Articles

ABSTRACT

This study looks at how crises affected the economies and business cycles in Slovakia and other Central European states. It compares both the economic and non-economic causes, as well as the various effects following the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 with the problems that emerged after the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc in 1989. A careful analysis shows that substantial changes extended to the legal system as well as the entire political and socio-economic system. At the same time, quite different processes were also occurring in both eras. The extent of their impact depended upon the specific conditions in the post-1918 successor states or the particular post-communist countries. Mainly, the initial economic conditions and subsequent economic and political developments after 1918 and 1989 would determine the repercussions of the crises.

The development of economic cycles in Slovakia after 1918 and after 1989 reveals many striking parallels. Countries which came into existence after the demise of the Habsburg Monarchy, such as Slovakia, were in a similar situation after 1918 as the post-communist countries after 1989. Economic development in the 1920s and 1990s of the 20th century in Slovakia and in neighboring countries naturally also show particularities and differences.

The shared characteristic was the partial or entire change of the social, economic, and political system, as well as legislative changes, accompanied by a collapse of long-term markets and a loss of trade outlets. A fundamental change of market orientation occurred, and mainly in the direction of the developed Western countries. However, the countries which came into existence in the 1920s strengthened the role of new trade barriers, and in the 1930s aimed to achieve autarky, whereas the post-communist countries of central and south-eastern Europe rejected the barriers to economic integration through the process of joining the EU. Another important parallel occurred in the realm of ownership. In the successor countries, complex capital transfers happened; in Czechoslovakia, for instance, it involved land reform and other property changes. Post-communist countries carried out a complex privatization process. However, after the demise of the Monarchy, the continuity of a market economy and private ownership persisted, whereas privatization after 1989 brought about a complete change in the character of ownership when the recent transition from central control to a market economy occurred.

Economic and political changes in the 1920s and 1990s put to the test the viability of individual companies, economic sectors, and the whole economic structure. As a result, profound structural change took place in the economy of particular countries. The aforementioned processes shared similar concomitant circumstances and measures, such as currency reforms, the exchange of money, inflation, and a significant social impact. The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet bloc resulted in processes which led to a renewed cycle of global recovery, and further complicated the economic and structural changes in the particular countries.

The previously noted factors appeared in certain countries, depending on specific conditions; these mainly concerned the achieved level of social and economic development, the character and structure of the economy, the character of the political system and the strategy of politics on economic issues. It can be stated that in the case of Slovakia, those basic conditions were unfavorable. In the context of the new economic situation, Slovakia had an inappropriate economic structure after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union.

Before 1918, the present-day area of Slovakia belonged to the most industrially developed regions of Hungary. It remained a mainly agrarian country; the development of industry occurred in Hungary based on a political program which aimed to industrialize, but focused only on certain parts of Hungary and only on certain sectors (mining, the iron industry, textiles, the pulp and paper industry, the leather industry).

In addition, production depended entirely on consumption in other parts of Hungary and on government orders. That is why the structure of the economy showed some serious disproportions hidden by closed markets and a whole system of economic preferences made by the government in the area of taxes, loans, shipping discounts and direct financial grants (Faltus 1983, 544–558; Kováč 2004; Horváth, Valach 1975; Vadkertyová 1975, 417–440).

Economically, the fall of Austria-Hungary brought about the disintegration of the united market of the monarchy, and disrupted the infrastructure and the complicated process of forming economic areas for new central- European countries. The area of Slovakia created a new economic space along with Czech regions, which had assumed the biggest share of industrial production made in the more developed Austrian part of the Monarchy. Slovakia’s share in the industrial potential of the new country based on the statistics from 1910 can be estimated to be about 8 %. The capital share of Slovak financial institutions created approximately 6 % of the value of the banking industry in Czechoslovakia. Slovakia played a more important role only in agriculture, where it accounted for approximately one third of the crop production and animal husbandry. The borders of the successor countries cut Slovakia’s business sphere off from the main trade outlets in former Hungary. The large centralized factories, which produced iron, chemicals, textiles, and other products, depended on markets outside Slovakia; they were hit head on by the competition of more mature industries from the Czech regions, which also had to solve the problem connected with the loss of trading outlets in a smaller marketplace. After the demise of the Kingdom of Hungary, Slovak companies lost tax, tariff, borrowing, and other advantages provided by the authorities, as well as lucrative government orders. The breakdown of infrastructure turned out to be one of the greatest problems, mainly the disruption of the railway network, which appeared to be the one more developed segment of the transport system in Slovakia. It became necessary to rebuild the whole network in a westward direction toward the Czech regions and Western markets. The underdeveloped road infrastructure faced a similar situation. The banking industry lost its ties with central banks in Budapest, which caused a reduction or even a cessation of capital flow. Key companies were left without capital backing (Faltus, Průcha 1969, 15–27; Průcha 2004, 41–48).

The influence of an entire set of negative factors was initially muffled by a short post-war boom in 1920–1921, due to conditions of gross shortages and high demand. In Slovakia, there were relatively successful outcomes, as 129 new joint-stock companies started up and the banking industry increased national Slovak capital. However, the boom was restricted by a state regulated economy. Prices increased and inflation grew, even if it was more benign in comparison with surrounding states. Another phenomenon of the boom was the expansion of concerns and banks from Czech regions, connected to profitable Western capital, to the entrepreneurial sphere and banking industry of Slovakia with help from the economic legislation of the new state (the Nostrification Act of 1919). In the Slovak space, the banks and corporations of the Czech regions took on the functions of Budapest’s great banks and the Austrian-Hungarian companies from the preceding era. At the global level, a post-war economic crisis had already appeared in 1920 and it had to balance the disparities of a war economy, post-war reconstruction and hyperinflation (Andrýs 1922, 267–273; Skorkovský 1923).¹

In Czechoslovakia, a crisis broke out in the second half of 1921 and continued until 1923. Unprofitable companies ceased to exist, production declined, and prices fell. In Slovakia, the recession crisis saw a 30 % decline in industrial production, which was far more than average on the international scale. In the successor countries of Austria-Hungary, the crisis manifested even more serious signs of far reaching significance. It also revealed the negative aspects of the breakdown of a common market and showed its impact on a large scale. Important factories, which lost their trade outlets in the crisis situation after 1918, found themselves in an untenable situation, and dozens of them simply disappeared. In the less developed economy of Slovakia, the disappearance of one big company had a long-term impact on the social and economic development of an entire region. The corporate sector was handicapped by a significant deterioration of productive conditions, most of all in railway transport. The demise of the Monarchy and negative conditions of production caused an outflow of capital from Slovakia and a disruption of capital expansion from the Czech lands. That is why other companies were left without capital assets and they ceased to exist. The tendencies mentioned above handicapped most industrial branches. The worst situation was in the relatively developed iron industry, in which Hungarian capital concerns lost their interest and they agreed to their liquidation in exchange for compensation. Most of the ironworks disappeared (Krompachy, Zvolen, Hnúšťa) or changed their production plan (Trnava). Because of that, the Slovak economy lost a fundamental part of a sector, which, until the formation of Czechoslovakia, had constituted the core of its industrial potential. Other handicapped sectors included the chemical industry (Dynamit Nobel Bratislava), the textile and glass industry, the food industry and the stagnating mechanical engineering industry. In 1922–1924, the crisis in Czechoslovakia carried from the areas of production to the lending sphere. The deflation of currency had a great influence on these developments, especially during the pivotal year of 1922. Deflation safeguarded the long-term and stable development of the currency, but it undermined export industries and merged them with banking. The losses of the banking industry in Slovakia reached the high figure of 643 million Kčs (Czechoslovak crowns). The banking system of Czechoslovakia was saved from certain collapse by a reorganization of the country on the foundation of legislation during 1924 (Faltus 1966; Strhan 1960).

