European journal of American studies
13-3 | 2018 Special Issue: America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations
Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13498 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.13498 ISSN : 1991-9336
Éditeur European Association for American Studies
Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 13-3 | 2018, « Special Issue: America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 07 décembre 2018, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13498 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.13498
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.
European Journal of American studies 1
SOMMAIRE
Introduction America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations Piotr Skurowski et Agnieszka Pantuchowicz
Coming Out in Poland Tomasz Basiuk
Americanizations of Holocaust Memory and Museum Aesthetic Experience Karolina Krasuska
Figurations of Attachment in Sylvia Plath and Halina Poświatowska Agnieszka Pantuchowicz
Will You Awaken When Your Netflix No Longer Works? American Films, Television Productions and Social Transformations in Poland Mirosław Filiciak
Dances with Westerns in Poland’s Borderlands Piotr Skurowski
A Train to Hollywood: Porno-Chic in the Polish Cinema of the Late 1980s Karol Jachymek
African-American Music in the Service of White Nationalists: Polish “Patriotic Rap” as a Pop Cultural Tool to Promote National Values Piotr Majewski
The Polish Superheroes Have Arrived!: On the Popularity of Superhero Stories and Adaptations Emma Oki
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes to Poland: The Founding of the Polish AA and the American Connection Marek Jannasz
Railroad Workers, Civilization and Communism: the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Interwar Polish Frontier Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska
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Introduction America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations
Piotr Skurowski and Agnieszka Pantuchowicz
1 The papers included in this special issue of EJAS address the complexity of the presence of American culture in contemporary Poland, of its various forms, appearances, and manifestations in broadly understood cultural texts. The history of this presence seems to be also a complex one. Between 1945 and 1989, Poland found itself on the receiving end of flows arriving from the East (the Sovietization of Poland) and the West, with the Western (both West European and American) influences kept at a minimum by the political authorities, ineffective as that control eventually turned out to be. After the systemic change in 1989, Poland was open to currents coming mainly from the West, but also, in a broader sense, became integrated with the global capitalist economy. It can thus be said that after 1989 Poland experienced simultaneously a number of processes, including the systemic change from socialism to capitalism, democratization, globalization, Westernization, Europeanization, and, as some argued, Americanization.
2 One would be ill-advised to perceive the American cultural influences mainly and simply in terms of “Americanism” or “Americanization” which (especially the latter one) are usually invested with negative meaning. The word “Americanization,” as pointed out by Rob Kroes, is often “unduly alarmist,” as it “reduces the complex processes of cultural influence, of borrowing, imitation, and reception, to the stark binary form of a zero-sum game,” where “any degree of Americanization will… imply an equal degree of de-Europeanization” (xi).
3 As convincingly argued by such theorists as John Tomlinson and the already quoted Rob Kroes, the “cultural imperialism” thesis, implying docility and the “colonized” mass audience’s passive acceptance of the delivered content for one’s own, shows its inadequacy in the face of what actually happens ‘on the ground’. Following Rob Kroes one might use the metaphor of the receiving culture as a beachcomber, picking up the cultural “flotsam and jetsam” brought to the shore by the ocean waves to make a bricolage of the cultural material at its disposal rather than that of a beleaguered bastion of its own purity (Kroes 162-178). Such, in the words of Winfried Fluck, is the drift of much of the recent scholarship on the cultural transfer from America to
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Europe: “The recognition that cultural material is never simply absorbed as a model of behavior but is re-appropriated in different contexts for different needs and purposes is… the bottom-line consensus at which the Americanization debate has arrived” (21-22). Fluck considers the fear of “losing control of one’s culture” embedded in the allergic response to “Americanization” as being misplaced and “obsolete,” as it [the fear] “clings to an outdated notion of national self-control or even nationhood,” like in the case of analogous German fears of “Germanness” becoming “diluted” or “polluted.” What makes such fears “hopelessly” obsolete, argues Fluck, is that they are expressed at the time when “the ownership of media and other cultural resources can no longer be neatly distinguished” (29).
4 What we would like to visualize in this volume is the cultural flow taking place from America to Europe, and to Poland in particular, not so much as a “threat” to the “Europeanness” or “Polishness” of the receiving culture, but as part of a complex dynamics of cultural exchanges, borrowings and adaptations arising from cross-border and cross-cultural contacts whose volume and speed have dramatically increased, owing to the deployment of new, or vastly improved, means of communication but also to the lifting of the rigors imposed by the political regimes.
5 What should be kept in mind is that the flows from America to Poland were frequently indirect. Having skipped the “opportunity” to be Americanized during the Cold War, much of Eastern Europe after 1989 became open to what sometimes took the form of Americanization by proxy. Most importantly perhaps, the models of consumer capitalism which had arrived in Western Europe directly from the United States after the Second World War, were now being exported to Poland mainly through European, and not American, channels. Eastern Europe’s conversion to capitalist economy and consumer culture was spearheaded by West European businesses and brands, with the Polish consumers seduced not by American but by French, German, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese shopping malls, supermarkets and chain stores, all of them “American” as the culture of mass consumption might have been to the Western Europeans in the postwar decades. This, of course, does not amount to saying that America’s “soft power” has not affected the Polish culture and the Polish imaginary—far from it, but talking about it one should have a sense of proportions keeping in mind that “Americanization” in Poland never led to such outbursts of self-defense as could be heard in Latin America or among some of the Western European intellectuals.
6 What will, we hope, transpire from the contributions to this volume is that the American cultural influences—call them cultural transfers from the United States—took various forms and were mediated by a number of factors: political (primarily between 1945 and 1989, when the cultural flow from across the Atlantic was being interfered with by the Communist authorities), economic (one thinks especially of the Americanization of the Polish media industry and film distribution) and ideological (like the often manifested mythic belief in the closeness of “American” and “Polish” values). Fluck, Winfried. “The Americanization of German Culture? The Strange, Paradoxical Ways of Modernity.” German Pop Culture. How “American” Is It? Ed. Agnes C. Mueller. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. 19-39. Print. Kroes, Rob. If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Print.
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Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Continuum, 1991. Print.
AUTHORS
PIOTR SKUROWSKI Piotr Skurowski is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of English at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw. His main interests lie in the areas of U.S. Cultural History and Cultural Studies. His publications include monographs on Henry Adams and on the image of Europe in American Progressivism, as well as a number of articles and edited volumes on U.S. history and culture.
AGNIESZKA PANTUCHOWICZ Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches translation and literary studies. Her research interests include translation theory and cultural studies, comparative literature, and feminist criticism.
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Coming Out in Poland
Tomasz Basiuk
1 In a 1981 interview for Gai Pied, a magazine he helped establish, Michel Foucault referred critically to gay coming out as an American invention. His skepticism about coming out was rooted in the recognition that it mystified homosexuality as a unique type of desire, one in need of discovery and explication. Being on the receiving end of someone’s coming out can easily result in the misperception that one is being let in on a secret, becoming privy to some privileged information. Encountering someone’s claim that they are lesbian, gay, and so on, is likely to prompt speculation about the presumed essence of these subject positions. Foucault contended that, rather than think of it as a form of desire, we should be thinking of homosexuality as an object of desire because it bypasses the established social institutions, making alternative kinds of relation more readily visible and more compelling. Foucault’s general term for these various alternatives was friendship, and his point was that homosexuality promoted friendship as a way of life. At the time, neither same-sex marriage nor registered partnership existed, so that having a same-sex partner indeed required an inventiveness that would accommodate this choice. The broad concept of friendship provided a capacious label for the emergence of homosexuality as a way of life rather than just a sexual object choice.
2 A few years prior to Foucault’s interview, Jeffrey Weeks invoked the United Kingdom to argue that coming out was a social process of increasing the visibility of LGBT+ people and thereby helping them demand equal rights. In this historicizing perspective, personal coming out plays a part in the larger social process but is not equivalent to it. Visibility is achieved also by other means, such as political campaigns and media representations (Basiuk 2014). People who lead openly queer lives—those who are out in the sense of living in a same-sex relationship, for example—are constructing a queer visibility no less than those who verbally declare that they are gay or otherwise non- heteronormative. A verbal declaration of one’s identity may be useful but it need not be crucial.
3 In describing homosexuality as inventing a lifestyle, Foucault is referencing this larger social process of coming out. But when he calls coming out an American invention, he has in mind the verbal gesture of avowing that one is gay. Just how American is such
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rhetorical coming out? The expression coming out is borrowed from debutantes’ balls at which young upper-class women came out into society. In early queer usage, one came out into the life. Samuel R. Delany notes that in his youth coming out designated the first time one had sex with a partner of one’s own gender (13). This changed in the wake of the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, when the political message about the need for public visibility, expressed in the slogan, “Out of the closets and into the streets,” contributed to a shift in meaning and produced the now-current collocation, to come out of the closet, that is, to avow that one is homosexual (or otherwise not normative with regard to one’s sexuality and/or gender identification). This more contemporary sense of coming out, the sense of a rhetorical avowal, began with groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and with subsequent developments, right up to testimonies found on Youtube and in social media, in which people come out as queer but do not usually mention an actual sexual experience; indeed, such rhetorical avowal may occur prior to any same- sex activity. An autobiographical component, including the avowal of one’s queerness, is also central to the It Gets Better campaign, initiated in the United States of America, which aims to educate and reassure younger people who may be despondent about being queer with the evidence of increasing acceptance of sexual difference, offered in the form of personal testimonies from grown-ups. Coming out in the sense of an avowal is a contemporary phenomenon that originated in American culture.
4 Personal testimonies which perform this avowal deploy it as their central rhetorical gesture. They also typically figure coming out as a life-changing decision not to be regretted. The verbal coming out is thus usually embedded in an account which leads up to one’s decision to come out and which posits this decision as a crucial determinant of one’s selfhood. Suzanna Danuta Walters notes that it is customary among American lesbians and gay men to swap their coming-out stories: “Coming out into the family of origin is often the first story gays tell each other, often the opening line in date come- ons. It’s our ‘come here often?’” (197). This type of confessional narrative describes the process of self-recognition and, simultaneously, acknowledges one’s identity as a way of ritually acceding to the group with which one identifies (Basiuk, Exposures 168-170). The coming-out narrative thus plays a double role. It links the older usage, coming out into the life, wherein one describes an experience leading to sexual self-awareness and shares that experience in order to join the ranks of those already in the life, to the more recent usage, coming out of the closet, wherein one performs an act of rhetorical avowal addressed to the non-queer world. These two usages approximate the two meanings of recognition: recognition as revelation resulting in self-knowledge, captured by the Aristotelian term anagnorisis, and recognition in the eyes of others, captured by the Hegelian term Anerkennung. On both these counts, the rhetorical coming out operates in the manner of testimony. It entails the giving of testimony in the sense of affirming a profoundly personal truth and in the parrhesiastic sense of speaking truth to power (Basiuk, Exposures 258-260).
5 The similarity to testimony is one way in which coming out is connected to the conversion narrative, which also combines an account of personal self-examination and self-recognition with the rite of gaining access to a group and assuming a new identity. In a comparative study of American, French, and British gay men’s autobiographies, Paul Robinson contends that only contemporary Americans adopt the model of the coming-out story, modeled on the conversion narrative and thus based on a clear distinction between the closeted, shame-ridden existence prior to coming out and the happy resolution which follows. In this model, the experience of recognizing and
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acknowledging one’s identity—the point of conversion—is the central tenet. Noting the prevalence of the coming-out model among American gay male writers, Robinson jokingly states, “Americans, one might say, are fundamentalists even in their perversity” (xix).
6 Robinson’s remark pinpoints the similarity of the coming-out story to the Puritan conversion narrative, as discussed by Perry Miller and others. The conversion narrative, which was part and parcel of the Puritan confession of faith, also served as a mode of ingression into the religious congregation and, by the same token, into full- fledged political citizenship. The genre, epitomized in Jonathan Edwards’ “Personal Narrative,” is organized around a shift, sometimes dramatized as a specific event, which divides the narrator’s life experience into the turbulent and dark time before the conversion and the moral peace and clarity resulting from it. It presents conversion as profoundly life-changing. The narrative model it provides has served other, non- religious purposes. For example, the process of coming to political awareness may be narrated as secular conversion, and the gay coming-out story follows suit. Even though religious motivation appears to matter very little in most people’s coming out, the connection between coming out and American religious and cultural history is a matter of persistent, if usually unacknowledged, heritage. Once this heritage is noted, even the term the homosexual closet is revealed as having a Puritan antecedent in the notion of closet piety, denoting a too-fastidious observance of the evangelical prescription (in Matthew 6, 6) to observe in private, i.e., in the closet, rather than before the eyes of the world. However, it is not so much the religious content that matters for the coming-out story as the theologically determined dichotomy of the time before and the time after one’s coming. This dichotomy defines the narrative structure of the coming-out story.
7 Delany remarks that the coming-out story’s foregrounding of a specific event of coming out inevitably simplifies and generalizes the experience of coming to terms with one’s sexuality. The actual process involves a longer-term trajectory and a more complicated learning curve. In a personal essay titled “Coming / Out,” he mentions “put(ting) together a list of some twenty-two incidents involving sex” between the ages seven and fifteen, some of them heterosexual (7). Each instance represents a partial coming out, each one altering the horizon of his sexual self-awareness and preparing the way for the next stage. Delany insists that only by taking such personal trajectories into account can one do justice to the way that self-recognition takes place. But narrating their progress does not lend itself to being rendered in terms of a narrative in which a dramatic shift is the governing rhetorical gesture.
8 The rhetorical avowal of coming out as gay (or lesbian, etc.) merely describes one as belonging to a group, connected by this or that characteristic and sharing a common interest. But it does not do justice to one’s self-identity. Rhetorical coming out is a significant strategy because it posits the common political identification of a group but it is an imperfect way of expressing one’s individual identity. In speaking of identity labels in this way, Delany sees them as a convenience because they prompt an articulation simply by virtue of being available. In another essay, he illustrates Foucault’s social constructionism by describing the way that people gathered in a large central hall for a party will drift into adjacent rooms so long as the doors to these rooms are open. By analogy, the availability of discursive categories makes it possible to occupy the subject positions which these categories name. Some people will come out as gay so long as this option appears on their mental landscape, placed there by others
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who have already come out, by the media portraying certain identities, and so on (Times Square Red… 189-190). (With Delany’s imaginary example we have, in a manner, returned to the debutantes’ ball, the source of the coming-out metaphor for contemporary gay culture.)
9 The conversion narrative, with its roots in Christian confessional discourse, is not a universal articulation of sexuality. Gay coming-out stories have hardly spread to European writing, including to Polish literature, where homosexual, transgender, and other queering tropes were employed by some Modernist authors in a veiled and indirect way, for example, with double ententes, or otherwise encoded in figurative language, as German Ritz has argued. This allusive mode began to yield ground to more direct expression only at the end of the twentieth century. The recent publication of personal correspondence and journals, new readings, and biographies of some Modernist greats, including Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Miron Białoszewski, and Witold Gombrowicz opened up a discussion about their sexuality. Other authors broke through the veil shrouding queerness. In 1980, the émigré writer Marian Pankowski published Rudolf, a novel in which a Polish narrator enters into a dialogue with an elderly German homosexual man and revels in the man’s account of his free-wheeling sexuality. (First published in London, Rudolf was reissued in Poland in 1984 and 2005.) The established writer Julian Stryjkowski, who has broached the topic of homosexuality in earlier work, published a personal essay titled “Milczenie” (Silence) in 1993, in which he addressed growing up as a Jew and a homosexual. The renowned literary scholar Michał Głowiński came out as a child Holocaust survivor and a Jew in a 1998 memoir, and as a gay man in a 2010 autobiography. Stryjkowski and Głowiński describe early homosexual encounters as transgressions they barely dared to undertake. A similar note of constraint and trauma resounds in Pankowski’s Polish narrator, though not in the German man’s account. These coming-out stories are rather different from the American model because they do not put forward the premise that coming out was a crucial turning point in the writer’s life. They are more concerned with reminiscing and, for some, with regret.
10 A younger generation of writers has been more forthcoming. Izabela Filipiak came out as a lesbian in the public media in 1998. The work of the lesbian writer Ewa Schilling (the pseudonym of a writer who remains anonymous) struck a chord with many queer readers without becoming broadly known. In 2005, two young gay male authors published queer debut novels: Michał Witkowski is the author of Lubiewo (subsequently translated into English as Lovetown), and Bartosz Żurawiecki authored Trzech panów w łóżku, nie licząc kota, a novel whose title plays on Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). In 2006, the late radio journalist Anna Laszuk, an out lesbian, published a collection of lesbian biographies Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy!, based on interviews with lesbians, whose title beseeches women to come out of the closet. Not all of these publications fit the coming-out mold, however. For example, Witkowski’s protagonists, two elderly queens whose prime was in the days of “real socialism,” eye the contemporary, politicized gay man with much suspicion. And Laszuk’s call for lesbians to come out of the closet has largely remained unanswered.
11 This is not to say that coming out is altogether absent from public life. Several male actors have come out, including Marek Barbasiewicz and Jacek Poniedziałek. There is a handful of out gay male politicians (Robert Biedroń and Paweł Rabiej are the most known), and the transgender woman Anna Grodzka served as member of the
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parliament in the 2011-2015 term. Promoting coming out is a major strategy used by the mainstream LGBT+ groups. For example, the bimonthly magazine Replika, published by the organization Campaign Against Homphobia (KPH), regularly interviews men and women who have come out. These interviewees are usually people with some public standing, for example, a university professor, the head of a local self-government body, or a young-and-coming actor, who are implicitly presented as role models. Replika also carries information about internationally known celebrities who have come out (many of them American), as well as articles about LGBT+ rights and the struggle for these rights in the past and in the present, including in the United States.
12 There is little question, however, that coming out is far less common in Poland than in the U.S. Coming out is often seen as a cultural import, a gesture for which there is no established protocol and which can easily turn into embarrassment for both those who attempt it and those being addressed. Robert Gliński’s documentary Homo.pl, structured around interviews with lesbian and gay couples, does not acknowledge that almost all of the interviewees are former or current LGBT+ activists, a circumstance suggestive of how difficult it may be to find individuals willing to broadcast their sexuality to the public (Basiuk, “Coming Out and Beyond”). At the same time, the unease about being out may be declining. A growing number of university students seem to be out. At the University of Warsaw, a student group named Queer UW, founded in 2011, has sponsored conferences, film screenings, debates, and other extracurricular activities, helping promote, as well as report on, an LGBT+ friendly environment. A 2016 survey showed that 14% of the University of Warsaw self-selected student respondents did not know any peer who was out, while a third believed that coming out while at the university could have negative consequences (Drozdowski, 15-17).
13 The precarious status of coming out in Poland as a strategy promoted by the mainstream LGBT+ discourse and, simultaneously, a foreign import and thus something requiring an explanation may be illustrated with Jerzy Krzyszpień’s recent inspirational self-help manual Wychodzimy z ukrycia (We’re Come Out From Hiding), forthcoming in 2018. The manual makes the familiar point that a personal coming out is a matter of personal dignity, as well as a crucial political tool which affects other individuals and has the potential to help them. The book’s author, an accomplished translator who has rendered into the Polish John Boswell’s seminal Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, alongside a host of other relevant publications, is a university lecturer and an influential figure on the Polish LGBT+ scene. He has written previously on the language of LGBT+ emancipation and has successfully persuaded activists to stop calling homosexuality with the masculine noun homoseksualizm, which suggests a medical diagnosis, and to use instead the friendlier-sounding feminine noun homoseksualność. (The difference is analogous to that between the German words Homosexualismus and Homosexualität.) The recent manual includes other pragmatic recommendations about how to come out and how to talk about one’s sexuality while avoiding the impression that one’s words are direct borrowings (usually from the English), or that one is engaging in awkward, wooden mimicry.
14 The unspoken but quite apparent premise in Wychodzimy z ukrycia is that coming out is indeed a cultural import. This is especially visible in the wide selection of inspirational quotes which pepper the book. Most of them translations from the English, as if coming out was naturally linked to being able to converse in English. There are numerous mentions of American activism and U.S. government policy. The It Gets Better campaign
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receives considerable attention and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s 2011 speech in Geneva on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which she focused on LGBT rights, is quoted in extenso (in Polish translation). These choices are meaningful, as the United States is consistently presented as inspirational for the LGBT+ human rights struggle worldwide.
15 Krzyszpień’s focus on the United States is motivated in part by his personal experience. In a short autobiographical chapter—his own coming-out story—Krzyszpień describes his time on a scholarship in the United States in the mid-1970s. In the course of his college year abroad, he discovered and avidly read publications on homosexuality. He confided in a pen pal and in an older woman friend, receiving support and advice. This positive experience was in a stark contrast to the situation back home. Krzyszpień returned to Poland a changed man but found that most homosexual men there were either uninterested in being out or too oppressed and too scared to come out. His attempts to write about gay rights and to publish relevant translations from the English were blocked. Homosexuality and any sexual otherness were absent from the Polish public discourse. The United States was thus the author’s main point of reference in those days and has remained so ever since.
16 In Wychodzimy z ukrycia, Krzyszpień reaffirms his long-standing position on the necessity of demanding equal rights, rather than merely tolerance, by repeatedly bringing up same-sex marriage. His argument for same-sex marriage reflects his stance on coming out. He offers little discussion of marriage as an institution, and the purpose of a brief comparison between marriage and registered partnership is to show that only marriage provides full equality. Same-sex marriage is thus presented as the logical next step in the struggle initiated with coming out. Like the call to come out, the demand for marriage equality combines a consideration of personal dignity with the larger context of political rights. While same-sex marriage has become the law of the land in some countries, including in the U.S., the demand for access to marriage is a fairly radical one in Poland, where same-sex unions remain unrecognized. Indeed, a demand for same-sex marriage has not been articulated by any political party or mainstream LGBT+ organization. On this point, Krzyszpień is on a frolic of his own as he reiterates his earlier strategy of finding a progressive standard abroad and trying to make it resonate in the Polish context.
17 A number of marginal points in Wychodzimy z ukrycia also adopt a perspective easily recognizable as stemming from the American context. For example, Krzyszpień mentions in passing that telling one’s parents that one is practicing safer sex can reassure them and bolster one’s chances for a successful coming out. Because there has not been a major HIV/AIDS epidemic in Poland, the absence of any reference to HIV/ AIDS (or any other STD) makes this point ambiguous, not least because it implies that young homosexuals are more promiscuous than young heterosexuals. The underlying reason is that the advice seems transplanted from the American context without clear indication that the Polish context may be different.
18 Krzyszpień is critical of some other borrowings. He considers the terms queer and heteronormativity but finds them unsuitable for the work of coming out because they are all but impossible to render in plain Polish. They are also difficult to explain to the uninitiated. Queer refuses to clearly denote an identity position, defying the strategy of coming out. Krzyszpień sees the term’s growing popularity among the left-leaning young Polish queers as a threat, although in many instances the more typical LGBT+
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politics go hand-in-hand with the queer alternative. For example, the magazine Replika, which regularly publishes coming-out interviews, has the acronym LGBTQ in its subtitle and the word queer pops up on its pages at least occasionally. Another popular LGBT+ website is called queer.pl. In short, the contradiction between LGBT+ and specifically queer theorizing and activism is less pronounced in Poland than it is in the United States and in the West more broadly. (Joanna Mizielińska and Robert Kulpa have written on the convoluted temporality of the Polish LGBT+ context which defies a characterization in terms of either progress or regression.) The term heteronormativity, coined by Michael Warner and often used as a cognate of homophobia, denotes a more specifically systemic understanding of the way that a binary concept of gender and the expectation of heterosexuality (called “compulsory heterosexuality” by Adrienne Rich) determine a range of norms pertaining to sexuality and to gender. Krzyszpień acknowledges this term’s broadening currency in the Polish public debate but, like in the case of queer, he sees it diffusing the positive impact of coming out. In pitting the identity-based strategy of coming out against the queering strategy, he appears, once again, to be transplanting a debate embedded in a specifically American context to the Polish one, where the conflict is either absent or more subdued, and where the debate is ultimately shaped by other considerations, such as the heteronormative conglomerate of religious and national identity and the prevalence of Catholic religious instruction offered at public schools.
19 Edmund White’s autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) has been called the prototypical American gay coming-out story. For example, Robert McRuer makes this point even as he is critical of the novel’s limitations. A Boy’s Own Story was translated into the Polish by Jerzy Jarniewicz in 1998 after an excerpt (in another translation) was published in the influential monthly Literatura na świecie, which devoted an issue to White in 1997. The magazine’s selection placed A Boy’s Own Story in the context of work which did not focus on being gay, underscoring White’s literary talent. However, a short personal testimony by Miras Soliwoda, a self-avowed gay man from Poland who had been White’s house guest in Paris, was also included, intimating that White’s gay- themed work was grounded in the writer’s life. Reissued by another publisher in 2012 and noted by the LGBT+ community (e.g. Queer.pl), A Boy’s Own Story never quite achieved cult status as a gay text in Poland even though literary representations of homosexuality offered in Polish translation have traditionally played an important role in gay men’s self-definition, as is evidenced in life writing and epistolary writing from the 1970s and 1980s, and by the unofficial circulation of literary translations in mimeographed and carbon copies of typescript. Perhaps White’s translation came too late to play a similar role, as Poland was already undergoing a major socio-economic transition and many kinds of cultural artefacts and texts were rapidly becoming available, crowding out a novel which might otherwise have played a culturally formative role in the way that James Baldwin’s novels and some other texts have done. It may also be that White’s novel did not resonate with Polish readers because a coming-out narrative, focused on the psychological turmoil and hardship associated with staying in the closet, seemed either too alien to these readers or too close for comfort, especially as most gay male readers would not have been out. In other words, either the whole coming-out paradigm was foreign to them and the novel had little bearing on how most gay men in Poland construed their identity, or else it merely reiterated the Polish gay male readers’ closeted status in a way that made it less than interesting to them. (An additional reason may be that White’s writing demands from
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the reader a level of familiarity with the American realities of class and race, the rituals of life at a boarding school, and so on, without making these things a point of focus and thus without harboring a fascination that might have an easy heuristic effect for the reader.)
20 A Boy’s Own Story is an early example of the coming-out story but it is also more complex than the label coming-out story implies. White plays with this model without fully engaging it. The novel’s first-person narrator very nearly comes out without quite achieving this end. He is out in some contexts but not in others. He grows into his sexuality but is never completely at ease with himself. He works through his issues in therapy and in other ways but fails to achieve emotional clarity. Ultimately, he undermines his own coming out with an act of betrayal tinged with internalized homophobia. The following analogy suggests itself: If verbal coming out may be described as a performative speech act because it does not merely announce one’s identity but makes it real by using words, then White’s novel functions more like a periperformative, to invoke Sedgwick’s term for an utterance which approximates a performative speech act or occurs in its vicinity. Ultimately, White’s periperformative narrative in which the resolution of a coming out is obstructed is the more realistic alternative to the prototypical coming-out story, especially as the novel’s events are set prior to 1969, before coming out as avowal became common.
21 The concept of the periperformative as an incomplete gesture, one ridden with tensions and complexities, seems to correspond to the Polish context more closely than does the performative speech act of coming out. While queerness has a far greater visibility in today’s Poland than it did a decade ago, and while there is increasing social acceptance of homosexuality, its legal status has remained unchanged (except for the adoption of a rarely used non-discrimination clause in the labor code, required for membership in the EU). Homosexual acts have not been criminalized since the interwar period, and the law has remained silent on the topic, reflecting and reiterating a social taboo. Same-sex couples remain unrecognized. A bill regulating gender reassignment, sponsored by the transgender MP Grodzka and adopted by the outgoing parliament in 2015, was promptly vetoed by the newly elected head of state. With the leftist parties out of parliament altogether and in apparent disarray, no clear political agenda for LGBT+ rights is being articulated.
22 Given the uneven cultural and socio-political landscape, one in which both progress and regression occur and are to be expected, the periperformative model seems more in tune with the rhythm of the developments than the affirmative stance of a performative speech act. The announcing of one’s gayness (or another identity position), which is simultaneously its performative verbal production, requires a clarity about what the act entails. That is what John L. Austin meant by meeting the conditions of felicity for performative speech. In a context in which such clarity is largely absent, one cannot come out quite in the way that a manual such as Krzyszpień’s Wychodzimy z ukrycia presupposes. When coming out in the context of legal and discursive upheaval, one inevitably becomes entangled in positionalities and claims that attach to one’s speech in ways that one may not even intend. The connection drawn by Krzyszpień between coming out and the demand for same-sex marriage illustrates this point because the agenda is his own rather than consensually adopted. However persuasive Krzyszpień’s argument may be, the connection is tenuous and arbitrary because there is no locally available discursive context in which to embed it.
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23 Coming out into the life is increasingly the standard in Poland, helping to build a sense of community. Coming out of the closet, on the other hand, is mostly a matter of the larger, long-winded process of increasing LGBT+ visibility, described by Weeks and postulated by Foucault. This process is likely to entail various hard-to-predict vagrancies. A straightforward articulation of one’s identity as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender to the outside world is likely to facilitate this process and may be strategically necessary. However, such avowal is not regarded as standard. It is also inevitably opaque given the absence of a consensually adopted and clearly articulated LGBT+ agenda. Basiuk, Tomasz. “Coming Out and Beyond: Polish and American Representations of Sexual Minorities.” Ad Americam 15 (2014): 55-65. Print. ---. Exposures. American Gay Men’s Life Writing since Stonewall. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2013. Print. Delany, Samuel R. “Coming / Out.” Boys Like Us. Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. Ed. Patrick Merla. New York: Avon Books, 1996. Print. ---. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. Print. Demadre-Synoradzka, Anna. Jerzy Andrzejewski. Przyczynek do biografii prywatnej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2017. Print. Drozdowski, Mariusz [aka. Jej Perfekcyjność], ed. Wyobcowane, wyobcowani. Raport z badań nad sytuacją osób LGBTQ studiujących na Uniwersytecie Warszawskim. Queer UW. 2016. http://queer.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ raport_z_badania_2016_e.pdf. Foucault, Michel. Interviewed by Rene de Ceccaty, Jean Damet and Jean LeBitoux. “De l’amitié comme une mode de vie.” Gai Pied Best 1979-1991: 34-36. Originally published in Gai Pied 25 (April 1981). Print. Głowiński, Michał. Czarne sezony. Warszawa: Open, 1999. Print. ---. Kręgi obcości. Opowieść autobiograficzna. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010. Print. Homo.pl. Documentary. Robert Gliński, dir. Filmcontract Ltd., HBO Polska, 2007. Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław. Wszystko jak chcesz. O miłości Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza do Jerzego Błeszyńskiego. Ed. Anna Król with Malwina Mus. Warszawa: Wilk & Król Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2017. Print. Krzyszpień, Jerzy. “Język i emancypacja LGBT: uwagi praktyczne.” Queer Studies. Podręcznik kursu. Ed. Jacek Kochanowski, Marta Abramowicz, and Robert Biedroń. Warszawa: Kampania Przeciw Homofobii, 2010. 139-146. Print. ---. Wychodzimy z ukrycia. Ujawnianie się lesbijek, gejów, biseksualnych i transpłciowych+. Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2018. Kulpa, Robert, and Joanna Mizielińska, eds. De-Centering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Print. Laszuk, Anna. Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy! Płock: Fundacja Lorga, 2006. Print. McRuer, Robert. The Queer Renaissance. Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. Print. Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson. The Puritans. Volumes 1 and 2. 1938. New York: Evanston and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. Print. Niżyńska, Joanna. The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Print.
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---. Traumatyczne, codzienne, queer. Królestwo wieloznaczności Mirona Białoszewskiego. Trans. Agnieszka Pokojska. Kraków: Universitas, 2018. Print. Pankowski, Marian. Rudolf. Kraków: Ha!art, 2005 (1980). Print. Queer.pl. “Książki o tematyce LGBT: Edmund White, Zuch” [Note on Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story reissued in 2012]. https://queer.pl/ksiazka/4339/zuch-edmund-white. Ritz, German. Nić w labiryncie pożądania. Gender i płeć w literaturze polskiej od modernizmu do postmodernizmu. Trans. Bronisław Drąg, Andrzej Kopacki and Małgorzata Łukasiewicz. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 2002. Print. Robinson, Paul. Gay Lives. Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Around the Performative. Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative.” Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 67-91. Print. Schilling, Ewa. Lustro. Wybór opowiadań. Olsztyn: Infopress, 1998. Print. Soliwoda, Miras. “Dzień z Amerykaninem w Paryżu.” Literatura na świecie 3/1997 (308): 196-200. Print. Stryjkowski, Julian. Milczenie. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1993. Print. Suchanow, Klementyna. Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz. Volumes 1 and 2. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017. Print. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003 (2001). Print. Warner, Michael, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. With an introduction by the editor. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Print. Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out. Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quarter Books, 1977. Print. White, Edmund. A Boy’s Own Story. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Print. ---. “Opowieść chłopca” [an excerpt from A Boy’s Own Story]. Trans. Krzysztof Zabłocki. Literatura na świecie 3/1997 (308): 173-195. Print. ---. Zuch [A Boy’s Own Story]. Trans. Jerzy Jarniewicz. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998. Print. ---. Zuch [A Boy’s Own Story]. Trans. Jerzy Jarniewicz. Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2012. Witkowski, Michał. Lovetown. Trans. W. Martin. London: Portobello Books, 2011. Print. ---. Lubiewo. Kraków: Ha!art, 2005. Print. Żurawiecki, Bartosz. Trzech panów w łóżku, nie licząc kota. Romans pasywny. Warszawa: Sic!, 2005. Print.
ABSTRACTS
Coming out of the closet, a concept originating in American culture and consistent with the paradigm of conversion, has been embraced by many Polish LGBT+ activists. However, literary coming-out narratives have played a relatively minor role in Polish homoerotic writings while a prominent American gay coming-out novel has not had significant resonance after it was
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published in Polish translation, suggesting that neither the coming-out story nor the rhetorical act of coming out has been adopted without reservation. Moreover, a contemporary call for Polish lesbian women and gay men to come out in order to promote marriage equality seems more directly aligned with the present-day U.S. political context than with any broadly accepted local activist position on the question of same-sex marriage. Given the absence of consensus about the meaning and the goal of coming out, or even its appropriateness, verbal coming out cannot function as performative speech in the Polish context, where it is better understood as periperformative speech (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick).
INDEX
Keywords: coming out; conversion; parrhesia; periperformative; marital equality; testimony
AUTHOR
TOMASZ BASIUK Tomasz Basiuk teaches at the University of Warsaw American Studies Center and heads the UW Institute of the Americas and Europe. He published two monographs, Wielki Gaddis: realista postmodernistyczny [The Great Gaddis: The Postmodern Realist] (2003) and Exposures: American Gay Men’s Life Writing since Stonewall (2013), co-edited several volumes in American studies and in queer studies, and authored a number of articles and book chapters. He co-founded and co-edits the online queer studies journal InterAlia (since 2006). He is principal investigator in the HERA- funded project “Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures” (2016-2019). He currently serves as President of the Polish Association for American Studies.
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Americanizations of Holocaust Memory and Museum Aesthetic Experience
Karolina Krasuska
1 The key debates around the core exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw understandably mostly revolve around its representation of Polish-Jewish relations.1 The core “multimedia narrative exhibition” (Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, “Inside the Museum” 216), which opened in 2014, displays a thousand years of the history of Polish Jews and unfolds generally chronologically in eight sections, with the section titled “Holocaust” being the seventh (“Core Exhibition”). Accordingly, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has not been envisioned as a Holocaust museum. Even to the contrary, following the principle that POLIN is a “museum of life” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theater of History” 22) and the Holocaust is not the culmination of the history of Polish Jews (Engelking and Leociak, “Holocaust”), a major part of the Holocaust gallery focuses on Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Poland.2
2 How and, even why, then, talk about Americanization and specifically the Americanization of Holocaust memory in the context of this museum? The exhibition itself, showing the history of Polish Jews in an international or transnational context, contains a few American moments: a section on immigration at the turn of the twentieth century or the prominent panels on the charity American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee helping Jewish war victims in the WWI are prominent examples here. There is also the story of the beginnings of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews begins in the US. As told by creators of the museum, the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (USHMM) was the inspiration of an idea to develop a museum narrating centuries of Jews in the Polish lands (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theater of History” 22).3 These beginnings are embodied in a specific person, Grażyna Pawlak, the Director of Development of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland in the early 1990s, the contacts with the creator of the USHMM, Jeshajahu Weinberg, and finally, eminent American scholar, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett becoming the chief curator of the core exhibition.
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3 I am not going to rehearse the by now well-publicized story of curatorial, organizational, and institutional American connections, but rather point to the significance of this initial American moment. Namely, it positioned the museum makers in a complex relation to the USHMM, which occasioned the coinage of the phrase “Americanization of the Holocaust.” These convergences point to a global circulation of American and Americanized Holocaust memory, this time not through popular culture, but museums. In what follows I examine an aspect of this relation in aesthetic and ideological terms, taking as an example an emblematic segment of the USHMM exhibition, The Tower of Faces and the POLIN’s installation on Jedwabne, that is, on the 1941-2 pogroms in Nazi-occupied Poland. To accomplish this I first disentangle the various meanings of “Americanization” that are used in American Studies in Europe and in Holocaust and memory studies respectively. Here, I focus especially on how Americanization has been read also in aesthetic terms (Fluck) and apply this perspective to what became known as the Americanization of the Holocaust. These theoretical peregrinations lead me to consider exhibition as film, together with museum studies critics and cultural theorist Mieke Bal. In the analytical part of the article, then, I approach The Tower of Faces and the POLIN museum’s Jedwabne installation to tease out how cinematic readings of these segments add to their interpretation. At first glance, similar family photographs are used in different aesthetic frames that are key to the larger concept of the exhibitions. The POLIN’s Jedwabne installation stands, then, in visible relation to The Tower of Faces. Yet it is produced not only to comply with the smallest common aesthetic denominator (Fluck, “Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung” 63), but at the same time aesthetically reconfigured to also ideologically speak to local Polish debates on the participation of Poles in the murder of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
1. Americanizations
4 “Americanization” is closely related to American popular culture and its ubiquitous presence, if not domination, globally (Fluck, “Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung” 56). As such, it is used within American studies to analyze cultural phenomena worldwide, as well as within, for instance, Holocaust studies and memory studies to talk about popular culture forms shaping Holocaust memory. And this is the end of the relative consensus because the term carries nothing short of opposing meanings. These, especially in the context of American Studies, vacillate between the idealized potential of emancipatory powers inherent in popular cultural forms and the danger of cultural imperialism carried by American cultural products (Fluck, “Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung” 56). Within Holocaust studies approaches to popular culture, the negative connotations have been more significant when preeminent critics, for instance, talked about “trivialization” in the reviews of a Holocaust miniseries from 1978 (Wiesel). Reapproaching this terminological dissent from within both disciplines, historically based in different research methods and modes of reflection may be epistemologically advantageous to think about memory in transit and certain aesthetic solution in the Holocaust gallery of the POLIN museum.
5 Talking about Americanization of culture, Winfried Fluck points to the lack of satisfactory explanatory approaches and attempts to analyze it from within an in the context of broader social and cultural processes. For Fluck, “Americanization” is a
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mode of culture that is determined by its projected relation to the audience, the mentality it mirrors, and its financing (“The Americanization of German Culture?”).4 Formally speaking, Americanized culture relies on reduction (24). We can view it negatively from the point of view of the disinterested aesthetic sphere where complexity is most valued. But, as Fluck stresses, reduction not only degrades existing formal characteristics, stripping them of complexity, but rather, productively, generates “new possibilities of expression and aesthetic experience” (25). In turn, these new possibilities and forms serve the purpose of greater audience accessibility (24), or we can paraphrase—the democratization of culture. As such, this greater accessibility of culture is the product of “America of the mind” (28), that is its cultural imaginary connected to “dehierarchization” and individual self-empowerment (27).
6 In other words, Americanization is not about reduction as such, but it is a means to find the smallest common aesthetic denominator (“Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung” 63) for the members of the audience. In the examples that Fluck considers this means, for instance, the development in American culture from the popular novel to silent film. While the novel still required the knowledge of language, which had exclusionary potential towards some (immigrant) audience members, the silent film was a more inclusive visual form (59-61). Americanization refers here, then, to specific cultural processes in the US from the turn of the twentieth century that only after WWII started to play a central role globally.
7 In this way Fluck attempts to add positive value to what otherwise has been looked down on in aesthetic terms. Importantly, his argument is more than political, valorizing popular culture because of its counterhegemonic potential. It is rather expressed in aesthetic terms as creating new sensibilities and new potentials for aesthetic experience that go hand in hand with idealistically democratizing political principles.
8 The concept of Americanization in the context of Holocaust memory is similarly ambivalent. Americanization implies here, however, mostly a theoretical move in a different direction. For Fluck, revalorizing Americanization has implications on how we can approach the import or influence of American cultural modes on European ones. In other words, it is the current Americanization of European culture, however understood. Only this leads him to ask about what Americanization has meant for America itself. With “Americanization of the Holocaust” the representation of a European event undergoes a set of displacements or Holocaust memory is refunctionalized within a cultural context that is originally geographically foreign to the event itself. It does not mean, of course, within the global mediascape that these specifically American representations do not return to us and influence local European collective memories of the Holocaust, another meaning of the Americanization of Holocaust memory. The “global icons”, as Aleida Assman calls them (109), play precisely such a multivalent role of traveling placeholder that bear shifting ideological investments.
