“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what has since come to be.”

With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, and how the relationships formed the bases for the pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe.

In today’s post, I return to my experience in 1974 (drawing from the report in my book) to further my dialogue with Dayan Dayan, as we explore together the relationship between “monstration” and power. I report here first my recollections of my “trivial day” and why what seemed so unimportant at the time was of practical significance in Poland back then. I close by highlighting what I take to be the theoretical significance of my little story.

The Arrest

Disorientation is what I remember about that April afternoon in Lublin, when the People’s Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters. The bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin that week were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and others of mediocre quality were in great number. Veteran theater critics, journalists, directors, and actors were generally dissatisfied, particularly with one performance I attended, billed as a “happening.” It took place in a gymnasium and involved little more than a rock soundtrack, a colorful slide show, and some student actors playing with an orange and yellow sheet. When it ended, a group of Polish journalists wanted to make things more interesting. They grabbed the sheet and spread it over themselves. They stood on one another’s shoulders, made pyramids, and horsed around. And then they decided to go outside with their merrymaking and turn the pseudo-happening into the real thing.

The journalists under the sheet led the other members of the audience, along with the actors of the failed performance, down two flights of stairs onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Lublin. And as soon as they hit the street, their act of ordinary horseplay became a public event. Crowds formed on both sides of the street. Theater participants mingled with shoppers, clerks, and workers in marveling at an open spontaneous public event.

But a few others, particularly one man in an oversized trench coat, seemed to be offended. He and a woman companion started shouting at those under the sheet: “You will hurt yourselves!” “Not only yourselves, but others!” “You can’t breathe properly under there!” And the like. With a refined, cosmopolitan sense of what happenings were supposed to provoke, the theater people laughed and enjoyed the couple’s contribution to the show. Others just scoffed at them and shouted back at them to leave the kids alone. The couple left. With that the interest of the passersby dissipated, and the happening moved on. The sheet-being turned up a side street and draped itself over a small Italian Fiat 850-S with German tourist license plates: my car.

Some friends coaxed me into the car with the sheet performers. When it was clear that the next logical step was to start the engine, at my Polish colleagues’ instigation, I turned on the ignition. Ten seconds later, the man in the oversized trench coat swept the sheet off my car and, with a paddy wagon behind him, showed us his identification. He was with the People’s Militia, and he politely indicated that we were to follow him.

At the militia headquarters, we had to hand in our papers. The Poles presented their personal “legitimacja,” I my American passport. Then we were taken to a secured lockup area. I presented unanticipated problems. They hadn’t expected an American to be at this obscure performance, let alone at a place where the divide between theater performance and political order had been breached. They wanted to put an end to the event in as uncompromising a way as possible. But the officers on duty did not seem to have the authority to either release us, or further process our detention.

They told us that they had to confirm our story with the theater festival organizers. But first they confiscated film from the cameras of the journalist photographers. And then we waited.

While we were locked up in the militia station, my Polish friends, veterans of Poland’s subtle politics of cultural life, assured me that nothing serious would happen. They realistically assessed our situation. If I weren’t there, some greater unpleasantness might ensue. Maybe they would be detained without being formally charged for the permissible forty-eight hours. But our little escapade on the street was not really significant, and the city wouldn’t want to risk an international incident over it. Indeed, the local party hacks might have been afraid that their actions would meet disapproval in Warsaw. It was the era of détente. Poland was experiencing an apparent economic boom based on loans from Western governments and banks. Tensions were relaxed and political muscle was not to be flexed. Therefore, the Poles predicted that we would wait for a few hours and then would be warned and released. And they turned out to be right. After two hours, our papers were returned (though not the film) and we were released with a warning not to take part again in “an unauthorized theater event.”

In spite of the benign outcome, when I returned to the festival and later to my apartment in Warsaw, I was shaken up. I had not intended to become involved in Polish politics, except to study its relation to Polish culture. I knew the relationship was intimate, but hadn’t expected to be caught up in it. Yet, the whole adventure almost immediately became the subject of jokes, and I soon forgot it. But I was to be reminded of it again.

A photographer in our group, it seemed, had somehow managed to retain a roll of film documenting what had happened. And months after the event, a weekly newspaper in Krakow, Student, published an account – not a news story, but a comic-book rendition of Little Red Riding Hood. The sheet-being was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood, and the city street became the forest in which we met the Big Bad Wolf: the undercover agent who finally showed his teeth when we were in Grandmother’s House – my car. The newspaper didn’t reveal all of the circumstances of the arrest, but it clearly showed the political police doing its work.

In retrospect, I realize that this happening was more successful than any other I have observed or read about. It crossed the divide between the aesthetic and the social, and it developed a life of its own, encompassing a large and formidable territory. These reflections included. It began inside its own repressive context: it was confined to a gymnasium, because the authorities did not permit performances outside of conventional settings. The authorities wanted only channeled innovation, knowing that without the proper channels, cultural autonomy might not easily find acceptable limits. But those in the world of theater, as well as in the other arts and sciences, pushed limits as a matter of fundamental principle; and in Lublin that day, they improvised.