In years 1924–1929, the economy of Czechoslovakia experienced a relatively successful boom within the context of a worldwide economic expansion. It resulted in about a 40 % increase in industrial production (Průcha 2004, 148–164). This, in fact, applied only to the Czech lands. The enterprise sector of Slovakia went through a complicated process of structural changes. Production increases only occurred in sector branches which found new outlets in the changed conditions of the domestic and international market, as well as the capital hinterlands (the pulp and paper industry, the wood industry, the cement industry, the rubber industry, the magnesium industry, the electric industry, the petrochemical industry and the printing industry, some segments of the food sector), or ones which received support from the economic policy of Czechoslovakia (the electricity supply industry). Others managed only to reconstruct pre-war capacities and production potential (mining, the textile industry, the food industry as a whole) and some of them remained below the pre-war level of production (the iron industry, the chemical industry, the glass industry). That is why until the end of the 1920s, the entire capacity of industrial production merely reached or just exceeded the level of the crisis year of 1913. The resulting effect was a stagnation of industrialization. Very slow progress in infrastructure reconstruction contributed to that, such as the revival of the railways and road network, as well as a slow elimination of other unprofitable production conditions in Slovakia (Hallon 1995, 68–87; Hallon 2004, 309–324).

One can visually document the changes in the industrial structure as a consequence of the disintegration of the united Monarchy’s market and postwar economic attitudes by looking at the increase in the number of active working people in particular economic sectors during years 1910 – 1930. It is based on a sum of enterprises and factories in statistics for the given years. The comparison of production amounts or its value in the given period could be even more objective and visual. Unfortunately, we do not have access to sufficient statistical data.

Table 1 Changes of the industrial structure in Slovakia in years 1910–1930 according to number of active employees.

Source: Table 1 is compared according to the statistics of number of factories and employees on December 31, 1910 and May 27, 1930, which were compiled by (Faltus, Průcha 1969, 287; Faltus 1987, 73–84).

If we compare the development of industry in Slovakia after 1918 with other successor countries of the interwar period – Hungary, Poland and Austria – it is clear that they manifest very similar trends of development. Similar to Slovakia, other successor countries underwent structural changes of industry depending on initial economic relations after the decline of the Monarchy and due to decline of a unified market in Austria-Hungary. Crucial branches of industry experienced the greatest decline or stagnation because they were most dependent on market outlets in the economic realm of the former Monarchy during the 1920s. In Slovakia, this applied mainly to the building materials industry, in Hungary the engineering industry and food industry, in Austria the building materials industry, the iron and steel industry, the engineering industry, and in Poland, for example, brown coal mining and petroleum and non-ferrous metals production. Development occurred in branches which found new market possibilities in the changed conditions; for instance, in Hungary the textile industry got rid of Czech and Slovak competition. Until the end of the 1920s in all the above countries, the overall amount of industrial production barely exceeded the pre-war level, or did not even reach it, as was the case in Austria and Poland. The only exception in the central European region was the Czech lands; because of a more favorable starting point after the decline of Monarchy and a wealthier industry, they managed to overcome losses or stagnation in some economic sectors (textiles, coal mining) and replaced them with growing sectors (the engineering and electro-technical industries, the footwear industry), resulting in a large increase in the amount of industrial production. In order to illustrate the comparative development of industrial production during the interwar period in Slovakia, the Czech lands, and three other successor countries, here is a table presenting the level of success achieved in industrial development.

Table 2 Index of industrial production in Czech lands, Hungary, Poland, and Austria in 1929 and 1938 in comparison to 1913 (1913 equals 100 %).

Nota bene: Presented data is based on different statistical surveys (the number of employed workers, the amount of production, the value of production), and that is why the table is an example.

Source: (Landau,Tomaszewski 1971, 59, 289–290; Fischer 1987, 543, 796; Faltus, Průcha 1969, 14, 25, 43, 287; Lacina 1996, 286–287).

Overall, agriculture in Slovakia enjoyed a more advantageous position during the 1920s. After the demise of the Kingdom of Hungary and creation of new borders with Hungary, Slovakia acquired the market outlets of Hungarian producers in Czech regions. It was also protected by customs barriers which the governing circles of Czechoslovakia, dominated by the agrarian party, had passed. Those favorable factors were reflected mainly in crop production. Land reform in Czechoslovakia removed the greatest inequalities in the structure of agricultural enterprises, mainly because of the decline of aristocratic and clerical estates. The modernization of production and the development of progressive middle-sized farms achieved only a little progress (Faltus, Průcha 1969, 133–134, 157, 206).²

The Great Depression economic crisis of 1929–1933 interrupted the gradual consolidation of Slovak economy by the end of the 1920s. However, the industrial recession was less sharp than in the Czech lands because Slovakia had experienced a weaker economic boom in the previous years. According to contemporary analyses, the level of employment decreased by 25 % during years 1930 – 1932 and the number of worked hours decreased by 29 % in industry. The most important problem in agrarian Slovakia was agriculture, which still employed approximately 60 % of active working people. An agricultural crisis in Slovakia and all of Czechoslovakia broke out in 1929 and farming production was affected mainly by the collapse of prices for products in 1928–1932 by about 42 % (Hallon 2004, 324–327; Lacina 1974, 38–44, 49–51).³ At that time, the crisis stimulated the ruling powers towards investments in infrastructure, with the interest of creating new job positions, and this in turn accelerated the development of railways, roads, and the energy sector. Ruling circles moved towards a new philosophy of state-monopolistic interventions in economy. In the second half of the 1930s, investments in the armaments industry emerged as a new phenomena because of the military threat to the country. The main objective of those investments was to prepare Slovakia as a potential hinterland against Nazi Germany. However, building an infrastructure more quickly and with a lower-paid workforce motivated investment in non-military areas of production. Companies from Czech regions such as Škoda, Zbrojovka Brno, Baťa and others rejuvenated the process of industrialization in the second half of the 1930s in Slovakia. In this period of time, the economic and political concept of solving the economic problems of Slovakia began to form. The economic revival influenced mainly the western and north-west parts of Slovakia, which were situated closer to the markets of western Europe and possessed a better developed infrastructure, while most other regions of Slovakia continued to lag behind (Hallon 1995, 147–161; Ferenčuhová, Zemko 2012, 366–372).