9 The Americanization of the Holocaust, however, has not been read in aesthetic terms, similar to Fluck’s. From a critical perspective, Joost Krijnen juxtaposes two views that read Americanization of the Holocaust in what he claims are moral terms (24). The dyad he creates is between, on the one hand, an advocate of what we can call productive refunctionalization of the Holocaust in the US, Michael Berenbaum, who was also the project director of the USMMH, and, on the other hand, the ardent critic of
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the term and, at the same time of the museum itself, Alvin Rosenfeld. Berenbaum writing in early 1990s sees a virtue in retelling the story of the Holocaust so that it resonates with every American and American credo of “pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and human rights” (42). Rosenfeld, in contrast, complains about widening “the language of ‘Holocaust’” because “it is regularly invoked by people who want to draw public attention to human-rights abuses, social inequalities suffered by racial and ethnic minorities and women, environmental disasters, AIDS, and a whole host of other things.” In addition to criticizing “Holocaust” as a mode of appropriation to parochial ends, Rosenfeld, also in a normative gesture, advocates against skewing its message towards sentimentalization and optimistic perseverance against all odds. Similarly to earlier work by Hilene Flanzbaum, Krijnen wants to shift the terms of the debate beyond the moral and rather read the representations of the Holocaust in cultural terms in order to examine their function. In Flanzbuam’s words “whether he likes it or not—the Holocaust has become an artifact of American culture. [Rosenfeld] certainly cannon control how or when or in what format the Holocaust will appear, but he can respond” (“The Americanization of the Holocaust” 97).
10 In his prominent 1999 study, Peter Novick also enters into the debate on the Americanization of the Holocaust from a cultural vantage point—descriptive and not prescriptive. Foreshadowing the memory studies boom and employing Maurice Halbwachs’s framework of collective memory, he asks about the function of Holocaust memory and forgetting in the subsequent decades after the WWII. However, he is deeply skeptical about the uses of the Holocaust in American life. For him, it serves “national self-congratulation” (14) and accentuating the difference between the US and the European old world. Also, importantly, the focus on the Holocaust allows for displacing historical events in which Americans bear responsibility (cf. 15).5 How the Holocaust is represented—we can add, also aesthetically—serves then as a litmus test of the collective and its memory.
11 Today, within Holocaust and memory studies, the “Americanization” of Holocaust memory, even in non-normative but descriptive terms, does not seem theoretically nuanced enough, still suggesting a certain norm of what we consider “American.” It is rather complicated by mnemonic models stressing transnational flows, multidirectionality (Rothberg; Craps and Rothberg; Levy and Sznaider)—tendencies that have also been shaping American Studies in this century (Graff, Basiuk, and Krasuska). But in a dialogue with Winfried Fluck and his idea of the Americanization of culture, understood in specifically historical and aesthetic terms, we can ask what “new possibilities of expression,” what new points of accessibility American representations of the Holocaust generated and whether and how they have traveled. Specifically, I would like to ask these questions looking at a particular installation at the USHMM and the Holocaust gallery at the POLIN.
2. Cinematic effects
12 The USHMM stands not only for what has become ambivalently known as the Americanization of the Holocaust, but also as a certain specific type of the museum that centers around “immersion and experience” (Witcomb 359, cf. Appelbaum, Freed). This in fact mirrors the self-reflective statement on the USHMM as a narrative history museum by Jeshajahu Weinberg that it “employs design elements that involve visitors
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in the narrative” (231). It is also indicative of a broader museum phenomenon: as Tiina Roppola suggests citing 1999 Neil Kotler, such an experienced-centered model of the museum displaced “collection-centered” and “education-centered” model (33). Characteristically, in relation to Fluck’s thinking on the Americanization of culture and the medium of film, experience-centered exhibitions or immersive exhibitions are also understood in comparison to a “good movie” (Stogner 19). As such, both museum research and Fluck’s thesis of Americanization seem to unwittingly converge in Mieke Bal’s theorization of exhibition as film, a useful framework to read The Tower of Faces installation at the USHMM and Jedwabne pogrom installation at the POLIN.
13 How to think about exhibition as film and what are the stakes? When Winfried Fluck singles out sound film as the aesthetically democratizing medium (“Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung” 65,) so immersive exhibitions seem to mirror this development in the museum world.6 As Mieke Bal writes proposing to approach exhibition as film, we use all three metaphors of (theatrical) mise-en-scène, narrative and poetry to talk about exhibition (22). These three models are combined in the model of cinema, which—as Bal stresses, similarly to Fluck—is the “art of the masses” (Bal 22) in the twentieth century or, within American Studies register, a key medium in popular culture. Practically speaking, exhibition can be effectively read “as a meaning-producing sequentiality emerging from the viewer’s walk through an exhibition” (15), in which the walk mirrors the sequentiality of the film. For Bal, the model of cinema becomes especially relevant in the context of photographs—so prominent in many exhibitions—because through the movement of the viewer the photographs “take on a cinematic effect” (16). This allows us to challenge the ostensible transparency of photography as a medium and grasp “the limits of visibility inherent in time” (22). What is at stake for Bal in theorizing exhibition as film is its affective, and consequently, political potential, which constitutes a framework that seems to productively enter into a dialogue with existing readings of one of the emblematic elements in the USHMM, The Tower of Faces.
14 One of key design elements used in the USHMM, and bridging the three levels of the exhibition, is the multi-story installation of mostly pre-war photographs. It has been thoroughly analyzed (e.g. Hirsch, Hansen-Glucklich), and as an aesthetic and mnemonic visual solution has been mirrored or approached in multiple museums, including Yad Vashem, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC, and, to a degree, in the Holocaust gallery in the POLIN. Just to remind us, The Tower of Faces is a product of scrupulous archival work of a child survivor from Eisiskes in the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands, Yaffa Eliach, herself a granddaughter of a local photographer couple. The rectangle shaped Tower is lined inside with a mosaic of just over 1000 photographs, illustrating everyday life of the Jewish population from the shtetl between 1890 and 1941 (Weinberg and Elieli 151-152). It may be termed “The end of the shtetl” in the exhibition catalog (Weinberg and Elieli 151-152), pointing to the massacre of over 4000 Jews by Nazi Shooting squads in September 1941, but it rather shows a “personalized” (Berenbaum 72) tapestry of life scenarios, as indicated also by the wall text: “The Jewish community had a rich religious culture and an energetic secular life.… In the studio, at parties and ceremonies, in homes, their [the photographers’] work portrays the life of the community.” The sheer amount and diversity of photographs, as Michael Berkowitz has demonstrated, is not exceptional here, but rather a norm in shtetls. But as displayed here, these everyday photographs are in blatant contrast to the popular
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image of starkly orientalized life in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, inaccurately popularized, for instance, by published editions of Roman Vishniac photographs (Benton).
15 In Marianne Hirsch’s influential reading, the Tower manages to effectively elicit identificatory reactions from the visitors through the photographs that resemble a family album, their own family album (252): “the conventional and familial nature of the images themselves manages to transcend these distances, figured spatially by the bridge that separates us [visitors] from the pictures, and to foster an affiliative look that binds the photographs to one another and us to them” (254). In this way the museum manages “to include all of its visitors in the generation of postmemory” (249) or, in a complex way, make the memories of previous generations their own. For her, it is then the genre of photographs that plays a key role in affecting the visitor.
16 Hirsch briefly describes entering the “tower-shaped room” with “photographic images that hover all around us” (251-252), but later in the text takes it in the direction of “the power of photographs as media of mourning” (256). This moment of spatial arrangement and in relation to photography that can be extended with Mieke Bal’s cinematic reading of exhibition, only to strengthen the proposed identification between the viewers and images, images themselves, and consequently, the viewers themselves “easily transcend[ing] ethnic identity and family history” (252). It is key that the Tower provides an arbitrary temporal break in the largely chronologic exhibition. The viewer surrounded by photographs, encased in this vertical space mirrors one of key cinematic exhibition experiences in Bal’s classification that she creates on the example of a different exhibition. Also, in the case of the Tower of Faces, the immersion seems to suspend to a large degree, or bend, a linear perspective (cf. Bal 31) to create the experience that Bal calls “pro-spective” (30). Referring to Deleuze, Bal claims, “[it] enfolds the viewer rather than allowing him to take in a spectacle at a distance, without involvement. The point of view of ‘the fold’ compels the viewer to enter the fabulation of the artwork, to travel inside and out again and emerge transformed by the experience” (31). Such “enter[ing] the fabulation of the artwork,” here ostensibly unending because of the soaring tower, seems to be a central aesthetic device experientially enabling the inclusion into postmemory. Moreover, the cinematic in this installation—like a family album or the instant recognition of the photo genre as one’s own—may serve as Winfried Fluck’s smallest common aesthetic denominator, allowing for broadly extending membership in the generation of postmemory.
17 Whereas the Tower of Faces cuts through the exhibition breaking its governing temporality, the installation in the POLIN using family pictures occupies a space that uses a different visual logic.7 Eisiskes family pictures installation memorializes and personalizes a shtetl’s life, a collage of Jedwabne Jewish private photographs are used to commemorate the pogrom and massacre of estimated 300 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 that in Polish memory came to denote around two dozen pogroms after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa or the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the region neighboring on Jedwabne8, as well as generally the debates around the memory of the participation of ethnic Poles in the murder of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland (cf. Forecki). The familial photographs, with their identificatory force theorized by Hirsch, are used here then to activate the identificatory lines within this emblematic moment in the memory of Polish-Jewish relations.
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18 The Operation Barbarossa section—which the Jedwabne installation is a part of—breaks the chronology of the previous parts in the Holocaust gallery devoted largely chronologically to growing repressions, life in the Warsaw Ghetto, deportations, uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, Polish-Jewish relations and the experience of hiding. This section returns us almost two years earlier to the big picture events of political history. It consists of five installations in a squeezed pentagon-shaped room each taking up the entire wall, indicating the breaking points within the timeline of WWII and the Holocaust: Operation Barbarossa, Jedwabne and Lwów pogroms, Ponary massacre, and Wannsee conference; the space in front of the fifth wall and the wall itself is taken up by an installation mostly translating the machinery of the death camps into an array of graphs and diagrams and functions as a narrative transition to the last room of the Holocaust gallery, a sordid, rusty, acoustically irritating space on the death camp universe itself.
19 Upon entering the first narrow part of the squeezed pentagon, we encounter a general map of the Operation Barbarossa, the invasion and the movements of Einsatzgruppen or the shooting squads. The installation on the pogroms directly faces these, with the lifeless grey tree trunks closing the perspective of this jagged space. A grey thick horizontal block overhang dominates the pogrom installation, forcing the visitors, as if with its weight, to bend down to look at the pre-war family pictures displayed on the recessed top lighted vertical wall. This obviously physically uncomfortable architectural solution resonates with the design of the preceding room on the experience of hiding during the Holocaust. Because of this design, first we do not see the details of the photographs, but rather look at the text on the directly adjoining wall mounted table. It includes two text blocks: the curator’s synopsis of the events, making clear that “Poles played a key role in the Jedwabne pogrom” and an excerpt from the influential testimony by a survivor from Jedwabne, Shmul Wassersztejn.
20 Only when bending or squatting, we face the collage of 48 photographs in the horizontal crevice between the overhang and the display table: a structured arrangement of pre-war black and white or sepia pictures of Jedwabne Jewish inhabitants, captioned (name, sometimes profession) and dated, displayed on a black background and probably in their original size. When compared to The Tower of Faces in Hirsch’s reading, the captions may seem to situate the image, which works against their universality and thus stalls visitor’s identification. Yet, it is also clear because of the captions that the logic of the collage clearly follows genealogical connections and the members of the same family are clustered together. Hirsch’s “family frames”, then, function differently here and may run along these exposed genealogical lines.
21 These relatively small, structured picture clusters, sometimes literally visually resembling pages from family albums, captioned for the following generations, are in contrast to many uses of photographs in the museum, as indicated, for instance, by Jason Francisco, that, as he claims, contribute to the effect of, among others, “part scholarly pop-up book, part multimedia kindergarten, and part solemn carnival.” The stark hyperbolic multiplication of images, their intense mirroring, blowing them up to function as wallpaper that he criticizes are absent from this installation, which suggests that these “high-tech expo” techniques (Francisco) may be rather used to defamiliarize perpetrator-produced images.
22 Also, with its architecture, the context of the family photographs display is different from the one in the USHMM. Here it is clearly not a break from the chronology, but
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rather its part. It is not immersive, like the Tower of Faces with Eisiskes standing for each and any shtetl, but rather pivotal for the narrative because of the wider resonance of Jedwabne. Also, contrary to the installation at the USHMM, familial frames are not spatially isolated from atrocity photography. They are displayed in direct contrast to perpetrator created images, both within the installation itself (the deeply recessed screen in the wall mounted table shows the Nazi footage of the sexual violence during the Lviv pogrom on a loop) and the neighboring wall of the Ponary massacre.9 In a cinematic reading, the thick block overhang dramatically changes the frame, forces a close-up on the photographs, the visitor’s movements, the visitors “enact[ing] cinema” (33), as Mieke Bal states in a context of a different exhibition. It is not the all- encompassing, Bal’s “enfolding” feeling from the Tower of Faces, but rather an intense focus on them through a particular framing.
3. Concluding Remarks
23 The aesthetic museum experience of the POLIN’s Jedwabne installation aesthetically resonates with The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To understand this resonance it is not enough to think about Americanization or Americanizations of Holocaust memory in functional terms, however productive for the analysis of certain American cultural artifacts they may be. Thinking about the Americanization of culture in aesthetic terms, as Winfried Fluck has suggested, changes the perspective and, as I was trying to demonstrate, allows us to also see and explain additional aesthetic correspondences in Holocaust memorializations, even if in the diverging contexts of an exhibition and national memorial culture these correspondences do not really correspond. Such a reading of the Tower of Faces of the USHMM may additionally reveal what “new possibilities of expression,” what new points of accessibility American representations of the Holocaust generated, also in relation to museum aesthetic experience, and, with the example of the POLIN’s Jedwabne installation, how they have traveled into other settings. Appelbaum, Ralph. “Designing an ‘Architecture of Information’: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Curator: The Museum Journal, vol. 38, no. 2, 1995, pp. 87-94. Print. Assmann, Aleida. “The Holocaust—a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community.” Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 97-117. Print. Bal, Mieke. “Exhibition as Film.” (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium, edited by Robin Ostow, University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. 15-47. Print. Baskind, Samantha. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture. Penn State UP, 2018. Benton, Maya. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered. Prestel, 2015. Print. Berenbaum, Michael. After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience. Cambridge UP, 1990. Print. ---. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Little, Brown, 1993. Print. Berkowitz, Michael. “Photography as a Jewish Business: From High Theory, to Studio, to Snapshot.” East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 389-400, 2009, doi: 10.1080/13501670903298286.
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“Core Exhibition.” POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. http://www.polin.pl/en/exhibitions/core-exhibition. Accessed June 22, 2018. Craps, Stef, and Michael Rothberg. “Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 53, no. 4, 2011, pp. 517-21. Print. Engelking, Barbara, and Jacek Leociak. “Holocaust 1939-1944.” Polin. 1000 Year History of Polish Jews, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Antony Polonsky, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2015, pp. 288-347. Print. ---. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. Translated by Emma Harris, Yale UP, 2009. Print. Flanzbaum, Hilene. “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 1, no. 1,1999, pp. 91-104. Print. Fluck, Winfried. “Amerikanisierung und Modernisierung.” Transit, vol. 17, 1999, pp. 55-71. Print. ---. “The Americanization of German Culture? The Strange, Paradoxical Ways of Modernity.” German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It?, edited by Agnes C. Mueller, The University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 19-39. Print. Forecki, Piotr. Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej. Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2018. Print. Francisco, Jason. “Polin.” jasonfrancisco.net, 1 Dec. 2014, http://jasonfrancisco.net/polin. Accessed June 22, 2018. Freed, James Ingo. “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: a Dialogue with Memory.” Curator: The Museum Journal, vol. 38, no. 2, 1995, 95-110. Print. Graff, Agnieszka, Tomasz Basiuk, and Karolina Krasuska. “Introduction: Transnational American Studies: Histories, Methodologies, Perspectives.” Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 12, Spring 2018, pp. 7-20. Print. Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Grudzińska-Gross, Irena, and Iwo Nawrocki, editors. Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. Peter Lang Edition, 2016. Print. Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation. Rutgers UP, 2014. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Kijek, Kamil. “For Whom and about What? The Polin Museum, Jewish Historiography and Jews as a ‘Polish Cause’.” Studia Litteraria et Historica, no. 6, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.1363. Accessed August 27, 2018. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Inside the Museum: Curating between hope and despair: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.” East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 45, no. 2-3, 2015, pp. 215-35. Print. ---. “Theater of History.” Polin. 1000 Year History of Polish Jews, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Antony Polonsky, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2015, pp. 19-35. Print. Konferencja “Od Ibrahima ibn Jakuba do Anielewicza 6” w Muzeum POLIN, cz. 8.” YouTube, uploaded by Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN, 10 July 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wes49xQ5so4. Accessed August 27, 2018. Krijnen, Joost. Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature. Brill | Rodopi, 2016. Print.
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Leociak, Jacek. Biografie ulic. O żydowskich ulicach Warszawy: od narodzin po Zagładę. Dom Spotkań z Historią, 2018. Print. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Translated by Assenka Oksiloff, Temple UP, 2006. Print. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print. Roppola, Tiina. Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience. Routledge, 2012. Print. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” Commentary, June 1995. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/witness/. Accessed August 27, 2018. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Stogner, Maggie Burnette. “The Immersive Cultural Museum Experience—Creating Context and Story with New Media Technology.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 117-30. Print. Wall text for “Jedwabne.” Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland. Wall text for “The Tower of Faces.” Permanent Exhibition, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Weinberg, Jeshajahu. “A Narrative History Museum.” Curator: The Museum Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, December 1994, pp. 231-9. Print. Weinberg, Jeshajahu, and Rina Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington. Rizzoli International Publications, 1995. Print. Wiesel, Elie. “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction.” New York Times, 16 Apr. 1978, Section II, pp. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/16/archives/tv-view-trivializing-the-holocaust- semifact-and-semifiction-tv-view.html. Accessed August 27, 2018. Witcomb, Amy. “Interactivity: Thinking Beyond.” A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 353-361. Print.
NOTES
1. For a nuanced reflection on the debates, see Kijek. Major critical voices on the exhibition are well represented in: Grudzińska-Gross and Nawrocki. The recording of the conference celebrating the opening of the exhibition also provides multiple clues: ”Konferencja „Od Ibrahima ibn Jakuba do Anielewicza 6.” 2. This focus on the every-day experiences and the life in the ghettos mirrors the lead scholars’ - Barbara Engelking’s and Jacek Leociak’s major research interests (Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto; Leociak) and resonates with recent research developments in Holocaust memory (e.g. Baskind). 3. A similar version of the official moment was narrated by Joanna Fikus, the coordinator of the Core exhibition in a private conversation in May 2018. 4. For the purposes of my argument, I am skipping Fluck’s important point on private modes of financing American culture that he deems crucial for the development if its specific modes.
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5. Novick also directs us toward more comparative approaches to memory formation in which different traumatic events are not in competition but rather circumscribe their reciprocal memory; cf. Craps and Rothberg as well as global circulation of American memory of the Holocaust-Levy and Sznaider. 6. This thought experiment, superimposing these cultural analyses with different foci, is not supposed to make them fully compatible, but rather usable to illuminate certain aspects of aesthetic transfer of mnemonic forms. 7. I am not comparing here the two permanent exhibitions as such—they function quite differently because of when and where they had been created, and because their focus is quite different. I am asking rather about a similar aesthetic segment, so characteristic for USHMM, and the functions it fulfills within these quite different exhibitions. 8. The research on 1941-1942 pogroms was catalyzed by the publication of Jan T. Gross’s, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001, Polish original publication 2000). It is outside the scope of this article to sketch the extent of work by such scholars as Anna Bikont, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, and others. 9. I am not considering here all textual elements of the installation on pogroms, including the latest, December 2017 addition of an object to the installation—a few sets of keys that have been dug up within the Institute of National Remembrance investigation at the location of the Jedwabne massacre.
ABSTRACTS
The article interprets an emblematic segment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition, The Tower of Faces and the installation on the 1941-2 pogroms in Nazi-occupied Poland in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews to compare the aesthetic experience of these examples of Holocaust memorialization. It argues that using the concept of “Americanization,” as it is employed in American Studies in Europe and in Holocaust and memory studies, respectively, is instrumental in analyzing the museum experience and as such may contribute to the debates on POLIN and its representation of memory.
INDEX
Keywords: Americanization, museum, Holocaust, Jewish, memory, representation
AUTHOR
KAROLINA KRASUSKA Karolina Krasuska is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, and the founding director of the research unit Gender/Sexuality at the ASC. She is the author of a monograph examining modernist poetry from a transnational, gender-oriented perspective Płeć i
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naród: translokacje [Gender and Nation: Translocations] (2012) and a co-author of the pioneering Encyklopedia gender (2014). She is also the Polish translator of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble(Uwikłani w płeć, Warszawa 2008). Her newest book publication is a co-edited volume (with Andrea Peto and Louise Hecht) Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (2015).
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Figurations of Attachment in Sylvia Plath and Halina Poświatowska
Agnieszka Pantuchowicz
1 What in psychology has been termed “attachment history” and treated as foundational for identity formation seems to be a significant aspect of various kinds of autobiographical narratives. In John Bowlby’s theoretical formulation (cf. 666-669), people are endowed with an innate system of forming attachments with broadly understood caretakers. Attachments are not always fully remembered, though they can be recovered from what Conway and Pleydell-Pearce see as “a self-memory system” which stores memories as transitory mental constructions which may “activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories” (261). “Autobiographical memory,” they go on, is of fundamental significance for the self, for emotions, and for the experience of personhood, that is, for the experience of enduring as an individual, in a culture, over time. As a consequence autobiographical memory is researched in many different subareas of psychology, for example, cognitive, social, developmental, clinical, and neuropsychology to name only some of the most prominent. (261)
2 What the idea of autobiographical memory inevitably brings to one’s mind is autobiographical writing, the genre of autobiography, or life writing, in which some kind of attachment history seems to be strongly present, especially in the case of those autobiographers who wrote about changing places, and who themselves changed their places of stay or of living. What is involved in such changes seems to be the change of ones attachments and the possibility of changing one’s attachment into detachment. In what follows, I am looking at the writings of two women writers, coming from two different places from the perspective of what may be called configurations of attachments. What links the two writers is not only the fact that they are women, but also the changes of places which they experienced as changes of attachment to those who cared for them and for whom they cared. If, broadly understood, home can be seen as a place which cares about us, then the change of the place of one’s home necessarily refigures the attachment history of one’s life. The two women writers are Sylvia Plath who changed her place of living from America to England, and Halina Poświatowska
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who, for some time, left Poland for America. What thus also links their attachment histories is America in which the two histories somehow meet.
3 Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (published in 1975, years after the author’s death) and The Bell Jar (published only a month before Plath’s death in 1963 under a pseudonym, and in 1967 with her own name) have predominantly been read in an autobiographical mode. Though from Al Alvarez we learn that Plath spoke of the Bell Jar “with some embarrassment as an autobiographical apprentice-work which she had to write in order to free herself from the past” (19), the motivation for the writing of the book may well be ascribed to a confession rather than to an autobiography, to a way of renouncing one’s previous life and beginning a new one in order to somehow display a hybrid coexistence of two lives in one. Halina Poświatowska’s Opowieść dla przyjaciela (A Story for a Friend) was published in 1967—nine years after heart surgery for which she went to the US and after the publication of her first volume of poetry and less than a year before her death in October of 1968 at the age of thirty two. This Story, which is a poeticized account of the experiences the poet had in America, is also frequently read as an autobiography despite the fact that in the opening paragraphs of the book she informs the reader that she is only going to talk: “I will talk, my friend” (Poświatowska 7). The text is also to be an expression of a certain togetherness, of “common days” and of a “common past” (Poświatowska 7) whose mien is not a singular person, a singular subject, but rather a kind of hybrid whose literary rendition demands a hybrid kind of writing. Though in some sense both Plath and Poświatowska do write about themselves, their texts are strongly concerned not so much with their selves, but with what is, or was, near to them and around them. The hybrid literary forms of Plath’s and Poświatowska’s prosaic works make room for various, though not mutually exclusive, readings: a meditation on love, closeness and friendship; a story of un/success; an account of (always already) failed translations of a life re-gained, though one where wild hunger for life all too frequently leads to linguistic, mental and culturally troublesome recognitions which are voiced in defense of instincts and ethics going beyond self-love and self-preservation. This kind of writing might be called, after James Olney, “periautobiographical”—writing “about and around the self” (Olney xv). Though, as he claims, what characterizes periautobiography is “its indefinition and lack of generic rigor” (Olney xvi), it simultaneously decentralizes the self of the traditional autobiography and “brings forth ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self” (Olney 20). The self is thus brought forth not as what it is, but as a hybrid upshot of an economy of attachment in which the attached does not simply come from the outside, but which also affects the inside through various bonds of friendship and links with what is close to oneself, even if this closeness is sometimes unwelcome and troublesome.
4 One of the senses of the verb “to attach” is associated with binding, with tying things together and fastening them so that they constitute a unity in contiguity, that is to say a seeming unity of elements which can exist independently from the whole. The relationships of attachment are those of closeness, and thus may be generally seen as metonymic. Closeness, however, is in fact a category of distance despite the fact that it may also be standing in opposition to distance. Distancing separates, while becoming close almost unites, though the seeming unity is an effect of nearness which strengthens the bond of attachment. Though what has been attached can be recognized as an added other, this cognitive recognition can be annulled through the affective
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identification with this otherness which thus becomes a stranger within ourselves. Paradoxically, however, foreignness can be felt as foreign only when it is close to us. For Julia Kristeva the foreign is attached to us from within. “Strangely,” she writes, “the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder” (1). For some reason, the something within, though close (can anything be closer than something within?), is something to which we are not attached through love or friendship, something which we’d rather do without and get rid of.
5 Plath’s wish to free herself from the past through writing The Bell Jar can be read, as I have already noted, as a confession. Plath as it were writes a text through which she wants to detach a part of her life from herself, perhaps the stranger within with whom she does not feel to be friendly. This detachment, importantly, is not the Christian renunciation which Foucault saw in his reading of confession as a technology of the self, consisting in a verbalization of guilt which “rubs out the sin and yet reveals the sinner” (42). Plath’s declared attempt to free herself from the past seems to be belonging to another kind of confession, one used “without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self” (Foucault 49).
6 Perhaps the solitude and withdrawal so typically ascribed to her and her writings can be read as a politics of detachment from the past whose unfriendly intimations haunt her like the specter of the Rosenbergs which opens the text: It was a QUEER, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. (Plath 1)
7 This recollection of a New York summer is Plath’s initial distancing gesture in which the detaching—“It had nothing to do with me”—is accompanied by the imaginary identification with burning alive juxtaposed with the omnipresent smell of peanuts. Both are seen as “unfriendly”, and it is this unfriendliness, or strangeness, of the recollected space that activates both withdrawal and exteriorization. The recollection which Plath wants to write down and forget somewhat aggressively steps in from the outside as the unwanted Americanness not only of New York, but also of the more private space of home: Ours was a small, white clapboard house set in the middle of a small green lawn on the corner of two peaceful suburban streets, but in spite of the little maple trees planted at intervals around our property, anybody passing along the sidewalk could glance up at the second story windows and see just what was going on. (94)
8 The constant being seen in the American suburb along with the violent visibility of America seem to be leaving no space for detachment. Though America praises privacy, this privacy is in fact under constant surveillance, which situation seems to be unbearable to Plath. In a sense Plath’s America is too close, it presses too closely so that rather than being simply attached, it infringes upon her “self” and makes it into an intolerable patchwork.
9 Robert Scholes, I think rightly, summarized The Bell Jar in The New York Times Book Review as “a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s twentieth year; about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue” (Scholes). The image of being made
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up of fragments, of being stuck together into a seeming whole is augmented in Esther’s recollection from the psychiatric hospital in which the doctors are seen as intrusive and too numerous to take care of a single patient: I lay on my bed under the thick white blanket, and they entered my room, one by one, and introduced themselves. I couldn't understand why there should be so many of them, or why they would want to introduce themselves, and I began to think they were testing me, to see if I noticed there were too many of them, and I grew wary. (153)
10 There seems to be no space for singularity in the hospital and Esther’s body is made into a whole which is a patchwork made up of the collective medical gaze. The space of the hospital is a space devoid of privacy, and what she misleadingly perceived as a room of her own on arrival (“I had my own room, again”), turns out to be belonging to an outside which is also linked with the past and with history. The history of the hospital as related by one of the psychiatrists (Doctor Nolan), is attached to the history of America which, for Esther, is a banal repetition of what she knew only too well: Finally, a handsome, white-haired doctor came in and said he was the director of the hospital. Then he started talking about the Pilgrims and Indians and who had the land after them, and what rivers ran nearby, and who had built the first hospital, and how it had burned down, and who had built the next hospital, until I thought he must be waiting to see when I would interrupt him and tell him I knew all that about rivers and Pilgrims was a lot of nonsense. (153)
11 What makes the hospital an inhospitable place is the vulnerability of its denizens to intrusions of both the doctors and, along with them, of the notorious stories of the making of America which seem to be culminating in the making of the hospital. The hospital is a besieged place in which there is no space for one’s own story, and so is the home whose space is easily penetrated by noises and lights of the outside world, culminating in the unstoppable ringing of the telephone: I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn't shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to. After a while I heard the telephone ringing in the downstairs hall. I stuffed the pillow into my ears and gave myself five minutes. Then I lifted my head from its bolt hole. The ringing had stopped. Almost at once it started up again. Cursing whatever friend, relative or stranger had sniffed out my homecoming, I padded barefoot downstairs. The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird. I picked up the receiver. ‘Hullo,’ I said, in a low, disguised voice. (94)
12 Though the outside world is in fact friendly, and the telephone call Esther receives is from a friend, she is clearly inhospitable to the outside. The Bell Jar seems to be a story of detachment in which friendship is not seen in terms of the duty of reciprocation in which detachment may be seen as an offence. What Esther/Plath experiences in America, from what she wants to “free herself”, may be the kind of friendliness which America offers both in its public and private spaces, the friendliness in which closeness is performed intrusively, braking the metonymic demand of remaining close, of being there as another. Plath is not hostile to the America she revisits in the book, and yet “cursing whatever friend, relative or stranger,” she as it were conjures the question of enmity which, in Jacques Derrida’s reading of friendship, inevitably haunts the idea of friendship through the paradoxical relationship which he terms “pharmacological”: The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called them up in advance, had
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indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding question, a question of wound. No friend without the possible wound. The tension between friendship and enmity would be pharmacological. (Derrida, Politics of Friendship 153)
13 The kind of friendship which can be traced in Plath’s book, and from which she detaches herself, seems to be one-sidedly curative, a pure remedy for lack of a togetherness unspoiled, or “unpoisoned” by the logic of pharmakon which is “neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing” (Derrida, Positions 43). The curative power of pharmakon lies in the complicity of contrary values thanks to which “presenting itself as poison, may turn out to be a cure” (Derrida, Dissemination 125).
14 What America hides, and what Plath sees and experiences, is the poisonous aspect of its overt friendliness. According to Carole Ferrier, Plath is “a victim of the fifties and its ideology of the family” (Ferrier 215), of its oppressively patronizing protectiveness also embodied, paradoxically, in the figure of her mother and visible in Plath’s hostility to her (cf. Journals 429). One may call this kind of friendliness fake, while Plath seems to be longing for a more real kind of attachment to the world. She expressed this quite literally in her Journals: My main thing now is to start with real things: real emotions, and leave out the baby gods, the old men of the sea, the thin people, the knights, the moon-mothers, the mad maudlins, the lorelei, the hermits, and get into me, Ted, friends, mother and brother and father and family. The real world. Real situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death. (471)
15 The above quotation extends Plath’s feeling of non-attachment outside America, to her new British milieu which she also sees as unreal. It was only for a while that attachment to another person withdrew her from the “real world”: “my whole being has grown and interwound so completely with Ted‘s that if anything were to happen to him, I do not see how I could live. I would either go mad, or kill myself. I cannot conceive of life without him” (274). For a while the metonymic contiguity changes into unity with Ted Hughes and becomes a part of her own being. This unity is strongly underlined in Journals, the idea of separation becoming associated with withering and dying. In May 1958 she wrote: “I am superstitious about separations from Ted, even for an hour, I think I must live in his heat and presence, for his smells and words – as if all my senses fed involuntarily on him and deprived for more than a few hours, I languish, wither, die to the world” (378). The inseparability from Hughes and the demand for togetherness may be an example of what Martina Bilá sees as “Plath’s obsession with doubles” (68), with alter egos of sorts with whom she sometimes does not identify herself. A year later, in 1968, the need for being incessantly together with Hughes gives way to a need of remaining apart. Hughes’s company becomes poisonous to her “self” and, like earlier America, intrusive: I enjoy it when Ted is off for a bit. I can build up my own inner life, my own thoughts, without his continuous ‘What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?’ which makes me promptly & recalcitrantly stop thinking and doing. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself & not let myself be made by him. He gives orders—mutually exclusive: read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an hour, think an hour & then ‘you read nothing in hour-bits, read things straight through’. (401)
16 Plath’s wish to make herself rather than allow for being made by others seems to be a gesture of periautobiographical writing around the self in which the autobiographical
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subject is more than one. As she declared in the Journal entry for 15 November 1959, “[t]he thing is, to develop other first persons” (530), an art which demands a detachment from the singularity of the ego with an eye to develop other egos, other first persons. Such other persons are, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase, singularly plural and thus always evading and avoiding their having been made by others. The detachment from the singular “I” of the first person along with the creation of “other first persons” may signify that “there is no Other and that the ‘there is’ is not an Other. Being is not the Other, but the origin is the punctual and discrete spacing between us, as between us and the rest of the world, as between all beings” (Nancy 19). Plath’s detachment from the past is thus also a way of creating a distance, or a space, between the “I” and the present, a space which allows for a declaration of one’s non-belonging to the appropriating demands of singular identities.
17 For the Polish poet and writer, Halina Poświatowska, America seems to have been a promise of regaining health and of becoming another person. Her A Story for a Friend was published in 1967—nine years after heart surgery for which she went to the US and after the publication of her first volume of poetry; less than a year before her death in October of 1968 at the age of thirty two—and constitutes a poeticized account of the experiences the poet had in America. The Story covers the time of travel, the surgical procedures and the years of Poświatowska’s American education (Smith College and summer courses at Columbia), of numerous travels and walks she took in New York and other cities (with one longer trip to the South). The Story seems to be, as in Plath, a way of bidding farewell to the past and to things left behind in Poland, the things which had made her through various kinds of being attached to places and to people in Poland. The America of Poświatowska’s Story figures as a land of life regained, though one where the wild hunger for life all too frequently leads to linguistic, mental and culturally troublesome recognitions which are voiced in order to be heard at the other shore of the ocean. This seems to be a defense of instincts and ethics different from the ones governed by the idea of self-preservation. The economy of life and the economy of friendship constitute the backdrop against which the Story is told to disturb the conventional conceptualizations of friendship and attachment, of the topographical and mental closeness as the determinant of being oneself, of constituting a singular identity.
18 If Plath’s America is a space of the past, Poświatowska visited America before she actually went there. Mostly tied to her bed, hardly attending a school, she learned about the world by hearsay, from her mother. “I was everywhere”, she wrote in her Story, “in the prairies of the American west, I took part in African expeditions, and crossed the stormy ocean” (31).1 As a child, paler and weaker than other children, having problems with breathing, she was visibly different, though the protective lies of her mother placed her in a fake zone of security whose fragility she felt only intuitively. Her mother’s eyes “were hiding a secret code whose each sign strengthened the feeling of security in me. I did not know then, I did not even suspect, that my mother could lie with her eyes” (35). Her mother also took care of the publication of her first poetical works, perhaps seeing in her propensity to writing an extension reaching farther beyond the sick reality of the body. The man she married had also a sick heart, he suffered from angina pectoris, and died two years after their marriage. He was also an artist, and what seems to have kept them together was again the spectral sphere of fantasies which was in a way more vivid than their bodies.
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19 Both her illness and the fantasy of creation can be read as an outsidedness of sorts within which there hides a besieged interior of healthy reality which is in fact empty. The illness and, say, the literary production can be viewed here as a kind of clothing with which this bare inside does not fully identify itself. They are contiguous, attached to each other, but kept separate. However, if what Susan Sontag calls in her reading of illness as metaphor the aesthetic pose of “romantic agony”—a kind of interior décor of the body whose poetic expression produces the, in fact desirable, aesthetic effect— Poświatowska, even before her travel to America, as it were interiorizes both her illness and the world of words by way of what Jacques Lacan called “extimacy,” a process in which the exterritorial outside, though seemingly strange an alien, infiltrates “the most interior of the psyche” (cf. Pavòn-Cuéllar 1). Or, as Slavoj Žižek phrases it, we begin to deal with the paradoxical situation in which “an external, contingent, found element… simultaneously stands for the subject’s innermost being” (Žižek 205). The external reality becomes thus eliminated as false or inauthentic, while the interior begins, at least provisionally, to be positively valorized. This is noticeable in Poświatowska’s poem “An Advertising Device” (“Chwyt reklamowy”): the world has tired me, everything was and nihil novi under the round shining is explained under the letter k: knowledge —study the encyclopedia— now I want to lie flat and kiss the uneven nails of your hand—sticky and dirty (Hymn bałwochwalczy 12)
20 The poem was written before her visit to America, though its published version was sent to Poświatowska when she was already there. The title of the collection of poems in which it was included was An Idolatrous Hymn (Hymn bałwochwalczy, 1958), perhaps also indicating some shift of her veneration not only from the external world of culture, from the world of words (encyclopedia), but also from the sick body to the bodily sexual pleasure. What the poem also “extimates” is the encyclopedic fantasy of the full picture and knowledge of the world which is transformed into the intimate experience of wild lovemaking which hinges upon tearing apart of the body and nearly cannibalistic transubstantiation: Study the encyclopedia Clench your teeth more tightly On my left arm Tear off the skin—it prevents Our tightened muscles From interlacing into uninterlacable
People Study the encyclopedia (13)
21 Make wild love and study the encyclopedia is not exactly a watchword of her contemporary Americans who wanted to make love in peace, though perhaps in a “wilder” milieu than a middle-class home. The nihil novi in the poem also signifies a disbelief in the newness of the world, in the possibility of finding a new world out there, even in the New World which has already been encylopedized as a historical past. The image of America which appears in A Story for a Friend is also the image of an overdomesticated space where there seems to be nothing new, and where there is no
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space for an authentic relationship. Her first impression when she sees America through the window of the airplane is unequivocal: This is already America. Not only letters connect me to this land, those few sheets of paper, a few names. This country is strange to me and I don’t know the people on whom my future depends. Under the wing of the plane the light-gray New York City, x-rayed by the sunset.… I notice the ashy outline of the island falling into blueness - the ocean, the glitter of sunlight in the tops of trees. (112)
22 Poświatowska does not seem be having any adventurous expectations about America, a touristic thrill of a semi-discoverer of something unusual or exotic. What she ironically conquers there are domestic places and cheap things: “You see, my conquest of America was not highly impressive. I washed dishes in clean kitchens and my only attainment were a few ancient dresses” (125). What she also discovers is America’s familial, umbilical linkage with the homely security of Europe: “Who of us does not have cousins in America, my dearest, it has turned out that I have too” (119). What has changed is that immigrants have become “pragmaticized,” deprived of the perhaps less domesticated natures from the past, which resulted from the long work of a few generations. When she informed one of her newly discovered cousins about her decision to stay in America, what he saw in the decision was a trace of the American mind as it were residing within her: “A cousin with a pragmatic mind—to which the work of a few generations has contributed—expressed his recognition of the practicality of my idea” (119-120).
23 Poświatowska’s America has been encyclopedized, though in a different language than her native one. There is no space for strangers in it, and thus for friendship whose dynamics, as I have already noted, demands the unfriendly otherness. Her text can be read as a kind of translation addressed to a friend, a figure of friendship posited outside, far away, and demanding translation. This translation does not have to reach for what Lawrence Venuti called foreignization, as the seemingly new reality is itself a plain text, as clear as an encyclopedic entry. What surprises her a little is that there are no black students at Smith, the fact which she mentions to her friend seeing in it a potentiality of disbelief: “you may check, not a single black man from Harlem is studying at this university, at this one and at any other one” (152). The passages referring to her travel to the South, however, do not contain any marks of surprise, perhaps except for the fact that she chooses it as an object of description: “Through the wooden screens of advertisements there show dirty, neglected huts of the settlements of blacks; doors frequently rigged up of plywood, the dark rectangles of windows deprived of glass. Weeds grow over the shallow ditches, on the paths, in the yellow sand half-naked colored children are playing” (188). Interestingly, this uninvolved view is juxtaposed in the text with the enthusiastic exclamation of one of her travel companions, Anita, expressing excitement about having reached this legendary region of America: “It’s already the South, the real South—Anita is shouting out” (189). Unlike Plath’s, Poświatowska’s America in non-intrusive. She is not attached to it and though decides to live there for a few years, the contact enforced by this decision always remains superficial. The relationship may be called a friendly apartness, with friendship being reserved for something else, for her life “poisoned” with illness. The world around her is friendly, perhaps smiling, but throughout the text she remains notoriously indifferent to it.
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24 A Story for a Friend is a letter written from a friendly world which Poświatowska wants to preserve as a milieu for her visibly disappearing life which takes place within her mind and her body. Perhaps what really mattered in her predicament was some language of the heart, the heartbeat whose sound must have been for her more valuable than all the other sounds coming from the distant world. Though the brief improvement of her health was made possible, and took place in America, the sphere, or zone which really concerns her lies beneath language, within the bodily flows of blood thanks to which she can see and read the world, however encyclopedic it may be. A heart, of course, may symbolize both a loved person, a dear friend, and the site of love, the place from which love originates and which keeps the beloved within itself. In Poświatowska, however, the heart figures as a bodily part which speaks life rather than love, a part which provides life with a rhythmicality whose repetitive work is also discernible in the monotony of the world outside as its translation. Towards the end of the Story Poświatowska discloses that what she wrote, including the America she went through in her text, was dictated by a strange kind of friendship, exactly a “pharmacological” one in which it is the dying body which speaks the words of life: I can hear the sound of the foamy water and can feel how the most sensitive of the measuring instruments—the heart—is delicately beating. It is still weak, but it is daringly beating and with great patience is pumping the warm blood. - Listen, my friend, all these pages are only its rhythm.