This activity of the young intellectuals was part of a long struggle with totalized political regimes over the issue of free public space. The happening revealed the nature of the battlefield. On the one side were the soft and hard totalitarians. On the other side were those who provoked the rulers, who struggled for room to act on their own, who were true to their cultural vocations, and those who saw the room so created, enjoyed it, and became collaborators with their resistance.

For the authorities, youth theater was a safety valve. For those involved in this theater, well understanding their situation, it was a base for freedom and for what I call the politics of small things.

The Ironies of Consequence

I discussed this event in Paris with Daniel Dayan and his student at Sciences Po. My key reasons for recalling that long ago, far away event here and in Paris: the Polish authorities worked to keep free speech and action as invisible as possible. The project of monstration, of showing such speech and action to a public, was enacted on that day in an improvised street theater happening, leading to my arrest. The authorities worked to restrict visibility, as my Polish friends and I worked to expand it. They wanted to block the show, but months later a Polish newspaper, retold the story as a fairy tale, elliptically but clearly monstrated the repressive apparatus in action. This media institution witnessed, recorded, translated (avoiding censorship) and illustrated the workings of both the power of the Party State and of an emerging opposition to this power before this opposition was organized. Later this power developed more fully in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc, with internal and international media reporting. It is important to note that the showing on that day in Lublin and later in the Krakow newspaper in important ways made the later developments possible. A seemingly trivial event, after the fact, was consequential. Dayan and I are struck by this, by the ironies of consequence, when the small turns out to be large, and the large, small. The monstration of official politics and the politics of small thing, needs careful examination.

To be continued…

Tomek Kitlinski informed me yesterday about a new round in the continuing story of the escalating cultural war in Poland. This one hits close to home for me. I have a tragic sense of déjà vu. The greatest of the student theaters I studied in the 1970s, Teatr Osmego Dnia (Translated as Theater of the Eighth Day, or The Eighth Day Theater), continues to face official repression. A theater that combined the theatrical insights of Jerzy Grotowski with deep exploration of the existential problems of “socialist youth” continues its critical journey in the post-Communist order, revealing that some things haven’t changed: their challenging artistic excellence, the intolerance of authorities to alternative sensibility, opinion and judgment, and remarkably, the political monitoring of the private life of artists, the theme of their powerful play, “The Files,” which juxtaposes their dairies with their security files of the Ministry of the Interior from the 70s (think “The Lives of Others” with more dramatic and documentary power, expressed through superb fully embodied acting). The invasion of privacy in this case involved Ewa Wójciak Facebook page, as reported in the letter below. I reproduce the letter of protest here, which points to the unfolding events and comments by Kitlinski, illuminating the meaning of the events. Readers wishing to support this letter of protest should send their names and comments to teatr@osmego.art.pl

On the day of the elections for a new pope, shortly after the official announcement was made, Ewa Wójciak took to her private Facebook profile and wrote: “…and so they elected a prick, who denounced left-wing priests during the military dictatorship in Argentina.”

To Wójciak’s astonishment, her status almost instantly became the cause for a massive media outrage.

She was invited onto a show for the local TV channel, where she defended the private character of her Facebook status, while retaining her conviction that the choice made by the Vatican was of scandalous nature. She explained that, regardless of specific cases and their finales in court trials, the Argentinian Catholic Church – including the newly elected pope – had in fact maintained a close relationship with the military dictatorship responsible for mass ‘disappearings’, tortures and deaths of some 30,000 people.

The councilmen of the city of Poznań demanded that the mayor dismisses Ewa Wójciak from the position of a director of the theatre immediately. Facebook shut down her account. The theatre became flooded with letters filled with threats and insults. Whereas the town hall continues to debate the suitable punishment for Ewa Wójciak, the right-wing councilmen attack the theatre and its ‘leftist’ character, calling for its shutdown. It turns out that in a democratic country, the authorities expect artist subsidised by local councils to share their official worldview. Especially their catholic beliefs.

The situation appears serious. The witch-hunt against the theatre has been going on for years now. The theatre that has over the past few decades become a hub for lively discussions and debates, a platform for independent, young artists, and an important cultural centre is under constant fire from the local authorities.

There has come yet another critical moment for our theatre, and we kindly ask for your support in the form of an open letter or a petition. One such letter has already been produced and signed by approx. 600 representatives of Polish intelligentsia.

Tomek Kitlinski’s Commentary

“In the mid-1970s, the Eighth Day suffered most severely from censorship. Indeed, in the first production of “The Sight of the Crime,” in 1973, 80 percent of the original text was eliminated by the censor.” (Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom. An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America, p. 99) The current attempts at censorship against Wójciak in Poznan testify to the violence of culture wars (analyzed in Deliberately Considered, here,  here and especially here) and Poland’s polarization.

There is a pattern of cultural repression which is also notably observable in my home town, Lublin. There, the City Council decreed: “Producing the Positive Educational Climate for the Younger Generation of Lublin Residents” which implies art censorship; Lublin artists and scholars have immediately started a petition against this repressive measure (in English at the bottom of the page).

