Gloomy Landscapes. Everyday Strategies of Identity in 1960S Poland. a Case Study

50 BOI 23 / 2005 Alltag und Ideologie im Realsozialismus F o r u m 51 Gloomy Landscapes. Everyday Strategies of Identity in 1960s Poland. A Case Study José M. Faraldo (Potsdam) andscapes can incarnate ideas and ideologies, they tain scepticism towards, or at least oblivion of these Lcan become sources for discourses of diff erent types, memoirs. With the growing importance of biographic and they can be the ground stone for identities too. For methods in the social sciences, including history, such Barbara R. the thousand lakes and the never-ending materials deserve more attention. forest of Northern Poland were the landscapes of her The process of collecting the memories began childhood, but they also provided her with a precise shortly after the end of the Stalinist period and the image of the world, an image that was a main piece of beginning of reforms in Poland in 1956. The Western the identity she had to build in order to survive in the Institute prepared a contest in order to gather material strange conditions of post-war Warmia and Masuria. about the new settlers in the Western Regions. Three The two regions, very close from a geographical, histor- contests were held until 1970, each of them show- ical and even administrative point of view, were parts ing some specifi c aspects. The fi rst competition was of Ostpreußen, the former German province of Eastern launched in December 1956. Exploiting the increased Prussia that after 1945 was divided between Russia and freedom of expression, the promoters of the memoirs Poland. Most of their inhabitants fl ed or were deported competition encouraged settlers to write down autobio- to Germany. Thousands of people expelled from the graphical texts describing their arrival to the Western Eastern Polish Regions, now under Soviet rule, came to Regions and their life there. The settlers seized the op- settle in those former German lands, trying to come to portunity with joy. For the fi rst time they could speak terms with a new homeland that was alien and strange freely about facts they felt as epic, for the fi rst time they to them. could express their views about political repression and But unlike many of her neighbours, Barbara R. the terrible events of the fi rst years after the immediate was born there, in this same territory, not very far away settlement. They wanted to tell the world about their from her present home. She and her parents were, in traumatic experiences and, in the mood of the day, they the offi cial statistics, “autochthonous”, part of the al- felt they could do it. Zygmunt Dulczewski has affi rmed leged Polish natives who had survived centuries of Ger- that: “after all these years, people really wanted to talk” man oppression and who were purportedly waiting for (Interview with Z. Dulczewski, December 8, 2000). There the “return” of the area to the motherland. was a fl ow of letters to the Institute, not only sending memoirs, but also congratulations for the idea. When the competition was closed, 227 memoirs had been Materials of memory received and 205 were assessed after having fulfi lled the necessary requirements. The collected memoirs are arbara’s remembrances of childhood and youth very diverse, but almost every one of them begins with Bare preserved at the Western Institute (Instytut Za- a reference to the end of the war. Some of the writers chodni), in Poznań, the capital city of the Wielkopolska had been in concentration camps or had served as slave region in Poland, together with more than 800 diaries workers in these parts of the new Poland and decided to and memoirs. Such diaries and memoirs are notations stay where they were, while others were very young and of the time or subsequent recollections mostly written came to the Western Regions looking for adventures or by people who settled, after the Second World War, a better life. Some subjects are very well depicted in the in the former German regions ceded to Poland at the memoirs: the settlers’ move into the region, settlement Potsdam conference, the so-called “Northern and West- problems, confl icts with Soviet soldiers, plundering of ern Regions”. The memoirs were collected by means every kind of goods, the last German inhabitants and of diverse competitions that had been announced in their expulsion, the physical and psychical situation of radio and newspapers and by posters and advertising. the population, and the beginning of adaptation to the The outcomes were sometimes published, but seldom in new territories. their full version. In 1966 the Institute launched the second The contests were based on a methodology contest, the one to which Barbara sent her memories initiated by Florian Znaniecki and developed by his (more on that below). The third contest took place in disciple Józef Chałasiński. In the