25 The friend seems to be herself, the listener to oneself who is bound to hear the other. Such a listening to oneself is not a gesture of selfishness, but rather of a much more complex possibility of friendship with oneself as attached to the other. Such a listening, to reach to Derrida’s politics of friendship once again, “inscribes friendship, knowledge and death, but also survival, from the start, in a single, selfsame configuration. The same here is none other than the other. It has at least the figure of the other” (Derrida, Politics of Friendship 7).
26 Poświatowska’s friend within herself does not read the outside world as hostile and, as I have already noted, her America is non-intrusive and seems to be only one of the figures of the other in her attachment history. Unlike in Plath, she does not detach herself from America seeing in it an “everywhere” about which she heard from her mother’s stories. What speaks through the fragments of Plath’s writing which I have read here seems to be a stranger within herself, something which I have tentatively called the intolerable patchwork of her “self”—a fragmented narrative in which attachment, as was the case of her attachment to America, easily changes into detachment and obstructs the construction of Derrida’s “selfsame configuration” (see above) of friendship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alvarez, Al. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Print.
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Bilá, Martina. “Subjectivity in The Journals of Sylvia Plath and Diaries of Virginia Woolf.” Theory and Practice in English Studies 7.2 (2014): 63-72. Print.
Bowlby, John. “Attachment and Loss: Retrospect and Prospect.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 52.4 (1982): 664-678. Print.
Conway, Martin A., and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce Christopher. “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System.” Psychological Review 107.2 (2000): 261-288. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print.
---. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. Print.
---. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self. Ed. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 16–49. Print.
Kövecses, Zoltan. Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Structure of Concepts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1986. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1991. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Print.
Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print.
Pavòn-Cuéllar, David. “Extimacy.” Encyclopedia Of Critical Psychology. Ed. Thomas Teo. New York: Springer. 2014. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Toronto: Bantam, 1971. Print.
---. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber, 2000. Print.
Poświatowska, Halina. Hymn bałwochwalczy. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1958. Print.
---. Opowieść dla przyjaciela. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1967. Print.
Scholes, Robert. “Esther came back like a retreaded tire.” The New York Times Book Review, (April 11, 1971): no pagination. 5 Sept 2018. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/plath-bell.html
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Print.
NOTES
1. All translations of fragments from Poświatowska are mine, unless otherwise stated.
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ABSTRACTS
The paper addresses the question of attachment to places and the modes of its reflection in the “periautobiographical” (James Olney’s term) texts of Sylvia Plath and Halina Poświatowska. For these two women writers the change of the place of living (from America to England in the case of Plath, and from Poland to America in the case of Halina Poświatowska) was a significant event which can be read as a history in which the topographical change becomes crucial for the construction of autobiographical memory. This memory, partly constituted by the play of attachments and detachments, is also crucial for the understanding of the role of the ideas of home and homeland seen as a refigured space of attachment in which the idea friendship and its various bonds are links with what is close to oneself, even if this closeness is felt as unwelcome and troublesome.
INDEX
Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Halina Poświatowska, autobiography, attachment, friendship
AUTHOR
AGNIESZKA PANTUCHOWICZ Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches translation and literary studies. Her research interests include translation theory and cultural studies, comparative literature, and feminist criticism.
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Will You Awaken When Your Netflix No Longer Works? American Films, Television Productions and Social Transformations in Poland
Mirosław Filiciak
1 “Freedom. What do you need freedom for? You’ve got TV.” Thus begins “Po co wolność” (“Freedom? What For?”), a song by Kult, one of the most popular bands in the history of Polish rock music. It comes from their 1989 album titled Kaseta (Cassette), a highly suggestive name in the context of this essay as it refers to the main medium of music distribution used at the time. Like most Kult songs, the lyrics provide a commentary on the social and political situation in Poland, and the above quoted words from the beginning of the song are followed by examples of how the authorities (still communist at the time) bribed the citizens with little comforts. It is not by chance that the TV opens the list here and that the rest of the song, which includes “a gratuitous ration of spirit,” there are abundant references to TV shows. As Iwona Kurz, the historian of Polish culture, notes, in the 1970s and 80s popular culture images of Polish TV were unambiguous. It was represented as a tool for escapism and mass hallucinations (Kurz 390). Yet, these images related mostly to the propagandistic role of the national TV, filled with programs produced by Poland and the Comecon countries. The audiences’ reception of what came from behind the Iron Curtain was entirely different.
2 In this essay, I will discuss the historical transformations of the status of access to TV and cinema content in Poland from the 1980s till today. However, I will not focus on particular shows but will, instead, bring them under the common denominator of American productions. My main interest will lie in the models of access to this content. Sonia Livingstone and Ranjana Das’ research will constitute my major point of reference here. As they argue, if, according to the Anglo-American tradition of cultural studies, media is both texts and objects, then audiences likewise have a double nature: they read texts but they also re-produce social relations (Livingstone and Das 105-106).
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I will explore here the status nature of such reproduction and the dynamics of its transformations. The local aspect of my analysis will, of course, be of great importance here, especially in the context of Polish audiences’ encounter with American content. I will look at how the mythologized West, which was an important point of reference for Poles and was identified with American productions in the realm of popular culture, functioned during and after the political transformations. I will also explore which types of encounter with American audiovisual content have been perceived as productive of prestige.
3 Referring to cinema and TV productions made in USA is important not only because of the role the US has played as a world production center but also in the context of a phenomenon which Alexandr Kiossev describes as self-colonization: an uncritical fascination with the West driven by the fear of one’s own peripheral status (Kiossev). This is hegemony without domination, a situation which is the opposite, or perhaps a mirror reflection, of the relation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe with the “East” personified by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had successfully imposed its domination on Poland for over four decades; accordingly, in the social imagination it retained the status of an aggressor. The West enjoyed a different status: Poles yielded to it voluntarily, even with enthusiasm in terms of culture and politics. We can see this in the overwhelming majority of elites’ uncritical attitude towards to the shock therapy (a US import, to a large extent) given to our country after 1989. The elites have remained, until today, impervious to any discussion about economic models alternative to neoliberalism.
4 I thus adopt here a cultural studies perspective in which not only content, but also, and even primarily, the ways of accessing it and the social practices linked to it are of crucial importance. Since in this short essay I will analyze transformations beginning in the 1980s and lasting until today, interpreting particular films or series would miss the point and would provide only anecdotal evidence for my arguments. Analyzing types of content, and especially the ways of distributing it to viewers, is justified given the fact that access to audiovisual content, not only in Poland, has undergone significant changes over the last three decades, mainly due to technological progress. The arrival of the VCR and satellite TV in the 1980s loosened state control over the circulation of the content but also became a point of reference for the aspirations of the culture of consumption of those times. Beginning with a historical outline, I discuss how the changing technological platforms have continued to express the aspirations and identity of its users despite the political change in Poland and the processes of globalization.
1. Going to Movies or… the VCR Show?
5 During the Polish People’s Republic, access to American content was severely restricted. US films, as well as American TV series, reached Poland in meager amounts, often considerably delayed and, obviously, selective. They almost always achieved considerable success, which is at odds with the image of those times cultivated by Polish intelligentsia. As Arkadiusz Lewicki shows, the dominant image of the cinema audiences in the Polish People’s Republic who, or so it is often assumed, watched ambitious films and abundantly participated in film societies, finds no confirmation in statistics (46). Lewicki also notes that the interest in Polish and European cinema, so
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often evoked today, can at least partly be treated as caused by lack of access to American productions. In 1964, a year of record attendance, Hollywood films constituted a mere 15% of the cinema programs in Poland. Afterwards, the percentage was sometimes higher, yet Hollywood productions continued to be meted out, sparingly and selectively, by the communist authorities.
6 However, it was already by the mid-1980s that the state began to lose control over what Poles were watching. This loss was mostly caused by the boom of the VHS. It was then that the culture of viewership began to develop. American films (often of poor technical quality caused by multiple copying) and access to devices which enhanced the status of their owners were significant elements of this culture. The status in question was not only material. Possessing a VCR, or at least having access to it, called for financial resources which in the Polish People’s Republic were inextricably linked with resourcefulness, something valued immensely in Polish culture. In a radically centralized economy, both preferential access to commodities and opportunities to increase one’s revenue required a network of contacts and an ability to move skillfully within it. Though such a comparison may be overdrawn, we can note here certain analogies to how the VCRs functioned in other countries, semi-peripheral or peripheral from the perspective of the economic center. I am referring here to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory which segments the world on the basis of division of labor. Core countries use higher-skill production, while periphery countries focus on labor-intense production and extraction of raw materials. Semi-periphery countries have double characteristics and mediate between centers and peripheries (Wallerstein). The division of labor and access to products connected with it affect local cultures and peoples’ cultural practices built around media. We could mention here the Salomon Islands, discussed by Jean-Marc Philibert and Christine Jourdan (61). Seen as very prestigious electronic devices, the VCRs were not always used there in the way intended by the manufacturers because, for example, the users did not have enough competence to operate them. What is more, when the device broke down, it was frequently left unrepaired because of limited access to service centers. Yet for the owners, using the devices did not need to be more important than the prestige derived from possessing them. The situation in Poland seemed to be strikingly similar until the fall of the communist system.
7 In the first half of the 1980s, most VCRs which were available in Poland arrived through what can be called “private import,” or, to be more precise, smuggling. Later, they were sold, for dollars, by the state-owned chain stores Pewex and Baltona. It is estimated that already by the mid-1980s, there were over half a million VCRs in Poland, and counting (Gaweł 1). This figure is quite high given that at the beginning of the decade the VCR cost an equivalent of an average salary of five years. Afterwards, it cost an equivalent of the salary of several months. In order to obtain a possession of the VCR, resourcefulness was also needed. It allowed people to increase the official salary and buy the VCR at a price absurdly high from our viewpoint. What was also needed was the ability to mobilize the reservoirs of knowledge necessary to obtain the films or to connect the devices themselves to incompatible color systems or cables, which frequently required appropriate expertise. For this reason, home VCR screenings of American movies—often organized for neighbors and friends—were in fact spectacles of the status of the hosts with the VCR functioning as a medium of prestige. These aspirations corresponded with the images shown in the films because in the social
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imagination of the Polish People’s Republic the US was a country of widespread affluence based on the entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens. The owners of the VCR saw themselves as doubly avant-garde: people who in comparison to the rest of the population had an easier access to American pop culture but also as people who, through their actions and abilities to make money effectively, personified the Western spirit of resourcefulness and thus were closer not simply to American films, but to the American way of life. This, by the way, also corresponds to the narrative which was dominant in the Polish People’s Republic, even in the official media, a narrative about Poland’s backwardness and its constant chase after the West. The VCRs allowed people to feel that the distance separating them from the West got somewhat diminished.
8 Films available on VHS cassettes covered a wide range, also because in the absence of official distribution, the copies of films (disseminated mostly at the markets) belonged to different types of circulation which were kept separate in their countries of origin. From the perspective of the viewers who came into their possession, mostly through the purchase or exchange of pirate copies, these differences were often imperceptible. In the same place, often side by side on the same cassette, one could get not only action films, but also a B horror movie and arthouse cinema. Porn movies, which became an essential component of most home collections, acquired a unique status. This brief deregulation of the cultural taboo resulted from the fact that watching porn movies was treated not only as a manifestation of access to a new means of circulation, but also as circumvention of moral censorship which was identified with up-to-datedness. This censorship was not only a result of the policies of the government, but also of the values propagated by the Catholic church which supported the opposition. The confusion of the types of circulation also occurred in the case of Polish productions. In the interviews I and Patryk Wasiak held as part of our research on the social life of the VCR in Poland, we heard, among others, a story told by a VCR fan who as a teenager, by the end of the 1980s, watched Ryszard Bugajski’s Przesłuchanie (Interrogation, 1982). It may just as well be the most famous Polish film banned from distribution (the film was made in 1982 but it premiered only on December 13, 1989). An iconic film among those which leveled accusations against the communist regime, it tells a story of a woman tortured by the Office of Public Security in Stalinist Poland. When watched by a professional technical school student, it was mostly seen as a Polish equivalent to the subgenre of the cinema of exploitation (“women in prison”), popular in VCR circulation. Even if this case is an anecdotic one (since it is impossible to determine the range of similar interpretations today), it proves that at least in some part of the society video fans derived pleasure from an erotic tension generated by the tormenting of the female protagonist rather than from the evidence it provided for the cruelty of the authorities.
9 The raptures over the freedom inscribed into this channel of distribution began to wear off rather fast by the end of the 1980s, which can clearly be seen in how the cultural elites related to the VCR cassettes. Initially, they reached for the VCR mostly because they saw it as a medium challenging and unsettling the state monopoly on the distribution of information and cultural texts. Yet it was also seen as a medium which allowed people to watch films such as the already mentioned Interrogation, and the most recent American cinema. The VCR screenings were organized in the salons of the opposition intelligentsia. It soon turned out, however, that although the new technology provided access to content inaccessible in official circulation, it would also come to transform the entire media and culture ecosystem. In the cinema and on TV,
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distribution was centralized—the program was chosen by party officials, but sometimes also by the cultural elite cooperating with media and cultural institutions. In the case of the VCR, it proved to be entirely different. The discouragement is perfectly captured in Agnieszka Osiecka’s famous text “Wydeo” (the misspelling reflecting the mispronunciation of the word video), which was published in Polityka, a Polish weekly, in 1989. The VCR, the eponymous “wydeo,” is represented as a symbol of the birth of the new middle class, wanting in taste and obsessively watching action cinema (the article obviously cites Rambo starring Sylvester Stallone).
10 It is worth noting, however, that such processes were local in character. Somewhat belatedly, they also followed the phenomena one could encounter in the West. In his new introduction to the influential 1979 book Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, Herbert Gans mentions the media, including the VCRs, as a factor of cultural divergence in the USA. Writing about “cultural wars” and the diversification of tastes, Gans reminds us that they were, in fact, an element of class struggle in which the VCR and computers played a significant role supporting the development of new cultural niches (3-25). The change of the cinema program, but especially the change of the institutions regulating film distribution, became part of the symbolic struggles between former elites and the new middle class whose economic and political significance continued to grow. It was thus in the interest of the middle class to enhance the cultural competences which had hitherto remained outside the canon. Of course, bringing the US and Poland into a comparative perspective calls for some clarification. At the turn of the 1970s and 80s, the American white middle-class still enjoyed the delusion of growth. In Poland, the consumerist boom and the development of the management caste in the 1970s, vividly depicted, for instance, in the TV series Czterdziestolatek (dir. Jerzy Gruza, 1975), were brutally stopped already at the beginning of the 1980s when the martial law was introduced. The reduction of the standard of living and the awareness that the authorities were capable of brutal acts provided the background to the VCR revolution in Eastern Europe. This does not change the fact that there were internal tensions between the existing elites (the intelligentsia managed to maintain such status in the times of the Polish People’s Republic) and the new groups of economic advancement that aspired to claim the position of the intelligentsia.
11 In Poland, the tension over the extension of cultural capital (an extension taking place under the pressure from groups gaining in economic strength but having limited high culture competence) was mostly related to the rhetorical strategies of intelligentsia attempting to defend its position (this process is still visible in the public life; see Zarycki). At the moment, radical neoliberal economy began to gain ground, this group, which during the Polish People’s Republic had retained a strong position despite censorship, now feared degradation at the hands of the new middle class. The middle class had been burgeoning since the 1970s, but was relatively less educated and held a different set of values. This paradox touched upon the ambivalent relationship with the West which the Polish intelligentsia saw as an oasis of civil freedom antithetical to the Soviet Union, on the one hand, but, in the context of the 1980s/1990s economic transformations, also as a symbol of consumerism detrimental to high culture.
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2. Pirate Modernisation in a Digital Mode
12 The modernization of Polish culture, described above, was of a “dirty” character which brings to mind the transformations of Indian cities Ravi Sundaram has called “pirate modernity” (see Sundaram). The term describes the modernization of public space in which new media played a key role but which, despite this technological support, had an improvised, pirate character. Simultaneously, this pirate character could be detached from the rhetoric of protest against the dominant system because what was at stake was not only a break-up with the past, but also consumption within available means. Above all, it was based on local innovations which combined new technological solutions with grassroots activities focusing on the reduction of access costs. This involved, in particular, pirate copying and the development of a system for the circulation of copies. However, the liberation from under the influence of the Soviet Union, which also manifested itself in the realm of popular culture, fueled (as was the case in postcolonial countries) new forms of entanglements. On the one hand, it meant a growing proximity to the countries of the economic and cultural center, a proximity mediated by technology; on the other, a simultaneous participation in their culture by means of pirate solutions. While exploring the Nigerian VCR market, Brian Larkin describes this phenomenon as the “colonial sublime,” that is, processes in which viewers who aspire to enter fully the realm of Western pop culture at the same time use the equipment imported from the West and maintain a conviction about the superiority of its implied users (Larkin 35-44). In the case of the VCR pirate market, this superiority was everywhere to be seen given the low quality of recordings, the poor quality of dubbing superimposed on the original sound track, sometimes subtitles in foreign languages or logotypes of Western TV stations one could see on the recordings. They made it clear to the viewers that they were not the intended audience of the content and that this content reached them only by way of an enforced recycling. They showed that the Polish audience—despite the substantial costs they believed they had borne—remained incompatible with the Western circulation of content; just like the VCRs which coded colors in the PAL system were incompatible with Eastern European TVs which operated in the SECAM system.
13 It is clear, in the light of the argument presented in this essay, that the situation was radically changed neither by the fall of communism (which did not, after all, entail a leveling out of economic differences) nor by the technological transformations. Each new technology, though holding a promise of egalitarianism, continued to reproduce the dependence between the center and the semi-peripheries even if it enabled a local economy of prestige, itself enabling the production of differences within Polish society. However, this was not obvious at the beginning of the transformations because in some ways the situation had diametrically changed after 1989. State censorship was lifted, and new distribution channels appeared. The copyright law was implemented in 1994. What now signified the social prestige was the legal access to various kinds of audiovisual content, including rentals of DVDs and paid satellite channels. This, to a large extent, corresponded to the situation in other countries as discussed, among others, by Barbara Klinger (Beyond the Multiplex). Home audiovisual sets, as well as the collections of DVDs, constituted a specific manifestation of cinephilia which was based on access to both economic capital (the equipment) and cultural capital (collecting films). What also signified prestige was access to TV channels of the premium segment
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(Canal + or HBO) available only on subscription. Yet there were also pirate alternatives even to these premium media—the informal circulation of films also included the TV and pirate decoders were widely available on the market. At any rate, only recently did the development of terrestrial digital television diminish the interest in satellite and cable TV, both very popular in Poland. In 2012, seven million Poles used paid satellite platforms, while almost five million had cable TV subscriptions (Szewczyk). Despite access to free channels, a substantial part of the population used satellite or cable TV, which makes it difficult to see them as signifiers of prestige. Yet like in the era of the VCR, change occurred at the moment a new solution cropped up. It again linked, unambiguously, access to a channel to access to symbolic capital, not necessarily invoking, in any direct way, the economic status of the viewers.
14 This change was obviously brought about by the internet. At the turn of the century it was being popularized in Poland and was used by the statistically younger, well- educated and urban part of the population (Batorski). What is more, the diversity of its uses and the proficiency of its users who aimed to render their every-day life more efficient were visibly linked with the amount of the cultural capital the users enjoyed (Filiciak, Mazurek and Growiec). Due to the development of high-speed connections and new formats of film coding which enabled transmission through the internet, from the beginning of the twenty-first century on, new platforms developed facilitating an exchange of files in the peer-to-peer architecture. Their use—a unique return of the piracy of the VCR era in a novel form detached from any contact with intermediaries— was at first primarily available to educated youth, and, on account of the quality of connections, restricted mostly to big cities. It was also linked with cultural competences: knowing English or having the ability to find subtitles with their translation. And although piracy is often blamed by Polish distributors for impoverishing the official offer, it was at that time that the next generation understood that the films downloaded outside the official distribution channels were more interesting and ambitious than those available in the cinema and on TV.
15 The scale of the informal digital internet distribution gradually increased encompassing around one third of the population (Filiciak, Hofmokl and Tarkowski). Forms of sharing unauthorized content underwent change, making access more egalitarian. Cda.pl, a web hosting and media service established in 2003, a phenomenon unique on a world scale, is a symbol of that change. It allows its users to share films on the internet and access them through streaming. As is easy to guess, most of the offer violates copyrights even if the service only provides a platform where films are shared by its users. The service has over eight million users, which makes it the most popular video sharing platform in Poland after YouTube. This is an example showing that the current change of the ecosystem of access to pirate audiovisual content is not only about the forms of content exchange (the easy to use streaming rather than file exchange), but also about the creation of professional services. These services are treading the path paved earlier by the Polish video game industry. The founders of the world-renowned developing studios such as CD Projekt or Techland began their careers as sellers of pirate games (see Filiciak). This is why Cda.pl is getting ready to enter the stock market and trying to sign legitimate contracts with distributors. What is more, beside the proceeds from commercials, it also reaps profits from premium subscription.
16 Pirate distribution can also help, however, to promote new types of content as was the case with informal screenings of Japanese animations at American campuses. This
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gradually paved the way for the popularity of anime in the US (Jenkins 156-161). Similar examples can be found in Poland where American TV series of the new generation gained popularity online first and only later did the official distribution take advantage of it. Again, the already familiar situation developed: an entire gamut of content which blurred the dividing line between various formats came to be ennobled through the distribution channel.
3. TV and Intergenerational Tensions
17 Contemporary quality TV, in its TV series version, often linked with The Sopranos by HBO, constitutes the culmination of the transformations in the American TV industry of the 1980s. It is above all a culmination of the development of satellite TV, the deregulation of the cable TV market and the establishment of an influential position by networks such as HBO, which generate profit not from commercials but from subscriptions. In a nutshell: the progressive segmentation of the viewers gave rise to more productions tailored to smaller audiences. Addressing their productions to the relatively affluent and well-educated portions of the society (not only American), cable TVs began to experiment with shows which did not shy away from talking about ambiguous situations and controversial characters, and eagerly played with conventions often breaking moral taboos along the way. The latter was possible as they were not subject to legal regulations binding for American open access broadcasters. The development of new technologies which enabled timeshifting also played a certain role here. In Poland, a groundbreaking show which initiated the fashion for TV series downloaded from the internet was Prison Break by the Fox Broadcasting Company. This could be seen as another example of the significant role of the medium of distribution. Prison Break was not a series comparable in any degree to the productions from the Fox premium segment. After the internet success, the series was bought by the open-access TV channel Polsat on which it enjoyed immense popularity.
18 Again, we can note a similar pattern here: the sense of prestige is produced by a particular access channel and is then gradually dispelled when access is made egalitarian and when the content is dispersed through other forms of distribution, such as television platforms. And thus again, we find in Poland a pirate version of an American phenomenon. Jane Feuer, who explores the phenomenon of new generation TV series, draws on the category of not TV, a category used in the marketing strategies of HBO and stemming from the slogan: It’s not TV. It’s HBO (154-155). According to Feuer, this slogan delineates real points of reference for new generation TV series (she refers, for example, to Six Feet Under, which was promoted as arthouse TV, closer to theatre plays or literature than traditional series) but also for their inspirations. She argues, ironically, that such explorations are immanent to television genres. This shift towards the realm of art or high culture is significant, though. Television, even on the level of the texts it creates and distributes, no longer fits within what has traditionally been associated with TV. But, for marketing reasons, it willingly wears and sports this novel garb. It boasts of not being TV thus creating a new segment of viewers who treat the traditional TV with contempt or as a form of guilty pleasure. However, in Poland, not TV content ended up in a medium different from premium channels: pirate internet channels. It thus paved the way for the emergence of other access platforms, with Netflix at the forefront.
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19 Netflix, an indubitable icon of the transformations of TV, has been available in Polish only since September 2016. Yet access to Netflix remains elite. During the first months, when popularity was driven by the one-month free trial, the service reached the level of a million subscribers. At the moment, the number reaches 760 thousand (Ula). Again, the subscribers are mostly young people in big cities (see PS). It seems that what is essential for the provider to attract a wider audience is not economy (it is common knowledge that many users, loyal to the Polish tradition of resourcefulness, share their accounts) but cultural competence which manifests itself in taste. As Pierre Bourdieu would put it, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6). It is mostly young and educated Poles aspiring to join the global middle class who seem to be the Netflix audience. Raised in the EU, they sever themselves from the generation of their parents when it comes to taste and ways of using new content. According to statistics, the generation of their parents is less inclined to choose Netflix. For this reason—even if this decision may seem risky—I treat access to this platform as another sign of changes linked with the specific status of Netflix. This platform is simultaneously the producer and distributor of the audiovisual content—it functions as both the TV and a digital medium which is based on recommendation algorithms and allows viewers to use the content in a manner closer to computer data bases than traditional forms of access to audiovisual content. As such, it fits my discussion of the various modes of access, in which not only the content itself but also the mode of access (i.e. the mediation of a given device or service) are of great importance.
20 From this perspective, Netflix is seen as a database which Lev Manovich describes as a cultural form, making possible a (re)presentation and (re)configuration of culture in ways not possible before the era of the computer (218-243). Yet as Jose van Dijck, among others, has shown, the logic of a database reconfigurable by means of social media permeates nowadays the online sociality, or even sociality as such (Culture of Connectivity). Such platformed sociality generates concerns among the elderly who see such ways of building relationships with others as inauthentic (moving boundaries between private, public and corporate) or self-interested (connectivity can be seen as a resource). What they also find worrisome is the new logic of creating such social connectivity which the platformed sociality enables. Without entering into the discussion on the validity or invalidity of such opinions, I see in this logic of managing one’s own social networks a certain break from the logic underlying older types of media. They allowed for a smaller circle of friends that was more difficult to reconfigure or connect to sub-circles. We can compare these two types of logic to the difference between the TV and social media. The former provided content which could be discussed by friends who met on other occasions; the latter enabled a swift and convenient switch of groups with which an individual comes to interact. Seen in a broader perspective, the possibilities offered by social media have political consequences. They enable the construction of thematic and also hobby-oriented social networks allowing the users to switch from one to another. On the intergenerational level this leads to identity tensions. It also, in a sense, levels various aspects of an individual’s life by bringing them all under one common denominator: from the choice of TV programs to the matter of one’s world view.
21 This intergenerational tension was brought to light in an interesting way thanks to Dorota Wellman, a well-known journalist who for almost a decade has been one of the most recognizable people of the TVN station. Within the Polish TV ecosystem of the last
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two decades, TVN is a station identified with urban audiences, mostly voting for the current opposition. Wellman has recently written an open letter to young people blaming them, in a way similar to the lyrics of the song which open this essay, for giving up on political resistance in favor of sitting in front of the screen. The title of the text in which she accused the young of passivity in the face of the threat of new authoritarianism read: “Does it really make no difference to you in what country you live? Will you awaken when your Netflix no longer works?”
22 This symbolic reference to Netflix reveals another division linked to the ways of using TV. This time, however, it is not about the simple difference between a more or a less prestigious medium. Wellman is a journalist who represents a broadcaster seen as a mouthpiece of the full-belly section of the generation of transformations who are a beneficiary of the systemic changes in Poland. It would be difficult to defend the thesis that she could be envious of those young people in their 20s or 30s who are building their professional careers in a new, highly precarious environment. Watching productions such as House of Cards indicates, instead, a consciousness of living in a world of weakened traditions and disappearing points of reference, both at the level of access to TV and of more broadly understood patterns of behavior typical of a given social group. It constitutes an element of an identity performance eluding simple classifications but simultaneously corresponding to the conditions in which young people have to function. The labor market which offers “flexible forms of employment” does not help them to function according to the traditional TV program format. The Netflix content, convenient due to easy access but still sophisticated in terms of cultural competence, has become a method of managing everyday life but also one’s own image by means of the media. As such, this content resembles the processes of simultaneously identifying with many groups which have little in common. It also signifies a unique alliance with the content provider who demands payment for one’s adaptation to those conditions. Once more, the Polish intelligentsia feels threatened by media changes because once more they have received, in the same package offering an attractive content, the tools to reconfigure social networks and manifest their transformed shape.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Batorski, Dominik. “Wykluczenie cyfrowe w Polsce“. Studia BAS 3(19) (2009): 223-249. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Print.
Feuer, Jane. “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV“. In: Quality TV: contemporary American television and beyond. Ed. J. McCabe and K. Akass. London: IB Tauris, 2007. 145-158. Print.
Filiciak, Mirosław, Justyna Hofmokl and Alek Tarkowski. The Circulations of Culture: Mashup. A Research Report. Warszawa: Centrum Cyfrowe, 2012.
https://obiegikultury.centrumcyfrowe.pl/mashup/?lang=en. Accessed November 12, 2018.
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Filiciak, Mirosław, Paweł Mazurek and Katarzyna Growiec. Korzystanie z mediów a podziały społeczne. Warszawa: Centrum Cyfrowe, 2013. https://centrumcyfrowe.pl/projekty/korzystanie-z-mediow-a-podzialy-spoleczne/. Accessed November 12, 2018.
Filiciak, Mirosław. “Playing Capitalism. The Polish People’s Republic, Constructing Memory, and Video Games.” Widok 11 (2015). http://pismowidok.org/index.php/one/article/view/314/677. Accessed November 12, 2018.
Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.
Gaweł, Piotr. “Pierwsza Runda dla Rocky’ego.” Polityka 11 (12 March 1988). Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Print.
Kiossev, Alexandr. “The Self-Colonizing Metaphor”. Atlas of Transformation. 2011. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the- self-colonizing-metaphor-alexander-kiossev.html.
Accessed November 12, 2018.
Klinger, Babara. Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies,and the Home. Berkley: University of California Press, 2006. Print.
Kurz, Iwona. “Telewizja: szyby niebieskie od telewizorów.” Obyczaje polskie. Wiek XX w krótkich hasłach. Ed. M. Szpakowska. Warszawa: WAB, 2008. Print.
Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructre, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.
Lewicki, Arkadiusz. “Ilu widzów oglądało ‘bergmany’? Dystrybucja i widownia filmowa w Polsce wczoraj i dziś—mity i fakty.” Wokół zagadnień dystrybucji filmowej. Ed. M. Adamczak and K. Klejsa. Łódź: PWSFTviT, 2015. 33-60. Print.
Livingstone, Sonia, and Ranjana Das. “The End of Audiences?: Theoretical Echoes of Reception Amid the Uncertainties of Use.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Ed. J. Hartley, J. Burgess, A. Bruns. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 104-121. Print.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Osiecka, Agnieszka. “Wydeo”. Polityka 22 (3 June 1989). Print.
Philibert, Jean-Marc, and Jourdan, Christine. “Perishable Goods: Modes of Consumption in the Pacific Islands.” Cross-Cultural Consumption, Global Markets, Local Realities. Ed. David Howes. London: Routledge, 2004: 55-76. Print.
PS. “Netflix z niestabilną odwiedzalnością w Polsce, maksymalnie 386 tys. użytkowników miesięcznie.” 2017. https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/netflix-w-polsce-liczba-uzytkownikow-miesiecznie. Accessed November 12, 2018.
Sundaram, Ravi. Pirate Modernity. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Szewczyk, Łukasz. “GUS: 4,8 mln abonentów TV kablowej i 6,9 mln użytkowników TV satelitarnej”. Media2. 2013.
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https://media2.pl/media/106695-GUS-48-mln-abonentow-TV-kablowej-i-69-mln-uzytkownikow- TV-satelitarnej.html. Accessed November 12, 2018.
Ula. “Netflix rośnie w siłę. Coraz więcej abonentów także w Polsce”. Rzeczpospolita. 2018. https://www.rp.pl/Media-i-internet/310189973-Netflix-rosnie-w-sile-Coraz-wiecej-abonentow- takze-w-Polsce.html. Accessed November 12, 2018. van Dijck, Jose. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
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Zarycki, Tomasz. “The Power of the Intelligentsia: The Rywin Affair and the Challenge of Applying the Concept of Cultural Capital to Analyze Poland’s Elites.” Theory and Society 38(6) (2009): 613–648. Print.
ABSTRACTS
This article is devoted to the historical changes of the status of access to American TV and cinema content in Poland. Using the framework of cultural studies, media are treated here both as texts and objects. The analysis of case studies from the VHS era as well as of contemporary online streaming services connects the way people access video content with the production of social prestige, and shows how changing styles of video consumption mark social transformations in contemporary Poland.
INDEX
Keywords: American films, American television, VHS, cultural studies, media, distribution, social status
AUTHOR
MIROSŁAW FILICIAK Mirosław Filiciak, presently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the SWPS University in Warsaw, is a cultural and media studies scholar. His research interests include digital networked media changes, informal distribution of information and media archaeology. He was principal investigator on numerous research projects, including “Youth and Media” and “The Circulations of Culture.”
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Dances with Westerns in Poland’s Borderlands
Piotr Skurowski
1 Parallel to other European countries, the American West has always stirred a great fascination in the Polish public. An important part of the Polish context which seems responsible for that fascination was the role played in Polish history by the eastern borderlands (Kresy) whose place in the Polish imaginary seems to parallel, in some important aspects, the mythmaking role played by the Wild West in America. The mythic appeal of the Kresy owes a lot to one of the key Polish mythmakers, the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz whose famous Trilogy strongly defined the Polish imaginary concerning the history of the Kresy for generations to come. In Sienkiewicz’s mythic vision, the Ukrainian steppes constituted a scenic backdrop for a heroic struggle of the righteous and chivalric Poles against the invasions of barbarian hordes from the East, including the Cossacks, Turks and Tartars. That vision of Polish history has long dominated the Polish historical imaginary in a way that paralleled the American mythic constructions of the Wild West, except that the Polish myth reversed the cardinal points from West to East and bestowed the civilizing mission on the Poles.1
2 Despite the dramatic reorientation in Poland’s geopolitical situation after the Second World War (and the loss of the Kresy to the Soviet Union in the deal negotiated between Stalin and the Western powers) the myth of the “Wild East” continued to define the Polish identity (always constructed as “western”), even though it was now competing with the myth of the Recovered Territories, Poland’s new borderland consisting of the previously German territories (Masuria, West Pomerania, Lower Silesia) where the autochtonic population was almost completely erased and replaced by the settlers shipped from the Kresy.2 The cardinal points of Polish history were once more rearranged, with the colonization moving westward and the settlers taking possession of the remaining German property dispensed by the new socialist authorities.
3 The myth of the Recovered Territories as Poland’s own Wild West, where for a short time after the war the social and economic order practically ceased to exist and the vacated land and property were often grabbed on the first-come-first-served basis, was
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to some extent grounded in hard facts, though once the status of those territories was confirmed by the world powers the new Polish authorities were quickly proceeding with establishing a workable administration and the rule of law. The myth of the Recovered Territories, which found its expression in the government-sponsored propaganda and popular culture,3 consisted of some elements which were also notoriously present in the myth of the American West: the “emptiness” of the social space; the great opportunities awaiting the settlers; legitimacy of possession (“recovering” old Slavic lands as compared with Manifest Destiny); and the notion that the tough life in the new borderlands reinforces the “masculine” traits of heroism and physical prowess. Most importantly, the Recovered Territories became the place where a new socialist society was “officially” being forged and it comes as no surprise that the cultural apparatus of the People’s Republic was making heavy use of the myth of new borderlands as the founding myth of the new Poland. In the following part of my article, I will look at a number of Polish film productions from the socialist period to show how this mythicizing effort domesticated and utilized the narrative devices and moral structure of the classic Western to help build a narration legitimizing the changes that occurred in Poland after the Second World War.
4 I will start with the work of Jerzy Skórzewski and Jerzy Hoffman, the latter—along with Andrzej Wajda—being undoubtedly one of the most important filmic narrators of Poland’s national myths. Hoffman is an interesting case of a film director whose productions bear the imprint of Hollywood, without being imitations of American movies. His famous three-part adaptation of Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Wołodyjowski) featured the trappings of a Western (the omnipresent horse and horsemanship, the romance of the prairie-like steppe, the exotic bow-wielding Tartars and Cossacks, the chivalrous Polish protagonists), and his famous film version of Maria Dąbrowska’s Noce i Dnie (Nights and Days) was dubbed by the critics “the Polish Gone with the Wind.” However, it was his and Skórzewski’s 1964 film Prawo i pięść (The Law and the Fist, an adaptation of Józef Hen’s novel) that featured a consistent and skillful use of the classic American Western’s plot structure and aesthetics.
5 The film’s action takes place in 1945 in the Recovered Territories (in Lower Silesia). The protagonist, Andrzej Kenig (Gustaw Holoubek)—an ex-prisoner of German concentration camps, lands a job with a group led by a Dr. Mielecki (Jerzy Przybylski) heading for a nearby town of Graustadt (Siwowo) to secure local property from theft. The town is deserted, its only inhabitants consisting of a group of four women and a German maitre d’hotel of the local Tivoli hotel. Upon arrival it turns out Mielecki is not a medical doctor but instead acts as the leader of a gang planning to steal the property left by the German inhabitants. The gangsters have no scruples killing anyone who gets in their way, including a militia man.4 Kenig decides to act alone, to prevent the bandits from disappearing with their loot loaded onto trucks. In a final shootout, Kenig kills off all the bandits except for one who manages to escape. In the end, when finally a militia jeep arrives at the scene, a militia lieutenant tries to persuade Kenig to remain in town, but the latter refuses and decides to move on.
6 Even though the film was set in Poland, the makers of the movie were honest about their American inspirations: in an interview, Hoffman and Skórzewski admitted that “we watched High Noon a lot of times, because it is—in our view—one of the best Westerns. And we wanted to do a Western” (Woroszylski). Consequently The Law and the Fist, while not literally a Western as it takes place in the war-devastated part of Central
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Europe in 1945 instead of the nineteenth-century American West, shares a lot with the classic American Western. It is a morality tale where the solitary hero conducts a lonesome fight against evil characters, with justice and order prevailing at the end. It is action-packed and contains a lot of violent scenes including fistfights and a final showdown between the hero and the villains, with the hero outmatching his opponents with his shooting skills. Like the Westerns, the film celebrates masculine toughness, even though the look and the acting style of the main Polish character, Kenig, played by Gustaw Holoubek, is rather that of a war-toughened intellectual than of a cowboy. The deserted Graustadt, or Siwowo, is presented as a lawless frontier town, a truly liminal space in transition caught in between its recent German past and the soon-to- prevail new social and political order. In the meantime—in the absence of legitimate forces of law and order, community and social structure—like in classic Westerns, it takes the action of a single brave man to upkeep the principles of law and morality in the borderland even though the brutal logic of the recent war has devastated the long adhered to legal standards and notions of morality. This prominently includes the notions of private property: by a twist of irony, Kenig is defending the property deserted by its original owners—the Germans (even though, we might assume, some of it had already been plundered from the countries occupied by Germans) from being stolen as “szaber,”5 only to allow it to be taken over by the new Polish government to become public property, or be legally distributed to new owners.
7 There are a number of recognizable quotations from High Noon, including Kenig’s looking for (and failing to find) allies for his approaching confrontation with the bandits and his solitary fight in the final scene; like in the American classic, we see two contrasting women characters, the “respectable” Anna (Zofia Mrozowska) and the sensuous Janka (Ewa Wiśniewska); there’s the fistfight and a long hide-and-seek game between the hero and the villains in the dark interiors and narrow passages between buildings leading to the final shooting scene in the middle of a deserted town, with the lonely Kenig facing and dispatching the bandits. There is, too, the music by Krzysztof Komeda, with the famous “Nim wstanie dzień” (“Before a new day rises”) song bringing immediately to mind Dimitri Tiomkin’s opening ballad from High Noon. Most importantly, both films take up similar topics: the need to stand up to evil, even at the risk of one’s life; and the tough beginnings leading to the emergence of a sense of community for a town sitting on the precarious border between lawlessness and civilization. And, of course, in the case of the Polish movie the emergence of the community is correlated with the emergence of the new socialist Poland.
8 For a movie that embraces the dawn of the new socialist order, Kenig seems not an entirely “appropriate” protagonist. Like many a film Western hero Kenig is an asocial, lonesome figure with a dark past—in fact, a past that couldn’t possibly be darker: that of a prisoner of a concentration camp and an ex- Home Army soldier who fought in the doomed Warsaw Uprising. He is clearly not a proletarian figure, but rather a specimen of the Polish intelligentsia. We hardly know more about him, though, except that— almost like Shane—he arrives out of nowhere and, at the end of the movie, decides to follow the road to an unknown destination. Kenig is not a materialist and—contrary to almost everybody else in the film—does not long for worldly goods and comforts of life (clearly a redeeming trait, given his “incorrect” background). But he decides to take on the bandits mainly not for ideological reasons, but because he was hired to protect the property and gave the man who hired him his word of honor. The moral code of the classic Western hero, putting honor above material gain, seems strikingly appropriate
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for a man who in effect becomes a socialist hero, keeping the acquisitive hyenas at bay and holding the town until the arrival of the militia.
9 The film’s ending was obviously meant to send an ideological message: the arrival of the “legitimate” new rulers (militia) in a jeep at the end of the film is a reassuring sign that from now on lawlessness and anarchy are going to give room to a new social and political order—Polish and Communist.6 Yet Kenig has his own Will Kane moment, though he has no badge to throw into the dirt: he refuses the offer to serve as a communist official in the town he had saved from the plunderers. Leaving the incipient community to fend for itself, Kenig decides to head for an unknown destination—a restless and individualistic redeemer-hero, haunted by the dark past. We can almost hear him say the famous parting words of Shane to Joey: “there’s no living with the killing.” While not riding proudly off into the sunset—instead falling asleep on a jeep ride to the train station—Kenig protects his independence like an “authentic” Western hero. As the hero departs, we can see a long procession of settlers moving into the “saved” town to give it a new, socialist life. Parallel to the mythicization of conquest in classic Westerns—where the conquest was presented as the process of settling the “virgin land,” Hoffman and Skorzewski’s film passes over the brutal aspects of the eviction of the German population: instead, Siwowo/Graustadt is shown as an “empty” social space in need of being taken over, possessed, and reinvented by the new social order.