Similarly, Poznan cultural operators have been campaigning against the scapegoating of Wojciak. The legendary poet of the opposition, former Harvard professor and Eighth Day playwright, Stanislaw Baranczak and foremost international artists, Miroslaw Balka and Zofia Kulik, intellectuals Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Elzbieta Matynia and hundreds of people in Poland have signed a previous letter of support for Wójciak.

An eminent scholar of American literature, Zofia Kolbuszewska, has also signed it and subsequently resigned from the position of Vice Dean of the Humanities at the Catholic University of Lublin. Zofia authored a book, which by using the methodology of Lacan, Kristeva and Agamben, explores the American Gothic of such female authors as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin and Toni Morrison. Kolbuszewska was vilified in the far-right press, but defended by two open letters.

Ever a rebel, Ewa Wojciak has always stood up against authoritarianism. Ewa has always been outspoken, impudent and honest — in her protests against the one-party monopoly before 1989 and in her disagreement against the injustices of the transition. She has invited minority speakers to her Theatre: refugees, “lokatorzy,” poor Poznan residents threatened with eviction, feminists, LGBTQ. She took part in the banned 2005 women’s and gay demonstration in Poznan which was brutalized by the police and one of her actors was arrested.

La Pasionaria of the alternative theatre, Ewa recited-sang the poetry of the poet repressed under the Soviet system, Anna Akhmatova. In the recent shows of the Eighth Day, she performed with a new force, biting irony and vis comica, passionately satirizesing the megalomania “Polishness.” I will always remember her performances in “Paranoicy i Pszczelarze” on ultranationalist, vainglorious paranoiacs and open-minded cosmopolitan beekeepers, in “Portiernia” on Europe resisting refugees, and most deeply personal in “Teczki” on security police files against her and other members of the company.

Ewa Wojciak and the Eighth Day Theatre should be supported on grounds of free speech. Let’s also not forget their aesthetically experimental production, always with a message of freedom.

12. In the sixteenth century, Lublin was a hub of anti-war and anti-feudal religious group Socinians who – exiled to Transylvania and the Netherlands – influenced the political philosophy of John Locke. In the Renaissance, this city attracted dissenters; in modernism: the avant-garde; and in the 1970s and 80s: conceptual artists and alternative theatre. Today it boasts young artists: Robert Kusmirowski (featured in the recent Liverpool Biennial), Urszula Pieregonczuk (who queers Dostoevsky and war history) Mariusz Tarkawian (whose drawings will be on show at the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Museum in January: ) and Piotr Brozek who has authored the FB profile of a Jewish child murdered in the Holocaust, Henio Zytomirski. Brozek updated the profile with newsfeeds in the first-person, using the present tense. Invitations to add Henio as a friend read: “I would like to tell you the story of one life.” Internet users befriended Henio, and sent him messages, comments and even gifts. Mariusz Tarkawian drew a monumental panorama of bloodshed throughout human history in Lublin’s Biala Gallery. The Holocaust was presented, as was the Armenian genocide (the artist’s ancestors were Armenian, who had for centuries been living in Poland). Tarkawian also graffitied a house with the lyrics to a Yiddish song in order to commemorate Jewish Lublin. Such artistic-social initiatives are necessary in Poland, where mourning  for the victims of the Holocaust is lacking. Unmourned millions, unmourned life.

13. In a book Jewish Lublin: A Cultural Monograph, published by the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, the Jewish Mexican sociologist Adina Cimet writes, “What had been home became hell and much was severed: lives, culture, faith, hope, and humanity. The Majdanek extermination camp, just a bus ride away from the city, remains one of the tombstones of that destruction.”

Author of educational projects at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York Adina Cimet adds on Lublin,

“I encountered young people that were struggling with the past they had inherited: the city they were left with and the silence they were handed. These young pioneers – as I see them – were working to imagine the obliterated past; they struggled to conceive and recognize the Jewish contribution to their history in order to be able to understand ‘their’ past. Some ached from the slaughter that was staged in those streets. But their work revealed to me that, out of that past, they sought to imagine a future for themselves. They dreamt of rebuilding their world based on values of decency, respect to others, and the recognition of Jewish memory.”

14. Among these pioneers are the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University as well as NGOs: Homo Faber and The Well of Memory (Studnia pamieci). Intercultural Lublin is presented in and fostered by the photo campaign Open-create Lublin! O-tworz Lublin!, initiated by Barbara Wybacz. The tradition of this Jewish city is researched into by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Robert Kuwalek and Dariusz Libionka whose car was sprayed with swastikas .

15. We need even more grassroots art activism and opposition to the wave of ultra-nationalism which has gripped Hungary, Russia and Poland. Contemporary art is repressed here, as it explores the traumas of the past and of the present (Pussy Riot, layoffs of curators, Orban’s takeover of art institutions). East European societies are polarized economically and politically:  the moneyed few vs. precariousness of the transition; far-right militias on the rampage vs. socially engaged (Marcusian-Kristevan-Rancierian, albeit always local!) aesthetics .

