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The Ideology of Space

The former party headquarters of the PZPR (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza - Polish United Workers Party) at the crossing between Aleje Jerozolismkie and Nowy Świat.

Today the building is used by a consortium of banks, insurers and international luxury brands.

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Resistance in (un)freedom

After nearly a month and a half in Poland, one thing has really caught my mind’s eye: the completely different way of thinking on the common past. There is a big awareness of Polish culture, and not merely the ghost of Communism. In the streets of Warszawa the aftermath of the Second World War still lingers on every day.

On a superficial level this isn’t hard to understand: whole streets still haven’t been rebuilt (in certain blocks it is completely normally to see bullet hole-covered appartment buildings), and the Stalinist-Gothic of the Palace of Science and Culture dominates the skyline of the city. But more recent history has also left an indelible mark that further sharpens people’s political awareness. It was only 30 years ago that the country lived under a military dictatorship, after the December Coup of 1981 (a hideous situation, regardless of how ‘benign’ that coup was supposed to be). The revolution of Solidarność is only a generation old. Almost everyone who holds an influential or powerful position in Polish society today, is in one way or another linked to the trade union movement in the 1980s (Adam Michnik for example, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza; Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the rightwing-conservative PiS; ...).

The Polish people have a long tradition of resistance that goes back to the Polish partitions at the end of the 18th century. With figures like Tadeusz Kościuszko, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik and Lech Wałęsa, the country possesses an impressive pantheon of national heroes fighting for freedom. Characteristic of this Polish tradition is the relatively big importance of writers and artists in the struggle for freedom and independence. Between 1795 and 1918, especially after the failed uprisings of 1861-63, virtually all institutions supporting Polish culture and the Polish language were closed. Teaching Polish in middle and higher education became illegal in large parts of the former Commonwealth (an important exception is Austrian-administered Polish Galicia, but I am leaving that aside for this post). The twin pressures of Germanification and Russification were designed to assimilate the peoples of the Polish partitions to the dominant cultural/ethnic group of respectiviely the Prussian (later German) and Russian empires, wiping out any trace of their former Polish (or Ukrainian, Jewish, ...) heritage. Under heavy pressure of the censors of the three Empires it became impossible to discuss the Polish Question within the borders of the former Commonwealth, which resulted in Polish literature assuming a disproportionately important role in preserving the nation. Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Stanisław Wyspiański, Bolesław Prus, are just some of the names everyone in Poland knows because of their contributions to Polish literature - and therefore implicitly also to the struggle against foreign occupation and cultural homogenization.

This tradition was continued in the course of the 20th century, as the from 1918 newly-independent Second Republic had to cope with both Nazi- and Soviet-Occupation, and after that a Soviet-imposed Communist regime. Not only authors like Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Ryszard Kapuściński and Witold Gombrowicz, but also theatre artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski and Krystian Lupa, or film directors like Andrzej Wajda, can be seen as belonging to that tradition.

The developing distance and increasing isolation of art from society which we witnessed in the West, is something hardly to be found in Poland. When Tadeusz Kantor for example - in the best avant-garde tradition - pleas for an Artistic Fiction and the Autonomy of Theatre, he doesn’t mean that theatre is entirely isolated from the world in which it is produced. No artist can work in a vacuum. Instead, his concepts carry inside them a dialectic, where the autonomy of the arts, in transcending topicality, actually brings the arts closer to life by carrying out ideas and participating in intellectual debate. Autonomous art creates a space, which can also be political. In the art of Kantor for example a central concept is that of the memory, especially the presentation of memories that aren’t supposed to be there (such as the Polish-Jewish community), from a world that no longer exists: the Second Republic before the large ethnic cleansings of 1939-1948. Just like in Wajda’s Popiół i diament or Człowiek z żelaza, the choice of topic was in itself a big political statement of resistance, by presenting people, memories and narratives that were supposed not to exist.

Today Poland is a free country in the heart of the European Union, and in that capacity it is finally restored to its rightful place as a meeting place between East and West. At the same time the Polish intellectual tradition is under great pressure. While the Russian tanks might have gone, and even though the German Federal Republic is now one of Poland’s stauncest allies (not the least through NATO), Poland now (ironically?) seems to experience a whole host of internal problems. The might and authority of the Roman Catholic Church is unparalleled to anything known in contemporary Western societies. Homosexuality is treated not just as a sin, but as a physical illness. Abortion is de facto outlawed, and women’s rights are in some circles seen as mere theory (and a theory they reject, at that). Begging pensioners has been a normal part of Poland’s public space ever since the collapse of Communism, wages are deliberately kept low and working conditions are abysmal by any standard. The past few years Poland has been host to the largest far-right/neo-nazi demonstrations in Europe - a sad irony for a country that after 1945 has been almost exclusively white, Roman Catholic and Polish (an anomaly in Poland’s multicultural and multi-ethnic history). The current central government seems increasingly nostalgic for the power enjoyed by the one-party state between 1948-1989, and increasingly takes measures to muzzle dissent, turning the public broadcaster TVP into a propaganda station, while at the same time purging the arts - one of the few bastions of the Left in Poland - from most of its critical thinkers. The most remarkable to all these developments is that they aren’t forced by any foreign power: this repression is by Poles, for Poles.