10 Other films located in the Recovered Territories in the immediately postwar period also featured components commonly perceived as Western-like, including displays of masculine brutality and toughness, but also the basic moral polarities of the Western at work in a borderland situation marked by the opposition between nature and civilization. Except that in the case of the Polish films, the “nature” or “wilderness” part of that opposition—or what is un-civilized—was also the desolation, physical and moral, left by the war. A good case in point was Waldemar Podgórski’s Południk zero (Meridian Zero, 1970; screenplay by Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski), where soon after the evacuation of a small Mazurian town (Rosłęk) by the German army in the spring of 1945 a demobilized army lieutenant Bartkowiak (Ryszard Filipski), now appointed the town’s legal commissioner, has a mission to oversee the painful process of community- building and establishing the communist rule. Rosłek, like a typical town from the Westerns, is an isolated community, lost amidst a seemingly boundless and unpopulated territory and thrown at the mercy of a ruthless gang formed by newly arrived drifters and rogues, terrorizing and exploiting the autochtonic population. Bartkowiak’s integrity leads him to a confrontation with a gang led by Szczygieł which preys on the local population consisting of Mazurians: the part-Polish, part-German speaking Slavic population which, Bartkowiak believes, yet needs to discover its Polish roots and identity. In a long final gunfight scene Bartkowiak, helped by two accomplices, members of the wartime Communist youth organization (ZWM), succeeds in liberating the town from the bandits who are only pretending to represent the legitimate Polish authorities but in fact are bent on theft and plunder. The funeral of a native villager and one of the two ZWM heroes killed in the shootout, attended by the village community, symbolizes the emergence of the new socialist order, and of a “Polish” identity among the Mazurians. Meridian Zero conveyed a clear ideological message: the new socialist, Polish order represented by Bartkowiak, will bring about a promising future to the Mazurians and will reunite them with the Polish nation. Yet the costs of such a transformation are inevitably high and involve the role that has to be
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played by people like Bartkowiak, a very much Western-style embodiment of a lonely sheriff—a courageous agent of law and order, possessed of strong moral principles and manly courage that need to be mustered in order to effect a successful reunification of Poland with its Recovered Territories.
11 A number of Western-influenced movies made in the People’s Republic of Poland were set on Poland’s new eastern border, the Bieszczady mountains’ natural beauty providing a locale—and a specific borderland social context—that inevitably invited comparisons with the Wild West. The earliest of them was Rancho Texas (1958, dir. Wadim Berestowski, screenplay by Józef Hen), telling the story of two students of zootechnics, Jacek and Marek, who come to Bieszczady to spend their summer vacation and earn some money working as “cowboys” (there is no precise Polish equivalent of the American original, as the word pastuch—shepherd—definitely lacks the kind of romantic and adventurous connotations raised by the word “cowboy”). The banal realities of a cow-puncher’s life in the Bieszczady (rainy weather, ever-present mud, beans as the main wherewithal; and most painfully, boredom) are fortunately interrupted by a series of incidents, starting with a rodeo where Jacek wins for himself a good horse and continuing with his courtship of two attractive girls who appear on the scene. The plot includes Jacek and Marek’s rivalry over Agnieszka, a research assistant to a geologist in search of precious mineral deposits; their discovery of an arms cache in an abandoned quarry; and the ensuing fight with the local gang of criminals. The film is self-consciously stylized as a “Western,” featuring the picturesque landscapes, horse rides and chases, fistfights and gunplay. The “Rancho Texas” signboard mounted on the porch of the cowherds’ shack is an openly tongue-in- cheek reference, just like the overall tone of the film where the imaginary world of Westerns is superimposed on the much less attractive, and banal, realities of everyday life in socialist Poland. Instead of the horse-mounted sheriff and his posse, the finale of the movie (following the Western-style shootout between Jacek and the gang leader) features the arrival of the militia in their military jeeps, establishing once and for all the rule of law and order in the borderland community. The movie was obviously meant to be, above everything else, entertainment for the Westerns-loving Polish public, but it was also sending a message: it mythicized the southeastern borderlands by using the clichés of the American West; in the process, the recent events which had taken place in those territories (the Second World War, the ethnic pogroms, the enforced communist takeover, the warfare between the local pro-Ukrainian fighters (UIA, Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and the Polish army and militia, were now being replaced in the cinemagoers’ imaginaries by the tales of romance and adventure, where the intervention of the socialist state power to resolve the conflict and restore order could be seen as a “natural” and welcome occurrence.
12 The People’s Republic’s propaganda machine gladly sponsored works of fiction and film legitimizing the Polish Communist rule over the new borderlands, which provided an excellent occasion to glamorize the activity of the militia and border security forces as outposts of Polishness and the new socialist order. Within that framework, the sparsely populated, picturesque Bieszczady borderland, now the easternmost part of the country,7 was often cast as the part of Poland where the primitive living conditions and the tough challenges posed by the lingering presence of the anti-communist underground gave it the flavor of Poland’s “Wild East.” Łuny w Bieszczadach (Bieszczady in flames), Jan Gerhard’s bestselling account of the Polish People’s Army struggles with the UIA and the remnants of the Polish anticommunist resistance still operating in the
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Bieszczady after the war, was the best known example of using the literary medium to sanction and glamorize the activities of the Polish communist authorities in the Bieszczady region by constructing a narrative that can be read as a Polish Western, or “Eastern.” The best known film version based on Gerhard’s writing was Wilcze Echa (Wolves’ Echoes, 1968, dir. Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski), a movie explicitly drawing on film Westerns’ conventions and imagery. The film’s plot takes place in 1948 in the Bieszczady, with a “lone ranger,” the warrant officer Slotwina (Bruno O’Ya)—a veteran of wars with the local “bandits” and an ex-soldier discharged for disciplinary reasons— arriving in a little town to discover that his old friend Wladeczek who used to be commander of a local militia post, is missing and that the job has gone to a man named Moroń. It turns out that Moroń is the boss of a ring of corrupt militiamen whose goal, after disposing of Wladeczek, is to find the treasure once belonging to the UIA. In a series of fistfights and gunfights, Slotwina single-handedly dispatches all the bad guys and retrieves the lost treasure—not for himself, to be sure, but for the Polish authorities. The film had all the attractions of a Western: a fast-paced action, cavalry rides and pursuits across the spectacular landscapes of the Bieszczady mountains along with much gunplay, fistfights, a competition of tough and daring men (O’Ya, Perepeczko) for an attractive woman (Irena Karel), and the polarities of good and evil (Mieczyslaw Stoor playing the main bad character) one would expect from a Western. The mise-en-scène (Jan Grandys) and camera work (Stanislaw Loth) openly borrowed from the aesthetics of Westerns, including the “Western-style” look of the half- deserted village with its wooden houses, the corral and the stockade at the border post, the high-angle panoramic vistas of wide open spaces, tracking shots of riders and horses in motion, low-angle takes of armed men, etc. All this was accompanied by the music of Wojciech Kilar, reminiscent of a number of film Western scores. The film was meant to provide entertainment, yet the image of Poland’s southeastern borderland was certainly in tune with the contemporary propaganda portraying the Bieszczady as a lawless and almost empty terrain, waiting to be civilized by the legitimate communist rule represented by the Polish army and militia, shown as cooperating closely with the friendly Slovak and Soviet border troops. The truth, of course, was far more complex, as the region had recently seen its Ukrainian population evicted from their homes in a major ethnic cleansing operation (Akcja Wisła) staged by the Polish Communist authorities after the war, an event legitimized by the government-circulated myth that the Lemki, or local Ukrainian population, consisted of bloodthirsty nationalists. Another essential component of the immediately postwar context was the presence of the armed resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Polish anti-communist underground which refused to lay down arms and continued fighting in the hope that the third world war would soon break out. The communist army and militia’s role in that remote region was obviously to annihilate the armed underground, consistently portrayed by the government propaganda as ruthless bandits. While not dealing directly with the continuing borderland war and focusing instead on a classic crime story (treasure-seeking bandits terrorizing a village), the film undoubtedly served an ideological purpose of reinforcing the image of Poland’s borderland as the all-but- vacant “moving frontier” undergoing the inevitable civilizing process masterminded by the Polish Communist government. Interestingly, the film to some extent subverted this ideological message by showing some corrupt militiamen—which was generally a taboo in the People’s Republic. It seems plausible to suspect that the film’s reputation
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as a “Polish Western” made the censors turn a blind eye to this evident breach of the code.
13 While a number of other Polish action films located in the Recovered Territories during the postwar period could be viewed as “Polish Easterns” (e.g. Ogniomistrz Kaleń [Artillery Sergeant Kalen], 1961, dir. Ewa and Czesław Petelscy), one should mention a relatively late movie, Wszyscy i nikt (All and None, 1977, dir. Konrad Nałęcki, screenplay by Janusz Przymanowski) as coming closer to a “Western” than most of them. The plot outline of Nałecki’s film resembles that of the acclaimed Magnificent Seven (dir. John Sturges, 1960), serving as an ideologically charged morality tale about the exploits of six war- returning, demobilized Polish People’s Army soldiers and one militiaman (to make up the required number) liberating an isolated mountain village from the ”bandits,” which in this particular case plainly meant the soldiers of the anti-communist underground. The final showdown ended in a victory of the peace-loving agents of the new social order, their leader—the indomitable communist Twardy (the Tough One, played by Emil Karewicz) performing the body count of the fallen baddies in the style of Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven. Similar to other socialist “Easterns,” All and None stressed the masculine toughness and righteousness of the People’s Army soldiers, contrasted with the duplicity and foolhardiness of the Home Army partisans inevitably meeting their inglorious death in the final shootout. Here again, like in the other “Easterns,” the plot structure, the emphasized moral code (with stress on honor) and, most importantly, the manly heroism of the protagonists leading the village to “liberation” from the hands of anti-Communist guerillas—the use of tropes and narrative devices commonly perceived as characteristic of the Western genre work toward supplanting the myth of the Home Army with a new narrative, installing in the social imaginary a set of new, socialist, heroes.8
14 The intertextual and inter-generic quotations from the Western at the time of the People’s Republic drew their strength from the great popularity of Western fiction and movies among the Polish public. In that regard, the Polish public was not at all unique among other European countries, West and East alike: the taste for Western fiction and movies was what both sides of the Iron Curtain had in common, for all the differences in the ideological and cultural context resulting in different readings and adaptations of the Western. Much has been written already about the spread of interest in the Wild West which was spurred by the success of not only fiction and films made in the U.S.A. and distributed in Europe, but also by the success of the European imitations of that production: one thinks, for example, of Westerns produced in Italy, West and East Germany or Yugoslavia. The cinematography of socialist Poland never produced its own imitation Westerns to speak of,9 even though, as I have argued, it found much use in utilizing the aesthetics and conventions of the classic Western to tell its own history within the larger narrative framework of the socialist propaganda. 10 Also, the Polish film distribution, which allowed only a limited access to American movies (yet less limited and restrictive than in the other Soviet-controlled Eastern European countries), was more “generous” in releasing the Westerns than most other American film genres. As a result, the Polish public was quite well acquainted with many film Western classics, the iconic status of some Western films and film stars resonating with the Polish viewers to an extent unknown after 1989, when for a variety of reasons the Western lost some of its magic pull, not only in Poland, of course, but also in its home— the United States (one is tempted to think in this context of the Western as a genre whose popularity was strongly embedded in the culture of the Cold War). There can be
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no better proof of the persistent symbolic heft of the American Western in Poland than the famous Solidarity electoral campaign poster from June of 1989 featuring a frame from High Noon with Gary Cooper as Sheriff Will Kane, wearing a Solidarity pin above the silver star. The poster has since become a cult classic, having an independent life of its own: it has spawned a number of adaptations used for new and different political purposes.11
15 Despite the relative drop in popularity of Westerns vis-à-vis other genres in the post- Cold War world, some Polish artists kept their interest in the Western, which resulted in a few attempts to make “real” Westerns shot in the Polish scenery. It has to be stated outright, though, that those attempts—few as they were—can hardly qualify as successful. The most important part of this effort came from Józef Kłyk, author of a number of low-budget amateur productions which have never stood a chance of being commercially distributed and remain practically unknown. Kłyk’s heroes all speak in the Silesian Polish dialect, as the films tell the story of Polish Silesian immigrants to the American West, mainly the settlers who founded the town of Panna Maria.12 One other example of an eccentric and abortive effort to make a Polish Western in recent years was Summer Love (Letnia miłość, 2006), directed and produced by Piotr Uklański. Despite starring some of the well-known Polish actors and a well-advertised half-minute stint by Val Kilmer, Uklański’s Western—shot exclusively on Polish locations—turned out to be a complete flop and remains virtually unknown to the public.
16 At the same time a number of important Polish films made in recent years have been marked in the public reception as “Westerns,” despite their makers’ occasional protests. One of them was Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (Rose, 2011), which picks up the postwar borderlands theme in a way which made some critics pronounce it a “Polish Western.” Like in The Law and the Fist, the setting is in the Recovered Territories, the once German lands annexed by Poland in 1945. It tells the story of Tadeusz, an ex-Home Army soldier and participant in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising who is drawn to the northeastern borderland of Mazury (previously part of East Prussia) in an attempt to start a new life. Tadeusz is assigned quarters in the house of a German-speaking Mazurian woman (Rose) and eventually becomes her lover, protecting her and his new home from savagery at the hands of the Soviet soldiers and the Polish bandits who abound in the immediately postwar, frontierland situation. The film’s grim, naturalistic mood accompanied by many acts of extremely graphic violence (which has become a mark of Smarzowski’s filmmaking), if evoking the Western at all, belongs with the films of Peckinpah rather than classic Westerns. While the world presented in Rose is consistently dark, evil and corrupt, the film’s focus on a single man’s desperate fight for justice and survival inevitably perhaps brings to mind the moral symbolism of the Western, which didn’t escape some critics’ attention. The American critic Alissa Simon’s review of Rose in Variety, for example, recognized this “Western” feel to Smarzowski’s movie: “What in other hands might have played as costume melodrama focused on the victimized title character here takes the perspective of the loner hero, as Smarzowski gives the pic the hallmarks of a latter-day Western.” A number of Polish critics likewise noted the Western-style quality of Smarzowski’s film. The critic Tadeusz Sobolewski also referred to the film as a “Polish metaphysical Western,” where a “universal, metaphysical battle between good and evil is taking place,” and the protagonist “goes through a human-made hell, always keeping his cool, the way the Western heroes do.” Sobolewski noticed that Rose engaged in dialogue with “another Polish Western,” namely Jerzy Hoffman’s The Law and the Fist, even the soundtrack
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(music by Michał Trzaska) raising associations with Komeda and Osiecka’s famous Western-style ballad from Hoffman’s movie. Sobolewski was quick to observe, though, that the ideological perspective present in The Law and the Fist (made in 1966) was no longer “achievable” in 2012, as “the viewer knows only too well that evil doesn’t end with the defeat of Hitler.” Yet, in the Polish critic’s view the Western-style gore-and- flesh scenes abounding in Rose are ultimately transcended by “pure and boundless love,” giving Smarzowski’s film a “metaphysical” dimension. 13 It is worth noting that Smarzowski distanced himself from the idea that his film was meant to be a “latter- day” Western. In an interview with Jakub Majmurek for Krytyka polityczna, cued by Marmurek that after the screening of Rose at the Gdynia Film Festival “everybody instantly thought of The Law and the Fist,” Smarzowski came out with a protest against reading his film as “generic”: “After I made Rose I read that I had made a Western. I never thought of that while shooting.” Instead, he insisted that “the film’s basic plot is about love—tough and built on ruins,” and that he wanted to do a film about “love in inhuman times,” with the tragic story of the Masurians, “a nation which fell victim to two nationalisms and whose destruction took place as if in passing” (Smarzowski).
17 Smarzowski’s disclaimer did not prevent other critics from reading Rose as a Polish Western, especially when those readings stemmed from their authors’ ideological commitments. A good case in point was that of Łukasz Adamski, a critic writing for the conservative online journal of opinion Fronda.pl. In Adamski’s laudatory review, Rose was an “incredibly good” film on account of showing the “infernal, pure evil of Nazism and communism, the ethos of the Home Army and the meanness of the Bolsheviks.” (What the Fronda.pl critic failed to observe, though, is that the moral heroism he admired in the portrayal of the Home Army protagonist was offset by the acts of savagery perpetrated on the Mazurians not only by the Soviets but also by the ethnic Poles). The critic expressed his disappointment that the film was passed over by the Gdynia film festival awards committee in favor of the “politically correct and anti- American” Essential Killing by Jerzy Skolimowski, and proclaimed Rose a “Polish Western” reminiscent of the films of Sam Peckinpah. “Watching Smarzowski’s movie,” he wrote, “I had the feeling I was visiting the Wild West,” even though, as he argued, Peckinpah’s films with their staged “ballet of death” did not achieve the level of cruelty present in Smarzowski’s realistic portrayal of the violence that had actually taken place in the Recovered Territories. Significantly, in Adamski’s view the slaughter of the Masurians could be compared to the “massacres perpetrated on the American settlers, or even to the butchery of the Native Americans” (Adamski).
18 Adamski’s attempt to combine his taste for Westerns with a pro-American attitude, coupled with his belief in the righteousness of the Poles as contrasted with the “mean Bolsheviks” and “evil Germans” seems representative of the paradigmatic knot of beliefs embraced by the adherents to Poland’s own exceptionalist narrative, usually paralleled by displays of pro-American sentiment. One can trace this attitude in the voice of the Polish conservative intellectual Ryszard Legutko, declaring his fondness for the classic Western with its clear-cut moral philosophy. In one of his essays, Legutko praised the ethics of High Noon and bemoaned the moral decline he traced in the “new” Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn.14 The New Western’s “historicism,” in Legutko’s view, undermined the universal and timeless appeal of American myth, along with the myth of American uniqueness, and was opening the door to new leftist ideologies and intellectual “fads.” All this led the Polish critic to the defense of
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American culture against the “European” notions of high culture: “the case of the Western demonstrates… a deadly effect of high culture on mass culture” (Legutko 208).
19 The moral certainties of the classic Western occasionally elicited a nostalgic response on the opposite end of the ideological/political spectrum, as reflected in the context of Waldemar Pasikowski’s 2012 Aftermath ( Pokłosie). Like Rose, Aftermath was not a Western sensu stricto, though it can be said to contain elements reminiscent of a Western. It takes place in a small, shabby-looking provincial town in Eastern Poland, whose population mostly consists of ignorant and brutish anti-Semites. It is a story of Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), a Polish immigrant to the United States, who returns home to his village and joins his younger brother Józef (Maciej Stuhr) in an attempt to uncover the dark secrets surrounding the death of the local Jewish population at the hands of their Polish neighbors during the Second World War—the Polish viewers of the film could easily make the connection between the events narrated in the film and the real-life pogrom of the Jews which occurred in July 1941 in Jedwabne. Józef and Franciszek stand up to the whole village community who act in a conspiracy to cover up the shameful facts from the past, and even though they succeed in their fight to uncover the truth, Józef pays the ultimate price for his righteousness, as he is killed and crucified by the anonymous members of the community. While not exactly a “Western” story, the film nonetheless invited comparisons with some American classics. J. Hoberman, for example, in his perceptive New York Times review saw it as “a Polish thriller (which) has affinities with American ‘guilty town’ Westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock and High Plains Drifter” (Hoberman). Predictably, the film stirred up a big public debate in which both its harsh critics (representing the nationalist viewpoint, denying the Polish complicity in the Holocaust) and the “liberals,” or the Polish cultural left, looked for affinities with American Westerns. One Polish critic of the movie, for example, described it as a Western about Polish anti-Semites, in an obvious attempt to disavow the movie. On the opposite end of the ideological/political spectrum, actor Daniel Olbrychski compared Aftermath to High Noon: “High Noon is one big accusation of a community permeated with evil—in Hadleyville, like in Aftermath, only one righteous person has the courage to stand up to the bandits. That film should have led to assaults and spitting on Gary Cooper, but instead it is an American film classic.” Olbrychski believed the hero played by Maciej Stuhr to be the equivalent of Gary Cooper’s role in High Noon, and put Aftermath “in the category of historical revisionism, along with numerous American films critical of the slaughter of the Indians, the Vietnam War and racism” (Olbrychski). Significantly, Waldemar Pasikowski, the film’s director, and Maciej Stuhr, who played the main role—both of whom were viciously attacked by their “patriotic” opponents—attempted to deflect the attacks by calling their film a Western. In an interview for Do Rzeczy magazine, Stuhr declared that “Pasikowski himself admits that Aftermath is a Western. There are no Germans, no Jews in it. Everybody sees the film lacks in nuance. But I don’t agree that this lowers its significance.… It’s a very much black-and-white movie, not presenting all perspectives perhaps, but it’s an honest movie” (“Maciej Stuhr przeprasza”).
20 This review of Polish films mostly playing with, but not actually imitating, the Western formula or trying to be like “real” Westerns (if only in the way the East German/ Yugoslav productions once aspired to) should not omit Piotr Mularuk’s Yuma (2012). Apart from all the Western tropes traceable in the movie, it provides a post-socialist, or perhaps also post-modern counterpoint to The Law and the Fist, visibly engaging in dialogue with the latter. Yuma’s protagonist, the young Zyga (Jakub Gierszał) who
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makes a living smuggling and stealing goods from the neighboring town across the Polish-German border, is clearly no Kenig, contemptuous of materialism and personal gain. Zyga, who is initiated into a life of crime by his aunt—a brothel keeper (Katarzyna Figura)—ends up leading a gang of young criminals, the mock-heroes of the new Polish capitalism where the accumulation of wealth begins with theft and bootlegging. Like Siwowo/Graustadt from The Law and the Fist, Yuma is set near the Polish-German border, in Lower Silesia, and both films grapple with the problem of crime. Yet, while the protagonist in The Law and the Fist takes on the bad guys (szabrownicy) who are stealing what has become public property, Zyga and his gang—the main characters in Mularuk’s film—engage in shady dealings not less repugnant than those of their criminal counterparts from Hoffman and Skórzewski’s movie. What makes the practice less odious, in terms of the film plot, is that Zyga shares the loot with his friends, and the drinking orgies taking place at the local bar (named “Eldorado”) to celebrate the trans-border transactions bring to mind some unruly scenes from the U.S.-Mexican borderland to be found in films like The Wild Bunch. Zyga’s “wild bunch” crimes clearly do not carry the same moral weight as the szaber in The Law and the Fist, in fact they are often represented as mock-heroic exploits rather than dark crimes eliciting moral outrage.
21 The film abounds in Western cues, starting with the title, of course, which sends the viewer to the classic American Western (Delmer Daves, 3:10 to Yuma, 1957), but is in fact mainly a reference to the Polish slang terms for stealing (jumanie, jumać)—a noun and a verb adopted from Daves’s movie in reference to the cross-border theft and the bootlegging business thriving on the Polish-German border in the early 1990s, after the border was opened for visa-free crossing. Why Yuma? Apparently because the train from Zielona Góra to Berlin, a convenient means of transportation to bootleggers, used to set out precisely at 3:10. Needless to say, the playful choice of the title made Mularuk’s film an ironic commentary on—to use another trope from the Westerns— how the West was now being won, with the moral code of the classic Western (and of the “socialist morality”) brushed aside by the new rules of the rough-and-ready “frontier” capitalism. In keeping with its title, Mularuk’s film is filled with Western tropes, though used mainly as pastiche: Zyga, an aficionado of Western-style Americana and American kitsch, wears a stolen leather vest and a pair of cowboy boots bought for the money earned in the bootlegging business, and we see him lugging a lifesize cowboy dummy into a cinema showing, of course, Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma. Yet, for all his use of the Western fetishes and props Zyga is hardly a tough hero: beneath the cowboy costume—the leather vest and boots—we can spot a “softie”: a young man who is more of a romantic dreamer than a profit-oriented bandit. And even though Zyga is going to meet his punishment (at the hands of the Russian mafia) near the end of the movie, one gets the feeling the makers of the film could not resist perceiving the “wild bunch” of thieves and bootleggers as the avant garde of Polish capitalism. Sleazy characters as they are, they are also possessed of some redeeming traits, the “entrepreneurial spirit” not the least among them. The thieves-as-cowboys motif seems to lead to the construction of a new myth of origins of the new capitalist order emerging from the borderland’s “grey zone” of the early 1990s, with the “border” not only synonymous with the Polish-German frontier, but in a figurative sense marking the divide between East and West, between “raw” and developed capitalism.
22 The movies I have discussed here show an uncanny ability of the American Western —“tested” over a long time in a rapidly changing context of a distant country—to lend
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itself to many different adaptations, borrowings and interpretations. To be sure, the Western has amply shown its “genre bender” malleability and openness to other genres in the U.S. movie production itself: one thinks for example of the generic cross- breeding evident in the case of Western and science-fiction movies and war movies, or such Hollywood “Easterns” as Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (Eisele). Yet its international, or transnational, career has been equally spectacular, by which I mean much more than the success of the “spaghetti” western and other attempts of making “American” movies abroad, or in co-production with Hollywood—contribute, as they certainly did, to the development of the genre. Some European directors will certainly be tempted to follow the example of Sergio Leone and produce “real” Westerns—the most recent example is that of Jacques Audiard, who in his own words “had never even previously thought about doing a western,” but has recently finished The Sisters Brothers (2018), a French-American co-production shot in Southern Spain but set in the time of the California Gold Rush with a $40-million budget allowing for many special effects and the hiring of American stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Joaquin Phoenix (Williams). In the estimate of Manohla Dargis, in his film Audiard plays with the film Western genre, but despite the things that would be unacceptable in a John Wayne movie, like “the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood… (he) isn’t attempting to rewrite genre… which is one of the movie’s virtues” (Dargis).
23 But, as it has been argued here, one can “do a Western,” play with the Western tropes, without making an actual Western movie—which was the way most Polish filmmakers have utilized the genre. A number of non-American film productions have done something similar, just to mention the “sukiyaki” and “kimchi,” or “de-Westernized (East Asian) Westerns” analyzed recently by Vivian P. Y. Lee (Lee). In Europe, a recent German film by Valeska Grisebach seems to be a good case of a transnational and hybridized use of the cultural material offered by the film Western. Grisebach’s movie with a misleading generic title Western (2017) is anything but a genre film, and in most ways is not a Western at all, as it deals with a German construction team working on a remote site in the Bulgarian-Greek borderland and their cross-cultural encounters with the local population. As Grisebach admits, the East European borderland setting she selected for her film seemed particularly fit for telling her story: I started off by travelling between Bulgaria and Romania because the story drew me to Eastern Europe and also because of all the legends that sprung up there following the end of communism: the idea of the ‘Wild East’ or the feeling that that was some sort of vacuum or empty page at the time, even if things are already very different there now. And once I was in Bulgaria, I was drawn to the border region because so much cultural mixing has taken place there, between Bulgarians and Greeks, Turks, and Serbs.
24 The prominent place of borderlands in the imaginary and the cultural memory of Central and Eastern Europeans seems to be a factor facilitating the domestication of the Western and accounting, if only in part, for its popularity. To conclude this article dealing with the Polish attempts to domesticate and utilize the Western, I would like to quote another fragment from James Latimer’s interview with Grisebach where she explains why she called her film a “Western,” as she seems to speak not only for herself, but for the other European artists for whom the Western remains a meaningful point of reference and a vital source of inspiration for telling their own stories: When I start thinking about a film, I do so independently of a story. The starting point is a theme, and then I like to devote my time to researching that theme in a very personal way; it’s only afterwards that I start writing a narrative. And the
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Western genre was indeed the starting point, because I realized just how fascinated I’d been by it, ever since my childhood. It was as if I felt homesick for the Western and therefore wanted to wander back into it in my own way via film. I grew up with Westerns and the heroes of the genre, although looking back I realize that watching those films as a child—and a girl in particular—is different…. But for me, it was just exciting to engage with the Western or even dance with it, as it were, to return to all those solitary heroes, to their loneliness, to the themes they carry with them, all those heavy burdens…. And so giving the film the title Western started off as kind of a reminder of all those things, and that’s where I set off from. And in talking to other people about it, it became clear that despite it being an American genre, it’s a genre we all carry within us: everyone has images of the Western in them. (Latimer)
25 “Dancing” with the Western... by choosing this metaphor (sending us to the title of Kevin Kostner’s 1990 movie), Valeska Grisbach not only described her own way with the Western, but seems to have found the right expression for the work of the Polish filmmakers inspired by the American genre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamski, Łukasz. “Róża Smarzowskiego: ten film jest jak granat rozwalający serce.” Fronda.pl., Feb. 5, 2012. http://www.fronda.pl/a/quotrozaquot-smarzowskiego-ten-film-jest-jak-granat- rozwalajacy-serce,17667.html. Accessed October 14, 2018.
Bobowski, Sławomir. “Wielka mistyfikacja. Ziemie Odzyskane w kinematografii PRL-u.” Pamięć i przyszłość 1.1 (2008): 41-49. Print.
Campbell, Neil. Post-Westerns. Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Print.
Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors. The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Print.
Dargis, Manohla. “Review: Blood Is Never Simple in ‘The Sisters Brothers.’” The New York Times Online, Sept. 20, 2018.
Eisele, John C. “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern.” Cinema Journal 41/4 (2002): 68-94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225789.
Hoberman, J. “The Past Can Hold a Horrible Power.” The New York Times Online. Oct. 25, 2013.
Latimer, James. “At the Frontier: Valeska Grisebach on Western.” Cinema Scope Online. http:// cinema-scope.com/spotlight/at-the-frontier-valeska-grisebach-on-western/. Accessed October 5, 2018.
Lee, Vivian P. Y. “Staging the ‘Wild Wild East’: Decoding the Western in East Asian Films.” The Post-2000 Film Western. Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity. Ed. Marek Paryz and John Leo. London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2015. 147-166. Print.
Legutko, Ryszard. Etyka absolutna i społeczeństwo otwarte. Kraków: Arcana, 1997. Print.
Letnia miłość (Summer Love). Directed by Piotr Uklański, 2006.
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Łoziński, Łukasz. „Okres pionierski na ‘Ziemiach Odzyskanych’ w filmie fabularnym PRL. Obraz społeczeństwa.” Początek. Ed. Marta Błaszkowska et al. Kraków: Inicjatywa Humanistyczna Babel 2015. 9-38. Print.
”Maciej Stuhr przeprasza za Cedynię i broni Pokłosia.” wPolityce.pl. Nov. 26, 2012. https:// wpolityce.pl/kultura/246770-maciej-stuhr-przeprasza-za-cedynie-i-broni-poklosia-choc- przyznaje-to-jednostronny-film. Accessed October 14, 2018.
Olbrychski, Daniel. „Bohater ‘Pokłosia’ jak Gary Cooper.” wPolityce.pl. Nov. 29, 2012. https:// wpolityce.pl/kultura/246793-olbrychski-bohater-poklosia-jak-gary-cooper. Accessed October 14, 2018.
Paryz, Marek, and John Leo, eds. The Post-2000 Film Western. Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity. London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2015. Print.
Pokłosie (The Aftermath). Directed by Waldemar Pasikowski, 2012.
Południk zero (Meridian Zero). Directed by Waldemar Podgórski, 1970.
Prawo i pięść (The Law and the Fist). Directed by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski, 1964.
Rancho Texas. Directed by Wadim Berezowski, 1958.
Róża (Rose). Directed by Wojciech Smarzowski, 2012.
Simon, Alissa. “Review: Rose.” Variety. June 16, 2011. https://variety.com/2011/film/markets- festivals/rose-1117945460/. Accessed October 14, 2018.
Śląski szeryf (Silesian Sheriff). Directed by Józef Kłyk, 2014.
Smarzowski, Wojciech. “Moje filmy mają prowokować.” Krytyka polityczna pl., Oct. 19, 2011. www.krytykapolityczna.pl/Serwiskulturalny/SmarzowskiMojefilmymajaprowokowac/ menuid431.html. Accessed March 17, 2016.
Sobolewski, Tadeusz. “Polski Western metafizyczny.” Wyborcza.pl, June 10, 2011. http:// wyborcza.pl/1,75410,9757956,Polski_western_metafizyczny.html. Accessed Oct. 14, 2018.
Sowa, Jan. Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą. Cracow: Universitas, 2011. Print.
Western. Directed by Valeska Grisebach. 2017.
Wilcze echa (Wolves’ Echoes). Directed by Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, 1968.
Williams, Thomas Chatterton. “Can’t ‘the French Scorsese’ Pull Off a Western?” The New York Times Magazine Online, Oct. 12, 2018.
Woroszylski, Wiktor. “Polski western.” Film 41 (1963): 5. Print.
Wszyscy i nikt (All and None). Directed by Konrad Nałęcki, 1977.
Yuma. Directed by Piotr Mularuk, 2012.
Zwierzchowski, Piotr. Polskie wczoraj i dziś. Kino nowej pamięci. Obraz II wojny światowej w kinie polskim lat 60. Bydgoszcz: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, 2013. Print.
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NOTES
1. For an excellent source on Poland’s self-perception vis-à-vis the West and the mythic “East” (complicated by Poland’s repressed post-colonial mindset, mixed with Polish messianism and a denial of “unwanted” history), see Jan Sowa’s Fantomowe ciało króla, especially 443-536. 2. After 1989, the ideologically charged term Ziemie Odzyskane (Recovered Territories) largely dropped out of use and was replaced by the “neutral” phrase Northern and Western Territories). 3. See Łoziński, “Okres pionierski na „Ziemiach Odzyskanych” w filmie fabularnym PRL. Obraz społeczeństwa,” and Bobowski, “Wielka mistyfikacja. Ziemie Odzyskane w kinematografii PRL-u.” 4. I will use the word “militia” for the Polish milicja realizing it is, to some extent, a translator’s false friend: the People’s Republic replaced the word policja (police)—used before the Second World War—by milicja (militia) as a political gesture signifying the new socialist origins of the force contrasted with its “capitalist” equivalent, policja. Which, of course, was a semantic ploy to legitimize the communist state law enforcement apparatus. Usually, of course, the word “militia” refers to a military force made up of non-professional soldiers, or is linked to rebel or terrorist activities. 5. Szaber is a word borrowed from the Yiddish, and in this context functions as a noun denoting stolen property which used to belong to a now-absent owner. 6. In fact, the “rise of the new socialist order” theme deconstructs itself in the movie, since among the szabrowniki are also some corrupt representatives of the new regime. 7. The Bieszczady, while not being part of the once German-owned Recovered Territories (that region belonged to Poland before WWII), was often represented in the Polish propaganda as a region that was actually recovered from Ukrainian nationalists, including the Łemki, who were removed by force to Northwestern Poland (operation Akcja Wisła) and Ukrainian nationalists (UIA), eliminated by the Polish Communist forces with Soviet help. 8. The clearly political use of the film Western clichés to tell the official narrative of the founding of the People’s Republic reflects—in due proportions—the political and ideological function played by Westerns in Cold-War America: see Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors. The Western and U.S. History. What is meant by “due proportions” here is the fact that the film Western tropes, intriguing as they are, have to be seen as just a part of the massive propaganda effort to legitimate and glamorize the Communist takeover through the medium of film sponsored by Poland’s culture industry, with as many as 300 war films (both feature films and documentaries) made between 1960-1970 comprising what Piotr Zwierzchowski calls “the cinema of new memory.” 9. This lack was qualified by a few exceptions, i.e. several film shorts being adaptations of nineteenth century prose. Among them were two films directed by Jerzy Zarzycki in 1967, A Comedy of Errors, a film short based on a story by Henryk Sienkiewicz set in nineteenth century California and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s story. One should also mention The Matter of Conscience (1969), dir. Ewa and Czesław Petelscy, based on Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War story, “An Incident at Owl Creek.” 10. The lack of Polish-made imitation Westerns was more than compensated by a long list of popular Western fiction writers, including such names as Nora Szczepańska, Wiesław Wernic, and Sat-Okh (Stanisław Supłowicz). 11. For example, in the referendum deciding about Poland’s entry into the European Union (2003) the famous photo of Gary Cooper was once more re-edited, with the insignia of the EU replacing the Solidarity pin. Likewise, in a 2009 poster protesting further tightening of anti- abortion laws, the Gary Cooper silhouette from the Solidarity poster was replaced by that of a woman. It is not certain, though, how long the sign will retain its symbolic power: young people in Poland today can no longer be “safely” expected to have a recognition of High Noon or Gary Cooper, which I’ve become painfully aware of in some of my American culture classes.
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12. Kłyk’s productivity in turning out one “Silesian” Western after another is truly amazing, with his first attempt dating back to 1970, and the most recent one (The Silesian Sheriff) made in 2014. His amateur films have since acquired a cult following, mostly in Silesia, and he has been the hero of a number of documentary movies. 13. Smarzowski’s other films, like The Dark House (Dom zły, 2009), or most recently Clergy (Kler, 2018), can perhaps be adequately described as “anatomies of evil.” 14. Legutko’s reading of the Western genre misses the double-coding present in films like High Noon, raising questions with regard to the moral certainties of Cold War America he seems to embrace with a misplaced nostalgia characteristic of Poland’s right-wing ideologues and their followers.
ABSTRACTS
This article deals with the influence of American Westerns on the work of the Polish film directors who chose to adapt the language of the film Western to construct their narrations about Poland’s postwar borderlands, including the so-called Recovered Territories and the Bieszczady region. The analysis of selected films draws on the ideological and cultural context of film- and myth-making in Poland, and points to the larger patterns of domesticating the American mass culture repertoire in Europe.
INDEX
Keywords: Western films, borderlands, cultural adaptations, Polish film, Recovered Territories, Bieszczady, Silesia
AUTHOR
PIOTR SKUROWSKI Piotr Skurowski is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of English at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw. His main interests lie in the areas of U.S. Cultural History and Cultural Studies. His publications include monographs on Henry Adams and on the image of Europe in American Progressivism, as well as a number of articles and edited volumes on U.S. history and culture.
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A Train to Hollywood: Porno-Chic in the Polish Cinema of the Late 1980s
Karol Jachymek
1 This article is an attempt to analyze selected Polish films, produced in the second half of the 1980s, in the context of the erotic content included in these movies and references to broadly understood sexuality. Polish cinema of that period is full of erotic themes, which on one hand may be explained by the changing political and social situation as well as the transformation of social norms that was ongoing in the country at the time, and on the other by the influence of numerous American texts, or broadly defined western popular culture, that began permeating the country with an increasing boldness and led to clear eroticisation and even pornographication of Polish cinema at the time. In consequence, the so-called second wave of porno-chic (the term will be defined further in the article) that was taking place in the West, also impacted Polish cinema. Moreover, porno-chic became one of the catalysts of a revolution of the imagination (Krajewski) that was beginning to develop in Poland at the time. Therefore, this article analyzes selected films produced in the second half of the 1980s, which exemplify the above-noted process. The article also includes source materials, such as film reviews, commentaries of experts and archival texts that illustrate the significance of erotic themes in the Polish cinema of this period.
2 At the same time, it should be noted that the terms appearing in this article, such as “eroticisation,” “pornographication,” “sexual themes” (etc.), are sometimes used as synonyms, although clear differences in their meanings can easily be pointed out (“sexual themes” would mean the main or side plots of films centred around sexual issues, “eroticisation” would mainly refer to nudity or scantily dressed actors, etc., and “pornographication”—to bold scenes of sexual encounters). This decision mainly stems from the imprecise, and sometimes even an intuitive way in which such terms were used by commentators or experts at the time.
3 The turn of the 1980s and 1990s was undeniably the time when western popular culture succumbed to a visible pornographication. What it means is that nudity, as well as human sexuality (the latter usually perceived rather simplistically), started appearing in contemporaneous media and pop culture more boldly than before. There are at least
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a few, more or less direct, reasons for this interest in the issue of sexuality, including: the growth of academic discourse on pornography (which in fact initiated a broader discussion on this subject and in turn paved the way for issues of sexuality to cross into the public debate on a mass scale); the development of consecutive waves of feminism; the growing sexual awareness in the society (for instance, in the context of HIV/AIDS epidemic); the rise of LGBTQ+ culture and the voices of people who grew up during the sexual revolution (i.e. between 1960s and 1970s); as well as the commercial interest in sex as a marketing tool, according to the “sex sells” strategy (see McNair 63-64). Consequently, this sexualisation of pop culture, characteristic of the period under analysis, appeared under the name of “porno-chic.” Nevertheless, Brian McNair observed that Porno-chic is not porn… but the representation of porn in non-pornographic art and culture; the pastiche and parody of, the homage to and investigation of porn; the postmodern transformation of porn into mainstream cultural artefact for a variety of purposes including... advertising, art, comedy and education. (61)
4 It does not mean that porno-chic was only a part of a broadly understood entertainment or lacked deeper meaning. McNair adds: Porno-chic aims to transfer the taboo, transgressive qualities of pornography to mainstream popular production, but in the knowledge that if media audiences are in general less easily shocked than in the past, mainstream culture remains a zone where real pornography is not acceptable. (70)
5 Porno-chic itself is not a brand-new phenomenon. Its first wave, also called “The Golden Age of Porn,” can be traced back to the USA of the beginning of the 1970s. This is when pornography was destigmatized on a wider scale, and its transgressive potential was recognized for the first time. Therefore, various pornographic content was introduced into the mainstream, for instance: Mona. The Virgin Nymph (1970, directed by Michael Benveniste, Howard Ziehm), Boys in the Sand (1971, directed by Wakefield Poole), Devil in Miss Jones (1973, directed by Gerard Damiano), or, most importantly, Deep Throat (1972, directed by Gerard Damiano). At the time, those films enjoyed a wide viewership and were very successful commercially. The interest in explicit pornography, which reflected the ongoing sexual revolution, was mainly perceived as an expression of a counterculture stance. To put it briefly: conscious use of pornography was a protest against conservative and traditional values (see Williams, Power 99-119; Williams, Screening 130-154).