16. Lublin itself has also been home to groundbreaking thinkers: the philosophers of science Emile Meyerson and Ludwik Fleck, the specialist on Bergson, Romuald Jakub Weksler Waszkinel, who serving as a Catholic priest discovered that he was Jewish (a Holocaust survivor who had been handed over to a Polish family by his mother). This city is exceptional through outstanding women and LGBT personalities: the lesbian writer Narcyza Zmichowska (whose Gothic novel The Heathen Woman was translated into English by Ursula Phillips), The Bund leader Bela Shapira, the novelist Malwina Meyerson and her daughter poetess Franciszka Arnsztajnowa whose friendship with this city’s avant-garde gay poet Jozef Czechowicz is depicted by Hanna Krall in her reportages. The Grodzka City Centre-NN Theatre is presenting Czechowicz’s photographs of Jewish Lublin, as well as the life and work of Krystyna Modrzewska, a transgender Jewish doctor, scientist and writer, forced out of Poland when anti-Semitism reached its climax in 1968.

17. This month the cultural historian Marina Warner lectured fascinatingly on iconoclasms; in fact, iconoclasms against art are taking place in the streets of Lublin. Culture wars are being waged which pit a camp for openness against jingoists and pseudo-religious crusaders when Poland, Hungary and Russia have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity. We need an eastern Europe that holds true to Transeuropa’s belief in “democracy, equality, culture beyond the nation state,” when we deplore the punishment of Pussy Rioters, the destruction of art in Lublin and Fidesz’s witch hunt of outstanding philosophers such as Agnes Heller:

18. The ambivalence of Lublin and Eastern Europe can be defined through the Derridean neologism of hostipitalité. Hostility and hospitality blend here: on the one hand, art activism is effervescent; on the other, censorship is crushing it. The Bakhtinian Pussy Rioters and Femen perform human rights, whilst extreme right ideas are employed by the political class.  The hunger for profit (ubiquitous privatizations) and classism are intensifying.

19. The Polish word for hospitality (goscinność) embraces otherness (inność). This linguistic phenomenon indicates that hospitality hosts alterity as hospital-alterity. Drawing on the Hebrew Bible, Lublin should become an open city (ville franche) or refuge city (ville refuge). The philosophers Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney define this city as a space where “migrants may seek sanctuary from the pressures of persecution, intimidation, and exile.” The feminist thinker Hélène Cixous also employs this idea of hospitality in her extraordinary plays and other texts. At his Lublin Labirynt Gallery lecture, the art historian Piotr Piotrowski elaborated on his concept of the critical museum as a place which could be paralleled by a “critical, self-critical city”; a self-critical, open-refuge city is of the utmost importance in our here and now. How can we enhance our common humanity — shared with refugees dying at the borders of the EU, and with women, migrants-turned-slaves, Jews, Roma, the homeless, the unemployed and the LGBT communities?

20. The destruction of the Lublin tickets has revealed social fissures. Artistic freedom has been jeopardized by controlling and vandalizing public artworks. It is our duty to reclaim the right to Lublin. We are following the activist and academic Ewa Majewska who has critiqued the evictions of both ordinary residents in Warsaw and Poznan and artistic venues (Warsaw’s Museum for Modern Art); similarly, in The Art Newspaper Julia Michalska has analysed anti-Romany hostilities in Hungary and political pressure to evict the Roma Parliament in Budapest.

21. We dream of Lublin becoming a hub of participatory democracy where minorities and majorities enjoy equal rights, are visible and decide together on the affairs of our polis. This city should cultivate hospitality, a truth Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us of. The commitment to opening Lublin to otherness depends on all of us.

1. Art representing Roma, gays and Jews has been banned and destroyed in Lublin, Poland, twice host to Transeuropa Festival. Stop Toleration for Toleration, a far-right soccer hooligan march, with hate speech chants, has lashed back against the social-artistic campaign Lublin for All, led by Szymon Pietrasiewicz. The campaign included bus tickets with the images of national and sexual minorities who have shaped this city for centuries as a hub of Jewish, Romany, Protestant and queer cultures. City Hall, under pressure from the soccer hooligans, censored and shredded this art. As the municipal authorities have caved in to the extreme right, Lublin — it appears — is not welcoming at all.

The destruction of art crushes the human geography of Lublin: this is a blow to the heritage of this intercultural city and to the current art activism working to make Lublin hospitable.

We need to reclaim Lublin from the far-right soccer hooligans. That’s why the ground breaking Holocaust scholars Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton, Poland’s leading feminist Kazimiera Szczuka, and this country’s only out gay MP Robert Biedron have all signed an open letter “Let’s not give Lublin up to intolerance, aggression and social exclusion,” authored by Agnieszka Zietek, a political activist and lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.