The heavy armaments industry, which started to form in the 1930s, lasted throughout the Slovak Republic from 1939 until 1945. Then after 1948, it continued during the socialist era of industrialization and the depths of the Cold War and formed the basic framework of the Slovak economy. The industrialization of Slovakia was definitively completed in the system of the centrally planned economy. The fast pace of industrialization was evidenced by the fact that in 1948–1989, the industrial potential of Slovakia increased approximately 29 times; on the other hand, the industrial potential of the whole country increased only tenfold. In the 1980s, the long-term plan of balancing the industrial level of Czech regions and Slovakia was nearly attained. In fact, production reached parity in both regions. Apart from the heavy armaments industry, the structure of the Slovak industry was dominated by raw material processing and the production of semi-finished products for final production in the Czech regions. This kind of heritage from the socialist economy was extremely disadvantageous for a market economy after 1989 (Turčan 1960; Ferianc 1987, 190; Londák 2012).

The common denominator of economic development in post-communist countries after 1989 was the decline of economic ties, the switch from centrally planned economies towards a market economy, privatization, and a radical transformation of the entire economic structure. In the case of Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, additional factors consisted of national and regulatory changes and the formation of economic areas in new countries. Other phenomena included monetary reforms, inflation, the disappearance of entire segments of the economy, and severe social repercussions.

The fluency, speed, and the depth of economic transformation were closely connected with the development of the economic politics of individual countries. Many expert analyses agree with the view that the transformation in Slovakia, as far as the influence of globalization and structural changes are concerned, took place in a few phases, which were closely connected with the actions of individual governments since 1990. In the first period of 1990–1992, under the conditions of the federal state, basic assumptions developed with the onset of monitored processes, in particular, the historical change of the social system, which followed the economic changes. The opening of the Slovak economy to the world made possible actions of a revolutionary character, such as the decentralization of economic governance, foreign trade and price liberalization, the achievement of the domestic convertibility of currency, and the creation and implementation of the first phase of privatization. After 1992, the further introduction of those changes was carried out. A similar scenario of economic reforms in the observed period also occurred in 14 other post-communist countries, mainly in the small central European countries, which later belonged to the Višegrad 4 and CEFTA (The Central European Free Trade Agreement).

The economic reforms in the period of 1990–1992 were followed by the immediate unravelling of post-communist economic ties and a change of orientation towards countries with a market economy, mainly with EU states. Unlike what happened in 1989, a deep economic recession ensued in 1991–1993, reaching the industries of 5 CEFTA countries, which saw declines of between 29 % and 39 %. The amount of mutual trade between Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia decreased in years 1988–1992 by 42 % of the GDP (gross domestic product). In 9 countries of the former Eastern Bloc, the GDP declined by about 23 % in years 1989–1991. Unemployment increased on average from 0 to 9 % (Borovský 2001, 448–451; Godfrey 1995, 6–8). During the change of external economic relationships, the problem for Slovakia was a disadvantageous commodity market in foreign trade. In 1991, a nearly 67 % share of Slovakia’s exports came from industrial branches, mostly the iron and steel industry and heavy industry, which had provided the bulk of production to markets of other [former] satellites of the Soviet Union. Above all, this affected the heavy armaments industry. The former regime had been preparing the conversion of the heavy armaments industry, chiefly due to reduction of international tensions. After the collapse of eastern markets and change of the whole philosophy of economic politics in Czechoslovakia, the production of so-called special technologies decreased at a significantly faster pace. The following table no. 3 illustrates the development of orientation of Czechoslovakia’s foreign markets and that of other post-communist countries, in comparison to mature Western countries in the short period of time between 1989 and 1992.

The position of Slovakia and other post-communist countries in foreign trade relations became largely influenced by developments in the monetary and financial areas. A common characteristic was high inflation, caused mainly by the liberalization of prices. In Czechoslovakia, the inflation before 1989 officially reached about 1 %, and according to real estimates about 2.5 % per year. However, in 1991 inflation rose 65 %, according to the price index (Švejnar 1993, 29–33). In 1992, the price level declined and inflation stabilized. At the beginning of the 1990s, historical changes affected nearly all European countries with centrally planned economies and resulted in a proposal for a program of complex privatization and its subsequent execution. This process opened the door to foreign capital. After a heated controversy about several concepts in Czechoslovakia, the voucher method of privatization won out, therefore, the gratuitous distribution of state property to the widest strata of citizens took place based on coupons representing a share of the capital. According to the plan, the privatization would be implemented in several waves. The first one started with a ratification by Czechoslovakia’s government in August 1991 and was to be completed in March 1993. For a complete or partial denationalization in the first wave, 678 big companies enrolled, worth 169 billion Kčs (Czechoslovak crowns). Of these, 48 % were privatized by the coupon method and only 7 % were resold to investors. Another 28 % of the enterprises came under the management of National Property Fund.⁴

Table 3 The change of orientation of foreign markets of Czechoslovakia and selected post-communist countries, in comparison to mature Western countries in period of 1989 – 1992 in % of sales value.

Source: “Zmeny strategickej orientácie obchodu postkomunistických krajín” (1993), Trend 45, p. 4.

The first wave of privatization in Czechoslovakia attracted great interest because it provided the opportunity for immediate profit from the right to resell acquired shares to a company or to investment funds, which the citizen could take part in. The participation of 2.6 out of the 5 million citizens of Slovakia did not suffice to overcome the negative social impacts of economic reform. The most noticeable was a rise of unemployment. In 1991, it had reached 2.6 % in the Czech lands, and 10.4 % in Slovakia. Among the main reasons causing those problems was the structure of the Slovak economy (Godfrey 1995, 6–8). Its foundation continued to be the energy-intensive processing of imported raw materials and semi-finished goods for final processing in the Czech lands. Economic reform and initial restructuring had far more serious consequences in Slovakia. Economic problems contributed to the popularity of new movements on the Slovak political scene, requiring fundamental change in the constitutional arrangement. In June 1992, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko) led by Vladimír Mečiar won the elections. In Czech lands, the right wing party and its leader Václav Klaus took power, aspiring to hasten all the reforms. The new national governments did not manage to agree on two basic questions, which were the constitutional arrangement of the country and the concept of economic reform. For this reason, the presidents of national governments, V. Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, personally decided to divide up the state.