6 Although porno-chic of the first half of the 1970s was directly related to actual pornographic texts, the second wave (dating back roughly to the turn of the 1980s and 1990s) was focused on a different approach. Brian McNair explains: Unlike the first wave of porno-chic in the 1970s, the resulting texts were not porn as such, but meta-pornographies works of all kinds, in every medium and genre, avant-garde and mainstream, fictional, scientific and journalistic, which talked about, referred to, or assumed on the part of their audiences a quite sophisticated familiarity with and understanding of pornography, not to mention a popular fascination for the subject which could legitimately be satisfied within the parameters of mainstream cultural production. (63)
7 To this extent, the issue of sexuality and pornography appeared, obviously, in the American cinema. In that period, the film industry created films such as American Gigolo (1980, directed by Paul Schrader), Cruising (1980, directed by William Friedkin), Risky Business (1983, directed by Paul Brickman), Nine ½ Weeks (1986, directed by Adrian Lyne), Blue Velvet (1986, directed by David Lynch), Pretty Woman (1990, directed by Gary
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Marshall), Basic Instinct (1992, directed by Paul Verhoeven), Indecent Proposal (1993, directed by Adrian Lyne), Colour of Night (1994, directed by Richard Rush), Showgirls (1995, directed by Paul Verhoeven), Striptease (1996, directed by Andrew Bergman), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996, directed by Miloš Forman) or Boogie Nights (1997, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson). Despite a vast range of forms and genres as well as a variety of motifs included in the films, there is no doubt that each of these movies refers to the themes of sexuality and pornography in its own way, in some cases even artfully usurping them. Indeed, some provocative scenes from these films have not only become a part of the modern American cinematic canon, but they also serve as a proof of the impact of the second wave of porno-chic and of the social changes occurring at that time. Moreover, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, a new type of protagonist, an embodied perfection, had gradually become popular in American cinema and television, for example Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian (1982, directed by John Milius) or Pamela Anderson in Baywatch (1989-2001) (see Holmlund).
8 It is worth noting that most of the above-mentioned tendencies, characteristic of American popular culture at the time, have also found their reflection in Polish cinema. The most prominent example is A Train to Hollywood (Pociąg do Hollywood), directed by Radosław Piwowarski in 1987, the time when the influences of American cinema became highly noticeable in Polish productions. Not only does the title refer (intentionally or not) to Train Ride to Hollywood (1975), a mixture of comedy, musical, and fantasy directed by Charles R. Rondeau with Dan Gordon’s screenplay, but the film also alludes to the work of Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe. The film’s main protagonist is Mariola Wafelek (played by Katarzyna Figura) who lives in rural Poland, at the time when the communist regime is nearing its end. She works in a dining car on a train and everyone calls her Merlin (Marilyn), because she bears a striking resemblance to the famous actress. Mariola Wafelek has just one dream: she fantasizes about becoming a famous actress in Hollywood. In order to achieve this goal, she writes letters to her favourite director, Billy Wilder. Surprisingly, after a while, the beloved director responds to one of her letters.
9 Nonetheless, not only does the subject matter undertaken by Radosław Piwowarski indicate that the Polish cinema of that time was inspired by American (popular) films and Western pop culture, but the film can also be regarded as a Polish emanation of the second wave of porno-chic, mainly due to the presence of Katarzyna Figura, about whom Michael Goddard wrote: “Films with Katarzyna Figura usually balance between two genres: melodrama and soft porn (actually, the actress played in an episode of the erotic TV series Red Shoe Diaries and she posed for photos for Playboy)” (Goddard 279-280). A Train to Hollywood confirms Goddard’s claims as an important aspect of the film seems to be the eroticized body of Katarzyna Figura, who undoubtedly shares a remarkable resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. Interestingly enough, the word “pociąg” in Polish has double meaning, i.e. both “a train” and “a sexual attraction.” Thus, even though the film lacks any explicit allusions related to pornography,1 it could have been perceived as such. Especially since the movie ends with one of the most famous erotic scenes in the Polish cinema—a scene of a joyful splash in the nude, in a lake.
10 Evidently, A Train to Hollywood is not the only instance of a direct use of the porno-chic aesthetic in the Polish cinema. The turn of the 1980s and 1990s was the time of noticeable pornographication of both the Polish cinema and pop culture of the time.2 In the case of cinema, this process had started even earlier—at the beginning of the 1980s
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—and became even more noticeable in the second half of the decade. This is when numerous television and film productions appeared, including 07 zgłoś się (07 Come In, 1976-1987) by Krzysztof Szmagier, Andrzej Jerzy Piotrowski and Kazimierz Tarnas, Konopielka (1981) by Witold Leszczyński, Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets) (1983) by Ewa Petelska and Czesław Petelski, Widziadło ( The Phantom) (1983) by Marek Nowicki, Seksmisja (Sexmission, 1983) by Juliusz Machulski, Thais (1983) by Ryszard Ber, Bez końca (No End, 1985) by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Och, Karol (1985) by Roman Załuski, Medium (1985) by Jacek Koprowicz, Magnat (The Magnate, 1985) by Filip Bajon, Tulipan (The Tulip) (1986) by Janusz Dymek and Andrzej Swat, Łuk Erosa (Eros’s Arch) (1987) by Jerzy Domaradzki, Życie wewnętrze (The Inner Life) (1986) and Porno (Porn) (1989) by Marek Koterski, Sztuka kochania (The Art of Love) (1989) by Jacek Bromski, Co lubią tygrysy (What Tigers Like) (1989) by Krzysztof Nowak or In flagranti (1991) by Wojciech Biedroń. Although none of these films was strictly pornographic, the more or less gratuitous erotic scenes and/or explicitly sexual subject matter played a crucial role in the movies.
11 The reasons for this phenomenon might be found in several processes occurring simultaneously at that time. Firstly, the 1980s in Poland witnessed a general “loosening” of social norms in the socio-cultural environment of the time (which can be directly related to such factors as changes in the western culture and the second wave of porno-chic).3 Secondly, the popularisation and pornographication of films produced in that period carried political significance. After the martial law was declared in Poland on December 13, 1981, the 1980s saw “one of the biggest challenges ever to the legitimacy of the communist power” (Zaremba 383). Therefore, the government strove for a swift neutralization of the spreading anti-government sentiments. “The only system of values that, in broad opinion, could attract social activism was the ethos of the Solidarity movement. Therefore, the purpose was to neutralize it by engineering a quick ‘atomization’ of the community” (Kornacki 202). One way to accomplish that goal was to attract a great number of people to the cinema. The strategy of the government relied on the assumption that an easy access to entertainment and attractive films would divert people’s attention from anti- governmental activity (see Kalinowska; Lubelski 547). Thirdly, despite the socialist system, “[t]he 1980s [were] a period of a visible commercialisation of the Polish cinema. Box office success achieved by individual film productions and by the film industry at large was always—contrary to a common belief—an important indicator of the films’ value, but in the 1980s making a profit by film studios and the entire film industry became a priority” (Kornacki 201, see also: Adamczak).
12 One of the most interesting examples of how, with the help of nudity, (an excess of) erotic scenes and (para)sexual themes, filmmakers attempted to attract big numbers of moviegoers is the aforementioned comedy Co lubią tygrysy ( What Tigers Like) by Krzysztof Nowak. The film premiered on April 24, 1989, but the preproduction started in 1986. It was a story about two middle-aged men, Marek (played by Krzysztof Kowalewski) and Piotr (played by Wojciech Pokora), who go on holidays to Sopot (a Polish seaside resort). Marek, who is married, wants to cheer up his friend Piotr, whose wife has just left him. As a result, they succumb to a whirlwind of tantalizing holiday temptations, which are related to various aspects of sexuality. Therefore, the film was full of numerous love affairs, beautiful women sunbathing on the beach, nymphomaniacs, passionate lovers, seaport prostitutes (called “seagulls” by the
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protagonists), dancing parties and strip bars. Moreover, the film Co lubią tygrysy also satirized several sex-related issues, such as: the HIV/AIDS epidemic (which was happening around the world at the time), homosexuality and sex counselling (conducted by the means of mass media, such as TV programs or columns in newspapers). One might even risk a statement that, viewed from this angle, the film was an excellent reflection of the transformation of social norms taking place in Poland and in the West at the time.
13 Even though the film Co lubią tygrysy is not an example of refined humour, it was fairly well received by the members of Komisja Kolaudacyjna Filmów Fabularnych (the Feature Film Pre-Screening Commission, being a body of experts responsible for the assessment and rating of feature films, including aspects liable for political censorship) at its meeting on December 20, 1988. Noticeably, the positive reaction towards the film was not at all based on the artistic value of the piece. The Commission members believed that cinemagoers would be lured into theatres by the nudity and erotic scenes. One of them, Stanisław Trepczyński, opined: “It is a skilfully-made comedy; there are pretty girls, a lot of amusing scenes—it is pleasing to watch” (“Stenogram”). Another, Czesław Dondziłło, added: “I ought to side with the majority of positive reviews, despite the fact that I personally do not have a liking for comedy; but I know that this kind of films meets with approval when it comes to both pre-war as well as contemporary comedies” (“Stenogram”). While Tadeusz Chmielewski explained: “It should be admitted that the comedy is quite simplistic, there is no complexity of any kind, but what is crucial is that the jokes do not cross the boundaries of good taste; we intended to make a popular comedy, and we assumed that the viewers would just have fun watching it” (“Stenogram”).
14 Jerzy Schönborn, the chairman of the proceedings, used this occasion to comment on what in his opinion was an unrefined sense of humour on the part of general audience: Surely this type of humour is not especially subtle, but if we want to attract a wide range of audiences, then we cannot expect subtle jokes, because they could become obstacles in watching the film, but I do agree that in this case we are not talking about this film being art, but rather a popular film, of the kind that is in demand, and I am convinced that many people will watch it.... I believe that the director will get his royalties and the cinemagoers their dose of fun. (“Stenogram”)
15 Although after the premiere Co lubią tygrysy did not meet with many positive opinions and reviews,4 the goal was achieved. In the end, the comedy enjoyed a relatively big commercial success and attracted a lot of viewers. Undoubtedly, there could be many reasons for this wide interest in the movie, but one of them was evidently the most important. Erotic scenes and the (para)sexual subject matter were indeed what the Polish audience had already known for a while and what people wanted to watch.5 More significantly, the sexual references and the porno-chic aesthetic in these films was a proof of their “westernization” and this particular characteristic carried exceptionally strong connotations. As Marek Krajewski noted, the late 1980s was the period when non-western content was replaced by videocassettes with movies such as Conan, Rambo, Lemon Popsicle (also known as Eskimo Limon) [an Israeli TV series], and Bavarian pornographic films, while television screens were occupied by Sabrina, CC Catch, Modern Talking, stars of italo disco, break-dance, and aerobic, but most importantly by representations of the ordinary lives of people living in the western world, people with problems so different from those experienced by Poles. (“Koniec lat 80-tych”)
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16 This saturation of the Polish socio-cultural reality of the late 1980s with an excess of “pictures from the other side,” as Krajewski called them, in consequence led to dramatic changes in the Polish media: The films shown in cinemas (Tabu, Łuk Erosa, Widziadło, Medium) contained bold erotic scenes, while public television attempted to compete against VHS players and satellite TV with the first Polish soap opera (W labiryncie, In the Labyrinth), late night screenings of soft-porn (Różowa seria) (The Pink Series), and entertainment programs showing music videos (Jarmark, The Fair). These new media experiences not only altered the Polish tastes that defined good entertainment, music, and film, but they also affected the people’s imagination by creating new standards of normalcy related to clothing, hairstyles, vehicles, home décor and interpersonal relations. These standards, as never before, made the gap between the reality that was and the reality that could be, clearly visible, objective and perceivable. (“Koniec lat 80- tych”)
17 The second half of the 1980s in Poland was a time of the so-called revolution of imagination—a process which in the long run led to a remodelling of awareness of ordinary Poles. This remodelling was mostly possible thanks to the new forms of audio- visual messages appearing with increasing boldness during the last years of the communist regime, and to the realities of the political transformation itself, because “what in the 1980s enabled a connection with the global production systems and the systems of standardization of dreams, were the innovative communication technologies, mainly VHS players and satellite dishes” (Krajewski). These technologies helped to supply the imagination of Poles with different types of media representations than before, and in turn these representations, so different from their socialist reality, became one of the factors that propelled the upcoming change.6 A change so significant that, in essence, it was not just a simple adjustment of common assumptions related to the way the world or daily life should look like. The proof of the striking power of this change was primarily manifested by the fact that it “introduced to the awareness of Poles entirely new parameters, which delocalized their existence” (Krajewski). In that period, “simple dichotomies such as East—West, Eastern Bloc—Western Bloc, USSR— USA, communism—capitalism” (Krajewski) were no longer enough to define one’s identity. It all happened mainly due to the pictures and the mass media circulating in our consciousness, which, on a large scale, broadened the perception of the reality that we had known so far. One of the key catalysts of this process were undoubtedly videocassette players and videocassettes with western-made films that heavily influenced the cultural norms in Poland at that time. As noted by Mirosław Filiciak and Patryk Wasiak, “[r]eading Proust was replaced by watching films with Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, while the western origin of the technology itself, alongside with the content, made the attack on the old hierarchies very successful” (90).
18 The content which at the time influenced the change in the hierarchy of values also included erotic scenes and sexual themes, known to the wide audience not only from pornographic films (noticeably enjoying a huge popularity in Poland at the time),7 but also from increasingly available, diverse texts of western popular culture that employed a porno-chic aesthetic. The popularity of these elements helped them to successfully enter the Polish cinematography. Nevertheless, they were not expected to play a transgressive function (as in classic porno-chic texts), but to serve the objectives of the government, by neutralising anti-governmental sentiments and generating a
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commercial profit. However, their impact proved to be much more revolutionary than intended by the authorities. As noted by Izabela Kalinowska: [I]t might be perversely admitted that the cultural politics of the last decade of the Communist regime, especially the permissiveness towards sex, brought an effect that was contradictory to what was expected: the commercialised physicality appearing on television and on the screens of movie theatres during the 1980s, had prepared the setting for the upcoming change that transformed the urban and rural working masses into consumers of pop culture. (78)
19 In this manner, the onscreen nudity and erotic scenes appearing with increasing frequency in Polish (and foreign) films at the turn of 1980s and 1990s, to a certain extent contributed to the transformation of the socio-cultural reality. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that the new types of representation which then became common in the media were deeply misogynistic, evidently intertwined with the patriarchal system and openly objectifying women. The eroticisation and pornographication of popular culture analysed in this article, in particular concerned women whose bodies were presented as attractive objects to look at. One should note here that this tendency is characteristic for nearly all of Polish cinematographic discourse, and the cinema in general, women being still commonly represented from the male point of view. However, this larger issue lies beyond the scope of this article.
20 Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the reality of the second half of the 1980s was profoundly dominated by the conventions characteristic of the American, or broadly understood western, popular culture. The above-noted films were clear examples of this phenomenon, as the film makers of the time eagerly borrowed from the conventions used in the western cinema. One of those conventions, as it was shown in this article, was the porno-chic aesthetic, which was employed with increasing boldness in a great number of films produced at the time. In consequence, all the changes analysed in this article became catalysts for the so-called revolution of imagination (Krajewski) which was beginning in Poland in the second half of the 1980s —a process which paralleled the transformation of the political system, ongoing in Poland at the time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamczak, Marcin. Globalne Hollywood, filmowa Europa i polskie kino po 1989 roku. Przeobrażenia kultury audiowizualnej przełomu dziesięcioleci. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2010. Print.
Filiciak, Mirosław, and Patryk Wasiak. “Wypożyczalnia rewolucji.” Polityka 22 (2013): 88-91. Print.
Goddard, Michael. “‘Figura’ postkomunistycznego pożądania? Role Katarzyny Figury albo: jak polskie kino stało się popularne.” Kino polskie: reinterpretacje. Historia-ideologia-polityka. Ed. Konrad Klejsa and Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska. Kraków: Wydawnictwo RABID, 2008. 275-286. Print.
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Holmlund, Chris. Impossible Bodies, Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Jachymek, Karol. “Seks w kinie polskim okresu PRL.” Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu 1 (2018). Web. http://www.akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/historia-polskiego-filmu/artykuly/seks-w-kinie- polskim-okresu-prl-wprowadzenie/626. Accessed 7 Aug. 2018.
Kalinowska, Izabela. “Seks, polityka i koniec PRL-u: o cielesności w polskim kinie lat osiemdziesiątych.” Ciało i seksualność w kinie polskim. Ed. Sebastian Jagielski and Agnieszka Morstin-Popławska. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2009. 63-78. Print.
Kornacki, Krzysztof. “Naga władza. Polskie kino erotyczne (schyłkowego PRL-u).” Studia Filmoznawcze 29 (2008): 195-225. Print.
Kornatowska, Maria. Eros i film. Łódź: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1986. Print.
Kowalczyk, Andrzej Z. “Co lubią widzowie?.” Sztandar Ludu 122 (1989): 9. Print. Krajewski, Michał. “Koniec lat 80-tych. Rewolucja wyobraźni.” I love Poland, by Mariusz Forecki. Związek Polskich Artystów Fotografików. Poznań: Okręg Wielkopolski, 2009. Web. https://www.academia.edu/2540689/Koniec_lat_80-tych._Rewolucja_wyobraźni Accessed: 5 Aug. 2018.
Lubelski, Tadeusz. Historia kina polskiego 1895-2014. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2015. Print.
McNair, Brian. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. London an New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
“Stenogram z posiedzenia Komisji Kolaudacyjnej Filmów Fabularnych w dniu 20 grudnia 1988 r. Na porządku dziennym: omówienie filmu pt. Co lubią tygrysy – zrealizowanego przez reż. Krzysztofa Nowaka w Zespole ‘Oko’.” Archiwum Filmoteki Narodowej, signature: A-344, position: 574. Print.
Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Print.
---. Screening Sex. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.
Zaremba, Marcin. Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2001. Print.
Zatorski, Janusz. “Tygrysy i pasikoniki.” Kierunki 27 (1989): 15. Print.
NOTES
1. It is worth noting that during the communist regime, pornography was not easily available in Poland, due to censorship. Hence, erotic scenes included in Polish film productions enjoyed a different status and had a considerable impact. It does not mean that the Polish audience had no access to any pornographic content, as pornographic publications and films, particularly in the 1980s, were often smuggled in from the West. 2. In addition, in 1986 Maria Kornatowska published her famous book Eros i film (Eros and Film), which certainly confirmed the presence of eroticism in popular culture.
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3. As I have written in Pleograf: “In 1983, books such as Seks partnerski (Partners in Sex) by Zbigniew Lew-Starowicz, a renowned Polish psychiatrist and psychotherapist specialising in sexology, or the scandalous novel Raz w roku w Skiroławkach (Once a Year in Skiroławki) by Zbigniew Nienacki, were published. Moreover, after a 20-year hiatus, the Polish Beauty pageant, Miss Polonia, returned. The new television executives agreed to broadcast the ‘pink’ series of erotic films, while in the second half of the decade, TVP (Polish public TV, the only television broadcaster at the time) ran a Polish erotic program charmingly named Sekscesy (a play on words ‘sex’ and ‘excess’). Marketing merchandise, such as calendars, pens, cards, etc., depicting naked women, was very popular at the time, and was distributed by almost all ‘respectable’ businesses. Nudism was also gaining in popularity; it was supported by Veto. Tygodnik Każdego Konsumenta (Veto. The Weekly of Every Consumer), and its presence in pop culture owed much to a song Chałupy welcome to, sung by Zbigniew Wodecki (Chałupy is a popular seaside resort in Poland, famous for its nude beach). Under the auspices of the Polish Naturist Association, lonely hearts’ clubs began to pop up here and there, articles about the emerging swingers lifestyle could be found and some magazines, such as Relaks i Kolekcjoner Polski ( Relax and Polish Collector) published private sex offers. Gay communities became more visible and began to establish their own structures and organisations, although from 1985 to 1987 they were under the scrutiny of Milicja Obywatelska (the communist regime police force) in an operation dubbed ‘Hiacynt.’ By the end of the 1980s, in news kiosks one could buy, published in Poland, magazines ‘for men’ that did not shy away from erotic content, such as the monthly Pan. Magazyn Poradniczo-Hobbystyczny (Mister: Advice and Hobby Magazine). In December 1992, three years after the fall of the communist regime, the first issue of the Polish Playboy was published, with Malwina Rzeczkowska as the playmate (posing in the style and setting straight out of Dynasty). At the time, first Polish pornographic publications also appeared on the market, including Wamp. Pikantny Magazyn dla Koneserów (Vamp: Hot Magazine for Connoisseurs), Nowy Wamp (New Vamp), Men, and Nowy Men (New Men) to name a few” (Jachymek). 4. Accordingly, Andrzej Z. Kowalczyk wrote for Sztandar Ludu (The Banner of the People): “What do cinemagoers like? It is simple: nudity, dirty thoughts, cussing, and burlesque. In case you do not believe me, here are a few examples: the scene in which a stripper takes off her clothes—the audience reacts with murmurs of approval and muffled giggles; Anna Chodakowska ridicules Wojciech Pokora, calling him an impotent—the audience bursts out laughing; while Bożena Dykiel tries (and fails) to take off the dress over her head, she exposes her breasts, and finally falls over—the audience roars with laughter and applauds (sic!); identical reaction occurs during the scene with the word ‘faggot’ in it. This is what cinemagoers like. This is what tigers like…” (Kowalczyk 9). 5. In one of the reviews of the film Co lubią tygrysy an outraged critic wrote, “The audience is wooed by the naked bodies in the posters and treated as a dreary, drooling over a naked thigh erotomaniac, which is a cardinal mistake or even an act of stupidity. Erotomaniacs, or people—mildly speaking—particularly interested in sex on the screen, have hundreds of videocassettes at their disposal, and they are not interested in the nudity of a few amateur actresses; these people watch Caligula, Emmanuelle or hard- porn. I demand that the filmmakers put a stop to treating these cinemagoers as if they were complete morons and start making films about love and eroticism for normal
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people at once!” (Zatorski 15). However, it should be mentioned that Zatorski was wrong because the Polish audience eagerly watched these types of films. 6. However, this media revolution was a phenomenon occurring simultaneously in the West. As pointed out by Marek Krajewski, “It should be kept in mind that while changes were taking place in our country, the well-developed capitalist countries were experiencing a rapid media revolution, whose products, such as CNN, MTV, satellite television, VHS players, CD players, and Walkmen, allowed information and most of all pictures, to flow freer than ever before, in a way that was not limited by political and ideological boundaries.” 7. In the opinion of Filiciak and Wasiak, “The working class was yearning for sex. In 1986, Tygodnik Polski claimed that 60 percent of videocassettes detained on the border were ‘against the Polish moral code.’”
ABSTRACTS
Polish cinema in the late 1980s—a period marked in Poland by a transformation of social norms and a mounting pressure on the political authorities from the illegal opposition movement— underwent a significant evolution, part of which was opening up to erotic content reaching Poland from the West in various forms, including the “porno-chic” phenomenon, defined by Brian McNair as being “not porn… but the representation of porn in non-pornographic art and culture.” In my article, I look at some major examples of the porno-chic trend in Polish cinema of the late 1980s and draw on the archival records from the Film Pre-Screening Commission to demonstrate how the political and cultural authorities of the time attempted to co-opt the new “western” trend to improve their standing with an increasingly irate public and to deflate the rising discontent by a supply of an attractive cultural and erotic content.
INDEX
Keywords: porno-chic, Polish cinema, film censorship, Poland—Western influences, eroticism
AUTHOR
KAROL JACHYMEK Karol Jachymek, Ph.D., works as an assistant professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He specializes in the social and cultural history of cinema (particularly Polish), the methodology of history, the problematics of the body, sex and sexuality, and media influence on individual and collective memory. His interests also include the socio- cultural contexts of social networks, blogs and vlogosphere. He is the author of the book Film – ciało – historia. Kino polskie lat sześćdziesiątych [Film—Body—History: Polish Cinema of the Sixties].
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African-American Music in the Service of White Nationalists: Polish “Patriotic Rap” as a Pop Cultural Tool to Promote National Values
Piotr Majewski
Introduction
Rap music has its roots in jazz, blues, funk and soul which, like rap, have played an important role in the African-American community by reflecting its identity and political endeavors (Keyes; Krims), and helping create the so-called Black public sphere. The New York ghettos of the late 1970s, which produced the “Last Poets” group of poets and musicians, are thought to be the places where rap was born. As argued by the researchers of this music genre, it is the “Last Poets” songs reiterating the slogans spread by other black nationalists and black separatists (Stuckey), the Black Power movement (Wend), the Nation of Islam ideology (Allen) and Malcolm X (Gallen), as well as the Black Panthers (Bloom and Martin) that inspired the rise of rap (Sullivan 205; Kowalewski 21-22). At its beginning, rap was less conspicuous than other forms of hip-hop culture such as graffiti, break-dance or DJ-ing. This situation started to change following the big success of The Sugar Hill Gang with their 1979 album called Rapper’s Delight. It was then that rap came to attract the attention of the media and record companies, previously showing little interest in popularizing this genre. At the same time rap’s quick commercial success led to first attempts to censor some of the hip-hop work. The main concern of the music industry was that rappers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in “The Message” (1982) addressed the sensitive issues of racial and economic segregation and social and political inequality, challenging the ways in which African Americans were being portrayed in American culture (Watkins; Kubrin and Nielson 187). What added to the confusion was that rap was gaining ground not only among the
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black ghetto dwellers but also other racial and ethnic minorities and, unexpectedly, white youths. (Kitwana; Wynter).1 In response to this phenomenon, there came the first attempts to penalize rap—using both legal and cultural instruments—during the so- called “conservative revolution” proclaimed by President Ronald Regan whose goals were geared towards the social and economic marginalization of minorities, including African Americans. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, special police units were established to observe rappers, interrupt their concerts, and invent evidence to prove that the artists and their fans had broken the law. Efforts were made to influence record companies and broadcasters to censor the rappers’ songs or make them refrain from publishing or selling the already produced albums. At the same time, the predominantly white cultural establishment started to criticize rap lyrics, portraying them as an “attack on American values.” The guardians of cultural orthodoxy came out in defense of their class hegemony and cultural supremacy, attempting to squeeze rap into a “wild zone,” understood as a language area repressed from the consciousness of the dominant white culture, pushed outside the boundaries of acceptable verbal expression, as well as outside the limits of acceptable experience. The notion of the linguistic ‘wild zone’... shows how the experience of a marginalized group of people... including their individual experiences and expressed in their ‘dialect,’ was denied access to the disourse shaping the language of their culture.... Instead of throwing itself open to diverse experiences, as pluralist cultures by definition do, American culture seems to impose rules of expression on the experience of minority groups through a pseudo- universal dominant language (which, in fact, is a dialect of white, heterosexual men holding power). As a result, the experience which is incompatible with the rules of the ‘dominant language’ must be deemed trivial, irrelevant, negligible, narrow, morbid, abnormal, etc. (Kamionowski 35-36)2
1. “Political Rap” and African-American Identity Discourses
Already in the 1980s rappers came to use their music as a weapon to fight the official narratives which composed a stereotypical image of the African-American community. Adopting pseudonyms like “Wise Intelligent,” “Professor X” or “Professor Griff” and using a stylized, almost religious rhetoric, many of them built their image of spiritual leaders and teachers of the African-American community. Reconstructing anti-colonial narratives and adjusting them to their contemporary social and economic conditions, those “organic intellectuals” (Hall 267) infused them with elements of other ideologies, like black nationalism and separatism, the Black Power movement, “Black Islam,”3 socialism or Afrocentrism (Collins 76-122). Thus, the conscious rap or political rap, a subgenre of rap music, came into being. It “purposefully refers to the historical models of political protest and is connected with the progressive forces of social criticism” (Dyson 64). It turned out that this kind of musical creativity, being an effective tool of social mobilization, is also increasingly popular among African Americans as a source of knowledge about their own history, challenging the cultural, political and economic status quo. “Political rap” being a product of ghettoization, segregation and racism, is understandable and attractive for its target audience, providing a way to manifest and communicate their “local knowledge,” both inside and outside the ghettos, and has become an important element of the black public space (Rose 124; Pough). The music of a generation represented by no formal political movement, “conscious rap” became the
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most popular form of musical expression among young African Americans, as well as a platform for presenting their ideas. Thanks to the hip-hop culture African Americans, for the first time on such a scale, managed to subvert the oppressive forms of their cultural representation generated by the white majority. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rap managed to climb out of a cultural niche in the U.S. to become as popular as rock music. As a result, rap came to be a relevant and popular carrier of emancipatory ideas and an element of African- American “resistance identity”4 (Lusane 41), one of its goals being to restore and de- falsify the African-American memory and to create a counter-memory challenging the widely shared beliefs about white America’s past: Singing about the past struggles—sparked off by the Nation of Islam and Black Panthers—to encourage Blacks to organize themselves, they [rappers] make their music an alternative means of education for the youth who do not have access to the knowledge about the history of black people in America.... From propagating refusal to perform military service to spreading the awareness of how drug addiction or alcoholism harm black communities; from explaining the need of using force in self-defense against racist attacks and police brutality to teaching about Black resistance against the supremacy of whites in the history of Africa and America. (Kowalewski 24) Stressing the positive influence of rap on the process of reconstruction of the African- American identity, one should also point out that the most important issues addressed in the discourse of “conscious” rap, i.e. exclusion, humiliation, racism, violence, poverty, lawlessness, racial pride, black culture and revolution, have been utilized by some rappers to (re)establish the meaning and importance of the basic mythological narratives, creating the ideological core of black nationalism with its extremely chauvinistic dimension. The first of them is the myth of genetic and moral superiority of the black race. Another is the story of an “innocent” civilization once destroyed by the European aggressors, which now has the chance to reinstate itself within the African-American public space. The third one is the myth of a relentless struggle with the age-old enemy, the said white barbarians. Within these narratives, the “black identity” and contemporary racial conflicts are presented in an essentialist perspective, bordering close with racist ideology. According to this essentialist philosophy races have their own unique sets of attributes which are fundamental to their identities. This unique essence is shared by all representatives of a given race and expresses the experience of a homogenous community. “Black essentialism” based on binary oppositions naturalizes and de-historicizes the difference between races and leads to a conclusion that all ideas and activities referred to as “black” are, supposedly out of their nature, progressive and freedom seeking (Jaskułowski 74-76). This essentialist narrative is undermined by, among others, the fact that black masculine culture tends to be oppressive towards women (Collins 161-196) and that the non- Anglo-Saxon people referred to as “ethnics,” are also a part of the American society (Novak 330-342).5
2. Hip-hop Culture and Globalization
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hip-hop culture gained popularity also outside the U.S. Rap turned out to be a perfect example illustrating the realities of the glocalization processes, or the adaptation of global cultural patterns to meet the needs and
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conditions of local communities. As a result of its popularization, it became internalized and “localized” by other cultures. Enriching it with their own identity narratives, expressed in vernacular languages and musical traditions, they adopted rap as their own “authentic” music. It seems that rap owes its global success not only to the big media companies but also to the power of is message, expressing frustration caused by discrimination, poverty, and lack of empowerment. It is also worth noting that rap has become—in a way unconsciously—a popular ally of many ideas championed by the representatives of the critical postcolonial theory (Spivak). A common denominator of those theories is the intention to undermine the hegemonic worldview used by various colonists to “perceive,” “understand,” “describe” and “assess” the world and its inhabitants. This is because both rap and the postcolonial theory create a new discursive space where it is possible to empower the “common” people who are politically, socially, economically or linguistically marginalized. By affirming their cultural practices and values, they enable them to present their own ways of thinking and their behaviors. Due to rap, the space provided by popular culture can be filled with alternative orders of knowledge and ideas which challenge the previous structures of power and the narratives they produce (Mitchell).
3. Rap in Poland: A Historical Outline
Polish rap has been present in Polish media roughly since 1993, although initially it remained outside the mainstream of Polish culture. Two years later it appeared on such commercial channels as Atomic TV, MTV Poland or VIVA Poland, and the Polish rappers quickly increased their popular appeal (the first Polish rap album was produced in 1995 by a Kielce group called Wzgórze Ya-pa3). 6 At that point international recording studios including Pomaton, BMG and Sony started to issue and promote albums of Polish rappers (Kleyff 17).7 Encouraged by the commercial success of the “street” rap which prevailed in Poland at that time, they jointly embarked on creating its more “cultured” version called “hip-hopolo,” a mix of hip-hop and pop aesthetics (Pawlak 52). In 2006, partly due to the dynamic development of the Internet, Poland’s hip-hop stage underwent dramatic changes. In the wake of poor returns big record labels ceased to publish rap albums and the media lost their interest in this genre. In response to this situation, rappers and their fans moved to the Internet, in particular to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and later Spotify. To gain independence from the record companies, some of the artists entered the world of business, setting up their own recording studios and launching apparel brands, which helped them finance their artistic activity (Miszczyński 8-9). Although after 2009 some Polish rap videos registered millions of page views, the actual breakthrough for the hip-hop culture came in 2012 with the premiere of Jesteś Bogiem (You're God), a feature movie by Leszek Dawid. This story of the cult rap group Paktofonika reached an audience of 1.4 million and revived interest in rap among the mainstream media. Today's rap is not only popular with a number of different audiences, but it is also an aesthetically diverse music genre, whose connection with its American origins is not as strong as in the 1990s (Kukołowicz 129). One may find there representatives of street rap, underground, new school (largely commercial), “intelligent” rap, experimental, poetic and “patriotic” rap. Moreover, the rappers perform not only in Polish but also in
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local vernaculars, like the Lemko, Kashubian and Silesian languages. Consequently, today “it is difficult to speak about one hip-hop culture. One should rather highlight the fact of its diversity, seeing this phenomenon as a multitude of voices and performances” (Struzik 166).
4. Inspirations vs. Originality in Polish Rap: Has Poland Ever Had a “Political Rap”?
Most of the first Polish rappers, many of whom still perform and enjoy their popularity, were born in 1976-1982. Together with their audience, they were the first generation which grew up in the democratic and capitalist Poland, with full access to the global stream of popular culture. Despite the fact that the Polish and American backgrounds of the hip-hop culture are dramatically different—the Polish rappers and their fans have never been subject to systemic persecution, discrimination or racial segregation— there are still some similarities to be observed. Most importantly, the first Polish rappers, inspired by the lyrics of American rap stars, started to create multilayered stories about the consequences of the Polish transition from the centrally planned socialist economy to free market capitalism. They were rapping about extreme social inequalities, poverty, pathologies, violence, corruption, brutality of the law enforcement officers and about second-class citizens whose lives—regardless of their attitudes or aspirations—became unbearable and purposeless. Those narratives were authored not only by rappers from families whose social and economic status was diminished after 1989, but also by those whose parents benefited from the new economic order and political changes. Apart from their narrative layer, those compositions were greatly influenced by the aesthetics, rituals, performances and musical patterns to be found in different subgenres of the American rap (Kleyff 10-12). The African-American hip-hop culture gave the Polish youths a set of tools and artifacts which came to be processed by them in a wide variety of contexts, and started to function beyond their original historical or cultural context. Using the African- American cultural material and infusing it with a new meaning, the people who created the Polish version of American rap sang about their own ideas, experiences and local socio-cultural context. This might actually be the reason why—despite the presence of the aforementioned content, rituals and symbols—the Polish rap cannot be seen as a political music or why one cannot find on the Polish rap stage a direct equivalent of the conscious (political) rap. A great majority of researchers studying the Polish rap maintain that this situation resulted from the fact that Poland lacked the kind of political or racial conflicts which were present in the U.S., therefore their rap's political energy was not so big.... Yet the Polish hip-hop culture was a form of resistance, admittedly not a radical one, to the dominant culture and to its own subordination…. [However], the Polish rappers have not proposed a positive program of building a new society, and they have not been openly involved in political disputes. (Kukołowicz 122)8
5. Attitudes Towards Polish Rap and the “Power of Judging”
The hip-hop culture and the accompanying cultural practices have been seen by a part of our intellectual, scientific and political elites as an “anti-culture,” and have become
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excluded from any “serious” critical or scientific discourse (Pawlak 6-7; Miszczyński 12-13). On the one hand, rappers are still being accused—though not so much as in the 1990s—of promoting negative, if not pathological, behaviors and social relationship models (within this discourse, the hip-hop culture was compared with the subculture of the so-called blokersi, i.e. hooligans living in highrise apartment projects constructed in the socialist period). On the other hand, it is sometimes argued that rap is an artificially transplanted music genre which has little to do with the local musical tradition. Last but not least, rap is still often seen as a “low” or “vulgar” genre, a kind of anti-music, presented in opposition to the "authentic" and "artistic" genres and their aesthetics. These socially structured labels not only stigmatize rap, rappers and their fans, but they also stand for “the power of judging” and reflect the class-conditioned habitus of the Polish intelligentsia, as well as the arbitrary aesthetic taste of a few generations who were not allowed to openly manifest their views before 1989. The new social and political reality led to the emergence of experts and arbiters of taste, acknowledging their hegemony in the process of ascribing meanings to cultural symbols and diverse types of human activity (Bourdieu 27). The same milieux (academic, political, media- related, intellectual) which in the 1970s and 1980s regarded Polish counterculture and music as positive and creative ways of demonstrating defiance against the socialist reality, in the post-1989 period built a new aesthetic hierarchy, with hip-hop at its very bottom. This new cultural system can be described as a cultural apartheid, “where particular aesthetic choices effectively separate social classes, framing them in a stereotypical way.... Within this dominant ideology the popular taste was ignored as naive and self-satisfied, vulgar, nice and easy, in fact, partly animalistic" (Skrzyczkowski 32). It took time for the Polish nationalists and racists to accept the rap aesthetics, since it was long perceived as alien to their national and civilizational values. Rap was being described as a disruptive musical genre, which could adversely affect the family and the “white” musical aesthetics believed to be an “authentic and direct extension, and a symbol of preserving the racial and civilizational ‘essence’” (Pankowski 122): ‘The nationalist scene is still mentally stuck in the subculture of the 1990s,’ argues Bujak, a rapper who describes himself as a supremacist and a nationalist, who uses rap to communicate his self-identity. Music is a channel of communicating ideas and values. Some people cannot understand how the Left in 1968 managed to wrest the world away from the hands of traditionalists. They all did it in the same way: by tapping into the cultural trends and avoiding ghettoization.... Recently, we’ve seen many rappers embrace patriotic values, and it really makes me happy.... music is a big thing and if we use it as a tool to spread influence and inspiration, we can win over people's hearts and minds. (Aktyw Północy 2017)
6. Rap in the Service of the Nation
Around 2006 Polish rap started to get institutionalized: it began to be used as a tool of a pop-nationalist education to (re)construct the Polish collective memory. One should point out that this phenomenon coincided with one of the hottest public debates in Poland after 1989, going on with varying intensity in 2003-2007: it concerned the shape and role of Poland’s historical policy (Nijakowski). Rap attracted the interest of national institutions responsible for cultural policy, and in due time those institutions began to sponsor rap songs devoted to a specifically construed vision of the national past.
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Rappers also became interpreters of the “masterpieces” of national poetic heritage.9 It is worth noting, however, that those rappers (including LUC, Sokół, Fisz, O.S.T.R, Peja, Mezo, Bilon and rap bands WWO, Hemp Gru, Zjednoczony Ursynów, all representing a very diverse spectrum of styles) did not typically create or perform songs which could be described as patriotic or political. It was not until a few years later—when those initiatives had proved successful, both in terms of business and publicity, after they got accepted by the public—that new albums started to appear, this time with the right-wing and nationalistic or historical and martyrological content outweighing other topics. This rap genre, also known as “patriotic rap,” started to be promoted by right-wing political parties and their dependent media (since 2015, when Law and Justice, a right-wing party, seized the power, rap became present also in the public media), nationalist organizations, Catholic Church and a growing number of state and local government institutions typically involved in championing nationalistic attitudes. The right-wing, nationalistic politicians and journalists who want to win over the young voters argue that “patriotic rap” is the first musical genre to be described as “truly Polish popular culture.” “The elites,” as pointed out by Marcin Gawrycki, “usually get to accept the existence of musical genres originating from the disadvantaged social strata once they have gained nationwide popularity; such genres get quickly incorporated into ‘the nationalistic discourse’” (11). The process of the institutionalization of rap, i.e. the embedding of rap in today’s nationalization processes, has been facilitated by the fact that in Poland, hip-hop culture has been around for at least twenty years. Rap is not only the music of the young, but it is also listened to by over-thirty and forty-year-olds, which only adds to its acceptance by the public.10 The use of fashionable cultural and consumer practices including a special outfit design based on the hip-hop style (and called “patriotic apparel”), not only broadened the audience of the “patriotic rap” but also increased the revenue of those companies which made it a significant component of their marketing strategy. Thus the situation has been reversed, compared to the circumstances of the African-American rap, created as a grassroots, spontaneous element of African- American “identity of resistance” which rebelled against the white racism and valorized black nationalism and socialism, as well as the social, political and religious ideas championed by the Nation of Islam. Meanwhile, the Polish “patriotic rap”—the first strictly political Polish rap style—came into being as a product of an “institutionalized evolution.” It became recognized by the state institutions and right-wing organizations and was subsequently utilized as an agent of ideological formation, reinforcing the myths belonging to the nationalist political discourse. The patriotic rap, much as its artists identify themselves as anti- systemic rebels, or a minority fighting for their rights, has become an element of a “legitimizing identity” produced by the dominant social institutions to extend and rationalize their domination over other social actors (Castells 22). However, it is by no means a form of a grassroots, subversive cultural practice that empowers the disadvantaged social strata, but rather “a translation of a theoretical ideology into a popular idiom” (Pankowski 13). In this perspective, the “patriotic” rappers seem to be pop-cultural “professional vendors of second-hand ideas” (Hayek 11) such as nationalism, libertarianism, white racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Catholic
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fundamentalism (Majewski, “Rap jako muzyka tozsamościowa”; Majewski “Polska dla Polaków”).