2. “Lublin free of fags!” “Run Pietrasiewicz out of Lublin!” “F … Gazeta Wyborcza [Poland’s progressive newspaper]!” “A boy and a girl are a normal family!” “Lublin, a city without deviations!” These were the chants of the soccer hooligan marchers. As editor-in-chief of the local branch of the Gazeta Wyborcza broadsheet Malgorzata Bielecka-Holda writes, the catcalls were received with sympathy by City Hall. This is just one element of the rise of the far right in Lublin. Other ominous developments: the mobilization of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the hosting of these Brown Shirts by the local Solidarność trade union, evictions and layoffs of the underprivileged, the predicament of refugees and women, refusing abortion to the fourteen-year-old rape victim Agata, and attacks on those who are reviving Jewish life.

3. Activist for Jewish Lublin, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, 57, has been assaulted with swastikas sprayed on his flat and with an explosive device. In 1990, he established Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre, devoted to the commemoration of Jewish culture in Lublin through plays, exhibitions, a publishing house and workshops for high-school students. Pietrasiewicz was also attacked with anti-Semitic posters that were pasted in his block of flats and in bus stops throughout Lublin. The perpetrators have not been found. As Pawel P. Reszka reported in Gazeta Wyborcza, the National Radical Camp (ONR), at a press conference hosted by Solidarność, insinuated that Pietrasiewicz attacked himself.

4. In 2006 Tomasz’s son, Szymon founded Tektura Space for Creative Activities, a squat with concerts, exhibitions and campaigns for human rights, women, LGBT, the homeless and seniors. This alternative collective opposes consumerism and neo-Nazism. Tektura is often threatened by skinhead raids, but, significantly, it is also not respected by economic neoliberals because of its stance for fair trade, the redistribution of goods and social justice, countering Poland’s widespread belief in the infallibility of the free market.

5. This year Szymon Pietrasiewicz started the Studio for Socially Engaged Art Rewiry, responsible for the campaign Lublin for All. The Rewiry has worked intensively in the deprived areas of Lublin, involving their residents in art activism. Pietrasiewicz’s Studio has also invited such artists as Joanna Rajkowska and Rafal Betlejemski to work with the local residents. The Rewiry is planning to bring the representatives of the international scene like David Cerny as well as Svajone and Paulius Stanikas to Lublin, too.

6. Tomasz Pietrasiewicz was a dissident in the 1980s, active in alternative theatre and underground publishing. Now two generations of nonconformists run the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and Tektura that champion independent culture. NN and Tektura hosted Transeuropa Festival which foregrounded LGBT, intercultural Lublin and refugees.

7. Chechen asylum seekers have told us at Transeuropa Lublin that they don’t feel that they’re treated as human beings here. A country of traditional emigration, Poland doesn’t welcome refugees. In October 2012 over 70 refugees in detention centers throughout Poland held a hunger strike against the legal and material conditions to which they had been condemned. A woman journalist from Georgia, Ekaterina Lemondzawa, wrote a dramatic letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, in which she described the humiliations that she had been subjected to as a refugee in Poland. The broadsheet later reported: “Poland is allegedly the only country in the European Union, where refugees, including children, being held for months in detention centers, are called from their rooms by whistle to stand at attention.” Helsinki Human Rights Foundation representative Karolina Rusilowicz confirms that “these detention centers hold a penitentiary regime.”

At Transeuropa Festival, Chechen refugees shared their problems — in fact hardships — with us. Generally, asylum-seeking should be decriminalized and immigration facilitated in the European Union. Migrants and refugees must not be treated as criminals. The Seyla Benhabib-inspired Lublin political scientist Sylwia Nadgrodkiewicz writes that one needs to go beyond the logic of exclusion in order to make immigration easier.

8. International experts, in a report on Lublin as an intercultural city, indicated that refugees should be more visible in this city. Szymon Pietrasiewicz’s campaign Lublin for All attempts to present Lublin’s coexistence of different cultures and the need for acceptance and cooperation; these images embody the ethics and aesthetics of diversity and equality. The censorship, ban and destruction of the bus tickets hurt the cause for an open Lublin.

9. The art expert and political economist Mikolaj Iwanski writes ironically: “Lublin’s leadership have begun a race to see who can condemn the action [Lublin for All] faster … It turns out that a smiling black man shouting Motor [the name of the club] is a deadly threat to the city, to this second-league club and to the municipal transportation.” On a serious note, Iwanski adds that “anti-Semitism, homophobia and ethnic prejudices are still present in Polish stadiums.” The Lublin area is very poor. Amidst economic hardships, scapegoating, conspiracy theories and prejudices are rampant.

10. Submitting to the far right could not be more dangerous here. That is why an MP Michal Kabacinski, 24, protested against Lublin City Hall’s submission to the soccer hooligans. “The mayor has failed to respond to these events. This was show of hate speech, a presentation of anti-Semitic and xenophobic positions. A scandal. We must not accept these events.” On the door of Lublin city hall Kabacinski hung a picture of the mayor next to a portrait of Adolf Hitler and an image of the Ku Klux Klan. The MP explained how he had intended to demonstrate that City Hall agrees with the promotion of ideologies which these figures represent.