In the first period of existence as a separate country, until the end of 1995, favorable trends predominated in the Slovak economy, which were a consequence of the government’s actions to defend the new currency and the independent economy of the new country, as well as the boom in Western markets. There was a significant rise in foreign trade, increasing the share of trade exchanged with developed capitalistic countries. In October 1995, it resulted in the full liberalization of the foreign currency exchange and full convertibility of the credit account balance. For major world currencies, a fixed exchange rate was introduced, determined first by a basket of seven currencies, and then by the two major currencies (DM, USD). Initially, this arrangement had a positive influence. The government supported mainly exports with special measures such as a 10 % devaluation of the Slovak crown (Slovenská koruna) in July 1993 and a 10 % import surcharge (Beblavý 2000, 97, 109–111). Semi-finished products predominated among exports, which at that time were in demand on the Western market, mainly because of lower prices; that helped to preserve the traditional basis of Slovak industry. A balanced proportion of imports and exports was possible to sustain only until 1995. After that, imports predominated, because of a passive foreign trade balance (Jakoby 2000, 145–146).⁵

The decisive factors for further economic development and a change from an unprofitable economic structure resembled that of other transitional countries – an influx of foreign investments and the engagement of a country in the globalization process. Joining multinational economic structures depended mostly on the nature of privatization. In fact, for the privatization process, the first Mečiar government rejected the coupon method and was looking for its own alternative plan for privatization. In 1994, diverse views on privatization in Slovak ruling circles led to the dismissal of Mečiar’s first government and enabled the short intermezzo of Jozef Moravčík’s government. As one of its main tasks, Moravčík’s government delineated a new plan for coupon privatization. The second Mečiar government, which followed in October 1994, trashed all those ideas and presented a completely new alternative method based on bonds. In reality, the main form of privatization became a direct sale of companies to domestic investors in long-term installments, with the goal of strengthening the Slovak entrepreneurial class. This process, designated as a management privatization, had a very vague background and reduced the influence of foreign investors even more than the former state. In the years 1993 to 1995, 11 companies participated in the sale, which were priced at 4.5 billion Slovak crowns (Sk), and their share in the purchase price of the companies decreased within those years from 24 % to 11 %. In the following period, the inflow of foreign capital grew very slowly and lagged behind other CEFTA countries in that direction (Marcinčin 2000, 291–296).⁶ Government and economic arrangements started to affect the relationships with foreign markets in a negative way, mostly through the stable exchange rate, which led to an overvaluation of the currency, a decrease of competitiveness, and an increase of foreign deficit to a value of 81 billion Sk (Jakoby and Krautmannová 1998, 75–81).

Table 4 Inflow of foreign investments to CEFTA countries in 1993–2000 per citizen in USD.

Source: (Hošková 2001, 7–10).

A fundamental change toward the globalization of the Slovak economy took place with the formation of the reform-minded first government of Mikuláš Dzurinda in October 1998. It replaced the stable currency exchange with a so-called floating one and voided the act concerning strategic companies, which had inhibited the privatization of genuine monopolies and other crucial enterprises. A law passed introducing industrial parks and investment stimuli, which allowed for a 10 year tax reduction period, as well as benefits for requalification. The signing of an association agreement with EU in 1999 and admission to the OECD in 2000 were strong motivating factors. The stated trend deepened and expanded in other directions during Dzurinda’s second right-wing government in 2003–2006; it did so mainly by applying a consistent income tax and a value added tax of 19 %, which was a part of the tax reform from 2003, in addition to being an element of joining the EU in 2004 and preparing to join the Eurozone. A part of the government’s plan aimed to complete the privatization of strategic companies and the input of foreign capital was also calculated as part of the retirement and health system (Marcinčin 1997, 9–12; Okáli, Gabrielová, Hlavatý, Morvay, Outrata 2001, 195–197; Juríčková, Vokoun, Kačírková 2005, 57–61). In the analyzed period, Slovakia joined international economic structures. In 1990–1999, investments worth 2.3 billion USD reached Slovakia, while in 2000–2005 it amounted to 18 billion USD. In the gains in capital per citizen, Slovakia outstripped Poland and reached the level of Slovenia. Foreign investments played a crucial role in the historical change of the structure of industry, as well as in the change of ownership in other spheres of economy.

Above all, based on foreign investors’ activities, the automotive and electrotechnical industries have become the most significant sectors. Today they constitute the core of Slovakia’s economic potential (Okáli, Frank, Gabrielová, Kormanová, Morvay, Outrata 2005, 452–457; Ferienčíková, Vážan 2005, 523–524).⁷ The structure of investments from the point of view of their direction was not perfect. The share of direct foreign investments in the overall value of invested capital gradually rose from 40 % to 60 %, but the remaining investments accrued to the purchase of strategic companies in the form of a public tender auction. The sale of even more companies occurred below their real value and was accompanied by corruption.

In terms of regional placement, the investments were directed mainly to the southwest and northwest Slovakia, similarly to the 1930s of the previous century, while in other regions investments appeared only as small islands on the map of all investments. The inflow of investments also depended on the development of employment in individual regions, as documented by data from Table 6. It follows that investment activity in addition to the structure of the economy also affected the regional socio-economic development and became part of the deep discrepancies between different parts of Slovakia. Mainly the central, south and northwest areas of Slovakia were economically underdeveloped and, as a consequence, chronic social problems appeared, as well as political extremism. Negative factors also accompanied the hectic boom of some regions apart from southwest Slovakia, where the development of the transport infrastructure was extremely underdeveloped in comparison to economic growth (Juríčková, Vokoun, Kačírková 2005, 57–61; Dudáš 2012, 371).

Table 5 Overall value of direct foreign investments in the Slovak Republic in 2003–2008 at year’s end.

Source: Štatistická ročenka Slovenskej republiky (2008), p. 314; Štatistická ročenka Slovenskej Republiky (2009), p. 315; (Ferienčíková, Pappová 2010, pp. 459–473).

Table 6 Inflow of direct foreign investments at the level of self-governing regions of Slovakia in 1997–2008 in comparison to the level of unemployment in 2012.

Source: (Dudáš 2012, p. 371).

Foreign corporations played a crucial role also in the privatization of banking, which was preceded by the reform of banks covered from public resources. Those corporations were important as well in the privatization of insurance investments and enterprising infrastructure, such as in the natural gas industry, the electrical industry, telecommunications, and partially in transportation. The entrance of international business chains utterly changed the character and structure of the market. The integration of the Slovak economy into multinational economic structures and the activity of foreign capital, particularly in certain segments of economy and non-productive sectors such as natural monopolies and strategic companies, health service, as well as in trade, are more controversial issues. That is why they triggers critique, both on the political scene and in society. The main point of the critique has become the outflow of profits to foreign countries, the danger of a reallocation of investments and production to other countries, as well as the sharp decrease of domestic agricultural and food products on the market. Another of the many problems concerns the still predominant proportion of final, or rather ‘montage’ production in companies of foreign capital, which uses cheap labor, and the low share of the domestic development of new technologies. The accompanying phenomenon of economic restructuring since the late 1990s included the decline of agriculture and the acceleration of the demise of many enterprises in traditional areas of production, such as the food, textile and chemical industries.