7. Polish Nationalism and Its Ideological Assumptions
The ideological core of the “patriotic rap” is grounded in the assumptions that belong to the identity discourse of the Polish nationalist and populist right wing, although some rappers do refer to the U.S.-born ideologies of white supremacy, “new racism,” or homegrown neopaganism. The Polish ethnic nationalism was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Roman Dmowski (1864-1939) deemed to have been the father thereof. For Dmowski the meaning of patriotism was mainly defined in terms of a moral unity of the individual and the nation; the individual had to be unconditionally subjected to the “collective will” of the nation. Dmowski believed that the nation should be based on “physical and moral tyranny” exercised by the “healthy part of the nation” (Dmowski 91). In this way he excluded from the national community all those who he referred to as “a foreign element,” i.e. national minorities, liberals, socialists, communists, feminists, or gay people, who were all supposed to be eliminated for the “healthy” part of the nation to be able to survive and perform its historical mission of build a Polish empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Brykczyński). Dmowski’s ideas continue to shape the political imaginary of the right-wing members of the Polish parliament and the extremist nationalist movements. Today, the most influential milieu embracing Dmowski’s political and ideological heritage is Law and Justice, the party that has been governing Poland since 2015. Its leader Jarosław Kaczyński, apparently the author of the slogan “Let us repolonize Poland,” i.e. make Poland and Poles “truly Polish” again, understands the nation as an organic, biological, cultural, religious and historical community determined by bonds of blood (Balcer 12-13). According to Kaczyński, who previously served as Poland’s Prime Minister (2006-2007), national identity should play a key role in the social life of Poles and determine their sense of existence and humanity. At the same time, the terms like civil society, individual freedom or human rights almost never appear in his statements. Kaczyński has consistently built his political position criticizing the democratic state born after the demise of the communist regime, in spite of his personal involvement in the political establishment which came into power in 1989 (he was outside the Parliament only in the period of 1993-1997). Presenting Poland after its transition initiated in 1989 as a country which is a continuation of the communist state and ruled by elites who pursue pro-European and anti-national policies, Kaczyński, along with other right-wing politicians, have idealized earlier forms of the Polish statehood, notably the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and the Second Republic of Poland (Leder). Such “politics of memory” provides the individuals and groups who identify themselves as Polish nationalists with inexhaustible source of nostalgia for past greatness, heroic fight for independence and knightly resistance against foreign domination. In keeping with Dmowski’s mythic framing of the Polish identity, today's nationalists, including the patriotic rappers, define the Polish nation as: (1) a national community that has been in existence since at least the early Middle Ages, and whose borders are marked by the graves of those who laid their lives in defense of their homeland: “For over one thousand years Jesus Christ has been our king / people are united around him
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/ there is no room left for another religion” (Sekcja WU, “Anty-Jihad”); (2) a guardian of sacred civilizational and spiritual values, with a mission to restore the true faith in the materialistic and cosmopolitan western world: “We’re a pack of wolves coming from the East, / Saviors of European Nations, / No force can stop our progress, / Pure blood runs in pure veins.... The voice belongs to the mighty, no more democracy, / The power of age-old supremacy is coming! / No more of your theatricals, of your morbid deviations, / You drug-addicts, you fags, you’re all the same / All the people are equal? I will despise them” (Bujak, “The First to Fight”); (3) a community of “true” Poles who are like they were hundreds of years before, although other nations, more numerous, economically and militarily stronger than them, are trying to destroy them, with some help from the traitors: “We, the Poles don’t give a shit what the Germans think... It is for us who decide who we want to host at home, / no Eurocommie will ever tell us what to do... The German press is talking about hearltless Poles, let them better remember about the Third Reich… our authorities want to welcome them [the refugees] with open arms. / Who serves whom is obvious enough” (Basti, “Stop”); (4) a nation chosen by God, attached to their past and the Catholic religion, true to traditional morality; resistant to whatever is contrary to human nature: to the mixing of races, religions and languages, as well as “deviations” like homosexualism or gender ideology which the decadent European Union is attempting to implant in Poland: “I guess it’s a bad sign, I seem to be too white, / For the modern Europeans to love me, / Worse still, I’m arrogantly proud of being a Pole... I'm not fond of gays, we're not the same, / Those people have always been around, this is the way they are, and let’em be that way, / But no minority will dominate us, / Hands off our weddings, hands off adoption... What father’d like to have a black for a son-in-law?/ Sorry, that’s the way it is, / This is not Africa, here winters last half a year, / Such guys will get a Polish girl pregnant only to disappear next, / Tell me, what father would want an Arab for a son-in-law? / What father will bring up his daughter to be a servant? / What father wants his daughter to be a lesbian? / Think of it before you call me a fascist next time!” (Basti, “88 mila”). The nationalistic worldview founded on the above scheme seems to the “patriotic” rappers an unquestionably positive norm.
8. Tadeusz “Tadek” Polkowski: From Gangstarap to Patriotic Griot
In the remaining part of this article I would like to focus on the lyrics of Tadeusz “Tadek” Polkowski, one of the most popular “patriotic rap” artists in Poland, to take a closer look at the ideologies at work in this rap sub-genre. Polkowski is sometimes presented as the first to rap about the “cursed soldiers,” Captain Witold Pilecki or Inka. Those songs had a great resonance with the football fans groups, but also inspired other rappers to bring up those topics.11. In Polkowski’s songs and statements made to the media, one could find a majority of topics already addressed by other rappers who belong to the “patriotic” rap, notable for its almost automatic repetitive mode of nationalist messages cast into a pop-cultural mould. Polkowski started his musical career in 2000, co-founding the band called Firma. Their songs usually addressed the topics characteristic of the “street rap.” “Tadek” and his friends—who claim the credit for inventing the “JP” abbreviation for “Jebać Policję” (Fuck the Police), which in turn became the trademark of an apparel brand created by
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the Firma, otherwise known for its songs about street life, inequality, corruption, poverty, gang violence, prison inmates, binge parties, love for marijuana and hate for the police and the squealers. The Firma’s narratives not only commented on the “police state” oppression of “street kids,” but also on what the rappers believed were the “true” values. At the same time they allowed the group members to vent their protest against the rules of social life imposed by the elites, which were thoughtlessly accepted by the passive public. As Polkowski explained in a 2013 interview given to a manufacturer of so-called patriotic apparel (owner of the SurgePolonia brand), the values of his subcultural community were not very much unlike those observed by the “true patriots.” At the same time, he observed that not all the ideas present in the “street rap” should become a part of patriotic morality: The street style can have different faces…. it often draws on values: honor, solidarity with friends and family, fidelity, and so on... Today we feel more serious and responsible for our message. It is true that hip-hop promoted things that weren’t best for the public. It wasn’t didactic, in the best sense of the word, it wasn’t only about honor, nobility or passion. That kind of music sometimes had negative influence on the youth, though the intensions were always best. (Nowak) This narrative, describing the life and worldview of the rappers before their nationalistic “conversion,” is quite common among many artists who pursue this style in music.12 It is a story about the “sinful” period in their lives, when they fought with “the system,” groping for values and a sense of belonging before they experienced conversion, found the right way, and were “born again” in becoming “true Poles,” and at the same time another incarnation of the timeless myth of the archetypical hero (Campbell). Polkowski started his solo career in 2011 and has published two albums to date. The first, Niewygodna prawda (The Uncomfortable Truth), released in 2012 by the RadioWnet was attached to an issue of the Magna Polonia magazine connected with Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny (a far-right organization). The second, titled Niewygodna prawda II. Burza 2014 ( Uncomfortable Truth 2. Tempest 2014) appeared in 2014 produced by Fonografika, and was also inserted into an issue of Gazeta Polska, a newspaper subsidized by the Law and Justice party. Since the publishing of his first solo album, “Tadek” has largely given up on his attempts to shape the “communicative memory” of his subcultural community, focusing instead on his efforts to cultivate the “cultural memory”13 of the entire nation in his capacity as a “carrier of memory”: in the view of Assman, cultural memory always needs carriers known under a rich assortment of names, such as “shamans, bards, griots, priests, teachers, artists, clerks, scholars, mandarins, rabbis, and mullahs” (69). In the estimate of a critic friendly to Polkowski, Polish pop culture hasn't seen such a massive load of patriotic content in a long time… Tadeusz ‘Tadek’ Polkowski pays homage to the Polish national heroes, educating the young hip-hop audience.... I am convinced that his adolescent, hooded fans, whom the mainstream media describe as hooligans, must feel proud. Son of a distinguished poet Jan Polkowski, Tadek Polkowski gives them a big chunk of Polish history wrapped in the hip-hop ‘poetry of the 21st century’... he is ruthless both to the traitors to Poland and to the elites of the Third [Polish] Republic, who liked to call on us to ‘choose the future.’ This album is a warning against the manipulations of mainstream media and blasé celebs. One may say that Niewygodna Prawda is a voice of protest against the entire structure of the Third Polish Republic. For the parents missing a good idea for a present for their children and, at the same time, and who are concerned about their historical education and the prevalence of
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moral relativism at school, Tadek’s album will come like a gift from heavens. (Adamski) Tadek’s involvement with the Firma might seem to be discrediting in the eyes of the predominantly conservative and—at least on the declarative level—nationalistically minded audience. However, the right-wing authors and journalists maintained that the group's songs were an accurate analysis of the post-communist system of oppression, as seen by those who had been socially disempowered by the ruling “arrangement.” Polkowski himself stressed that the work of the Firma was a lyrical way to fight the “system” and its central component, i.e. the law enforcement apparatus, infiltrated by the former communist secret service officers (Heron 2017). Having published his first solo album, Polkowski deepened his involvement in “patriotic work,” which, as the titles of his successive albums suggested, meant communicating “uncomfortable truths,” or events whose memory was either distorted or erased from Polish history. Polkowski’s primary objective was to galvanize his audience into critical thinking. After listening to his message, the audience should undergo a “conversion”—similar to the one experienced by the artist—and reject the pathologies, hypocrisy and disfunctionality of the “system”: My mission in this album is to expose those frauds / … / And this album’s message is an uncomfortable truth / uncomfortable for those scoundrels who destroy this country... / This album is about many hidden scars… / about honor and our motherland. / This album is painfully honest, it's be about traitors and real heroes... / It’s about memorials which are still missing/ And about the cursed soldiers. (Tadek Firma Solo, The Uncomfortable Truth) For Polkowski, those who marginalize, ignore, and distort Polish history act in league with the postcommunist and liberal elites who conspire with external enemies to keep Poland a German, Russian or European “colony.” It is those two groups that fear the “truths” that Polkowski has set out to unveil. “Once I stumbled upon some sociological research results which said that 93% of the Polish elite originates from the Polish People's Republic,” said Polkowski in one of his interviews and added: Thus, bluntly speaking, in the 21st century Poland we have post-Soviet elites. The same is true of the media or universities. If the political line of a newspaper or TV station is determined by people—or children of those people—who were actively involved in the Sovietization of Poland and eagerly served the communist propaganda, it won't be an overstatement to say that to a large extent the media pose a threat. (Meller) To unveil those “uncomfortable truths” is a source of empowerment and will enable the Poles to “decolonize” and “repolonize” their country. An important role in this “unmasking of lies” is to be played by the patriotic rappers, or the popcultural “leaders of memory.” Polkowski and other rappers’ songs classified as “patriotic rap” are grounded in ideological essentialism, marked—like in the case of some American rappers who refer to the ideology of black separatism—by binary oppositions which claim to encompass all possible attitudes towards reality. On one side of this Manichean divide we can find “the truth” and “patriots,” on the other, “lies” and “the enemies who exploit them.” The discursive power of this essentialism is based on the naturalization and dehistoricization of those binary oppositions and on the stable and unchanging meanings that are ascribed to them. All selectively picked events and individuals, serving as examples of the “genuine love for the motherland” or, to the contrary, of
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“treason / enmity,” symbolize the sets of values and attitudes characteristic of those two opposites. Within this discourse, a hero, a traitor, or enemy of the nation is never just an individual, a single life trajectory, or a protagonist of one event— he/she must always represent a community, or something bigger and more important than themselves, be an embodiment of some paradigm.... The life of a hero... is defined not only by their character but also by their ‘belonging,’ because their conduct and what happens to them depend on what they belong to and where their place is, rather than on what they are like. (Karahasan 72)
Conclusions
The rise of “patriotic” rap, a showcase for the internalization of global cultural practices and adapting them to local conditions, demonstrates how such adaptations may serve dramatically different functions than the “original” cultural products. The black political rap used to function in the public sphere of the 1980s and 1990s America as music that became a significant part of African-American identity, built in opposition to the dominant group and challenging the existing power structure along with the its legitimizing discourses. In comparison, the Polish “patriotic” rappers effectively became pop culture promoters of the nationalist ideology which has come to take hold in Poland. Their aim, however, is not a struggle for the empowerment of the oppressed; instead, the patriotic rap is reinforcing a vision of the world which is grounded in a nationalist mentality. The music they create—the first strictly political music genre in Poland—emerged not in opposition to the power structure (which was the case of American rap) but with a generous support of the state and its institutions, public and private media, as well as right-wing and nationalistic circles. Adamski, Łukasz. “Tadek Niewygodna Prawda—tak powinno uczyć się patriotyzmu— Recenzja”. wPolityce.pl. 27 Nov. 2012. http://wpolityce.pl/kultura/246777tadek- niewygodna-prawda-tak-powinno-uczyc-sie-patriotyzmu-recenzja. Accessed November 30, 2018. Allen, Ernest Jr. “Religious Heterodoxy and Nationalist Tradition: The Continuing Evolution of the Nation of Islam.” The Black Scholar 26.3/4 (1996): 2-34. Print. Assmann, Jan. Pamięć kulturowa: Pismo, zapamiętywanie i polityczna tożsamość w cywilizacjach starożytnych. Trans. Anna Kryczyńska-Pham. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa UW, 2008. Print. Balcer, Adam. Beneath the Surface of Illiberalism: The Recurring Temptation of ‘National Democracy’ in Poland and Hungary—With Lessons for Europe. Warsaw: WiseEuropa, 2017. Print. Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. California: University of California Press, 2014. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Dystynkcja: społeczna krytyka władzy sądzenia. Trans. Piotr Biłos. Warszawa: Scholar, 2005. Print. Brykczyński, Paweł. Primed for Violence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Print. Campbell, Jospeh. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell). Novato: New World Library, 2008. Print. Castells, Manuel. Siła tożsamości. Trans. Sebastian Szymański. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2008. Print.
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Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Print. Dmowski, Roman. Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka. Wrocław: Nortom, 2002. Print. Dyson, Michael Erick. Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas, 2007. Print Gallen, David ed. Malcolm X: As They Knew Him. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Print. Gawrycki, Marcin Florian. (I)grając ze smakiem: muzyka tożsamość i polityka na Karaibach. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2013. Print. Gramasci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. Morley David and Chen Kuan-Hsing. New York: Routledge, 1996. 262-275. Print. Hayek, Friedrich August von. Intelektualiści a socjalizm. Warszawa: Prohibita, 1998. Print. Heron, Wojciech. “‘Zrozumiałem, że lepiej zło dobrem zwyciężać.’ Wywiad z Tadeuszem “Tadkiem” Polkowskim.” 15 May 2017. Radio Maryja. http://www.radiomaryja.pl/ informacje/zrozumialem-ze-lepiej-zlo-dobrem-zwyciezac-wywiad-tadeuszem-tadkiem- polkowskim/. Accessed November 30, 2018. Hirsch, Lilly. E. “Rap as threat? The Violent Translation of Music in American Law.” Law, Culture and the Humanities (2014): 1-19. Print. Hooks, Bell. “Postmodernistyczna czerń.” Trans. Ewa Łuczak. Kultura, tekst, ideologia. Dyskursy współczesnej amerykanistyki. Ed. Preis-Smith Agata. Kraków: Univeristas, 2004. 429-439. Print. ---. “Postmodern Blackness.” http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/ Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html. Accessed November 30, 2018. Jaskułowski, Krzysztof. “Kultura popularna jako bole bitwy: wokół kulturoznawstwa krytycznego Stuarta Halla.” Ścięgna konsumpcyjne. Próby z kulturoznawstwa krytycznego. Ed. Burszta Wojciech Józef and Czubaj Mariusz. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Katedra, 2013. 51-77. Print. Kamionowski, Jerzy. “LeRoi Jones / Amri Baraka – Kaliban w płaszczu Prospera.” Czarno na białym. Afroamerykanie, którzy poruszyli Amerykę. Ed. Łuczak Ewa, Antoszek Andrzej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2009. 29-66. Print. Karahasan, Dževad. Sarajewska sevdalinka. Trans. Joanna Pomorska and Danuta Cirlić- Straszyńska. Sejny: Pogranicze, 1995. Print. Keyes, Cheryl L. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print. Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Civitas Books, 2006. Print. Kleyff, Tomasz. “Rzut oka wstecz.” Węcławek Dominika, Flint Marcin, Kleyff Tomasz, Cała Andrzej, Jaczyński Kamil. Antologia Polskiego Rapu. Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014. 10-25. Print. Kowalewski, Zbigniew M. RAP: między Malcolmem X a subkulturą gangową. e-Book. Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Kubrin, Charis E., and Erik Nielson Erik. “Rap on Trial.” Race and Justice 4.3 (2014): 185– 211. Print.
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Kukołowicz, Tomasz. Raperzy kontra filomaci. Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014. Print. Kurnicki, Karol. “‘Dziś w moim mieście’: społeczna i polityczna przestrzeń codzienna w hip-hopie.” Hip-hop w Polsce: Od blokowisk do kultury popularnej. Ed. Miszczyński, Miłosz. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014. 144-164. Print. Leder, Andrzej, Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenia z krytyki historycznej. Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2014. Print. Lusane, Clarence. “Rap, Race and Politics” Race & Class 35.1 (1993): 41–56. Print. Majewski, Piotr. “Rap jako muzyka tożsamościowa: od czarnego getta do polskiego pop- nacjonalizmu.” Sprawy Narodowościowe. Seria nowa 47 (2015): 57–79. Print. ---. “Polska dla Polaków, nie żaden kurwa Achmed—analiza narracji islamofobicznych w polskim rapie.” Kultura Popularna 51 (2017): 106-116. Print. Meller, Adam. “Wywiad z Tadkiem z krakowskiej Firmy nt. patriotyzmu i polskiej historii.” 13 July 2012. konserwatyzm.pl. https://www.konserwatyzm.pl/artykul/4822/ wywiad-konserwatyzmpl-z-tadkiem-z-krakowskiej-firmy-nt-patri>. Accessed November 30, 2018. Mitchell, Tony, ed. Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2002. Print. Miyakawa, Felicia. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop's Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005 Print. Miszczyński, Miłosz. “Hip-hop w Polsce. Od blokowisk do kultury popularnej”. Hip-hop w Polsce. Od blokowisk do kultury popularnej. Ed. Miłosz Miszczyński. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014. 7-18. Print. Nijakowski, Lech. M. Polska polityka pamięci. Esej socjologiczny. Warszawa: WAiP, 2008. Print. Novak, Michael. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies. New York: Mcmillan, 1973. Print. Nowak, Krzysztof. “‘Tadek: Nawijanie może być muzyczną publicystyką.’ Wywiad.” 12 Dec. 2013. SurgePolonia.Blog. http://blog.surgepolonia.pl/2013/12/tadek-nawijanie- moze-byc-muzyczna-publicystyka-wywiad/. Accessed November 30, 2018. Nowak, Krzysztof. “Tau: ‘Budujmy patriotyzm na miłości.’ Wywiad.” 13 Jan. 2014. SurgePolonia.Blog. http://blog.surgepolonia.pl/2014/01/tau-budujmy-patriotyzm-na- milosci-wywiad-2/>. Accessed November 30, 2018. Pankowski, Rafał. Rasizm a kultura popularna. Warszawa: Trio, 2006. Print. Pough, Gwendolyn D. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hi-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Print. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Print. Skrzyczkowski, Konstanty. “Czego słuchasz?—wolność i dyskryminacja w gustach muzycznych.” Kultura i polityka. Sztuka i polityka. Muzyka popularna. Ed. Jeziński Marek, Wojtkowski Łukasz. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2012. 29-42. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. Strategie postkolonialne. Trans. Maciej Kropiwnicki et al. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011. Print. Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987. Print. Sullivan, Denise. Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. Print.
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Struzik, Justyna. “Seks i kapitalizm. Polski przypadek kultury hip-hopowej.” Hip-hop w Polsce. Od blokowisk do kultury popularnej. Ed. Miłosz Miszczyński. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014. 165-180. Print. Watkins, Craig. Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Print. Wend, Simon. “The Roots of Black Power. Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement.” In The Black Power Movement. Rethinking the Civil Rights— Black Power Era. Ed. Peniel E. Joseph. New York: Routledge, 2006. 145-166. Print. Wynter, Leon E. American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America. New York: Crown, 2002. Print. “Wywiad z Bujakiem, przedstawicielem nacjonalistycznej sceny Rap.” 19 Oct. 2017. Aktyw Północy. http://www.aktyw14.net/index.php/artykuly/publicystyka/695- wywiad-z-bujakiem-przedstawicielem-nacjonalistycznej-sceny-rap. Accessed November 30, 2018. “Wywiad z chuliganem odcinek 44 – Tadeusz Polkowski.” 2 Nov. 2017. stadionowioprawcy.net. http://stadionowioprawcy.net/news/wywiad-chuliganem- odcinek-44-tadeusz-polkowski/. Accessed Nov. 30, 2018. Zakszewska, Sandra. “Kogo najczęściej słuchali Polacy w 2017 roku?” 12 Dec.2017. Tuba.pl. http://tuba.pl/tubapl/7,103887,22774669,kogo-najczesciej-sluchali-polacy- w-2017-roku.html. Accessed Nov. 30, 2018.
NOTES
1. Leon Wynter showed how the marginalized African-American culture, symbolized through rap, hip-hop street wear and “gangsta” lifestyle, transformed into a counterculture and was later taken over and commercialized by American corporations. Wyner points out that although rap is being predominantly created by African Americans the proportions change dramatically in the case of the ownership of the record companies, producers and the people in charge of the music industry (Wynter). Other researchers argue that the modern rap actually reinforces stereotypes about Afro-Americans and promotes materialism, violence, sexism and anti- intellectualism (Pope; Collins 161-196). 2. Courts in the U.S. increasingly use rap lyrics as decisive evidence in lawsuits against their authors. Chris E. Kubrin and Erik Nielson and Luly Hirsh, who analyzed the way the lawsuits based on circumstantial evidence were conducted (with a few dozen rappers sentenced to long- term imprisonment or capital punishment) argue that the verdicts were based solely on the literal interpretation of the “street” poetry (Kubrin and Nielson; Hirsch). 3. Many rap stars are connected not only with the “Nation of Islam” (NOI) but also with The Five- Percent Nation, a syncretic socio-religious movement established in Harlem in 1964 by Clarence Edward Smith, a former NOI member and Malcolm X’s disciple, who adopted the name of Clarence 13X and became famous as Allah the Father. Allah left the Nation of Islam since he did not accept its doctrine saying that “all white people have been tainted with the original evil” and he rejected the idea that Wallace Fard Muhammad, the first founder of the Nation of Islam, was
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actually Allah himself. Instead, he went on to preach that the original black man was God and the original black woman was Mother Earth. According to the teachings of the Five Percenters, also known as “The Nation of Gods and Earths,” black people were the first people to inhabit the earth and thus they are the fathers (“Gods”) and mothers (“Earths”) of all people. The Gods and Mother Earths being 5% of the global population (hence the name of the movement), they perceive themselves as enlightened researchers/scientists, whose aim is to find absolute knowledge and evidence to corroborate it. Their goal is to preach to the unenlightened, i.e. those who worship a false Mysterious God and atheists who compose 85% of the global population, and to fight with the remaining 10% of humanity who know the truth about the Mysterious God but use this knowledge to control the previously mentioned 85% of people. According to the Five Percenters, those people include the higher clergy of the Christian and other religions, authority officials, media people, members of international finance and corporate establishment. The Five Percenters do not constitute a monolithic group of believers who act according to the same consistent religious doctrine, and their spiritual endeavors are based on their individual experience. Moreover, with some of their members being, in fact, white individuals, this movement rejects the ideology of black supremacy. The teachings of Five Percenters became quite popular among African-American intellectuals during the Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1980s and 1990s they were among the most important sources of inspiration for “political” rappers. Among the activists belonging to Five Percenters or those who declared to have sourced inspiration from their religious assumptions and beliefs, one can name the following artists: Gang Starr, Mobb Deep, Poor Righteous Teachers, Jurassic 5, Mos Def, Everlast, Eve, Common, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Brand Nubian, Jay Z, Wu-Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Busta Rhymes, Killah Priest, Nas, Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, the Guru or Tribe Called Quest (Miyakawa). 4. Manuel Castells points out that “‘resistance identity’ is generated by those actors who are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society.... Naturally, identities that start as resistance may induce projects, and may also, along the course of history, become dominant in the institutions of society, thus becoming legitimizing identities to rationalize their domination. Indeed, the dynamics of identities along this sequence shows that, from the point of view of social theory, no identity can be an essence, and no identity has, per se, progressive or regressive value outside its historical context” (Castells 8). 5. Applying a critical perspective to the set of ideas comprising black essentialism, one needs to understand its context. This is explained by bell hooks: “Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African- Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of ‘the authority of experience.’ There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black ‘essence’ and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle” (“Postmodern Blackness”). 6. Parallel to its American model, Polish hip-hop culture was born at youth clubs, commonly present in major Polish cities. By the end of the 1990s, the Polish rap began to diversify—in terms of its lyrics and sound—depending on the region the rappers came from. Their songs would feature elements of different slangs, as well as different American rap subgenres the individual Polish rappers were inspired by. The Warsaw rap scene, for example, was inspired by the New York rap sound, while the Poznan rappers mostly took to the California (West Coast) style (Kleyff 14). Among the most popular American rappers in Poland were such artists and bands as: 2PAC,
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Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, 50 Cent, N.W.A, The Game, The Notorious B.I.G.DMX, Xzibit, Mobb Deep, Eazy-E, Busta Rhymes, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Onyx, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, D12, Wu-Tang Clan, G-Unit, Cypress Hill, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Nas, Eminem, Lloyd Banks, The Fugees, Outkast, Nate Dogg, Compton's Most Wanted, Jay Z, Fat Joe, Luniz, Young Jeezy, Outlawz, Lil' Wayne, Raekwon, Method Man, Big Punisher, Public Enemy, GZA/Genius, Puff Daddy, House of Pain, Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Redman. 7. Tomasz Kukłowicz comments on the 2005 and 2009 opinion polls concerning the social profile of the rap audience in Poland as follows: “At that time, rap was the music of young people. In the group of those up to 24 years of age, its popularity rate reached 40%. Its audience was rather male than female, including individuals with average and just below average incomes, rather than the very poor or the very rich. Rap’s popularity decreased along with the rise of the level of education. The genre was equally popular in towns and cities as well as in the country” (151). 8. As early as in 2014 Karol Kurnicki wrote that “Polish hip-hop was not politically polarized; it was never either left or right oriented.... Instead, it is mainly post-proletarian (popular?), i.e. connected with the situation of the urban dwellers whose position is determined by the neo- liberal economic transition. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the criticism expressed in Polish hip-hop songs is typical of the societies involved in the capitalist transition. It either assumes a ‘social’ position (meaning it highlights economic problems), or an ‘artistic’ one, emphasizing the pursuit of creativity and personal freedom over the socio-bahavioral matters” (161-162). 9. The Warsaw Uprising Museum (WUM) is particularly instrumental in utilizing music to promote its own historical policies. It became the first public institution in Poland hiring rappers to create songs about the Warsaw uprising. In 2007, WWO, a popular Warsaw group together with Kapela Czerniakowska recorded the song titled “Pierwszy sierpnia” (The First of August) commissioned by the WUM and the Institute of National Remembrance in association with the Discovery History TV channel. In 2009, the WUM was involved in co-producing a song by Hemp Gru “63 dni chwały” (63 Days of Glory); this group also created the soundtrack to the movie Sierpniowe niebo. 63 dni chwały (The August Sky. 63 Days of Glory), produced in association with the WUM in 2013. For over ten years, different rappers have been performing at concerts organized annually by the WUM to commemorate the Uprising. 10. According to Spotify, the most popular streaming platform in Poland, in 2017, hip-hop made 30 out of 50 most popular Polish artists, with Taco Hemingway (over 50m listener streams), Quebonafide, O.S.T.R., Paluch and Białas topping the list. (http://tuba.pl/tubapl/ 7,103887,22774669,kogo-najczesciej-sluchali-polacy-w-2017-roku.html). 11. The term “cursed soldiers” is quite controversial and has been used in the public discourse only since the 1990s. It refers to loose guerrilla squads which following the end of World War II continued to fight with the Soviet secret services and their Polish communist counterparts. Most of those squads were either eliminated or disbanded by the end of 1947. Some of them took to criminal acts like looting, banditry, murders and even genocide on civilians, including national minorities (Belarusians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Jews). Witold Pilecki was a member of the Polish underground state, a soldier of the Home Army, and a prisoner of KL Auschwitz where he set up a resistance movement; he was also the author of one of the first reports from Auschwitz (so called Pilecki’s Reports). In 1948, he was sentenced to death by the Polish communist authorities. Danuta Helena Siedzikówna alias Inka, was a nurse helping one of the Home Army squads which fought with the Nazis during the Second World War. Next, she served in a guerilla squad which fought after the war with the communist authorities. Arrested in 1946, she refused to testify against the members of the armed resistance. Siedzikówna was sentenced to death at the age of 18. 12. A rapper with the stage name of Tau, for example. says that he discovered patriotism thanks to the Holy Spirit: “First of all I experienced a really deep conversion and received a gift—though
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I don’t want to sound vain—the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.... My patriotism is connected with my conversion.... My faith in Jesus Christ led me to all the other values, like for example, patriotism.... For the last two years I have been a bit of a hypocrite but in order to get myself out of some serious trouble, I had to go a long way to understand my faith and patriotism. (http:// blog.surgepolonia.pl/2014/01/tau-budujmy-patriotyzm-na-milosci-wywiad-2/). 13. According to Jan Assman, communicative memory consists of memories referring to a recent past, a case in point being generational memory (66-67). Cultural memory is described by the German scholar as a “foundation memory,” oriented toward fixed points in the past which help define the group’s identity (67-68).
ABSTRACTS
In today’s world, cultural products, technologies, information and ideologies easily transcend national borders, and the history of the internationalization of rap music is a good example of this phenomenon. Rap has not only become a symbol of the IT revolution and the prevalence of the western capitalist business practices, but also a cultural tool used by some marginalized groups to express their identity. The first part of this article explains how rap, having become an important element of African-American culture, enabled its audience and artists to manifest and communicate their ideas, beliefs and values, including those that are rooted in the culture of black nationalism. In the second part, I provide an outline of the history of Polish rap and trace the African-American influences, to finally focus on the rise of a specific Polish subgenre called “patriotic rap.”
INDEX
Keywords: nationalism, consumerism, popular culture, hip-hop culture, “political rap, ” Polish rap, “patriotic rap” “culture war”
AUTHOR
PIOTR MAJEWSKI Piotr Majewski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the SWPS University, Warsaw, is an anthropologist and a sociologist. His academic interests includeurban anthropology, anthropology of sport, sociology of popular music and of nationalism.
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The Polish Superheroes Have Arrived!: On the Popularity of Superhero Stories and Adaptations
Emma Oki
1. Comics and Adaptation
1 According to David Roche et al., “Adaptation has… been an integral part of the history of comics” (7). Many comics have been inspired by and adapted into other cultural texts. For example, graphic versions of literary classics abound in the comics medium, as do filmic versions of comics in the medium of film. The existence of adaptations, as Blair Davis writes, “demonstrates our collective desire to experience the same stories and characters in more than just one form” (2). While adaptations may be interesting to readers and audiences for purely entertainment purposes, they are an altogether different affair for scholars of culture, adaptation, and American studies, for they allow scholars not only to examine source texts and adaptations but also to trace social, cultural, and political shifts in specific spatial and temporal frames.
2 The popularity of certain types of adaptations may provide insight into the spirit of the times in which they were created. The current success of, for example, film adaptations of superhero comics can be explained easily if the developments of the previous decade are taken into account. Liam Burke, for instance, identifies three main factors that have contributed to the rise of “The Golden Age of Comic Book Filmmaking”: cultural traumas and the celebration of the hero following real-life events, in particular the 9/11 terrorist attacks; technological advancements, most notably digital film techniques, which allow the source to be recreated more faithfully and efficiently on screen; and finally contemporary filmmaking paradigms that favor content with a preexisting fanbase and an amenability to franchise opportunities. (23)
3 The pervasiveness of superhero narratives has also led to the appearance of local superheroes that do not, as Rayna Denison, Rachel Mizsei-Ward, and Derek Johnston
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write, “trace their histories back to US comic books” (3). However, in the case of Maciej and Adam Kmiołek’s Biały Orzeł (White Eagle) character, a strong connection to the American superhero genre can be observed. In their series entitled Polski Superbohater Biały Orzeł (PSBO), the Kmiołek brothers weave culture-specific elements into the fabric of their stories by making use of their own cultural system and by tapping into the conventions of the American superhero genre. This makes PSBO a Polish superhero comic book series with a decidedly American slant in comparison to earlier superhero- inspired Polish comics.
2. 80 Years of Superhero Comics
4 Having made his debut appearance in the first issue of Action Comics in June 1938, Superman is the oldest superhero character still popular today. Fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, the Man of Steel is a cultural icon, which, as Ian Gordon writes, he owes to “circumstance and management” (4). During the Great Depression and World War II, Americans were in need of a hero—whether real or fictitious—that would distract them from and give them hope and strength to endure the woes of economic hardship and war. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s brainchild proved to be what the public needed and even more. Superman was a man of action and, as Tomasz Żaglewski writes, embodied the spirit of the New Deal era (109). He paved the way for a myriad of other superheroes, many of whom are an integral part of American popular culture, including Batman, the Detective Comics character only a year younger than Superman; Wonder Woman, who first appeared on the pages of All Star Comics in 1941; Spider-Man, who debuted in Amazing Fantasy in 1962; and Iron Man, first featured in Tales of Suspense in 1963. According to Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci, the superhero genre is successful due to several key factors: “Because they tell of ultimate strength, deep despair, unfathomable longing, and immeasurable bravery, superhero stories have been an enduring form of entertainment reflecting American ideals and celebrating the inherent nobility of man” (1). In their early days, superhero comic books also gained popularity owing to their affordability; costing only a dime apiece, they were cheap and highly entertaining. What also contributed to their growing readership was “the colorful nature of the medium” (Romagnoli and Pagnucci 6–7). Over time, superheroes appeared in other media, including radio, TV, and film, all of which had an influence on the development of the superhero genre. Today, its pervasiveness is unquestionable as superhero characters and their symbols are present across all cultural artifacts, from works of art to independently published zines.
5 While superheroes may be viewed as modern gods or demigods due to their mythic powers and abilities, not all of them are of divine origin. With some exceptions (for example, William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman), most superhero comic book creators have used science fiction to explain the origins of their characters’ powers instead of referring to classical mythology. In the case of Superman, Siegel and Shuster “explain the source of Superman’s abilities in terms more familiar to science fiction” as opposed to comparing him to the likes of Hermes and Heracles, who possessed incredible speed and strength (Bahlmann 5). This is yet another reason why the Last Son of Krypton and other superheroes are more relatable, universal, and, as a result, more appealing than their ancient antecedents.
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6 What can also explain the superhero genre’s popularity is its stories’ distinct structure and cyclical nature. Indebted to Joseph Campbell’s classical monomyth, John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett provide the following description of the American monomyth, which, as they argue, “derives from tales of redemptions”: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then fades into obscurity. (6)
7 Deviating from the classical departure-trial-return paradigm devised by Campbell, Lawrence and Jewett’s five-tiered plot formula is present, to a varying degree, in all superhero comics. Although it may be perceived as cliché, this story convention allows writers to tap into a well-established system that enables them to engage readers and to surprise them in other creative ways.
8 In The Mythology of the Superhero, Andrew Bahlmann contends that superheroes are enjoying an unprecedented prominence in contemporary popular culture. Indeed, as he writes, “From the time X-Men hit screens in 2000, superheroes have become a part of mainstream culture in a way they haven’t been for decades” (3). In the 2000s, the financial success of X-Men and later Spider-Man (2002) encouraged film studios to release big-screen adaptations of superhero comics at a hitherto unprecedented rate and scale. With minor exceptions (Catwoman and Elektra, for example), the movies’ consistent strong box office performance reinvigorated the superhero genre. In the mid and late 2000s, there also appeared several reboots, including those of the Batman and Hulk franchises (2005 and 2008 respectively). Released just over a month earlier than The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man was the first of twenty films belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of October 2018. Not surprisingly, its overwhelming popularity translated into more superhero content. In the early 2010s, the DC Extended Universe committed its efforts to the production of a new version of one of its most iconic superhero characters, Superman; when compared to Warner Bros.’ earlier attempt in 2006, the 2013 movie Man of Steel was a bigger success and was soon followed by four more superhero movies, two of which also featured the character of Superman.
9 An additional force that contributed to the superhero genre’s longevity and global popularity is globalization as well as adaptation. Listed among America’s biggest exports, American popular culture has played an important role in shaping many non- American entertainment industries (Isidore). The flow of not only capital but also culture allowed American superheroes to gain worldwide recognition. It also enabled the superhero genre to flourish in other cultural contexts. For example, many adaptations of American superhero comics exist outside the United States, such as in the center of manga and anime—Japan. In 1966, Batmania swept the country following the success of the campy live-action Batman TV series produced in the US. Wanting to capitalize on the Batman craze, the publisher of Shōnen King commissioned Jiro Kuwata to create Battoman, a manga series that ran for two years from 1966 to 1967. As a shōnen manga, it featured solely male villains, “which can be attributed to the fact that the manga was meant to be like an action movie directed at young Japanese male readers” (Ono 358). Although Kuwata intended to emulate the art style of his American counterparts, he was unable to do so due to the time-consuming nature of such an endeavor: “my intention was to adapt my art style to the American way of drawing Batman. However, as it happened, I couldn’t help but revert to my usual art style,
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which I regret to some extent. But even trying to stray from my usual form and draw it the American way took me twice as long to do” (344). Decades after its first publication, Kuwata’s Batman manga was introduced to American readers by the author of Bat- Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan, who admits that he “became aware of the comics through David Mazzucchelli” (Kidd). Kuwata’s Batman was later published in its entirety in three volumes by DC Comics. In his review of the first volume, Steve Raiteri recommends the series not only “for its cross-cultural interest but also to fans wanting some straightforward Batman adventure” (89). More recent manga adaptations of Batman include Kia Asamiya’s Batman: Child of Dreams (2000–2001), Yoshinori Natsume’s Batman: Death Mask (2008), and Shiori Teshirogi’s Batman and the Justice League (2017).
3. The Underpinnings of the Superhero Genre
10 Spanning more than eight decades, superhero comics are an established genre; they have their own history and distinguishing characteristics. According to Jess Nevins, the periodization of comics comprises the following ages: “the Golden Age, the Atomic Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Modern Age, and the Metamodern Age” (235). What may help demarcate, albeit somewhat arbitrarily at times, the beginning and end of each age is, as Nevins writes, “the content of the superhero—the ethos of the character type, their typical personality, [and] their generic outlines,” all of which have undergone changes over the ages (235). In terms of form, as Nevins argues, it is rather “set” as “the superhero no longer evolves,” belonging to one of the following two categories: “the Übermensch and the Costumed Avenger” (235). In To Be A Hero: A Superhero Role Playing Game (2006), Vincent Venturella offers a more detailed categorization for RPG enthusiasts, one that is based on a character’s origin. For RPG players, a clear-cut division is of paramount importance as it “determines the basic abilities and options open to the character” (Venturella 21). In brief, a superhero may belong to one of the five groups of origin: aliens, altered humans, nexers, peak human performers, and robots (Venturella 21–26). Some examples of the above from the Marvel and DC Comics universes include Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and Vision.
11 Setting aside superhero origin stories, Scott Jeffery offers an interesting reading of superhero stories, viewing them through the prism of the posthuman body, while simultaneously noting that other approaches are possible, especially from the perspective of feminist, queer, ethnic, and disability studies. Jeffery identifies the perfect (for example, Superman), cosmic (for instance, Dr. Strange), and the military- industrial bodies (namely, Iron Man), which may be perceived as being indicative of the times in which they were created: “the Transhumanism of the Golden Age focused on the creation of Perfect Bodies.… As the Silver Age reinvigorated the Superhuman, Transhumanism also became reinvigorated by the Cosmic Body.… By the time of the Dark Ages, the discourse of Transhumanism had also shifted… to the Military-Industrial Body” (Jeffery 234). Indeed, the superhero genre is, as Jeffery writes, a “posthuman body genre” owing to its medium’s visual nature and, most importantly, its genre’s dependence on the corporeal (13).
12 In his attempt to provide a generic definition of the superhero, Peter Coogan identifies three elements that are “the core of the genre”: mission, powers, and identity (82). Indeed, all superheroes possess superpowers, which, however, do not necessarily have
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to be supernatural. They have enhanced “normal” abilities, including speed and strength, but they also have special ones that give them an advantage in combat, enabling them to, for example, fly and fire power blasts. Superman, for instance, can move at an incredible speed, withstand bullet impacts, and see through walls. Although Batman seemingly does not possess any superpowers, he is, undoubtedly, more agile than the average human thanks to his training, can survive gunshots owing to his bulletproof suit, and can see more thanks to his high-tech gear. Apart from powers, superheroes also need a mission. The former character fights evil and injustice predominantly in Metropolis, while the latter in Gotham City. However, as Coogan argues, they should be selfless in their efforts to do good and justice: “The mission convention is essential to the superhero genre because someone who does not act selflessly to aid others in times of need is not heroic and therefore not a superhero” (77). The final ingredient is identity, which includes the superhero’s costume and codename. Both elements somehow reflect a character’s inner world, functioning as a bridge between their non-superhero and superhero selves: “Superman is a super man who represents the best humanity can hope to achieve; his codename expresses his inner character. The Batman identity was inspired by Bruce Wayne’s encounter with a bat while he was seeking a disguise able to strike terror into the hearts of criminals; his codename embodies his biography” (Coogan 79). Similarly, their costumes serve as a symbol of their character: Superman’s is bright and gives hope, while Batman’s is dark and evokes fear. Romagnoli and Pagnucci additionally provide the following characteristic features that 13 humanize superheroes in an attempt to make their stories more appealing to readers and audiences alike: 1. His/her origins are, in some way, informed by a tragedy. 2. He/she is obsessed with achieving his/her goals. 3. With few exceptions, he/she is a solitary figure. 4. His/her goal is unattainable. 5. He/she has a weakness. (8)
14 Indeed, many superhero characters are survivors: Kal-El survives the destruction of his planet of origin, while young Bruce Wayne witnesses an armed assault that led to his parents’ death. Both do what is within their power to fight evil, lead socially withdrawn lives, constantly contend with villains that want to disrupt the peaceful lives of unsuspecting citizens, and have certain vulnerabilities despite possessing super skills: Superman, for example, is influenced by Kryptonite, whereas Batman often struggles with his inner demons.