11. Lublin has been a city of women, minorities and migrants. Let us remember the residents of Lublin: Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Scots. Nowadays we must encourage contemporary migrants, including economic ones. Lubliners have enjoyed hospitality abroad, and metaphysically we are all migrants to this world. We must not allow prejudices in our region — that is why social change is badly needed. Let’s find within ourselves more than toleration: acceptance, more than integration: recognizing otherness as value, more than dialogue: cooperation among cultures. Zygmunt Bauman recently spoke about such a collaboration at both the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”

I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”

Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.

The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second post builds upon my thoughts as an observer of Polish democratization of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz. The third post, which is the part of the lecture written specifically with my Lublin audience in mind, is an analysis of the Polish response to Jan Gross’s Neighbors, a book in which Gross documents the fact of the active Polish participation of the Shoah in a small town in Eastern Poland, Jedwabne.

The first post is the most personal. It is formed by a cultural sensibility, “the wisdom of youth,” which I think requires serious and systematic deliberation. This is what got me to go where my mother wouldn’t. It is also that which told my son, in 2004, that Barack Obama would soon be President of the United States, and I think it is something to think about when we consider the promise of the new “new social movements” that have developed in recent years, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. Once one begins there is so much to think about.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism,”click here.

My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth.  I was looking for adven­ture.  I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my stud­ies.  I had a good disser­ta­tion proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major founda­tion was willing to pay for a year’s prepara­tion and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe.  This was a great oppor­tunity, both personal and profes­sional.  For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and under­stood, but not some­thing that should restrict my ambitions and plans.  In retro­spect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”

Because I was not restrict­ed by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remem­ber and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents.  But the insight of my mother’s question persists.  It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us under­stand the prob­lems of clashing collec­tive memories in the post-­totalitarian shadows.

In this paper, I reflect upon how Poles and Jews confront each other through their contrasting memories.  I attempt to show that there is endur­ing wisdom in my mother’s question, as a question, both because it raises a signif­icant issue and it does not dogmatical­ly declare an an­swer.  Back in 1970, dogma may have come in the form of a parental prohibi­tion concerning the plans of a respectful son: “you can’t go to the place my parents fled from.”  Here, in a more public domain, dogma comes in the form of contrasting truisms which shape conflicting memories, from “Poles are hope­lessly anti-Semit­ic,” to “Jews minimize the suffer­ing of others and do not understand the causes and respon­sibili­ties of their own suffer­ings.”  Here, I am presenting reflections based upon a paper written in response to controversies surrounding ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp.  I am extending those reflections to include the controversies about the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, the continuing controversies about Kielce in 1946, and the advance in my on going search for answers to my mother’s question.  The search started in the early 1970s, and it continues to this day.  Thus I present my thoughts in three parts: 1. Before the End of Communism, 2. Commemorating Auschwitz, and 3. Debating Jedwabne.  To anticipate my conclusion, I see these parts as revealing the development of a democratic Poland, with enduring and new problems.

Before the Fall of Communism

During my year and a half in Poland in 1973 and 1974, the “Why Poland?” question periodically became pressing.  I had to play memory games to make it less so.  This started soon after I ar­rived.  My first summer here was spent at a Polish language insti­tute.  Most of my fellow students were Polish Americans, trying to learn the lan­guage of their grand­parents.  We spent six weeks studying in Poznan and then two weeks on a bus tour all around Poland.  We visited Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Gdynia, Wroclaw, Zakopane, and Oswiecim (Au­schwitz).  The stops in Auschwitz, Zakopane and Krakow proved to be especially meaningful.  They serve as a prelude to later controver­sies over commemo­ration and memory.

Going to Auschwitz, I expected to be overwhelmed with grief, bewildered, appalled, and confused.  I experienced all this and much more.  My capacity to describe falls short of my aspirations to explain.  Yet, my most meaningful experience, from the point of view of our discussion today, was not in the field of my expec­ta­tions, and it is easily ex­plainable.  I was very angry.  My anger was not immediately directed at the Nazis, the German totalitarians, but at the Polish totalitarians: the Polish communists, who seemed to belittle the special suffer­ing of the Jews on the grounds of what is in fact the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.  At that time, it was hardly even noticeable that Jews were among the victims.  The sign at the entrance to the museum at the camp noted the suffer­ing of many nations, from the Russians to the French, from the Dutch to the Czechs; Jews were not specifically mentioned.  This was repeat­ed in the written materi­als on sale at the museum store.

To make matters worse, the pattern was repeat­ed in the old German barracks where there were special exhibits on the nations who suffered at the camp.  The barracks used to memori­alize the Polish nation were particu­larly disturbing.  One camp photo after another, with the names of murdered inmates, was dis­played. There were no Jewish names.  This was my most dramatic lesson in understand­ing that the categories of Jew and Pole commonly were mutually exclusive for Poles, even for Polish communists.  Our guide did not note such matters, nor did he point out that the Jewish exhibit had been “closed for renova­tion” since 1968, the year of the “anti-Zionist” purge.  We just passed the building housing the exhibit in silence.  As a rela­tively recent stu­dent of Polish culture and poli­tics, I was bewildered.  I later learned how silence replaced open anti-Semitism as official Party policy.