post-war years such 1970, in cooperation with the Friends of Memoirs So- competitions grew into a consistent strategy of Polish ciety and the Society for Development of the Western sociology and resulted in an incredible accumulation of Regions, both in Warsaw. As part of the state-sponsored results in many archives and institutions in Poland. The celebrations of the “25th Anniversary of the Return of extensive dimension of the phenomenon led scientists the Western Regions to Poland”, the organizers wanted to create a new category for this genre: “methodology to collect “materials showing the social, economical, of mass memoirs” or simply “mass memoirs”. Changes and cultural changes in the Western Regions”. They in sociological methodology in Poland in the eighties wanted – as Dulczewski writes – to obtain new materi- and the rejection of almost all research made under als in order to compare them with the fi rst competition, socialism after the changes of 1989 resulted in a cer- presenting the whole process of settlement from the 52 BOI 23 / 2005 Alltag und Ideologie im Realsozialismus F o r u m 53 fi rst “pioneers” to the new “inhabitants” (Dulczewski marriages were terrible, e.g. a husband who blamed 1978: 184). This was the conscious attempt to illustrate his wife for being German and who mistreated her and the huge leap forward of the country, in particular of their children. Sometimes, these problems ended in the the western territories, as proclaimed by the govern- suicide of the wife (the mother). Those children used ment. The outcome was really impressive in number: the memoirs to tell these traumatic stories, maybe as a 747 memoirs fulfi lled the necessary requirements. way of getting rid of their past. Although representations of everyday life in these memoirs are very accurate, the political circumstances at that time did not allow honesty and frankness in the written accounts. This were the years when increased political repression and an intensifying economical arbara R. participated in the 1966 competition. In a crisis led to a new worker rebellion, which eventually Bletter to the organizers, she declared that she did again forced the party-leadership to step down. Prob- not write the memoirs specifi cally for the competition, ably due to this political background, many of the mem- but because “in life there are moments when people oirs look, in comparison to the previous competitions, need to analyse the past, maybe aiming to fi ll at any dull and grey. price their dull void, to try to explain to themselves why they wasted half of their life“. She wrote in her memoirs “about everyday life“, and it seems that she understood very well what the mission of the competition would be because, “maybe this everyday life is the best image of he second competition, which began in March 1966 Polish Warmia’s new natives. Banal everyday life, joy, Tand closed on 31st October 1966, was directed to sadness, work, love, mean life, a life that is strongly “the young generation of Polish autochthons (natives) linked to our homeland, a homeland that is built here, in the Polish Western Regions” (Dulczewski 1967: 430). on Warmian land”. Under the word “autochthons” promoters understood Barbara was born on 27th September 1939, at “inhabitants of the territories who were born there the very beginning of the Second World War. In the little after their parent’s settlement or who came to the re- village where she was born German was the language of gions when they were only a few years old”. This time, everyday communication and only later she discovered the contest was organized by the Western Institute that Polish remained spoken in the church and that her together with the cultural journal “Nurt”. The motivmotiveses grandmother wrote a “black book” (a diary?) in Polish. to send contributions were very diverse: aside from Besides, according to her, one of her grandfathers came economical incentives (the prizes for the top-memoirs probably from Lithuania. were very high), we see literary ambitions, therapeutic When the Germans retreated from the ad- storytelling and the typical teenager wish of self-rep- vancing Red Army and the front reached the village, resentation. Another peculiar reason was that many of the mother fl ed with Barbara to a little town in the the writers were students motivated by peers or who neighbouring region, Masuria, where they sought had been assigned to write memoirs as homework by refuge. Some Soviet soldiers helped them fi nd a home their teachers. This makes these memoirs more liable to there and she remained in this village through all of her comparative analysis than the settlers’ memoirs, which childhood. Times were hard, the war had fi nished and were more heterogeneous because the settlers had no the fi rst“szabrownicy” (plunderers)(plunderers) came.

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