The incumbent leftist government led by Robert Fico from 2006–2010 halted the privatization of strategic companies and prevented the outflow of profits of private health insurance companies, which also involved foreign capital. However, most of the economic arrangements to promote foreign investments remained in force and its approach towards foreign investors did not change in comparison to the previous period. The inflow of direct foreign investments continued in 2006–2008 and amounted to approximately 17 billion USD.⁸ Economic and political conditions changed markedly after the onset of Fico’s second government in 2012, mainly due to the so-called flat tax and an overall increase of taxes, which contributed to a worsening business environment. Development since 2008 was affected by the onset of the global economic crisis, which substantially limited investment activity on a global scale. The economic crisis in Europe associated with the financial and budgetary crisis in the Eurozone, also influenced the orientation of world markets and Slovakia’s foreign trade. Slovakia remains a main partner of the EU, and especially Germany, but China has quickly raised its share of Slovak foreign trade exchange, and has already moved up to second place (Morvay 2011). It has proven difficult to find an alternative to economic development based on foreign capital and supranational economic structures, within the space of Europe, particularly in the EU and Eurozone.

Fundamental changes would have to occur at the global level, for example, in regard to the withdrawal of global corporations’ profits. Currently, it is in fact more a crisis of the global socio-economic system than the fluctuations in the economic cycle. Therefore, addressing global economic challenges will require long-term and far-reaching changes in global social systems.

A comparison of the business cycle in Slovakia and other central European countries after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 and the Soviet bloc in 1989 shows that the economies of the given countries, in which crises occurred, happened for economic as well as broader non-economic reasons. They were both very similar in many ways after 1918 and after 1989. They consisted of different constitutional changes as well as changes in the overall political and socio-economic system. At the same time, they logically manifested different characteristics. The extent of their influence depended on the specific conditions of individual successor states, or post-communist countries. It depended particularly on the internal structure of the economy and the level of overall economic development achieved. Initial economic conditions and other economic and political developments after 1918 and 1989 determined the depth of crisis phenomena. In countries with unfavorable initial conditions, which also included Slovakia, the national economic and political changes influenced the comparative economic cycles more substantially than the effects of global economic fluctuations, whether it was the world economic crisis of the interwar period, or the global economic crisis in 2008–2009.

A common feature of development after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet bloc in the successor states, and later the postcommunist countries, was the disruption of long-term economic relationships and the loss of traditional market outlets. A reorientation of markets followed and thereby changed the structure of the economy, leading to infrastructure problems and economic losses. In Slovakia, the mentioned factors were compounded by an unprofitable economic structure, due to economic development after 1918 and 1989. While Slovakia in 1918 joined the new Czechoslovak Republic at the beginning of the industrialization process, at the end of the 1980s, it found itself in its final phase. The unprofitable structure of the economy, focused on semi-finished goods and armaments, was the result of the economic politics of the previous socio-economic system and its state of crisis. At the same time, however, it depended on specifics of the economic strategy of Czechoslovakia before 1989 relative to the western and eastern part of the state. In interwar Czechoslovakia, the economic development of Slovak industry was realized in a common economic space with the Czech lands, where a poorly developed Slovak industry and some other segments of economy encountered competition from Czech regions. In the 1990s, that phenomenon only played a more crucial role until the dissolution of common state in 1993. The Slovak economy was still developing within the economic space of an independent country. Subsequent change occurred with Slovakia’s admission into the EU in 2004 and its integration into global economic structures.

With the establishment of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, in addition to losing traditional market outlets, also lost the support of industrialization policies of the former Kingdom of Hungary, and the corporate sector had to face serious infrastructural problems, which reduced its competitiveness. Partial changes of ownership relations appeared with processes of nostrification and land reforms. However, the continuity of a market economy remained intact. The impact of the Monarchy’s demise and formation of a new economic space in Czechoslovakia accelerated the post-war economic and deflationary crisis. The loss of production, especially in industry, was the consequence of the changing economy and also the long-term stagnation of industrialization during the business cycle of the 1920s. Stagnation was related to the slow elimination of unprofitable production conditions in Slovakia, especially in transport. The change of philosophy of the country’s economic strategy, paradoxically, stimulated the consequences of the Great Depression. An interest in creating new jobs in the 1930s accelerated the rebuilding of infrastructure and external threats led the state to investments in the armaments industry in Slovakia. A cheap labor force and the consolidation of production conditions also attracted investments in non-military production. A new wave of industrialisation had begun.

The changes in the economic structure and ownership in Slovakia in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc assumed considerably greater dimensions than in the 1920s, and were accompanied by more extensive economic losses. During the last years of Czechoslovakia’s existence, Slovakia’s economy transformed from a centrally planned economy to a market economy and began the process of privatization. The influx of foreign capital depended on the character and pace of this process, as well as on the remodeling of an unprofitable economic structure created in the former regime. After becoming an independent state, the nature of privatization in Slovakia took a new direction from the political group under V. Mečiar, which slowed down the influx of foreign capital, which preserved the old structure of economy. The economic strategy of political incumbents since the end of the 1990s’ brought about an increase in foreign investments. That enabled the admission of Slovakia to the EU and, as a consequence, also to the Eurozone.

The composition of key economic sectors has completely changed. Integration into international economic structures, however, has also brought some negative effects. Dozens of viable enterprises disappeared, foreign competition undermined agriculture, new disproportions in the economic development of regions appeared, and profits from new sectors escaped abroad. Slovakia’s integration into the global economic system exposed it to global crisis occurrences, as was the case during the economic crisis in 2008–2009. The crisis phenomena, however, can only be addressed effectively at the global level.

Text translated into English: Katarzyna Kaczmarek and Michael Kopanic

Ľudovít Hallon. Born in 1958, he has been working at the Institute of History, the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, since 1986. In 1992, he defended his dissertation thesis entitled “The Development of the Energy Concept of Slovakia during the Years 1918–1938.” His professional specialization concerns the History of Economy and Technology in the 20th Century in Slovakia and Central Europe. He is an author and co-author of 6 monographs, more than 20 chapters in monographs and approximately 90 scientific studies in Slovakia and abroad. Since 2009, he has served as head of the Department of History of Sciences and Technology, at the Institute of History, of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He gives lectures on a regular basis at international scientific congresses and conferences.

ENDNOTES

1“Akce tzv. Nostrifikační,” in Deset let Československé republiky (Praha, 1928), vol. 2, p. 147.

2 Dvacet let československého zemědělství (Praha, 1928), pp. 28–29, 33, 36; Dvadsať rokov aktívnej práce v prospech zemedelských potrieb Slovenska (Bratislava, 1938), pp. 30–35.

3 Slovenský priemysel (1932), pp. 11–36, 106–107.

4 Ministerstvo privatizácie Slovenskej republiky (1999) “Vývoj privatizácie, stav december 1999,” available online at: www.privatiz.gov.sk; Fond národného majetku Slovenskej republiky (1999) “stav december 1999,” available on line at: www.natfund.gov.sk

5 Top Trend (1997).

6 Ministerstvo privatizácie Slovenskej republiky (1999), “Verejný register privatizovaného majetku, stav v júni 1999.”

7 “Vybrané ukazovatele hospodárskeho a menového vývoja Slovenskej republiky,” in Biatec 12, pp. 32–33.

8 Štatistická ročenka Slovenskej republiky (2009), p. 315.

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This article has been published in the fourth issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memory of economic crisis.