One way and another, since the war, there had been no open critical confron­tation with the Holo­caust, and the Polish relation to it, beyond the clichés of official Marxist ideology and Polish privately trans­mitted common knowledge.  The limits of the former were obscenely evident in my trip to Auschwitz.  The museum presentation of Auschwitz erased Jewish experience, memory and suffering, and replaced it with the stale clichés of official Marxism.  In such a way, the Holo­caust was avoided from war’s end to 1968.  The closing of the Jewish exhib­it, which would have been likely an exhibi­tion of such official clichés, substituted racist aggres­sion for the igno­rance of ideology.  The silence, which fol­lowed, further undermined the possi­bil­i­ty of real delib­era­tion­­.

The limits of the common knowledge of Poles as it has been transmitted privately were sug­gest­ed to me by one of my fellow stu­dents in the Polish language program soon after we left the camp.  These limits were then revealed during numer­ous encoun­ters I had while re­search­ing Polish Theater in 1973 and 1974. When I read the discussions about Jedwabne, I heard echoes of the little relatively benign story I will now tell.

Our next stop, on our tour was Zakopane, a popular mountain resort town.  A few hours after our trip to Ausch­witz, one of Polish American students was shopping for souvenirs for friends back home.  After her shopping adventure, she related her experi­ence at a shop­ping stall to one of our fellow stu­dents.  On our bus returning to our lodgings, she ex­press­ed con­ster­na­tion that she was not able to “Jew down” the sales­person on the price of some trinket.  I overheard the conver­sation and object­ed, especially in light of what we had experi­enced together at our previous stop.  What surprised me was not so much her anti-Semitic expression, but her subsequent defense of it as being meaningless: just an expres­sion, having nothing to do with Jews.  Everyone she knows uses it, she ex­plained.  It has no malicious intent and nothing to do with Jews or the Holo­caust, as far as she could see.

This is more an American than a Polish anecdote.   While anti-Semitism certainly does exist in Poland, the expres­sion: “to Jew down,” meaning to bargain, is English, and not Polish, I’m told.  Yet, the story stayed with me during my Polish so­journ for what it said about xenophobia and its persis­tence, about xenophobia and the mechanism of collective memory.  This young woman came from a lower middle class district in Brooklyn.  In her world, Jews were more symbols and linguistic expressions than flesh and blood people.  This has been even more the case in Poland and much of East and Central Europe after the Nazi occupation.  In such a world of symbols, intents need not be malicious for them to be insen­sitive and malignant.  The absence of the other, who in inter­action challenges foolishness and insensitivi­ty, as I attempted to do, makes for the unintentional transmis­sion of hatred.  This transmission is not even disrupted when the immen­si­ty of hate’s conse­quences is revealed, as it was despite all the problems of presentation on the grounds of Auschwitz.

The expres­sion “to Jew down” builds upon the lie that Jews are particularly expert with money and have their ways of getting the best from Gentiles.  The way to succeed in money matters is to act like a Jew, be greedy, heart­less, focused on the monetary and not the moral.  Even if one does not think of real Jews in this way, if one has good feelings toward Jewish friends and acquain­tances or does not think much about Jews at all, to use the phrase is to keep the stereotype alive.  And when a significant part of a cultural identity is built upon such expressive stereo­types of the other, as it is in Poland, then mutual under­stand­ing and respect becomes ex­tremely diffi­cult, if not impossi­ble.

Soon after our visit to Auschwitz and just before my wife and I said goodbye to our American friends, we, as a group, visited the city of Krakow.  While our colleagues stayed on the official tour, we went, on our own, off the formal itinerary to visit Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter and ghetto.

In 1973, Kazimierz was not the gentrifying district that it is today.  Our official tour ignored the district completely.  It was a slum, empty and decaying, some synagogues being used as warehouses and the others closed to visitors.  The oldest one had been converted into a state museum, which was apparently continuously closed for renovations since 1968.  We did manage to see the ancient Jewish cemetery and the adjacent synagogue (Remuh) where an elderly man noticed us looking around.  He introduced himself as the caretak­er of the grounds.  We spoke in our only common lan­guage, Polish, he with a strong Yiddish accent.  Yet, he insisted that he was a Polish Catholic.  The visit was extremely disturbing.

It then became clear to me that if I were to spend the next year in this country, exploring the attempt by indepen­dent minded Poles to inject cre­ativity and critique into Polish public culture through theater, I had to do so as Ameri­can and not as Jew.  The Jewish ques­tion clearly remained, even if without Jews, but I would have to put it aside, along with my mother’s, if I were not to be consumed by them.  The needed Polish – Jewish dialogue was too difficult for me to take part in at that time.  And, what was true for me was also true for the few remaining Jews in post-sixty eight Poland, and for Poles of good will as well.  There were too many more pressing problems, both political and personal, to confront the question of Jews in Poland.  The “aliens,” who were one third of the population of Warsaw before the war and who were one tenth of the population of the nation, had been eradicated.  Hitler and his collaborators (both Germans and from other nations) had succeeded and no one had time to talk about it, includ­ing me.