The position of Poland, like Norman Davies wrote, at the heart of Europe, makes the problems of the country urgent for the continent as well. Poland has her own tradition and her own problems, but it is impossible to see those in isolation from developments elsewhere on the continent. The intellectual tradtion of the Polish is unique to the country, but she provides invaluable lessons to a West that is increasingly turning to authoritarianism itself. People like Kuroń or Kantor can’t be seen apart from their Polish context, but they aren’t exclusively Polish: it were the unique circumstances in which they lived that made them develop a more acute and more finely tuned sense of the moral pressures exerted on us in the modern age. Norman Davies compared Poland to the canary in the coalmine, writing that if things go bad in Poland, it is highly likely things are going (to go) haywire on the rest of the continent as well - influencing the world as well. Most circumstances and developments that now seem to be converging on Poland, are present (in different forms) in the rest of the continent and the world as well. To me it doesn’t seem unwise to keep an idea on the canary in the coalmine.

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Teatr Powszechny

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Daily sight

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Wawelska tram stop / October 2017

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Several interesting facts

By now I have been living in Warszawa for almost two weeks, close by the Wawelska tram stop in the district of Stara Ochota. Sometimes the district seems like a large living monument, with Skwer Reduty Kaliskej as the central focus. The tram stop smoothly changes into a memorial, which immediately clarifies how Warszawa works. This is a city that lives on mountains of only partly cleared away rubble. The scars left by the war run deep, and quite often still visible with the naked eye. At the same time it is this history that makes it that the city has a very excited atmosphere. The rebuilding of Warszawa is still in full swing. Things happen and things change, but there seems to be a permanent electricity pervading the city’s streets.

It is a city of extremes. Like most large cities in Eastern Europe, it has homelessness far beyond what we are used to in Western Europe (especially in the Low Countries). The most unsettling of them are the elderly, who are usually to be found at street corners and busy public transport stops selling battered and ageing - soon to be former - possessions. If they are not selling things, they are playing music. An example of that is to be found at Patelnia, the open area in front of the entrance to Metro Centrum. Every day I see a group of pensioners, probably 70+, singing old Polish/Slavic folk songs. Sometimes they include Red Army Choir classics like Ochi Chernye, echoing sentiments from a different time. After thirty years these pensioners have become a normal part of Varsovian public space. Yet even when you get used to their presence, it never loses its unsettling power. Never would you believe that you are looking at the faces of some of the victors of 1989.

Yesterday I had my first Polish language class at the Polonicum. While there, I saw the feminist protest movement Czarny Protest pass by, which is a movvement striving for the legalization for basic abortion rights and general female rights (and therefore also universal human rights). Last year Czarny Protest managed to mobilize more than 100.000 people against a proposal of the right-wing conservative PiS-government that would have restricted Poland’s abortion laws (already one of the most restrictive in Europe) even further, declaring it illegal even if the life of the mother is at stake. They managed to force the government into a U-turn, and the march in 2017 was meant to commemorate their achievement the previous year. There was some debate between supporters and opponents as to how many people showed up this time, but one thing is for certain: not as many as in 2016.

Two years of right-wing policy-making have left their mark on the country. The independent judiciary is fast being undermined and politicized, undermining one of the fundamental pillars of any democratic state. These attacks have maanged to unite the opposition in protest, but not in parliamentary terms. The leadership of the main centre-right opposition, PO, remains more concerned with its own power position - and seeing off a challenge by a new centre-right party, Nowoczesna - than it is with defeating the government. Culturally, however, the opposition is seeing more success. The satirical series Ucho Prezesa (The Chairman’s Ear) easily surpasses the one million-mark with almost every episode, sometimes even reaching 5 million or more (in a country of 38 million). A movement like #czarnyprotest would have been completely unthinkable even 5 years ago, given the fragmentation of the Left (which right now even lacks representation in its neoliberal centre-left form, the SLD). But the political fragmentation of the opposition is a major threat. If it only relies on gaining ‘moral victories’, but fails to organize and defeat the government, it risks leaving the country open to right-wing authoritarianism. The play Mefisto, which premiered at Teatr Powszechny last week, was in part concerned with this question and seemed to warn: it is nice to provoke controversy and be gain a ‘moral victory’, but it is not enough to defend universal rights and democracy. Around the corner lurks a danger of ‘moral narcissism’, where the Left retreats in its shell and keeps telling itself that it is right, ‘if only the people would see that’! What is needed is much more intense political cooperation among all shades of opposition, if the unholy alliance of PiS, ONR and the Polish Catholic Church is to be defeated.

In the meanwhile I try to watch and write down what I see. From today (October 4) onwards I am working at Nowy Teatr. I’ve been given a veritable potpourri of assignments, but it is a beautiful environment with very open-minded people. A place where ideas are given a chance to develop.

Today I also discovered that the Polish direction Krzysztof Warlikowski lives across the street, at the other side of Wawelska tram stop. I’m starting to understand where some of his inspiration comes from. I’m curious myself.