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ABSTRACT

The paper shows the impact of hyperinflation on the everyday lives of the inhabitants of Warsaw in 1923, focusing specifically on the situation of those population groups who earned their income. It analyses the problem of a drop in the value of real wages and the way households were managed at the time of rapid collapse of the value of money. The article shows the changing life conditions of the inhabitants of Warsaw in the face of economic crisis and attempts to answer the following questions: What were the costs of hyperinflation for the population of Warsaw? What strategies did Varsovians adopt to protect themselves against economic losses? What kind of an impact did financial hardship have on social relations in Warsaw in the early 20th century? Hence, the paper follows in the tradition of historical research into everyday life adding a bottom-up perspective to the portrayal of the Polish hyperinflation, a dimension which is rarely present in the relevant publications by economists and economic historians.

1. Polish hyperinflation – Introduction

The Polish inflation of 1919–23 was a legacy of the financial policy pursued by the Central Powers at the time of the First World War. Its post-war development, however, was determined by the specific situation of Poland. The country regained its independence in 1918 and was only just beginning to create its structures and the economic system, and yet had to face the challenge of post-war reconstruction and the need to finance the war it waged against Bolshevik Russia. To cover all these expenses, the state took out loans with the Polish State Loan Bank, which printed Polish marks for that purpose. Although inflation was deepening quickly as a result, it was used after the war to boost the economic situation. In 1923 inflation accelerated dramatically and the weak Polish economy slid into depression. Come autumn, the country found itself “in the abyss of hyperinflation, the very ‘heart of darkness’, destroying all foundation of social and state existence,”¹ wrote Andrzej Wierzbicki, director of the largest association of industrialists. In June 1923, after a short period of stability, the exchange rate of the Polish mark dived in response to the collapse of the German mark.² From that moment on, the value of the Polish currency was on a downward spiral until the exchange rate crashed in October. On the last day of May 1923, there were 52,875 Polish marks to a dollar; on 31 December – 6,375,000.³ In January 1924, the Polish currency hit rock bottom. On 10 January, one dollar could buy 10,250,000 marks.⁴ The rate was expected to fall further to 15,000,000 or even 20,000,000 marks per dollar,⁵ but the forecast never materialised. The process of the Polish mark losing value is illustrated by Table 1.

Table 1 Drop in the value of the Polish mark

Source: Edward Taylor, Inflacja polska (Poznań, 1926), p. 23.

Rapidly growing prices and a fall in the value of real wages shrunk the internal market. It was not only the purchase power that decreased as people had to radically curb their spending. Seeing its income dwindle, the state, too, was forced to cut down on public procurement. This was because hyperinflation exacerbated the chaos in public finance. Although the budgetary deficit was contained, the printing of the Polish mark brought fewer and fewer advantages.⁶ In addition, at the time of rising inflation, the role of direct taxes was diminished to the benefit of indirect levies. In 1923, only 9.2 % of state income from public levies comprised direct taxes and charges.⁷ On the other hand, all users of the Polish mark were subject to the so-called inflation tax, which was especially painful to those who lived off their wages.⁸

With fewer customers willing to buy products, companies scaled down their activities, which reduced demand for raw materials and investment goods. As early as March, industrial production started to gradually decline, first in the area of investment goods and then in the consumption sector. The downturn might have been slow at the beginning, but by October production was in ruins.⁹ A little before that, in late summer, the so-called inflationary export bounty disappeared together with all its advantages. At the same time, the loan market ground to a halt – the quickly depreciating legal tender made it impossible to obtain easy credit in the currency in circulation while creditors started asking for collateral as a form of protection from inflation-related losses.

With the industry collapsing, managers had to lay people off. The unemployment rate rose sharply in March.¹⁰ Even though it fell in the summer due to seasonal jobs, it picked up its momentum in the autumn. Also rising was partial unemployment (not visible in statistics), which consisted in shortening the working week.¹¹ Even though we have access to economic indices, it is still difficult to establish a clear timeline for hyperinflation and the beginnings of the economic crisis in Poland. According to the popular definition offered by Phillip Cagan, hyperinflation begins when the monthly rise in prices exceeds 50 percent and continues so for many months to come. Based on calculations by Wojciech Morawski, we could pinpoint the beginning of hyperinflation as June 1923 when the inflation rate amounted to 96.7 % and stayed at 89.2 % in July.¹² However, even Morawski mentions the spring of 1923 as the starting point of hyperinflation. Other scholars suggested different demarcation lines – Jerzy Tomaszewski wrote about the autumn of the same year whereas Oskar Lange saw the beginnings of the crisis in July.¹³ For the purposes of this paper, however, chronological boundaries are marked by political and economic events. My starting date is 30 June 1923, the day when the Treasury Minister in the centre-right government handed in his resignation after he failed to implement his reforms of the treasury and financial systems. As for the date concluding the period, I have chosen 1 February 1924 when the practice of printing the Polish mark for the needs of the Treasury was stopped. The value of money ceased to fall – from February on, the exchange rate of the dollar stabilised at 9,250,000 Polish marks¹⁴ and the government managed to secure a positive balance of revenue over expenditure.¹⁵ Even though it solved some problems, putting a stop to inflation did not bring about any dramatic improvement in the standard of living. The social consequences of hyperinflation were to be experienced for a long time yet.

2. Thematic scope and sources

The paper shows the impact of hyperinflation on the everyday lives of the inhabitants of Warsaw, focusing specifically on the situation of those population groups who earned their income. It analyses the problem of a drop in the value of real wages and the way households were managed. It poses the following fundamental questions. What were the costs of hyperinflation for the population of Warsaw? What strategies did Varsovians adopt to protect themselves against economic losses? What kind of an impact did financial hardship have on social relations? Hence, the paper follows in the tradition of historical research into everyday life adding a bottom-up perspective to the portrayal of the Polish hyperinflation, a dimension which is rarely present in the relevant publications by economists and economic historians.

The experience of inflation dominated everyday life in 1923. The period of hyperinflation may be called the “unreliable everyday”, to use a phrase by Zygmunt Bauman, which signifies a kind of reality that does not exude “safety, confidence in what is to happen and what cannot happen, what to do and what to avoid. [...] Peace and boredom.”.¹⁶ With hyperinflation the opposite is true. Fraught with many unknowns, it mars existence with uncertainty, challenges habits and belies tested strategies. It not only diminishes trust in the currency itself (which is rapidly losing value), but also undermines the authority of the state and disrupts social order.

The paper recreates the structures of everyday life on the basis of various source materials. It draws upon the available statistics, economic and sociological analyses as well as belles-lettres and memoirs. Most importantly, however, it makes use of everyday press articles, which provide much more information about the situation of Varsovians than scarce private records of hyperinflation and the very limited and imperfect economic and social studies of that time. It reaches back to dailies and weeklies of varying nature, ideology and political standpoint. Left-wing press is represented by Robotnik (The Worker), the mouthpiece of the Polish Socialist Party; right-wing press – by Kurier Warszawski (The Warsaw Courier), popular in the capital. There is interesting information to be found in sensationalist press such as Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (The Illustrated Daily) and Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (The Information and Telegraphic Courier). In addition to the dailies, I have also examined two weeklies – Bluszcz (The Ivy) for women and the satirical Mucha (The Fly) – as well as specialist economic journals – Kurier Ekonomiczny (The Economic Courier), Przemysł i handel (Industry and Trade) and Gazeta Bankowa (The Banking Gazette).