15 What is also typical of many superhero stories is that the characters go through the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, both literally and metaphorically. Superman conveniently illustrates the former, while Batman may serve as an example of the latter. Born on Krypton, Superman dies and is reborn on Earth, still eager to defend those in need. Similarly, in order for the Caped Crusader to come into existence, Bruce Wayne has to experience the death of his parents and later his helpless self to be reborn as Batman, the fearless avenger. Spider-Man, on the other hand, is an ordinary teenager whose regular life ends after he gets bitten by a radioactive spider, which grants him enhanced senses, agility, and endurance. However, the process of becoming a superhero, as Phillip Thurtle argues in his TEDx talk, is not just about survival but rather about transformation:
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It’s not so much that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, it’s that what you survive gives you a specific type of power. That’s an important difference. The first one concentrates on the notion of strength, the strength to endure disaster. The second one is about transformation and the ability to let your environment transform you. (“What Superheroes Are Made of”)
4. A Brief Overview of Polish (Super)heroes
16 American superhero comics were not widely available in Poland until the last decade of the 20th century, when TM-Semic started publishing reprints of Marvel and later DC series, including Spider-Man, Punisher, Superman, and Batman comics. Only after the fall of communism was it possible for American superhero series to appear on the Polish market due to the ideals and values that they promoted. By the same token, while Polish artists were familiar with the American superhero genre during the Polish People’s Republic period, they did not create their own superhero stories so as to avoid falling into disfavor with the authorities; as a result, Polish superheroes modeled after their classic American counterparts appeared much later than their European equivalents.
17 According to Paweł Timofiejuk, comics in Poland were political in their earliest days primarily due to their use as tools of propaganda, understood as “a way to communicate a certain point of view, with the aim of inducing the recipient to accept this viewpoint as their own” (196). Their history can be divided to correspond with their persuasive functions, namely prewar newspaper comic strips, many of which employed negative propaganda in that they achieved their ends through ridicule and criticism of particular nations, ethnicities, and ideologies; communist comic books, which instituted a more positive propaganda strategy than their prewar counterpart; and contemporary graphic stories, which more freely reflect their creators’ political leanings (Timofiejuk 180–195). This may help explain why it took so long for Polish superheroes to emerge. Nevertheless, there are early examples of characters that, while not being superheroes, possessed some superhero qualities.
18 During the Polish People’s Republic era, many comics published officially focused on disseminating good practices and fostering desirable behaviors, the aim of which was to create an environment conducive to the spread of communist ideals. Since American superhero comics were criticized for containing capitalist ideology and celebrating the individual rather than the collective effort, the regime was wary of them but nevertheless recognized their potential for mass appeal (Żaglewski 112–113). In 1957, Świat Młodych published Henryk Jerzy Chmielewski’s first Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek comic. While it was packed with propaganda content, it soon became one of the most popular series among young readers due to its appealing style and humor. For adult readers, there were humor and adventure newspaper strips. On July 10, 1966, Sierżant Cień appeared on the pages of Słowo Ludu, a Kielce-based newspaper. While the panels do not blend the verbal and the visual, Żaglewski argues that Zbigniew Nosal and Marian Gostyński’s work may be perceived as one of the first attempts to create a Polish hero inspired by the works of American superhero comics and their “capitalist heroes.” Although the main character, Jan Derenda, does not possess any superpowers, he has a mission to fight the Nazi Germans, which he does with great zeal (Żaglewski 112–113).
19 Apart from magazines and newspapers, new characters were introduced in the comic book format, for example, Jan Żbik and Hans Kloss. The former, a Citizens’ Militia (CM)
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officer, is the protagonist of Kapitan Żbik (1967), which was commissioned by Władysław Krupka to bring a more positive image of the CM formation. Not surprisingly, the main character fights crime and, at the same time, promotes socially desirable behavior. According to Żaglewski, the series is an early expression of the Polish version of the American monomyth, and, as Mateusz Szlachtycz suggests, the titular character may be viewed as Batman’s counterpart: after all, he owes his speed and strength to technology, as does Batman (Żaglewski 114). Another popular character of the time was Hans Kloss, featured in Kapitan Kloss (1971), an adaptation of the popular TV series Stawka większa niż życie (1967). As a secret agent, he helps fight Nazi Germany and also reinforces values in line with the agenda of the communist party. Other characters include Maciej Parowski et al.’s Funky Koval, who belongs to a team of space detectives, and Andrzej O. Nowakowski’s Doman, the main protagonist of a 1987 fantasy comic book series inspired by Conan the Barbarian. The former, as Jerzy Szyłak writes, owed its popularity to its multiple references to social and political events of the time (139). The latter, despite issues with perspective and the series’ unconventional size, garnered critical acclaim for its use of Polish legends (Wojteczek).
20 The most obvious reference to American superhero comics was Tadeusz Baranowski’s Orient Men (1976), which was first published in Relax (1976). As a parody of American superhero stories, the series was by no means what mainstream American superhero comics were at the time. It offered entertaining but absurd adventures of the titular character, a well-meaning superhero that could fly but not always succeeded in helping people with their oftentimes mundane issues. His adventures, however, may be read as a reflection as well as a criticism of the absurdities of the times in which Baranowski lived. Decades later, Orient Men comics were collected and published by two Polish publishers, namely Egmont in 2002 and Ongrys in 2015. Baranowski’s work inspired other creators, for instance, Bartosz and Tomasz Minkiewicz, the authors of Wilq (2003). Like its antecedent, Wilq parodies the superhero genre but in a more obscene manner. The cover of the first collection is a direct reference to the first issue of Action Comics: the titular character is holding a car in the air, and the people around him are running away in terror. Drawn in a simple style, the series contains humorous content and topical issues. However, its most notable feature is its vulgar language. More recent examples of superhero parodies include Maciej and Bogusław Zaręba’s Kops (2009), which started as an online webcomic series commenting on contemporary superhero comics and movies; Adam Czernatowicz and Rafał Kołsut’s Człowiek bez szyi (2011), which features the adventures of a superhero that gains incredible strength but loses his neck following an incident at a secret military base; and Łukasza Mazur’s Usta pełne śmierci (2014), a tribute to Fletcher Hanks’s character Fantomah (1940).
21 The shift from parody to serious or classic superhero stories took place in 2010 when Rafał Szłapa self-published the first issue of Bler. Not only is the titular character incredibly fast, but he also has x-ray vision. He gained his superpowers after undergoing a procedure that saved his life and enhanced his abilities—an all-too- familiar origin story, placing him in the altered human category. Dubbed Cracow’s Superman, Bler and his team’s mission is to prevent tragedies from ever happening, or so it seems. Thanks to a super-fast laptop, they can read the following day’s news, giving them an advantage over the would-be criminals and saving the lives of innocent people. The costume Bler adorns uses the same color scheme as Superman’s and Spider-Man’s outfits, namely blue and red, which immediately places the character in a specific context, namely that of a superhero and savior of the helpless. A more recent
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example of a Polish superhero is Piotr Czarnecki and Łukasz Ciżmowski’s Incognito (2014), who uses his power of invisibility to fight crime. Another interesting character is Dariusz Stańczyk and Jakub Oleksów’s Lis (2014), who returns to Poland after gaining super strength and agility following a lab accident in the UK; however, he does not use his superpowers only for selfless deeds.
22 Unlike their American counterparts, Polish (super)heroes followed a different evolutionary path. Aware of the prominence of superhero stories outside Poland, some Polish creators tried to include superhero elements in their stories. However, it was not until the 2010s that classic American-style superheroes started appearing in Polish webcomics and comic books. Previously, creators were rather focused on producing entertaining imitations, which nevertheless may provide interesting insight into the zeitgeist of the times in which they were created. The section below focuses on the Kmiołek brothers’ Biały Orzeł, who typifies the classic superhero character.
5. The Birth of a Polish Superhero
23 It is one in the morning. Clad in a red and white costume, a superhero is flying across the night sky, leaving behind the Palace of Culture and Science. Were it not for this landmark on its cover, readers might have mistaken Polski Superbohater Biały Orzeł (PSBO) for a non-Polish superhero comic book. Apart from Warsaw’s most iconic building, the rest of the features were undoubtedly inspired by the covers of American superhero comic book series, for instance, the superhero’s impossibly muscled body in flight. Spanning twelve issues as of October 2018, PSBO is one of the most interesting American-style Polish superhero series. On the one hand, it adopts the conventions of the superhero genre and the American monomyth, making it, as Żaglewski aptly notes, an “affirmative” superhero narrative (122). On the other hand, it contains many references to Polish culture and history, giving it a more local context.
24 The first issue of PSBO, which was published in December 2011, follows the character of Aleks Poniatowski, his transformation into Biały Orzeł, his clash with Techcorp’s supersoldier Projekt Zero (Project Zero), and a man-eating creature living in the tunnels of Warsaw’s Central Station. The Kmiołek brothers could not have made their character’s background more Polish. Aleks and his superhero alter ego are Polish to the core: the character’s last name, Poniatowski, is a stark reference to the last Polish king before the First Partition of Poland in 1772, while the white eagle is the main element of Poland’s coat of arms. Following the conventions of the American superhero genre, Aleks gains his superpowers, albeit temporarily, after being injected with a serum of mysterious origin. Thanks to the procedure that increases his strength and endurance, the main character becomes an altered human and embodies the perfect body. Aleks’s codename and costume are determined by his origin: he falls from the 15th floor but is brought back to the living by a white eagle. His costume, which enables him to fly, incorporates the imagery of an eagle as well as the color scheme of the Polish flag. Finally, Aleks’s mission is to find his missing father and to protect Poland and her people from evil powers, but he is not alone. He teams up with Hudini, a computer genius, as well as other beings with supernatural abilities, for example, Wyklęty Polski Rycerz (Cursed Polish Knight) and Syrena (Mermaid), as well as other enhanced individuals, such as the supersoldier Projekt Zero and vigilante Obywatel (Citizen). In PSBO’s universe, Wyklęty Polski Rycerz appears when Poland is in great danger (an
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allusion to the legend of the Sleeping Knight). Syrena, on the other hand, resurfaces when her fellow Varsovians are in need of her protection.
25 Apart from including legendary characters, the Kmiołek brothers also reinvent traditional tales, for example, the legend of the three brothers Lech, Czech, and Rus, the first of whom founded Gniezno, Poland’s first capital city. While there are four instead of three brothers in the comic, the fourth one being the most powerful of them all, the inclusion of Polish legends and legendary characters makes PSBO more relatable to Polish readers, as does featuring real locations. By setting the comic in, for example, Warsaw and Szklarska Poręba, the authors blend the fictitious and non- fictitious worlds, enabling the reader to find connections between the comic and real life. They also include more contemporary culturally-specific elements, for example, Borubar, a reference to the Polish goalkeeper Artur Boruc, and Ząbkowska Street, which used to be known as one of the most dangerous streets in Warsaw.
26 What makes PSBO American is the series’ adherence to the superhero genre’s visual language and the characters’ origins, as well as the use of the American monomyth. The stories follow the same formula: Poland is threatened by evil powers; Biały Orzeł steps in to protect the innocent; he eventually wins, enabling the community to return to their peaceful lives; he then disappears, only to reappear when the next threat emerges. It may seem to be just a hackneyed scenario applied only to secure the continuity of the series. However, PSBO manages to keep the reader interested thanks to the grand overarching story, which is slowly revealed in each issue as the series progresses.
27 To humanize Biały Orzeł, the creators made their character vulnerable. His origin is marked by several personal tragedies: he falls out the window, sustains multiple injuries, remains in a coma for four years, loses his wife and company in the meantime, and wakes up paralyzed, just to name a few. While Aleks does his best to ensure the safety of his fellow citizens, he is aware of the fact that he is on a never-ending mission. In his crusade, he can depend on not only his sidekick but also other Polish (super)heroes. However, in his private life, he has only Hudini. Finally, to maintain his superpowers, he needs fresh supplies of the serum that was administered to him prior to his father’s disappearance, a vulnerability that is, however, resolved later in the series.
6. Conclusion
28 The superhero genre is alive and well both in and beyond its original cultural context. Indeed, it seems we are living in a new superhero age; the sheer amount of new content, including comic books and live-action movies, may satisfy even the most avid consumers of everything superhero. While many Polish fans are perhaps more inclined to read American comics, the growing number and improving quality of Polish superhero stories may encourage readers to discover the expanding world of superheroes born and bred in Poland. At long last, the Polish superhero landscape is slowly filling in, with Biały Orzeł at its center. Of all the contemporary Polish superhero comics, Maciej and Adam Kmiołek’s PSBO is perhaps the most serious attempt at adapting an all-American genre to a Polish setting. The main character’s origin, mission, identity, and powers all make for a typical American superhero story, as does the visual style of the comic and its use of the American monomyth; however, the
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remaining elements are predominantly Polish, including numerous references to not only the culture and history of Poland but also the topography of Warsaw and other locations, making PSBO and its characters more relatable to the local reader than their American counterparts and a good example of an affirmative superhero comic book series.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahlmann, Andrew R. The Mythology of the Superhero. McFarland, 2016. Print.
Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre. UP of Mississippi, 2015. Print.
Coogan, Peter. “The Definition of the Superhero,” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 77–93. Print.
Davis, Blair. Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page. Rutgers UP, 2017. Print.
Denison, Rayna, Rachel Mizsei-Ward, and Derek Johnston. “Introduction.” Superheroes on World Screens, edited by Rayna Denison and Rachel Mizsei-Ward, UP of Mississippi, 2015, pp. 3–16. Print.
Gordon, Ian. Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon. Rutgers UP, 2017. Print.
Isidore, Chris. “These Are the Top US Exports.” CNN Business, 7 Mar. 2018. money.cnn.com/ 2018/03/07/news/economy/top-us-exports/index.html.
Jeffery, Scott. The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/ Human. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print.
Johnson, Jeffrey K. Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society, 1938 to the Present. McFarland, 2012. Print.
Kidd, Chip. “Batmaniac.” Vice, 1 Jan. 2000, www.vice.com/en_us/article/expxdk/batmaniac-104- guide-comics. Accessed 10 Nov. 2018.
Kuwata, Jiro. “Memories of Batman.” Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga Vol. 2, by Kuwata, DC Comics, 2015, p. 344. Print.
Lawrence, John Shelton, and Robert Jewett. The Myth of the American Superhero. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Print.
Nevins, Jess. The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero. ABC-CLIO, 2017. Print.
Ono, Kosei. “The Charm of Kuwata’s Version of Batman as a Scientific Detective.” Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga Vol. 1, by Jiro Kuwata, DC Comics, 2014, pp. 358–359. Print.
Raiteri, Steve. “Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga.” Library Journal, vol. 140, no. 5, Mar. 2015, p. 89. EBSCOhost. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=a9h&AN=101900251&site=ehost- live.
Roche, David, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, and Benoît Mitaine. “Introduction: Adapting Adaptation Studies to Comics Studies.” Comics and Adaptation, edited by Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, and
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Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, translated by Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche, UP of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 3–29. Print.
Romagnoli, Alex S., and Gian S. Pagnucci. Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture, and the Canon of Superhero Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2013. Print.
Szyłak, Jerzy. Komiks: Świat przerysowany. słowo/obraz terytoria, 2009. Print.
Thurtle, Phillip. “What Superheroes Are Made of: Phillip Thurtle at TEDxRainier.” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 28 Nov. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKymhU7yi0.
Timofiejuk, Paweł. “Polski komiks jako narzędzie propagandy.” KOntekstowy MIKS. Przez opowieści graficzne do analiz kultury współczesnej, edited by Grażyna Gajewska and Rafał Wójcik, Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, 2011, pp. 179–198. Print.
Venturella, Vincent R. To Be A Hero: A Superhero Role Playing Game. Venture Land Games, 2006. Print.
Wojteczek, Mariusz. “Doman. Wydanie zbiorcze—sentymentalna podróż do lat 80-tych [Recenzja].” Review of Doman, written and illustrated by Andrzej Nowakowski. Dzika Banda, 16 Oct. 2018, dzikabanda.pl/recenzje/komiks/doman-wydanie-zbiorcze-sentymentalna-podroz-do- lat-80-tych-recenzja/.
Żaglewski, Tomasz. “Białe Orły komiksu. Wokół polskiej specyfiki narracji superbohaterskich.” Teksty Drugie, vol. 5, 2017, pp. 108–128. journals.openedition.org/td/pdf/625.
ABSTRACTS
The superhero genre is thriving, as can be seen by the success of the DC Extended Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among others. Although essentially a product of the American comic book industry of the twentieth century, superhero characters co ntinue to have a universal appeal and, as Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci write, “have become entrenched in the collective consciousness” (2). Oftentimes simple and predictable to contemporary readers and moviegoers, superhero stories attract new g enerations of fans both in the United States and internationally. They have also inspired non- American creators to produce their own costumed characters with superpowers. This article discusses the popularity of superhero narratives and their adaptations, including Maciej and Adam Kmiołeks’ Polski Superbohater Biały Orzeł (PSBO). The Kmiołek brothers borrow from and adapt the conventions of the American superhero genre, while simultaneously infusing their stories with Polish cultural elements, which makes PSBO one of the first contemporary affirmative Polish superhero comic book series.
INDEX
Keywords: comics, adaptation, superheroes, Polish superheroes, Biały Orzeł
AUTHOR
EMMA OKI Emma Oki received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. She teaches courses on visual culture and practical English. Her
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research interests include Asian American graphic literature as well as representations of ethnicity in the medium of comics.
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Alcoholics Anonymous Comes to Poland: The Founding of the Polish AA and the American Connection
Marek Jannasz
1. Introduction
1 In May 2018, the manuscript of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book was purchased at auction for over two million dollars by Jim Irsay, an American billionaire who promised to create a special place in New York to exhibit it in public for visitors from across the world. On this occasion, Joe Maddalena, the founder of a renowned auction house, said: “We are thrilled this most historic manuscript has sold and hope it will be exhibited for the world to see the manuscript that has saved the lives of millions of people” (Associated Press, May 5, 2018, www.apnews.com). Quoted after the Associated Press, the press release, which also became the news of the day at Yahoo.com, reveals something important about the American heritage of the AA fellowship, its social significance and worldwide spread, as well as the media recognition of its success. It shows the reasons why it is worthwhile, according to the author of this paper, to discuss the issue of the 12-steps movement as a social and cultural phenomenon initiated in the American society and then imported by communities across the world— among others by the Poles—despite many differences and barriers. This importation, however, did not occur automatically or painlessly: it was a process which transformed both the fellowship itself and the local social worlds.
2 This article proposes to investigate the work of AA in Poland, placing this American invention in a comparative international context and tracing the process of its cultural adaptation to foreign realities. It is part of a planned volume-length study, in which the author has drawn on a number of methodologies and sources, including in-depth interviews with AA fellows and some of the most prominent individuals involved in introducing AA to Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as with a number of American AA fellows and administrators who supported them in this effort. The study hopes to
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fill a visible gap persisting in the AA research, which has mostly concentrated on the therapeutic aspects of the 12-step movements, leaving aside the (inter)cultural aspects of their international expansion. Such a new focus should also allow some insights into the processes of so-called Americanization, or more specifically of cultural and institutional transfers stemming from the United States and comprising the global flow of culture. The first part of this article will provide a brief historical outline of the 12- step movement and reconsider its claim to be an outgrowth of so-called “Americanization.” The second part will consist of the history of the AA movement in Poland, followed by observations on the adaptability of that American phenomenon in a foreign country and the role played by cultural difference in the adaptation process.
2. American Roots, Global Development
2.1. Alcoholics Anonymous as an American Invention? A Deconstruction of the Myth
3 It is commonly believed that mutual help movements based on the 12-step program, with the Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, originate from the United States of America. This statement finds its grounds in the historical facts surrounding the foundation of AA, in particular its time and place, i.e. the meeting of Bill W. and Doctor Bob, the “creators” or “founding fathers” of AA, which took place in Akron, Ohio, in 1935. That meeting was to become a founding myth of AA, the latter sharing striking resemblances with other myths drawing on the traditional repertoire of American exceptionalism (Lipset 19-70). As a matter of fact this fascination with AA as a deeply American cultural and social phenomenon is a recurring pattern in many writings on the history of the movement. Some European researchers, for example, tend to idealize the AA in opposition to other forms of so-called Americanization: “American culture has often been actively exported or promoted by centralized organizations. In contrast, there are no military, political, commercial, or even national cultural interests connected with the spread of AA” (Makela, et al. 29).
2.1.1 Once Upon a Time in America
4 In May 1935, Willian G. Wilson (in AA known as Bill W.), a sobering alcoholic and a New York broker travelling on business to Akron, Ohio, met Robert Holbrook Smith (aka “Doctor Bob”), a surgeon and also an alcoholic. At that time, Bill W. has just given up drinking to become a sober man and shared his personal experience with his alcoholic companion who had been suffering from the addiction and trying to fight it for quite some time. “1935, June 10: Dr. Bob has his last drink. Alcoholics Anonymous founded” notes one of the key AA texts: Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, p. vii).
5 There is no reason to doubt the historical authenticity of this event. At the same time, given all the spoken and written tradition inspired by this encounter, it also seems to be mythical. In reality, when it actually happened, it appeared rather ordinary, as it usually happens with any mythical beginnings. At the time when it happened, no one could have foreseen the birth of the AA movement, let alone its global spread that followed.
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6 Beginning in 1935, two founding fathers started assisting other fellow-alcoholics and drew up a mutual help program to overcome the addition. This was based on meetings with other alcoholics and sharing experience as well as nurturing spiritual development. The first piece of information concerning this program dates back to 1939. It appeared in a publication entitled Alcoholics Anonymous which serves as something of a Bible for any AA member, also known as “The Big Book” (Alcoholics Anonymous. New York, 1st edition 1939) due to its normative nature (despite the fact that it is a rather modest booklet). After overcoming the initial hurdles typical of any newly founded movement, AA managed to spread quickly in the United States during and following the Second World War, and later also overseas. This story was described in detail by Kurtz and other AA historians (e.g. Kurtz). Before the twenty-first century, Alcoholics Anonymous had about 2 million members associated in about 110,000 groups in almost every country or territory across the world.
7 The origins of the AA reveal some distinctive features which are typical of the manner in which the 12-step movements reached self-identification: (1) A meeting of two strangers is, by its very definition, very private and individualistic. (2) Its success—Dr. Bob’s recovery—was achieved without any additional external support. (3) For both founders, the idea of sharing their experience with the fellowship is very natural and, at the same time, ethical. (4) From the very beginning their activities are fully voluntary: AA members freely choose to share their experience with other, still suffering fellow-alcoholics. (5) The activities of the AA founders are based on spiritual ideas, quite similar to certain well-known Protestant movements and religious concepts such as that of redemption.
8 One should note that the features no. (4) and (5) reveal themselves as a double-edged sword (to use Lipset’s phrase from his book on American exceptionalism) since by promoting individual initiative and voluntarism, they at the same time present a threat to the coherence of the communitarian nature of the movement. Yet the AA through its activity (it is not an organization but a fellowship par excellence) seems to be offering a solution to the contradictory claims of individualism vs. collectiveness, and it does so in a manner which could serve as an example for other movements, grass-roots initiatives, etc. This was even admitted by one of the distinguished critics of AA: “AA, owing largely to Bill Wilson, has developed an organizational structure which is completely noncoercive and very democratic, and is in fact quite similar to organizational models developed by anarchist theorists” (Bufe 59-60).
9 Despite its virtually anarchistic structure, AA remains very successful proving at the same time that it is possible to defy the so called “tyranny of structure”: even in the period of dramatic increase in the number of members and substantial spread of its reach, AA managed to retain its original character as a community of small groups of fellow-alcoholics gathering locally in weekly meetings.
10 One should note that the AA’s global reach seems to be partly tied to its identification abroad as an American invention. In the research conducted by Makela and his mainly European co-editors, there are comments which directly indicate that AA is an American phenomenon, created in the United States, invented by representatives of American (mainly Anglo-Saxon middle class) and undoubtedly rooted in its traditions and Protestantism. At the same time, the research shows how successfully this Anglo- Saxon phenomenon became adapted to other cultures or communities like Catholic Mexicans or the native Canadian Inuit (Makela 27).
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2.1.2 Religion, individualism, pragmatism
11 It seems clear that any discussion of the uniqueness of AA as an American invention may not fail to take into account religion, individualism and pragmatism. Therefore, they deserve more attention and will be discussed separately below.
12 Starting with religion seems to be quite obvious when we realize that from the technical point of view AA began in Akron not only as a private meeting of two alcoholics (the founding myth about AA as an “invention”), but at the same time as a part of religious activities in a local community. As a matter of fact one may argue that it took an initial organizational shape as a small adjacent group within religious Oxford Groups Movement. From the very beginning mutual-help groups received encouragement first of all from Protestant religious organizations, a fact well-known to AA historians and sociologists of religion, like Robert Wuthnow. In his Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and the Quest for a New Community, Wuthnow observes that starting from its origins Alcoholics Anonymous was deeply influenced by religious teachings, having its roots in the so-called Oxford Groups movement (113). For our thesis let us just indicate three main attributes of the Oxford Groups that were directly borrowed by early AA and that at the same time could be perceived as very “American” (Kurtz 47-48; Wuthnow 113; Bufe 57-62): 1) informal community gatherings of "house parties" typical for Protestant tradition, with religion as a "members-friendly" form of fellowship; 2) members or participants not expected to leave their own churches (a tolerance characteristic of American Christianity, rare in Roman Catholic countries); 3) focus on self-development and transforming one's life attained by passing through stages (adopted in 12-steps approach of the AA program). To this “technical list” of religious borrowings in AA teaching one may also add some features traditionally identified as an “American” way of solving social problems (Bufe 60): 1) anti- intellectualism; 2) a strong belief in individual redemption; 3) focus on the individual’s own story, not on one’s background or faith (individualism and tolerance again).
13 These features became fundamental to the key practices of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings like: individual “story-telling”; strict rules forbidding direct criticism; equality of all speakers and participants; and “giving an example” as the main way of promoting AA ideas. However, AA quickly separated from the Oxford Group movement, mainly because of a profound difference in aims. The Oxford Group aimed to convert the world, while the AA has been focused from its mythical origins on helping individual alcoholics, with no ambition to improve the world or even enlighten society as far as addictions are concerned. While religion has played an important role in AA since its first meetings, consistently with its own mythicized perception of “the” American tradition the 12-steps fellowship embraces a mixture of devotion with pragmatism, individualism with community values, and effectiveness with distrust for organized religions. This distrust is understandable realizing that AA was invented by members of so-called wet generation, people disappointed after the First World War by nineteenth century Victorian morality: part of the revolt of the ‘wet generations’ had been against organized religion. While the heart of the Alcoholics Anonymous experience was religious, this aspect was kept noninstitutionalized and was softpedaled and attenuated as far as possible. In this way an AA recruit could tiptoe through the minefield of the anticlerical commitments of his or her youth while recapturing a sense of purpose beyond the individual ego. (Room 381)
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14 It was William G. Wilson, the founding father himself, who for the first time noticed these dilemmas and proposed a profoundly simple solution. Proper dependence was the only true independence. In the spiritual program of Alcoholics Anonymous proper dependence was first upon God. “The more we become willing to depend upon a higher Power, the more independent we actually are. Therefore dependence, as AA practices it, is really a means of gaining true independence of the spirit” (Twelve steps and Twelve Traditions 37, 61, 63, 108). Along with the changes in modern approach to personal spirituality, however, it is now the mutual-help movement which influences organized American religions helping them to adapt to the secular and individualistic tendencies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Wuthnow 7).
15 There is a wealth of historical and sociological studies of American society describing it as individualistic. For proponents of American exceptionalism, individualism used to be a part of the American creed, a trait to be proud of. At the same time, the psychological and social cost of individualism was observed (e.g. Putnam in Bowling alone or Bellah et al. in Habits of the Heart), including the decline of community spirit, the ascendancy of the private at the cost of the private sphere, the lack of commitment, etc. However, those tendencies have been counteracted by an increasing importance of 12-steps fellowships, self-help groups, and other forms of social cooperation which proved to be successful in giving emotional support to individuals, at the same time encouraging social activities within communities of all types.
16 The personal freedom factor is clearly declared in the definition of the AA membership (one may even argue that there is no such thing as the AA membership in a traditional sense). The Third Tradition of the AA says: “The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking” (Twelve steps and Twelve Traditions 21). It means that the A.A. membership could never be under the control of any other person. During the early days of the AA this “liberal” approach created some organizational problems and the desire to resolve them by imposing strict rules and strengthening stiff structure. Fortunately, as it appeared in next decades, the first AA generation succeeded in overcoming the initial difficulties remaining immune to the tempting visions of a big, centralized organization. This kind of anti-authoritarian and anti-organizational thinking took an anecdotic name of “Rule No. 62”: “Don’t take yourself too damned seriously” (Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age 104), which is a quotation from the laconic response of Bill W. to a draft of 61 rules proposed by one of local AA groups (see Kurtz 108).
17 For the early days of AA the key factor attracting newcomers was neither spirituality and the idea of “higher power,” nor an individualistic approach and organizational uniqueness, but the simple fact that it worked. It worked in terms of helping alcoholics in quitting their addiction and staying “dry.” It is no coincidence that the key fifth chapter of the Big Book, the AA “Bible” mentioned above, is entitled “How It Works” (Alcoholics Anonymous 49). This pragmatic statement has been kept from the beginning as the fundamental message of Alcoholics Anonymous to its members and members to be. The AA pragmatism meant, among other things, the sharing of successful stories of redemption with happy endings. But pragmatism also meant openness and tolerance: “A small group may combine a dozen people from a dozen different religious backgrounds. They very likely will be unable to agree on specific religious doctrines or theological arguments. What they can agree on is that God helped them through” (Wuthnow 19).1
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2.2 Globalization of AA
18 The global success of the 12-step movement and the therapeutic methods based on its principles seems to be an indisputable fact recognized by scientists and researchers who deal with this topic. American culture and social institutions have frequently been exported by centralized organizations funded by the government or big business. There are, however, no political, business or national interests which could be directly linked to the spread of AA (Makela 29). This model of grass-roots expansionism perfectly corresponds with the myth of the AA as an “American” invention and the earlier mentioned concepts like individualism or pragmatism—the ideas which embody the self-organizing genius of the community which functions despite (or, as in the case of Poland in the 1980s—against) the authorities. This is the case because “however dogmatic... an AA group could become, any two or three fellow alcoholics who object the way things have been going could leave it and start meeting for sobriety elsewhere creating their own, new AA group” (Kurtz 16).
19 The universal benefits of the organizational model of the 12 step movement are recognized even by the above mentioned critics of AA: “many of AA’s useful features, particularly its organizational principles and structure, could be fruitfully adopted in a far wider social and political sphere than that of alcoholism self-help groups” (Bufe 4). Among the different types of small associations, the mutual help groups belong to the most democratic and least dependent organizations, being most capable of working without strong leaders despite the fact that they often function with the organizational support of various churches. Robert Wuthnow, quoted above, appears to be right claiming that “small groups attract people not because of their organizational structure but because of the fact that these groups seem cozy, friendly and informal” (Wuthnow 121). Even more importantly, despite the efforts made by the clergy of a number of denominations who aimed to control what was going on in groups associated with churches, their members generally exercised a great deal of autonomy. This autonomy was also seen in the case of the Polish AA (Tadeusz AA, 194-247), where it was achieved despite the culturally unique role of the Catholic Church. The study of the Polish AA with its grassroots strategy seems especially pertinent, as it points towards a larger cultural and social context of Eastern Europe with its historical deficiency of social capital (see Marek Ziółkowski’s introduction to the Polish edition of Bowling Alone: Putnam 18-19).
2.3 The Case of Poland
20 The idea of the fellowship of alcoholics and their mutual help came to Poland in the 1950s, and the 1980s mark the beginning of its rapid expansion. According to the common opinion of the researchers and founders of the Polish AA, this became possible by means of importing this American invention directly from the United States (see Osiatyński 32-40). The roots of the Polish AA were untypical, however, because from the very beginning it was greatly aided by professionals—therapists who not only assisted in its organization, but also took part in the meetings. The Polish mutual help movement was also subject to institutional pressures which came from, on the one hand, the communist government with its Abstainers Clubs and information control, and on the other hand the Catholic Church which extended material assistance but
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tried to control the movement at the same time. However, according to the testimonials (notes from my conversations with Wiktor Osiatyński, February 2015- January 2017; my interview with Robert D. Gamble, Poznań, May 2018), as well as the Polish and American books on AA (Kurtz 158-162; Dumanowski 12-19), those difficulties were eventually overcome and the American model prevailed. This can be used to illustrate the power of the values described above constituting part of the American AA tradition. Before AA, groups such as these had been something unheard of in Poland. Subsequently, they went on to grow becoming mass-movements in a matter of several years and without any official support, without any funding with taxpayers' money and in a way that—to employ some clichés—was rather American than European.
21 By no means, however, does the above relieve a researcher from a critical deconstruction of the myths connected with the American origins of the 12-step movements and their global success. To this end, the importation of AA to Poland as a cultural and social phenomenon is analyzed below.
3. The Origins of AA in Poland
3.1 Two Beginnings, Two Centers
22 It can be rather difficult to identify one specific event as the actual beginning of the Polish AA. We’re actually looking at two distinct beginnings and two different centers: one in Poznan in the 1950s and 1960s and the other one in Warsaw in the 1980s (see Tadeusz AA). The dispute over the significance of the two centers can be perceived as a contest for recognition of the “true” birthplace of the Polish AA. This transpires from the statements of the “founding fathers” upon comparison of the records from Poznan (interview with TT, Poznań April, 2017, the 1st interview with Robert Gamble. Warsaw June 2016) with those originating from Warsaw (interview with FD, Warsaw January 2017, interview with Bohdan Woronowicz, Warsaw, February 2017) and also Cracow (interview with TF, Cracow October 2017).2 The last of the above statements, coming from a Cracow activist, best describes the issue, perhaps due to his neutral attitude to the other centers: “Everyone was looking for an effective way to get rid of the habit, no matter if this was Poznan or Warsaw.” Yet the same interviewee believed Poznań was probably first, because of its many contacts with the West and a tradition of the Abstainers clubs. On the other hand, Warsaw—as the capital city—was more important, also because it had people like Wiktor Osiatyński, a university professor with an international reputation who functioned as a link between Poland and the American AA, and Dr. Bohdan Woronowicz, who tried to help alcoholics in his clinic seeing the ineffectiveness of earlier methods.
23 In the case of the Polish AA it is therefore difficult to pinpoint a single event which could be described as a mythical moment of the movement’s inception, similar to the meeting of Bill W. and Doctor Bob which functions as the American founding myth. This may be a consequence of the above mentioned dualism in the myth of origins of the Polish AA, but it also illustrates the fact that in Poland, AA was a foreign borrowing. It is, on the other hand, possible to find analogies for the Poznan-Warsaw dualism at the beginning of the Polish AA movement, and a similar rivalry between Akron, Ohio and New York, which significantly affected the early period of AA in the U.S. (Kurtz). In both cases, this rivalry functioned on several levels related to ambition, personal
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experience, organizational structure (the center vs. peripheries) as well as the program itself. However, one event seems to reappear consistently in all interviews, symbolically reconciling both centers and both narratives, and it is the 1981 visit in Poznan paid by a group of therapists and founding fathers from Warsaw.
24 To identify this meeting as the foundation myth of the Polish AA would be an overstatement compared to the symbolic power which the Akron meeting of Bill W. and Doctor Bob represents for the history of AA, though it seems the best choice one has while looking for a single moment of the Polish AA’s inception. A comparison of both founding moments brings to mind an intriguing set of similarities and differences.
25 Similarities: - A meeting of people from two competing centers - Venue: a peripheral center - The meeting does not put the animosities between the two centers to an end, however it does prevent a major split - The meeting is of vital consequence in the history of the movement Differences: - The meeting of two individuals in Akron vs. a meeting of a group of people in Poznan - A strictly private nature of the meeting in Akron vs. institutional involvement in Poznan - No professionals in Akron vs. involvement of therapists in Poznan - Before Akron, there had not been any AA groups; however, there had been AA groups in Poznan and in other places before the meeting in Poznan.
26 Even though the Poznań meeting is usually identified as the beginning of the unification and of a dynamic development of the Polish AA, the beginnings of the 12- step movement in Poland go back to 1948, when when Henryk Zajączkowski, Ph.D., M.D. who had previously operated a detox sanitarium in Świack Wołłowiczkowski, initially called “a hospital for men suffering from nervousness-related illnesses” (Tadeusz AA 31), set up a Mutual Help Center for the Sick (Koło Samopomocy Chorych) drawing on his knowledge of the AA rules (Kaczmarczyk 67). In 1950, the first Abstainers Club was established in Poznan. It should be emphasized at this point that the story of the Abstainers Clubs—associations fully controlled by the communist authorities and having a structure typical for organizations of this kind with a formal management board, member IDs etc.—is by no means the story of a grass-roots mutual help organization which AA has always been, also in Poland. Yet the case of the Abstainers Clubs is remarkable in the sense that their establishment and operation was motivated politically, to meet the challenge from the American AA. In 1963, also in Poznan, the psychologist Maria Grabowska, M.A. initiated the meetings of the “Wednesday Group” composed of patients of the local counseling center and members of the Abstainers Club. In 1964, the Group applied for membership with the General Service Office in New York as the first group from behind the Iron Curtain and was subsequently listed in the world register of AA fellowships. Later on, in 1974, the Poznan Wednesday Group transformed into an independent (i.e. free from therapist oversight) and fully self-governed group called “Eleusis.” It was the first Polish group with direct links to the AA, although in terms of its organization it was still not fully in line with AA’s core paradigm (Tadeusz AA 74).
27 In Poland, the idea of AA had already been popularized by Professor Zbigniew T. Wierzbicki, a social entrepreneur and sociologist, publisher of the Trzeźwość (Sobriety)
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magazine (since 1956) and Zdrowie i Trzeźwość (Health and Sobriety, since 1957). In 1957, the latter magazine featured his own article on AA, followed in 1958 by a series of texts dealing with AA containing, among other things, the first Polish translation of The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous (Wierzbicki). Yet, the publication of a translation of the 12 Steps was prevented by the censorship office. According to some sources, as early as 1957 the first AA groups based on the ideas championed by professor Wierzbicki were formed, initially in Poznan and subsequently in Warsaw. Still, the historically important Poznan origins of the AA movement had a limited reach (only five more fellowships had been formed up to 1980). The 1980s, however, mark a turning point in the development of the Polish AA with the formation of AA groups in Warsaw. Here again, the key role was played by professional therapists and academics with ties to the fellowship and sharing a concern with the problem of alcoholism. In the 1970s, the psychiatrist Bohdan Woronowicz, M.D., started his therapeutic activity under the auspices of the Institute of Psychiatrics and Neurology. Initially, as he recounts, he did not know much about the AA, but intuition told him to pursue the idea of putting to use the mutual help groups (interview with Bohdan Woronowicz, Warsaw, February 2017). The beginning of the AA in Warsaw is currently considered to be May 1980, because of the establishment of the Odrodzenie (Rebirth) group whose meetings were held in Dr. Woronowicz’s ward (Woronowicz). The latter event was preceded, however, by the already mentioned meeting of therapists and alcoholics anonymous from Poznan, Warsaw, and other places throughout Poland which conducted celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the Poznan Abstainers Club. Irrespectively of the entire official backdrop and somewhat contrary to the intentions of the officials present at the occasion it became, according to the testimonials of the participants (interviews with FD and Bohdan Woronowicz) and the historians of the movement (Tadeusz AA, Kurtz), another milestone in the grassroots development of the Polish AA —an idea imported from America, which the Communist authorities believed was hard to control.
3.2 The Polish AA: Its Fast-Paced Growth, Barriers and the Polish Specificity
28 The year 1980 marks the beginning of a turbulent period in the history of the Polish AA, which was unique to the Soviet-controlled part of Europe and—according to some historians—worldwide. What allowed the Polish AA to survive through this difficult period was the active role of such individuals as Professor Wierzbicki, Robert Gamble— an American pastor, social activist and publisher, and Professor Wiktor Osiatyński, famous for his extraordinary commitment to the development of the AA in Poland in the 1980s. Robert Gamble, who first visited Poland in the 1950s, returned to Poland in 1985 and quickly put his organizational talents into action, getting involved in the movement he knew from the U.S. Beginning in 1985 Wiktor Osiatyński, an internationally recognized lawyer specializing in constitutional law, acted as an intermediary in the communication between the New York headquarters and the GSO and became fully involved in a translation project of the core AA literature. Osiatyński also became the first public figure in Poland to “come out” as an alcoholic in the famous article entitled “Grzech czy choroba” (“A Sin or a Disease”) published in the Polityka weekly in 1985.
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29 Earlier, in October 1984, the First National AA Rally took place in Poznan with representatives of as many as 34 different groups participating. During the second rally in Zawiercie in 1988, their number grew to 100 (though the actual number is still a matter of discussion among historians) and the third one, organized in Wrocław, gathered representatives of 200 groups. The late 1980s, which could be seen as a second birth of AA in Poland, brought an unrestrained activity, if not an explosion, of AA groups following the fall of communism in 1989. The 1990s saw the publication of the first authorized translation of the AA “Bible” into Polish, followed by a dynamic development of AA literature, the launching of a foundation for coordinating the publishing effort and other organizational activities relevant for the movement, as well as—following the American example—the establishment of the National Service Office (Biuro Służby Krajowej). By the end of the decade the number of AA groups had grown to 1500.
