Poland’s New Pantheon
The PiS regime is hoping to use this weekend’s NATO summit in Warsaw as an opportunity to push its historical agenda of martyrology and grievance. Their (misguided) conviction is that foreigners will respect Poland more if the country’s history is presented as a story of heroism, victimization, resistance to (always external) injustice, and above all national unity and homogeneity.
Yesterday I observed a strange ceremony on Piłsudski Square, just outside the Ministry of Defense building. Though staged on that massive public space, it was not a public event: there had been no advance publicity, and the only observers were a handful of curious tourists and the cameras of TVP (which once stood for Telewizja Polska, but nowadays would be more accurately labeled Telewizja Propaganda). I only happened upon the event because my apartment is nearby (I’m in Poland for the coming academic year), and I noticed a group of people dressed in historical costumes walking by. They represented various eras in Poland’s history, with the 19th and 20th century uprisings most prominently represented. Surrounding them was a handful of dignitaries and a unit of present-day soldiers, but when I asked one of the latter what was happening, he replied, “it’s something about an exhibition, but I don’t know anything else.”
It was indeed the official opening of an exhibition: one that was prominently displayed on the outside of the Ministry of Defence building, covering the façade that faces Piłsudski Square. It consisted of portraits of some famous Poles, with each accompanied by a short description or quotation in both Polish and English. The tiny audience was soon addressed by Wojciech Fałkowski, an Ministry of Defense official who introduced himself as a historian. He said that the exhibit was designed partially for Poles, but primarily for foreigners who might be in Warsaw because of the NATO summit or the upcoming Catholic World Youth Days. With this in mind, the government had prepared an English-language booklet that summarized Poland’s greatest accomplishments. The booklet was distributed to the assembled observers, though as far as I could tell, everyone (other than me and a few puzzled tourists) was Polish. Fałkowski lamented that foreigners knew almost nothing about Poland’s glorious past, but if they did, they would understand how important the nation was and respect the Poles more. It was therefore necessary, he continued, to propagate awareness of Poland’s greatest individuals (thus the portraits) alongside the country’s military accomplishments (outlined in the booklet).
Is ignorance about Polish history actually a distinctive problem? It would seem to be in my interest to agree that everyone should know more about Poland’s past, but let’s be realistic: ignorance about Poland history is no greater than ignorance of any other country of similar size. In the US, our young people don’t even know much about American history, so we need to put their lack of knowledge about Poland in context. For that matter, I wonder how much Poles know about Sudan, Algeria, Uganda, or Iraq (to name the countries closest to Poland in population) or Thailand, Argentina, Egypt, or Pakistan (to name the countries closest to Poland in total GDP).
Perhaps there’s a generic problem of historical ignorance, but I wish we could put to rest the idea that Poland is disproportionately, much less uniquely, invisible. In fact, based on my own (perhaps unrepresentative) experiences, interest in Poland is broad and growing. My course on modern Polish history gets more enrollment (around 100 students) than any other course I offer, including my surveys of modern Roman Catholic history, global economic history, and the history of WWI and WWII in Europe.
If my enrollment trends are unusual, perhaps it is precisely because I do not teach the sort of Polish history represented by the PiS worldview. That Ministry of Defense display, together with the accompanying booklet, exemplified an approach that focused on Great Men (and a few Great Women). At the center of the display, covering two floors of the building, was Pope St. John Paul II (of course). Surrounding him was the following pantheon:
- Kazimierz the Great
- Jadwiga d’Anjou
- Copernicus
- Mikołaj Rej
- Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski
- Jan Heweliusz
- Paweł Edmund Strzelecki
- Adam Mickiewicz
- Juliusz Słowacki
- Fryderyk Chopin
- Ignacy Łukasiewicz
- Jan Matejko
- Helena Modrzejewska
- Albert Chmielowski
- Henryk Sienkiewicz
- Ignacy Jan Paderewski
- Roman Dmowski
- Władysław Reymont
- Maria Skłodowska-Curie
- Henryk Arctowski
- Janusz Korczak
- Stefan Banach
- Maksymilian Kolbe
- Marian Rejewski
- Faustyna Kowalska
- Czesław Miłosz
- Stanisław Lem
- Father Jerzy Popiełuszko
The way this list is presented reflects a set of values that only a minority of foreign visitors (not to mention Poles) are going to find appealing. The actual line-up of people represents a variety of ideological perspectives, but the (sloppily translated) captions and quotations underneath the pictures present a more unitary vision. Sienkiewicz, for example, informs viewers that “the motherland [sic—ojczyzna] and the faith are a single giant altar,” and Dmowski proclaims that “the motherland is above all the nation, then the stage [sic—should be state]: without the nation, there can be no state.” Further on, Faustyna Kowalska is quoted as saying “O, how good [it] is to live a life of obedience, [to] be aware that everything I do is pleasant to God.” Lines like these present a vision of nationalist homogeneity and conformity that reflects quite well PiS’s “polityka historyczna.”
I shudder to imagine what Miłosz would think about his inclusion alongside the likes of Dmowski, but the exhibit gives no sense of any tension here: it manages to make the great poet seem anodyne by quoting the bromide, “O tym, kto kim jest, nie decyduje pieniądz” (translated as “Who is who is not determined by money.”) It is hard to quibble with that sentiment, but is this really the most representative line of Miłosz’s poetry that they could find? Amazingly, Janusz Korczak is identified simply as a “pedagouge [sic] and great friend of children.” He is quoted as saying, “When a child smiles, the whole world is smiling.” That he was a Jew murdered in the Holocaust is left unmentioned. Placing him in the same pantheon as Dmowski is scandalous beyond words.
It is significant that Piłsudski’s portrait was not included in the exhibit, though his statue is nearby. Given his lifelong goal of building the sort of state that could contain multiple languages and religions, he would probably have been glad to have been excluded. Missing also, of course, were any references to ideals like respect for the rule of law, acceptance of diversity, or a commitment to peace and prosperity. Missing were the great figures of Poland’s legal and constitutional tradition: people like Paweł Włodkowicz (the 15th century advocate for equal rights for Christians and non-Christians); any of the authors of the 1573 Confederation of Warsaw (which not only eschewed religiously motivated violence, but declared that the community of Poles included people of many faiths); any of the authors of the path-breaking constitution of May 3, 1791 (which encoded the idea that the law stands higher than the ruler); any exemplars of the Polish tradition of social democracy; and above all any of the towering figures who created modern Poland through the Solidarity movement of 1980-1981 and the Round Tabled Negotiations of 1989. If there is one name that most visitors of Poland will know and should know (other than John Paul II), it would surely be Lech Wałęsa. And it wouldn’t hurt to spread the renown of people like Jacek Kuroń, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, or Bronisław Geremek, though I fear that we won’t be seeing monuments to them any time soon.