3. Warsaw and its inhabitants in the face of hyperinflation

In 1923, Warsaw had a population of 960,381 people.¹⁷ The largest population group in the city was made up of workers employed in different sectors of industry, but the lifestyle and the nature of the Polish capital was mainly influenced by members of the intelligentsia such as white-collar workers, representatives of free professions and public servants. Blue-collar and white-collar workers, that is the people who obtained most of their income from wages and salaries, accounted for 63.2 % of the total working population. Self-employed people who did not hire extra labour force (mainly merchants and craftsmen) accounted for 17 %,¹⁸ while the share of the group classified as bourgeoisie is estimated at 2.1 % of the total.¹⁹ This last small group exerted a major impact on the economic life of the country. Triggering mechanisms of income and wealth redistribution, inflation was a major force shaping post-war relations. It created a sort of social ladder with different professional groups located lower or higher on its rungs depending on how well they coped with the devaluation of the Polish mark. The key demarcation line divided those who drew profit from the growing inflation from those who suffered losses. Very roughly, the group of “winners” was made up of those who had access to more flexible income and resources which did not depreciate (industrialists, entrepreneurs, bankers, real estate owners). The “losers”, on the other hand, were those who earned more stable wages (public servants as well as blue-collar and white-collar workers).²⁰ In Poland, a special role in the redistribution of national income was played by the State Treasury responsible for spending budgetary funds. The so-called inflation tax was levied on the entire population, but was especially painful for the working man (a fact postulated by T. Szturm de Sztrem²¹), whilst the profits went to the state and the economic community benefiting from unadjusted loans.

Rising inflation deepened social inequality and aggravated antagonisms, which often went beyond the simple division into winners and losers. It intensified conflicts between social groups and enhanced different stereotypes such as the dishonest, greedy Jew or the selfish peasant paying no regard to the public good. As inflation turned into hyperinflation, practically everyone started to incur losses (with the exception of a small group of stock market profiteers). Industrialists and bankers suffered because of the slump in the loan market and the disappearance of the so-called inflationary export bounty; entrepreneurs and merchants grappled with the problem of price calculation and the difficulty to purchase goods; white-collar and blue-collar workers were more and more affected by the drop in the real value of wages and job cuts. The Warsaw daily newspapers, however, reflected the shift only slightly and kept depicting the social groups in a way more suited to the reality of inflation than hyperinflation.

4. Everyday hardships – income and the cost of life

The wage situation in 1923 resulted from a number of factors which had previously left their mark on earnings. The war and the German occupation reduced wages on Polish territory to a very low level indeed – in 1918, the wages of workers and public servants were below 40 % of their real value in 1914. The years 1918–1921 saw a marked increase in both the nominal and real value of wages, which approached their pre-war levels in mid 1921. However, ever since that moment, a discrepancy could be observed – the nominal value of wages kept increasing, but their real value was falling and suffered from constant fluctuations as a consequence of accelerating inflation.

In order to adjust wages to the growing cost of living, a sliding wage scale was introduced. Statistical commissions calculated the rate at which the cost of living rose and the indices they published were used to regulate the amount of nominal earnings. Importantly, the adjustment complied with provisions in collective bargaining agreements adopted in different companies, provisions which were sometimes very divergent. Whether such agreements were honoured or not depended to a large extent on the good will of entrepreneurs. White-collar workers were in a worse position, which was especially true of the large group of civil servants, who were only covered by the sliding scale from February 1923.²²

Warsaw applied the calculations made by the Commission for the Study of the Cost of Living at the Central Statistical Office, which announced the price growth index once a month. The calculations are shown in Table 2. Nevertheless, the indexation of wages went only so far to protect them from falling. At the time of runaway inflation, the time and frequency of payment played a key role. The most popular way of remuneration was payment in arrears, which was the most disadvantageous for workers.

Table 2 Indices of the growth in the cost of living in Warsaw

Source: list compiled on the basis of information from Kurier Warszawski and Robotnik.

In 1923, the system of wage indexation developed during inflation ceased to be adequate for the living conditions under hyperinflation. The ever higher amounts of money Varsovians brought home each month could buy less and less. S. Karpiński, president of one of the Warsaw banks in 1923, wrote the following entry in his diary under 2 August: “I paid a million for a pair of shoes and 5.5 million for clothes. The salary I got from the Bank in July was 15 million.”²³ Prices of goods, including necessities, rose each day and the cost-of-living allowances could not offset the losses suffered as a result of inflation. This is why real wages were subject to sharp fluctuations. According to calculations made by T. Szturm de Sztrem, the index of real wages in the industrial sector in the second half of 1923 looked as follows:

Table 3 Index of real wages in the industrial sector in the second half of 1923 calc ulated in marks of the pre-war purchasing power (year 1914 = 100)

Source: Jerzy Tomaszewski, Stabilizacja..., p. 18.

Any attempts to adapt the sliding wage scale to the reality of hyperinflation were doomed, the calculations made by the commission giving rise to more and more controversy. From August on, the Statistical Commission started calculating the growth in the cost of living every two weeks, but this only produced a temporary improvement. The calculations were increasingly imprecise. The figure of 132.14 % calculated for November invited the following comment in The Worker: “This is of course valid for the most modest, almost starvation budgets. [...] But if you take the price of bread as the index [...] than the ratio will be even more striking: on 15 November, the price for 1 kilogramme of bread was set at 59,000 Polish marks by the commission [...], while on 30 November, the official price of bread was 160,000 Polish marks, which means it rose by almost 200 %.”²⁴

On 6 December 1923, the Parliament passed an act on taxation adjustment, which was to enter into force on 1 January 1924. The practice of calculating some public levies on the basis of a unit with a fixed value (the reference zloty) triggered the process of adjusting other regulatory liabilities as well.²⁵ Even though the introduction of a fixed measure of value was welcomed, the calculation of prices was still the biggest cause for concern. The adjustment of taxes, excise duties and railway tariffs led to another price increase while the calculation of product value provided sellers with new opportunities to abuse the system.²⁶

Wages were adjusted more slowly, even though the Central Trade Union Commission demanded as early as mid-December that a relevant act be adopted by the Parliament.²⁷ From January, the requirement to calculate wages on the basis of the fixed measure of value was introduced for different groups and included in collective agreements.²⁸ Wage adjustment stoked conflicts between workers and entrepreneurs as the latter tried to use the adjustment to reduce wages and were unwilling to pay cost-of-living allowances to adjusted remuneration. Employers justified the practice by the worsening situation in the industrial sector.²⁹ In spite of such difficulties, the real value of workers’ wages increased in the first half of 1924.³⁰

At the time of hyperinflation, Varsovians incurred higher costs not only in terms of the rising cost of living, but also the increased transaction costs related to everyday shopping. The time spent looking for hard-to-find products or visiting various shops to compare prices added to the cost of purchased products and increased their value in the eyes of consumers.