30 To summarize this brief presentation of the origins of the Polish AA, one should note that they took place in communist Poland, a country with an authoritarian regime and a bureaucratic practice of exercising power originating from a totalitarian ideology. It was not a coincidence that the years 1957 and 1980—milestones in the Polish AA’s history, corresponded with the major turning points of the post-WWII Polish history: the thaw of 1956 and the 1980 visit of John Paul II and the birth of the first Solidarity movement. The latter two events are visibly present in the interviews with the founders of the Polish AA. Yet, this periodization should be accepted with a grain of salt: it is possible that the respondents—consciously or not—incorporated the “big” national events into their narrative to fit it into a larger historical paradigm. The researchers and historians of the movement could, in turn, be affected by something that Mr. Marc Bloch, a famous French historian from the Annales school, called “a fetish of genesis” (Bloch).
3.3. The Polish AA Movement at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
31 How popular is the AA movement in Poland today remains a separate issue. Because AA is not an organization and it has no use for formal membership, it is impossible to precisely establish the number of its members. Besides, the lack of formal membership in AA corresponds with the fuzziness of the boundaries between the social worlds described by such theorists as Glaser and Strauss or Konecki and Chomczyński. The problem of this fluidity has always been a difficult issue for the American researchers of the movement in the US (Kurtz), even though they do not use the conceptual apparatus of qualitative sociology. Based on ordinary participation levels in the meetings, which in Poland was on average 10-20 people according to a survey by Ireneusz Kaczmarczyk (106), it would be possible to roughly estimate that every week the meetings across the country were attended by about 10,000 to 30,000 participants. The total number of addicts who were involved in the movement at some point in time and have identified themselves as alcoholics anonymous, but do not actually attend the meetings any more, must be significantly greater.
32 The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a further development of the movement which is now reaching smaller centers (cf. tables with sociological data in Kaczmarczyk 103-108). One should also note the recent trend of developing
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cooperation between the AA movement and professional therapeutic services, which are increasingly confident about implementing elements of group therapy along with the Minnesota method, created in the U.S. and based on the 12-step program. What makes this change significant is a shift in thinking about alcoholism, which is increasingly perceived as a disease, without carrying the social stigma that accompanied it before. Another important aspect of this change is the discontinuation of using medications like Anticol, Antabus or Esperal. One should also note the growing interest in the first private-sector centers for addiction therapy (like Warsaw-based Olcha or Akmed). Those centers work entirely based on the 12-step program and offer not only out-patient services but also in-house treatment with a 28-day stay based on the Minnesota method used by their American counterparts (interview with MZ, January 2017, interview with HP, Gdansk, March 2017, interview with IL, Warsaw, November 2017, interview with TP, Warsaw, December 2018). Nowadays, whether it is a detox ward in a hospital, a public or private-sector service, it has become a standard practice to encourage patients to attend AA meetings. Such an embedding of an essentially grass-roots movement like AA into an organized system of therapeutic services testifies to the AA fellowship’s growing recognition, but at the same time gives rise to numerous controversies (interview with WD, Dąbrową Górnicza, June 2018, interviews with TT and Bohdan Woronowicz). It will be worthwhile to take a close look at these as they might draw interesting analogies with the development of the American AA fellowship (Kurtz, Peele and Brodsky, Wuthnow), and could shed more light on the issue of the Polonization of AA as an American phenomenon.
33 The above discussion of the spread of AA in Poland may hopefully serve to confirm the view expressed by Klaus Makela in his introduction to the study authored by a team of international researchers that the Alcoholics Anonymous is “one of the big success stories” of the twentieth century (Makela 3). Obviously this success, more than anything else, is the success of every recovered alcoholic gathered in one of the thousands autonomous groups in over 180 countries and territories across the globe. But this organizational success was also made possible through an effective use and adaptation of the movement’s values rooted in the specific American cultural and social traditions.
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Ziółkowski, Marek. “Wprowadzenie do wydania polskiego.” Robert D. Putnam. Samotna gra w kręgle. Trans. Przemysław Sadura and Sebastian Szymański. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalna, 2008. Print.
NOTES
1. Significantly all the three features depicted above: religiousness, individualism and pragmatism are noted as peculiar for America in the perception of non-American AA members and students of the subject (cf. Makela; Tadeusz AA; Osiatyński; interviews conducted by myself). 2. In 2015-2018, I conducted eighteen in-depth interviews. The respondents can be divided into three general groups: (1) “the AA founding fathers” and friends of the fellowship; (2) long- standing AA fellows and people involved in the so-called AA services; (3) therapists who use the Minnesota method which is based on the AA ideas. The analysis of those interviews constitutes the basis of a more extended research effort described above. For the purposes of this article, only some of those interviews were used. When a respondent was a commonly recognized person, not as a fellow-alcoholic in the movement, his full name and the date are provided. In other situations, in line with the rule of anonymity, the fellows are referred to by their initials and the date and place of the interview. Certain details concerning the interviewees are presented below: FD—a long-standing fellow-alcoholic, one of the founders of AA in Warsaw, an over-seventy man; HF—a long-standing fellow-alcoholic, involved in the AA services in Gdansk, an over-sixty man; IL—an alcoholic with a long period of sobriety, with experience as an AA fellow and in group therapy, an over-fifty woman; MZ—a therapist from a leading Warsaw help center, a fellow-alcoholic, an over-fifty woman; TF—a long-standing AA fellow, credited for his efforts in Lesser Poland, an over-sixty man; TT—a long-standing AA fellow, pro-active member of the AA services in Poznan, credited for his involvement in the development of AA in the Greater Poland, an AA historian; TP—a therapist from a leading Warsaw center, an AA fellow, an over- fifty man; WD—a social activist, a member of the Abstainers movement (board member) from the Upper Silesia and also an AA fellow, an over-seventy man.
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ABSTRACTS
The goal of this article is primarily to present a historical outline of the origins of the Polish AA, supplemented with general reflections on the 12-step fellowships and their “American” specificity, as well as the challenges posed by their adaptation to a different cultural context. In- depth interviews used in my research, complemented by cultural sources and fellow-alcoholics' publications on the history of the community in Poland make it possible to close the gap that has persisted in the AA research. They indicate the social and cultural aspects of the spread of the 12- steps movements, which so far have not been studied directly, since the research has mainly dealt with the therapeutic side of the issue. Moreover, including the Polish perspective might add new threads to the debate on the U.S. cultural influence abroad.
INDEX
Keywords: Alcoholics Anonymous, American influences, alcoholism, cultural adaptations, therapy, 12-steps movements
AUTHOR
MAREK JANNASZ Marek Jannasz received his M.A. in History and worked as a researcher at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Centre. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University (1997). He became a publisher and a co-founder of two Warsaw-based publishing houses: Lingo (education, references, multimedia) and Lira (fiction, biographies). He is now a doctoral candidate in cultural studies at the SWPS University in Warsaw, and is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the 12-steps movements, focusing on AA as a social and cultural phenomenon.
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Railroad Workers, Civilization and Communism: the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Interwar Polish Frontier
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska
1 For the recently reborn Poland the post-World War I years brought havoc, disease and enduring military conflict. Regaining independence after more than a century of partitions, Poland struggled with typhus and against Soviet Russia. The country’s inhabitants suffered hunger and malnutrition; many of them faced homelessness while returning to Poland after several years of being forced migrants or refugees. The situation of the devastated and disease-ridden country triggered humanitarian responses from Western Europe and North America. Among several humanitarian organizations that assisted the postwar Poland was the Young Men’s Christian Association of the United States (YMCA, often named simply the Y).
2 This article seeks to present and analyze one of the aspects of the YMCA’s work in Poland: the initiatives for railroad workers from eastern frontier towns and cities. Focusing on the efforts that the organization undertook on the territory commonly referred to as the “Polish borderland” (Kresy), I show that for the leaders of the Y the work among the railway employees was of utmost political and civilizational importance. There were several reasons why the YMCA became involved in the railroad work on the eastern Polish borderlands. One of them was the looming threat of communism from neighboring Russia, another—the American Y leaders’ mythic perceptions of the U.S. moving frontier, which prompted them to adapt the American discourse on civilization to the Polish political and social situation. Using archival documents and recollections of Americans involved in the Y’s activities on the eastern Polish frontier I present how the perception of the Polish borderland by Y’s secretaries was greatly influenced by myths deeply embedded in American culture. Drawing on the contemporary Polish press reports as well as writings of local collaborators of the
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YMCA, I also describe the reaction of Polish public opinion to the Y’s undertakings on the Polish frontier.
3 The article situates the Polish case in a broader context of YMCA international activism and poses questions regarding the specificities of the Y’s undertakings in interwar Poland. The research on the involvement of the Y in post-World War I countries of Central and Eastern Europe has so far stressed mainly the YMCA’s sport initiatives, its service to the soldiers and veterans as well as the organization’s role in the rebuilding of the then newly (re)born countries of the region.1 A focus on the Y’s work for railroad workers expands the knowledge and understanding of the organization’s overseas activism and sheds light on the circumstances of transferring American cultural concepts to interwar Europe. The story of the Y’s involvement in the work on the Polish frontier also confirms the organization’s adaptability and flexibility in its international undertakings which has been emphasized by such YMCA historians as Matthew L. Miller.2
4 In the first decades of the twentieth century the YMCA was one of the largest American service organizations. Since its inception, it spread not only throughout the English- speaking world but also into several other countries of Europe, North America and Asia. Established in Great Britain in 1844 as an evangelical organization, the YMCA expanded into the United States in 1851. During the post-Civil War decades the organization was setting up municipal branches and erecting buildings in many American cities. The Y branches offered dorms, educational activities, and “wholesome” entertainment. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the organization generally directed its efforts to male middle-class city dwellers. The Y emphasized its religious character and devoted much energy to such activities as Bible study.3
5 At the turn of the twentieth century the YMCA reoriented itself, reacting to such changes in American society as extensive industrialization, rapid urbanization, or massive immigration. The power and authority of white middle class men—the main targets of the Y’s efforts—began to falter, challenged by immigrants, working class men and the women’s suffrage movement. As a response to these changes, the YMCA downplayed the evangelical element in its activities and began to emphasize a symmetrical development of young men who were to enhance their minds and body fitness by participation in social clubs and sports activities that became the pinnacle of the Y’s program.4 In the United States, as well as in Great Britain, the Y’s secretaries and members embraced a new model of manliness: Muscular Christianity that combined religiosity with physical strength and stamina that were to characterize young men exercising in the Y’s gymnasia.5 Concentrated previously on white middle class men, the YMCA began establishing branches for African-Americans; in some cities, the Y also opened women’s chapters.6 The organization’s secretaries began to target working-class men—often of immigrant background—and promoted industrial paternalism that was to mitigate social conflicts. The Y taught immigrant men English as a part of ongoing Americanization efforts; it also provided leisure activities and educational opportunities to the wearied men toiling in the new industrial order.7 All these turn-of-the-century innovations contributed to the growing popularity of the organization in the United States and facilitated the expansion of the Y abroad.
6 The YMCA owed its expansion into other continents to the boundless energy of the organization’s secretaries such as John Mott or Paul Super. Super—who played a salient role in the activities of the YMCA in Poland—began his service to the Y by establishing
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branches of the organization in Asia. In the first decades of the twentieth century the Y promulgated the Social Gospel in China and Japan, joining American missionary organizations in their civilizational and religious endeavors.8 Mott wholeheartedly supported the transfer of the Y to Russia where, as Miller argues, the YMCA was to contribute greatly to the preservation and expansion of Orthodox Christianity during the years of communism.9 In the interwar period, in its overseas activities the organization stressed sport and physical education that were winning over reluctant inhabitants of such territories as the Philippine Islands.10 Sport also became the driving force of the organization during its service to civilians and soldiers in Europe in the years of World War I.
7 The involvement of the Y in war-time assistance went back to the times of the Civil War when the organization cooperated with the newly established United States Christian Commission, providing stationary, newspapers, books and religious literature to soldiers and sailors. During the Civil War the Y began to operate mobile canteens that offered soldiers supplements to army rations; it was also mobile canteens that became a symbol of the organization’s war aid in World War I Europe. During this global conflict the YMCA collaborated with local governments, offering service and relief to civilians and soldiers in such diverse countries and territories as the United States, France, Russia, Australia, or the Middle East. Spreading throughout the war-ridden world, the Y boosted the morale of soldiers and propagated its philosophy of a symmetrical development of young men.11
8 Soldiers of Polish descent met for the first time with the Y in France, while serving in the army of General Jozef Haller predominantly composed of young men recruited in the United States. At the beginning of 1919, five Y secretaries including the aforementioned Paul Super were transferred with Haller’s Army to the recently reborn Poland. During the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, the YMCA ran several mobile canteens and built a number of shelters for Polish soldiers and officers. As in France or other war-torn European countries, in Poland the YMCA aimed at providing army men with educational activities and wholesome entertainment that were to divert young men’s attention from indecent and immoral activities.12 A gradually growing group of American secretaries and their local collaborators served cocoa and offered reading and writing classes to illiterate soldiers who applauded “ciocia Imka” (Auntie Imka), as the organization was nicknamed in Poland.13
9 In post-war years the YMCA initiated in Poland a multi-dimensional program for moral and physical renewal of young men and teenage boys, aiding refugees, students and war prisoners. As American humanitarians and social workers were gradually withdrawing from the country, the Poles, with the help of the Americans, created their own organization that combined the overseas model with several local features. Establishing in 1922 the Polish YMCA, local and American leaders of the organization concentrated their activities in two main sectors. The first one was setting up municipal branches of the YMCA in the largest Polish cities: the official capital of the country, Warsaw; “the intellectual capital,” Cracow; and “the industrial capital,” Lodz.14 In the buildings that were being gradually erected in Polish metropolises, the Y offered vocational training, physical education as well as “decent” leisure.15
10 The second main activity of the Polish YMCA was the work among railroad workers from eastern frontier towns and cities. The YMCA served railroad workers, as the American Director of the Association Paul Super described it, during “a time of national
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emergency,”16 that is in the first half of the 1920s which was a period of intense political conflicts and social unrest, accompanied by the final settlement of the Polish borders and a post-war economic crisis. As the situation on the eastern border improved, the organization abandoned its railroad work in 1926.
11 Paul Super was the person particularly devoted to the Y’s railroad work. In his writings Super, who made frequent visits to eastern Polish towns and cities, observed similarities between the Polish and American borderlands. Born in 1880 in Cincinnati, Super was a graduate of the University of Missouri who served in the YMCA throughout his life. Having worked for a few years in Oregon, he organized and directed the Y’s work in Hawaii. With the outbreak of World War I, Super began training the organization’s staff and was then transferred to Poland where he lived during the entire interwar period.17
12 In Twenty-Five Years with the Poles—the memoirs Super published in 1947, he openly admitted that he “loved the eastern frontier.”18 The Director of the Polish YMCA seemed to be particularly enchanted by Lvov and Vilnius, which he defined as “two Polish cities in every way and the main centers of western civilization in that part of eastern Europe.”19 Writing about their nearby territory, he added: “Between them… lies “the Kresy” or border-land, to me full of the reminders of our own western frontier, only ours was west, not east as in Poland.”20
13 A similar comparison between Polish and American frontiers may be found in an article published by Super in 1924 in the American periodical Railroad Men. The piece, included in the magazine for the American YMCA railroad industry members, was tellingly entitled “On Poland’s Frontier.” In it, Super commented: „The Polish frontier over toward Russia is real frontier. It reminds one of the less developed sections in our American prairies 25 years ago.”21 He also wrote: [I]n the old Russian Poland, where the paw of the bear rested most heavily, civilization was and is sparse. There the great plain stretches far abroad like Western Kansas. The villages are widely separated, farm houses as we know them in America are never seen, and great forests and marshes make up mile after mile of the landscape with occasional open spaces, across which one can see for many miles. The physical character of the country is not the only reminder of America’s wild west, for companies of bandits occasionally sweep across the Polish border, rob and kill, and return to Russia.22
14 Several features of the Polish frontier reminded Super of American borderland: the landscape, the settlements, as well as the population. What is striking and significant in Super’s writings regarding Poland’s eastern borderland is his usage of the term “civilization.” During his upbringing and education in the United States, Paul Super was “soaked” with ideas and philosophies that referred to “civilization” and that used this concept to discuss racial and social relations in the United States and worldwide. In Super’s writings one may see his intellectual debt to such American theorists and scholars as the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan or the psychologist and pedagogue G. Stanley Hall.23 Lewis Henry Morgan was known for what in his time was a seminal scientific theory delineating the “lines of human progress.” According to Morgan, human societies and races developed in the process of evolution that began from the stage of savagery, and led through barbarism to the most advanced level of civilization. For Morgan and his American contemporaries, by the nineteenth century only a few human groups achieved the highest rung on the ladder of civilization. At the top of it,
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racial theorists situated Anglo-Saxons, placing other groups such as Slavs somewhere in between, and representatives of African and “Oriental” races at the very bottom.24
15 Interestingly, the concept of civilization was used also in another, very eminent piece of writing that described the situation on the frontier defined as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”25 The latter phrase prominently featured in the seminal paper of Frederick Jackson Turner read during the assembly of the American Historical Association in 1893. The closing of the frontier line, as indicated in the 1890 census, was for Turner perilous for the future of the United States whose progress and development depended on the existence of western wilderness. “The frontier”— emphasized Turner—“is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.”26 It was on the moving western frontier that the American character was being forged and a new breed of people being raised: [t]he coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind… that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism… these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.27
16 The theory and discourse of civilization as well as the prominent “frontier thesis” doubtless influenced Paul Super’s diagnosis regarding the societal and political conditions on Poland’s eastern frontier. If the “Kresy” were “full of the reminders”28 of the American western frontier, as Super stressed in his afore-quoted memoirs, was the process of forging a nation taking place also at the Polish eastern borderlands? Prior to World War I the “Kresy” belonged to tsarist Russia; in the 1920s in independent Poland a mixture of different nationalities and ethnicities populated them. In most places ethnic Poles constituted a minority, being outnumbered by Jews and White Ruthenians (Belarusians) in the north-east and by Jews and Ukrainians in the south-east.29 Paul Super’s diagnosis of the situation on the Polish frontier pertained to what was a former Russian territory: the region in northeastern Poland with the cities of Vilnius, Bialystok, and Brzesc, inhabited at large by Jewish urban dwellers and Belarusian peasants. According to Super, on Poland’s eastern borderlands the White Ruthenian peasants were being transformed into Polish citizens. The eastern Polish frontier was for the American Director of the YMCA “a meeting point between savagery and civilization,” where borderland conditions facilitated the process of Polonization of Belarusian peasants.
17 “Before the war, White Ruthenian peasants were among the poorest and most ignorant in Europe,”30 wrote Super in his memoirs. In “On Poland’s Frontier,” he presented a highly stereotypical description of the borderland peasantry: “the peasants who move into these villages and become common laborers are White Russians—a sturdy race but apparently of low intelligence and certainly representing a low state of culture.”31 At the same time, Super observed that the frontier peasant was undergoing an evolution, transforming from a Russian serf to a Polish citizen. It was exactly the life on the frontier, or at the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” that expedited this alteration. As Super emphasized in Twenty-Five Years with the Poles: “He [the peasant] contrasts his present state with pre-war Russia and the Bolshevism only a few miles to the east, and daily becomes a better Polish citizen.”32 That the male Belarusian peasant was on his way to becoming “civilized” was in part due to compulsory military training. According to Super, military education provided young men from the eastern frontier with the possibility to learn to read and write. The army experience also erased peasant ignorance. As a result of the frontier living and military training, the peasant
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was becoming a civilized, law-abiding Polish citizen who wished, quoting Super again, to “build a sty for his pig instead of keeping it at home“ and to educate his brothers and sisters.33
18 The YMCA attempted to accelerate and to facilitate the Polonization of the eastern frontier and its rural population, perceiving Polishness as a signifier of a more advanced stage of civilization. A direct contribution of the American association to this process was the establishment of the YMCA railroad branches (ogniska) in the eastern frontier towns and cities. The idea to set up the ogniska came from Teodor Emil Landsberg, the president of the Vilnius railroad unit who at the beginning of the 1920s invited the YMCA to his company. In the early 1920s the YMCA established similar ogniska in such north-eastern frontier cities as Vilnius, Białystok, Brzesc, Pinsk, Baranowicze, and in many smaller towns. In fourteen YMCA railroad associations, about five thousand Polish railway employees found access to libraries and reading rooms, vocational courses and several social and educational programs that aimed at uplifting men’s morale and providing them with amusement and recreation. In Vilnius, the YMCA opened a nursery for the railroad workers’ children.34 Railroad associations were, however, first and foremost intended as centers of “Polish national culture”35 in territories where according to the YMCA leaders Western civilization was seriously imperiled.
19 This salient “civilizational” role of the railroad branches stemmed from a unique position of the railroad engineers and other technical employees.36 YMCA leaders emphasized the Polishness of the railway workers and defined them as “the best element of this population,” “the preservers of culture,” or “the local intelligentsia.”37 As a scholar and YMCA leader Roman Dyboski argued, railroad workers were one of a few frontier forces that “elevated life, represented civilization, made for progress, and looked for a brighter future.”38 Dyboski emphasized that the members of the YMCA railroad branches did not only maintain their own, that is Polish, culture, but also “performed a patriotic function of winning the less cultured and illiterate of the population to true Christian citizenship.”39 This “less cultured and illiterate population” was, we can assume, the Belarusian peasantry undergoing a process of Polonization that implied democratic citizenship and Catholic religion.
20 YMCA’s railroad work was not a typically Polish phenomenon as since the turn of the twentieth century the organization was establishing Y railroad associations in the United States, though for different reasons than in Poland. In the American context, as Thomas Winter argues, Y programs for working class men were to “defuse workers’ potential for labor unrest by involving them in a web of uplifting activities.”40 In Poland a similar aim of preventing or resolving labor-management conflicts was adopted by the YMCA in Lodz, the biggest Polish industrial center in the interwar years where the Y was invited into factories and offered programs for local young male employees.41 On the Polish frontier the purpose of setting up Y branches was different, however: the targeted railroad workers—enjoying a high social prestige as a local vocational elite— did not pose a threat but were seen in need of recreation and social welfare.
21 By founding its railroad branches on the Polish frontier the YMCA also recognized the cultural and political potential of the railroad stations that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century served a vital social role by helping establish order and maintain discipline in under-populated and “uncivilized” territories. As Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie argue in their acclaimed The Railway Station: A Social History, railroads
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and railway stations were unifying the nations and spurred economic growth and development, at the same time producing a new social elite of uniformed railroad employees.42 This function was of utmost importance in a newly reestablished Polish state that aimed at uniting the Kresy with the rest of its territory. Railroads symbolized progress and modernity that the young Polish state aspired to, and the railroad workers embodied order and discipline on the territories menaced by communism.
22 The narrative about the “Polish borderland” also reveals the YMCA’s assumptions regarding Polish citizenship and the “Polish religion.” Being an inherently Protestant organization, in Poland the YMCA emphasized its Catholic character and attachment to the Catholic Church despite the Catholic bishops’ vehement criticism of the Y’s activities and philosophy.43 The official policy of the Association allowed only Christians to become the members of the organization. The Y excluded Jews, whose presence in Poland Paul Super regarded as a “colossal problem.”44 Jewish inhabitants of the “eastern frontier” are meaningfully omitted from the narrative created by Super and other Y leaders. It may be argued that the striking absence of Jews in Super’s frontier writings helped the Director of the Polish YMCA to downplay the ethnic diversity of the eastern borderland and to present Belarusian peasants as a social class and not a national minority.
23 The Polonization of White Ruthenian rural dwellers which was taking place on Poland’s eastern borderland is presented in Super’s writings as an easy and smooth process that is fully and gladly embraced by Belarusian peasants. Super rather gently described this endeavor, stressing that “people are learning the Polish language, coming into the Catholic Church, thinking of themselves as Polish citizens, and in other ways creating in their own minds a mental state favorable to a normal life, settled political conditions, and a stable frontier.”45 The Director of the Polish YMCA did not mention the fact that a vast majority of Belarusian peasants belonged to the Orthodox Church, as this omission allowed the religious difference between the colonizing Poles and Polonized White Ruthenians to be ignored. In Super’s writings about the eastern frontier, Polishness implied Catholicism. Super erased Belarusian peasants’ ethnic characteristics such as language or religion, apparently for the sake of presenting their transformation into Polish citizenship and identity as smooth. Super frankly admitted that the efforts of the YMCA were in this aspect congruent with the official policies of the reborn Polish state, stressing that “our rows of triangles is indeed but a thin line down the frontier, but the importance of their service is recognized by railroad workers, officials in the Ministry, and citizens in general who know the eastern border.”46
24 Citizenship and religiosity are also crucial for identifying the last actor in Super’s frontier puzzle, or a group allegedly representing savagery on the Polish frontier. In Turner’s famous essay, on the American moving frontier this role was played by Native Americans portrayed as primitive “savages,” in opposition to whom American identity and American character were being formed. Native Americans, as argues the cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg, were “the utmost antithesis to an America dedicated to productivity, profit, and private property”47—the traits that connoted the capitalist economy. For the proponents of the theories of civilization, Poland and native Poles also possessed their “civilizational Other,”48 whose cultural Otherness became even more apparent after the events of 1917. In their view, Poland’s frontier was a meeting
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point between Western, Christian, democratic, and capitalist “civilization” and its opposite: the eastern “barbarism” embodied by Soviet Russia.
25 In the writings of Paul Super and other YMCA leaders, Russia had represented oriental barbarism even before the time of communism. For the YMCA secretaries it was Bolshevism, however, that became the fullest embodiment of “eastern savagery.” In the YMCA’s view, Bolshevism functioned as “the most demoralizing force”;49 and as “a plague that destroys everything,” and “menace to all civilizations.”50 The Association’s revulsion from communism was augmented by its members’ experiences during the Soviet-Polish war, when the YMCA aided Polish soldiers fighting against “bloodthirsty Bolsheviks killing women, children, and the aged.”51 According to the YMCA War Work Secretary D.A. Davis, in 1920 the Poles were “called to stand between anarchy, as manifested to the east of them, and the western world. The battle is one that of the anti-Christian materialist social order and ordered progress represented in a Christian civilization.”52
26 For the YMCA leaders, the winning of the war over Bolshevism in 1920 did not, however, bring Poland’s civilizational mission to completion, especially in face of the acquisition of new eastern territories. Super and his collaborators sustained their belief in Poland as a civilizer of its eastern borderland throughout the interwar years. In 1937, after fifteen years spent in Poland, the Director of the YMCA Paul Super wrote in one of his reports: “eastern provinces should be defended from the Russian invasion; they must be strengthened against the Bolshevik propaganda, and their standard of civilization in the rural areas must be both raised and Polonized.”53 However, in the late 1930s the YMCA no longer played a direct role in this “civilizational endeavor,” as since 1926 it was focusing solely on its municipal branches. Nonetheless, the Association leaders spoke frequently about the peril of communism and strengthened anti- Bolshevism in the largest Polish cities. Paul Super adhered to the view that “Western civilization will either hold this country [that is Poland] and improve it or be pushed back by a lower culture [“oriental” Soviet “barbarism”].54
27 ***
28 As I have argued, American leaders of the Polish YMCA envisaged the Polish eastern borderland along the lines of the U.S. western frontier and thus treated it as a meeting point between savagery and civilization, as well as the territory where a new Polish citizenship was being forged. The railroad work that the YMCA initiated in the early 1920s had in this context long-lasting political, cultural and civilizational ramifications. For YMCA leaders such as Paul Super or Roman Dyboski, the railroad workers from the eastern frontier personified civilization and were accorded a vital task of a cultural uplift of illiterate Belarusian peasants who were climbing the ladder of civilization. On the territories that had belonged to tsarist Russia and were now endangered by the Soviet propaganda, the YMCA and its railroad workers were to serve the role of the bulwark of Christianity, democracy, and capitalism: the concepts that denoted Western civilization. In the YMCA leaders’ rhetoric, the bordering Soviet Russia connoted, on the contrary, “eastern barbarism,” synonymous with primitivism, anarchism, anti- Christian materialism and totalitarianism.55 Significantly, the goals that the Association intended to reach on the eastern frontier, such as the Polonization of Belarusian peasants or the taming of Bolshevism, corresponded with the national and international policies of Poland.
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29 The YMCA’s vision of social relations and the political situation in Poland’s borderlands stemmed from the American frontier myth and the influential discourse of civilization that shaped the opinions of such Y workers as Paul Super. In his narrative regarding the civilizing mission in the eastern borderlands the sizeable Jewish population of the region was completely ignored and the religious difference between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity was erased. Although the Polish leaders of the YMCA such as Roman Dyboski largely shared Super’s assumptions, the local Polish press, and probably the railroad workers themselves, regarded YMCA’s eastern branches as cultural and educational centers serving engineers and conductors, and not as “civilizing spots” in the “eastern wilderness.” In Polish press articles that described the Y initiatives for railroad workers, the narrative of the Polish frontier that filled Paul Super’s writings is strikingly absent.56 The Y’s eastern branches named in Polish as ogniska or “firesides” were to give “light and warmth”57 to wearied railroad workers who in fact constituted an advantaged group in the region, but who did not necessarily see themselves as civilizers or Polonizers. Copeland, Jeffrey C. and Xu, Yan. “Introduction: Collaboration and Conflict: The YMCA at War.” In The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World Wars, 1-16. Edited by Jeffrey C. Copeland and Yan Xu. Lanham. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018. Davidann, Jon Thares. A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890-1930. Cranbury, NJ: Lehegh University Press, 1998. Dyboski, Roman. The YMCA in Poland. New York: Foreign Committee Young Men’s Christian Association of the United States and Canada, 1935. Gems, Gerald M. The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904. Hopkins, C. Howard. History of the YMCA in North America. New York: Association Press, 1951. Hübner, Stefan. “Muscular Christianity and the „Western Civilizing Mission”: Elwood S. Brown, the YMCA, and the Idea of the Far Eastern Championship Games.” Diplomatic History 39, no 3 (2015): 532-557. Jaroszewski, Julian, and Maciej Łuczak. „Kultura fizyczna w programach Łódzkiego Oddziału Związku Młodzieży Chrześcijańskiej (YMCA) w latach 1920-2002.” Prace Naukowe Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie. Kultura Fizyczna 13, no 2 (2014): 95-113. Johnson, Elmer L. The History of YMCA Physical Education. New York: Association Press, 1979. Kałamacka, Ewa. “Działalność Amerykańskiej Misji Wojskowej YMCA w Polsce w latach 1919-1922.” In Z najnowszej historii kultury fizycznej w Polsce, vol. 5. Prace Naukowe Letniej Szkoły Historyków Kultury Fizycznej, 127-137. Edited by Bernard Woltmann. Gorzów Wielkopolski: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe Kultury Fizycznej, 2002. Kałamacka, Ewa. “Działalność „Polskiej YMCA” zapowiedzią sportu dla wszystkich (1923-1939).” In Z tradycji wychowania fizycznego i sportu w czasach zaboru i II RP, 63-71. Edited by Stanisław Zaborniak i Paweł Król. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, 2008. Kałamacka, Ewa. “Działalność polskiej YMCA w dziedzinie wychowania fizycznego i sportu.” Wychowanie Fizyczne i Sport no 4 (1989): 77-90.
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Kuźma-Markowska, Sylwia. Dziecko, rodzina i płeć w amerykańskich inicjatywach humanitarnych i filantropijnych w II Rzeczypospolitej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2018. Ladd, Tony, and James A. Mathisen. Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999. Lupkin, Paula. Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota, Press 2010. Marcus, Joseph. Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1983. Mędrzecki, Włodzimierz. Województwo wołyńskie 1921-1939. Elementy przemian cywilizacyjnych, społecznych i politycznych. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1988. Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City. Edited by Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Ann Spratt. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. Miller, Matthew M. The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012. Mjagkij, Nina. Light in the Darkness: African-Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1940. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society, or the Researchers in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Era. Edited by Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Richards, Jeffrey and John MacKenzie. The Railway Station: A Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rose, William J. and Paul Super. The Polish Young Men’s Christian Association: Facts for Friends in America. New York: Associated Press 1927. Service with Fighting Men: An Account of the Work of the American YMCA in World Wars. New York: Association Press, 1922. Smith, Erika Cornelius. “The YMCA and the Science of International Civil Statecraft in Post-World War I Czechoslovakia,” In The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World Wars, 101-122. Edited by Jeffrey C. Copeland and Yan Xu. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018. Super, Paul. Twenty-Five Years with the Poles. New York: Paul Super Memorial Fund, 1950. Tlustý, Tomáš. “A Brief Comparison of Physical Education and Sport within the Czechoslovak and Polish YMCA in Interwar Years.” Prace naukowe Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie. Kultura Fizyczna 16, no. 3 (2017): 29-45. Tomaszewski, Jerzy. Zarys dziejów Żydów w Polsce w latach 1918-1939. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1990. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Turner, Frederic Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920. Vandenberg-Daves, Jodi. “The Manly Pursuit of Partnership between the Sexes: The Debate over YMCA Programs for Women and Girls, 1914-1933.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1324-1346.
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Winter, Thomas. Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Xing, Jun. Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919-1937. Cranbury, NJ: Lehegh University Press, 1996. Zald, Meyer L. and Patricia Denton. “From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA.” Administrative Science Quarterly 8, no 2 (1963): 214-234. Żebrowski, Piotr T. “Symbol of Symmetrical Development: The Reception of the YMCA in Poland.” The International Journal of History of Sport 8, no 1 (1991): 96-110.
NOTES
1. Tomáš Tlustý, „A Brief Comparison of Physical Education and Sport within the Czechoslovak and Polish YMCA in Interwar Years,” Prace naukowe Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie. Kultura Fizyczna 16, no 3 (2017): 29-45; Piotr T. Żebrowski, “Symbol of Symmetrical Development: The Reception of the YMCA in Poland,” The International Journal of History of Sport 8 no 1 (1991): 96-110; Erika Cornelius Smith, “The YMCA and the Science of International Civil Statecraft in Post-World War I Czechoslovakia,” in The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World Wars, ed. Jeffrey C. Copeland and Yan Xu (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018), 101-122; Julian Jaroszewski and Maciej Łuczak, „Kultura fizyczna w programach Łódzkiego Oddziału Związku Młodzieży Chrześcijańskiej (YMCA) w latach 1920-2002,” Prace Naukowe Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie. Kultura Fizyczna 13, no 2 (2014): 95-113; Ewa Kałamacka, „Działalność „Polskiej YMCA” zapowiedzią sportu dla wszystkich (1923-1939),” in Z tradycji wychowania fizycznego i sportu w czasach zaboru i II RP, ed. Stanisław Zaborniak i Paweł Król (Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, 2008), 63-71; Ewa Kałamacka, „Działalność polskiej YMCA w dziedzinie wychowania fizycznego i sportu,” Wychowanie Fizyczne i Sport no 4 (1989): 77-90. 2. Matthew M. Miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012). 3. C. Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), 101-404; Meyer L. Zald and Patricia Denton, “From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA,” Administrative Science Quarterly 8, no 2 (1963): 214-234. 4. Hopkins, History of the YMCA, 452-593; Elmer L. Johnson, The History of YMCA Physical Education (New York: Association Press, 1979), 45-220; Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 111-136. 5. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of
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American Sport (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999); Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Era, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. Nina Mjagkij, Light in the Darkness: African-Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015); Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Ann Spratt (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997; Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, „The Manly Pursuit of Partnership between the Sexes: The Debate over YMCA Programs for Women and Girls, 1914-1933,” The Journal of American History 78 no 4 (1992): 1324-1346. 7. Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 8. Jon Thares Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890-1930 (Cranbury, NJ: Lehegh University Press, 1998); Jun Xing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919-1937 (Cranbury, NJ: Lehegh University Press, 1996). 9. Miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture. 10. Stefan Hübner, “Muscular Christianity and the „Western Civilizing Mission”: Elwood S. Brown, the YMCA, and the Idea of the Far Eastern Championship Games,” Diplomatic History 39, no 3 (2015): 532-557; Gerald M. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 11. Copeland and Xu, “Introduction: Collaboration and Conflict: The YMCA at War,” in: The YMCA at War, 2-4. 12. The Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Minneapolis [henceforth: YMCA Archives], YMCA of the USA Records, Records of YMCA International Work in Poland [henceforth: YMCA in Poland], Bibliographical Records, Talton to Terrill, box 202, folder 2, A.S. Taylor, The YMCA in Poland,” The Red Triangle no 4, 1921, 179-181; Service with Fighting Men: An Account of the Work of the American YMCA in World Wars (New York: Association Press, 1922), 458-467. 13. YMCA Archives, YMCA in Poland, Bibliographical Records, Talton to Terrill, box 202, folder 2, A.S. Taylor, “The YMCA in Poland,” The Red Triangle no 4, 1921, 179-181; Service with Fighting Men, 458-467; Ewa Kałamacka, “Działalność Amerykańskiej Misji Wojskowej YMCA w Polsce w latach 1919-1922,” in Z najnowszej historii kultury fizycznej w Polsce, vol. 5. Prace Naukowe Letniej Szkoły Historyków Kultury Fizycznej, ed. Bernard Woltmann (Gorzów Wielkopolski: Towarzystwo Naukowe Kultury Fizycznej, 2002), 127-137. 14. Paul Super, Twenty-Five Years with the Poles (New York: Paul Super Memorial Fund, 1950), 41. 15. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, Dziecko, rodzina i płeć w amerykańskich inicjatywach humanitarnych i filantropijnych w II Rzeczypospolitej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2018), 312-340. 16. Super, Twenty-Five Years, 66. 17. Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America Archives, New York City [henceforth: PIASA], Paul Super Papers [henceforth: Super Papers], folder 6, News from the field: Retirement of Paul Super (1946). 18. Super, Twenty-Five Years, 118. 19. Super, 30. 20. Super, 30. 21. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” Railroad Men June 1924, 157. 22. Super, 157.
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23. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or the Researchers in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877); G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904). 24. Morgan. 25. Frederic Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 3. 26. Turner, 4. 27. Turner, 37. 28. Super, Twenty-Five Years, 30. 29. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Zarys dziejów Żydów w Polsce w latach 1918-1939 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1990); Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1983); Włodzimierz Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie 1921-1939. Elementy przemian cywilizacyjnych, społecznych i politycznych (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1988). 30. Super, Twenty-Five Years, 64. 31. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” 158. 32. Super, Twenty-Five Years, 65. 33. Super, 65. 34. Super, 31; William J. Rose and Paul Super, The Polish Young Men’s Christian Association: Facts for Friends in America (New York: Associated Press, 1927), 2-3; YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 1, folder 7, Report of D.A. Davis Visit to Poland, Feb 1-8, 1925, s. 4; YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 1, folder 5, Poland 1924, s. 7-8. 35. Roman Dyboski, The YMCA in Poland (New York: Foreign Committee Young Men’s Christian Association of the United States and Canada, 1935), 8. 36. Dyboski, 8. 37. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” 158. 38. Dyboski, The YMCA in Poland, 8. 39. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” 158. 40. Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 65. 41. Kuźma-Markowska, Dziecko, rodzina i płeć, 354-356. 42. Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie, The Railway Station: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 43. Kuźma-Markowska, Dziecko, rodzina i płeć, 322-324; Żebrowski, “The Symbol of Symmetrical Development,” 105-107. 44. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 8, folder 5, Poland and the Polish YMCA in March 1937, by Paul Super. 45. PIASA, Super Papers, folder 10, Eastern Poland as Seen by Paul Super, 3. 46. PIASA, Super Papers, folder 10, Eastern Poland as Seen by Paul Super, 4. 47. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 37. 48. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 82-83. 49. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 7, folder 7, The Polish Y.M.C.A., The Permanent Establishment Project of the Polish YMCA, Warsaw 1928. 50. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 1, folder 1, Report no 2 on YMCA War Work in Poland, D.A. Davis, 11.
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51. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 1, folder 1, Report no 2 on YMCA War Work in Poland, D.A. Davis, 11. 52. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 7, folder 6, D.A. Davis, War work of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Poland and Checho-Slovakia, 10. 53. YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 8, folder 5, Poland and the Polish YMCA in March 1937, by Paul Super, 3. 54. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” 157. 55. Super, “On Poland’s Frontier,” 157-159; Dyboski, The Y.M.C.A. in Poland, 7; YMCA Archives, YMCA of Poland, box 7, folder 6, D.A. Davis, War Work of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Poland and Checho-Slovakia, 10. 56. “Z życia ‘ognisk kolejowych.’ Zadania i praca ognisk kolejowych.” Wileński Przegląd Artystyczny, 8-9 (1924): 15; „Y.M.C.A. (Od własnego korespondenta).” Wieczorny Kurier Grodzieński 102 (April 13, 1935): 7. 57. “Z życia ‘ognisk kolejowych,’” 15.
ABSTRACTS
This article seeks to present and analyze one of the aspects of the work of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA or Y) in interwar Poland: the initiatives for railroad workers from eastern frontier towns and cities. Focusing on the efforts that the organization undertook on the territory commonly referred to as the Polish borderlands (Kresy), I show that for the leaders of the Y the work among the railway employees was of utmost political and civilizational importance. There were several reasons why the YMCA became involved in the railroad work on the eastern Polish borderlands. One of them was the looming threat of communism from neighboring Russia, another—the American Y leaders’ mythic perceptions of the U.S. moving frontier, which prompted them to adapt the American discourse on civilization to the Polish political and social situation. Using archival documents and recollections of Americans involved in the Y’s activities on the eastern Polish frontier I demonstrate how the perception of the Polish borderland by the Y’s secretaries was greatly influenced by myths deeply embedded in American culture. Drawing on the contemporary Polish press reports as well as writings of local collaborators of the YMCA, I also describe the reaction of Polish public opinion to the Y’s undertakings on the Polish frontier.
INDEX
Keywords: Young Men’s Christian Association, interwar Poland, communism, civilization, frontier
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AUTHOR
SYLWIA KUŹMA-MARKOWSKA Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She specializes in twentieth-century social and cultural history of the United States and Poland. Her areas of research include women’s and gender history, transnational history of reproduction and public health, and history of social movements.
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