Of course, I am being too harsh on Poles of good will and on myself.  The “Why Poland?” question, the question that assumes the existence of intractable problems in Polish – Jewish rela­tions, but confronts them, could be addressed and tentative answers could be dis­cussed, even within the Communist system.  A key for such address and discus­sion is memory, memory of a time and a place when such relations robustly existed.  The starting point is the everyday memory of Polish – Jewish relations current in Polish society.  The start­ing point inevitably begins with cemeteries, including Ausch­witz.  This became clear to me as I traveled around Poland studying student theater.

When I began talking with my interviewees, invariably the fact that I am Jewish became evident.  Either this would be evident from my name or my physical appearance, or it would come up in conversation.

The response took on a predictable pattern.  First, there would be a personal note.  I would be told of the Jewish cemetery near the homes of just about every person with whom I spoke.  Next there would be long discussions with my new friends about the events of 1968 [a time of official anti-Semitism in Poland) and more deeply about Polish Jewish history.  The young Poles revealed a great deal about themselves and their nation in these discus­sions.  Since I was primar­i­ly talking to Polish liberals, aspiring cosmopolitan artists who looked to the West for inspiration and community, who were themselves involved directly or indirectly in the student revolt of ’68, the discussants tended to be unam­big­u­ous­ly critical of the anti-Semitism of the regime and those who responded positively to such anti-Semitic maneuvers.

The depth of their criticism became evident when we spoke about long term Polish – Jewish relations.  There were those who emphasized Polish liberalism, who pointed out that Jews were welcomed in Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centu­ries, when they were treated as pariahs in the kingdoms further East and West.  They would point out that it was not an accident that so many Jews had lived in Poland.  On the other hand, there were those who emphasized the continuity of anti-Semitic troubles among Poles.  Their comments would focus on the last one hundred years, the years of the greatest troubles in Polish – Jewish relations, and espe­cial­ly on the post war period, the years of their lived experience.

I came to realize that those who most emphat­ically “taught” me about the long history of friendship between Poles and Jews tended to be anti-Semitic, and those who forth­rightly spoke about Polish anti-Semitism tended to be tolerant, truly liberal, respectful.  I did not intend to explore these discussions system­at­i­cal­ly.  I had made the decision to avoid them in order to stay focused on an understanding of the politics of the alternative culture.  I was committed to the decision I made in Krakow that my personal con­cerns and prob­lems with the region should not take prece­dence over my specific intellectual reasons for being in Poland.  The histor­i­cal memory of anti-Semitism seemed to be quite periph­eral to my pressing project.  Yet, the symbolism of anti-Semitism was not.  It became apparent that definitions of Polish identity are con­nect­ed with such symbolism, and these have since become increas­ing­ly impor­tant in the config­uration of Polish political life.

Towards the end of my first Polish adventure, I was reminded of my grandparents’ experience.  An American friend, Jeffrey Geronimo, was visiting us, and my wife and I and our close Polish friend, Elzbieta Matynia, were on a little tour with him of the Polish countryside.  In an isolat­ed village in the Kielce region, we chanced upon an elderly man, apparently well into his nineties.  He was the picture postcard vision of a Slavic gentleman, walking with a cane, with a long angular nose and flowing white moustache.  We started a conversation, talk­ing about the usual tourist fare, all of which now escapes me.  When saying our farewells, Elzbieta challenged the gentleman to guess where my wife and I came from.  By this time we were speak­ing Polish rela­tive­ly well.  He guessed Warsaw.  When we indicat­ed New York, he did not believe us.  And after some joking around, he declared he did not know who we were or where we were from, for sure, but one thing he was certain of was that we were not Jews.

Here was the Poland my grandparents fled from – the Poland in which the Jew is the definition of the other that negatively invokes common identi­ty, even humanity.

At the time, the incident seemed to be more about the past than about the present or the future.  I have since learned that this was not so.  Both the elderly gentle­man’s statement and our Polish friend’s response to it, her extreme embarrassment and consternation, tell us a great deal about the post-communist political culture of Poland.  For, in an important sense, the problem of anti-Semitism in today’s Poland and much of East and Central Europe, the anti-Semitism without Jews, has little to do with Jews and a lot more to do with the nations states of Europe, which live in the midst of Jewish graves.  This has become most appar­ent after the fall of commu­nism, during such symbolic events as the commemoration of the liberation of a concentration camp, and such pressing practical events as the political ascendancy of overt anti-Semites, and now the debates over Jedwebne and Polish complicity in the Holocaust.  The problem has to do with the way anti-Semitism is knitted into Polish common sense, but more about that after we closely consider the problems of commemoration in Auschwitz and in Jedwabne.