted to prevent the world from realizing Poland’s glorious contribution to victory in WWII. In fact, every PiS supporter would be delighted to have a museum that would “highlight Poland’s contributions to victory,” recount the “inspiring deeds of Poland’s past,” and “do justice to the history of a people that has suffered under regimes of propaganda and distortion.” Surely Kaczyński himself wants the world to see Poland as a land that “knows perhaps better than any other that truth sets us free” as a country that collectively “said no to Hitler,” and as a place where people are uniquely “willing to die for the sake of poetry.” PiS wants Poland to be seen as a land where outside forces of evil constantly bring bloodshed and tyranny, rendering the country into history’s perpetual victim and martyr.
Elsewhere I have argued against this interpretation of Polish history, and I don’t want to rehash my objections here. What matters now are the implications of trying to build a defense of Polish democracy on the foundation of national martyrology. We are faced with a government that wants to shut down or marginalize historical debate and discussion, to enforce a single vision of Poland’s past, and to push all those who disagree with them out of the public sphere. I am skeptical that we can we fight the imposition of Kaczyński’s “polityka historyczna” in the name of an alternative, only slightly more mild version of the same. Can we resist their martyrologies, their maudlin phraseology, their patriotic clichés, and their national exceptionalism by merely countering with a few amendments and qualifications? We do indeed need to use “dispassionate professional terms” when discussing these matters, but (as this letter exemplifies) it is very hard to do so if we stay within the familiar tropes of Polish patriotism. I don’t believe that the PiS vision of history can be opposed by saying “yes, but…”
Of course, for Kaczyński it is unacceptable to even mention antisemitism, to even hint that there were Poles who found the call to “die for poetry” insufficiently motivational, to even suggest that there are any complexities or nuances worth considering. That’s why a purge is underway. And that is what we must protest.
Those of us who study Poland from afar, in my opinion, do no favors to our Polish friends and colleagues when we perpetuate a heroic, lachrymose, or martyrological understanding of Poland’s past (or present). Of course we need to talk about the catastrophe of the Second World War, and we should highlight the fact that northeastern Europe was one of the primary sites of that world-wide disaster. In percentage terms, the citizens of the Second Polish Republic suffered more casualties than any other country in WWII, and even if we separate Jewish and non-Jewish casualties, the numbers are still beyond imagining. And yes, the Polish resistance movement was among the largest in Nazi-occupied Europe—perhaps the largest. But if we write about those years within a genre of heroic tragedy, it then becomes hard to incorporate the nuances and complexities that usually characterize good historical scholarship. Even more important at the moment, we find ourselves on very tenuous ground when attacked by those who want to advance the same story, but without any of the qualifications we might want to add.
I recognize that right now the specifics of this debate are of secondary importance. For precisely this reason, though, I feel that we should unify around what we share: a commitment to maintaining a space for differing points of view and an opposition to attempts by the Polish government to impose one and only one historical interpretation. I believe that as scholars we must take a stand against the very idea of a state-sponsored “polityka historyczna,” rather than arguing about what specific message such a polityka should convey.