What was especially time-consuming was queuing up for necessity goods. Queues were part and parcel of hyperinflation-stricken Warsaw. Sensationalist press reported in July: “Sugar queues have become so commonplace in the recent weeks that today there is no store in Warsaw before which large crowds of women have not been gathering since the small hours.”³¹ Errands which involved long waiting were often entrusted to people who had time to spare, that is the old and the unemployed.³² But in some situations, governmental regulations made purchasing a product conditional on presenting the passport³³ – such was the case of sugar, whose rations had to be collected by Varsovians in person, a provision which caused serious problems for the working population. The additional time and energy put into trade transactions is sometimes called the shoe leather cost.

Inflation also gave rise to calculation problems. S. Karpiński wrote in November: “The constant calculations and additions of the cost-of-living allowance mars our work at the office.”³⁴ Companies and institutions struggled to calculate allowances and recalculate capital. Each Varsovian, regardless of their level of education, had to face the problem of multi-million transactions. Inflation taught the “common cook” as well as a member of the intelligentsia to do their sums.³⁵ The very figures posed problems – people tried to tell the difference between a billion and a trillion with the press offering helpful tips.³⁶Tiresome mathematical operations were a necessity adding time and energy to the costs of hyperinflation.

5. Adaptation strategies – household budgets

Confronted with rising prices and a drop in the real value of wages, Varsovians had to make serious changes in the structure of their household budgets and the way they satisfied their needs. Planning everyday expenses posed many difficulties. Z. Kaliciński remembered how his father would collect his wages and then “take a sheet of paper and a pencil, arrange the banknotes in little stacks and then count, write, sum up.”³⁷

How extensive the changes had to be depended most of all on the initial situation in a household. A small number of Varsovians did not have to modify their budgets at all – the resources they had gathered allowed them to maintain their previous standard of living. Cuts and reductions could only be made by those families which still earmarked some of their funds to satisfy higher order needs and had a complex structure of consumption. This was not the case of households whose income only sufficed to afford the basics, let alone those where people lived at the minimum subsistence level. At most, they could resort to reducing starvation diets.

Wherever possible, people tried to consume more rationally, a good illustration of which is summer vacations taken by the intelligentsia. In spite of the growing pauperization, the group found it hard to compromise on their ingrained code of social behaviour. Consequently, efforts were made to cut down on costs rather than give up leisure trips altogether. High prices in well-known spas made smaller places more popular and foreign destinations were losing out to domestic ones.³⁸

Most often, however, summer vacations were simply taken out of the budget. This was due to the shrinking discretionary fund, that is those resources which were set aside for additional and spontaneous expenses related mainly to tourism and culture. Books and newspapers were among the first items to go in the austerity drive. This raised fears of society becoming barbarised. The Warsaw Courier offered the following comment: “Purchasing anything new becomes a luxury. Black marketeers don’t buy books because they don’t want to – the intelligentsia, because they can’t afford them.” .³⁹ People tried to compensate for the losses and find new ways of satisfying higher order needs. Władysław Berkan, a worker returned from Germany, wrote in his memoir: “I used to subscribe to about fifteen different newspapers, but now have to do with just one. And if the newsagents keep raising prices like that, I will stop at reading the free-of-charge copy of Postęp (Progress) on the tram.”⁴⁰ Yet another way to read gratuitously was to consult newspapers in cafes. Budget cuts sometimes encroached on education, especially when children were forced to go to work to help their parents.

People also gave up all amenities and investment in home furnishings – furniture “one owns has to suffice as long as the new one doesn’t get cheaper.”⁴¹ After the July increase of telephone tariffs, the press reported the common phenomenon of people giving up their phones not only in private flats, but also in offices and pharmacies.⁴² In August, it was noticed that many consumers postponed the repair of their gas installations as a way to avoid gas bills.⁴³ People tried to reduce the cost of buying clothes, too. One way to curb consumption in this area was to use old items kept for a rainy day. And so they would repair and darn damaged articles of clothing and wore down those which have already finished their useful life.⁴⁴ If new clothes had to be obtained, they were bought in second-hand street markets offering them at bargain prices.⁴⁵ The Fly often included cartoons depicting a member of the intelligentsia or a worker in tatters,⁴⁶ visibly unable to afford new shoes or clothes. A lot of Varsovians could not replace the clothes they had had since 1914 so their appearance was not very far from the one shown in the cartoon.

In order to be less reliant on paid services, people either substituted many of them with home work or simply gave them up. In August, for example, after yet another increase in ticket prices, the number of people travelling by tramways dropped significantly.⁴⁷ At the time of high prices, W. Berkan cut down on barber services – he would shave at home and have his hair washed by his wife.⁴⁸ However, the savings thus generated entailed opportunity costs in the form of the time and energy necessary to perform the necessary activities.

By cutting spending on higher order needs it was possible to rebalance household budgets. The share of basic goods and services, especially food, increased as a sign of society getting poorer. Yet, economies had to be made even in this category. The Ivy, whose target readership was made up of well-to-do women, offered recipes for cheap ginger bread and biscuits.⁴⁹ Still, the recipes suggested in the periodical were beyond the reach of many Varsovians. One of the readers of a sensationalist daily wrote: “With prices at such exorbitant levels, I have very modest expenses: breakfast for 5.000 marks, lunch for 10.000 marks and supper for 5.000 marks, which makes up 20.000 marks per day or 600.000 marks per month.” The person earned 575,190 marks at the time. The low cost of food, which he could not afford anyway, was due to the fact that he dined at his relatives’.⁵⁰ The pauperized white-collar workers were also saved by collective catering establishments run by social welfare organisations, which used post-war supplies from American food aid campaigns. ⁵¹

The need to slash household budgets radically combined with the difficulty in satisfying basic needs made people focus on the material aspects of everyday life and their own problems. Care for the public good was pushed to the background. A journalist writing for The Warsaw Courier deplored the fact that there are no people willing to help the Women’s Work Club, a charity organisation.⁵² Concluding the description of the economies he had made, W. Berkan said: “What do I care for others! At a time like that, everyone tries to save himself as best he can. [...] Those [...] who have to limit themselves and draw on their old juices are the most numerous.”⁵³

Members of those households which operated at the subsistence level put all their time and energy into satisfying the needs from the lowest section of Maslow’s pyramid and reducing deficiencies. This is aptly put by The Fly in its Ode to the Stomach: „Żołądku mój jedyny. Przy tym Nowym Roku / Życzę ci, bym cię zgubił na ulicy w tłoku, / Bo powiedz, kiedy marka nasza całkiem kona, / Kiedy dolar przeklęty sześć i pół miliona, / Kiedy mąka miliony, pustki w mojej chacie, / Powiedz drogi żołądku, czym napełnię ja cię?” (O my dear stomach. It is my New Year’s wish / That you should get lost somewhere in the crowd / As the mark is on its death bed/ And there are six and a half million to the cursed dollar/ As flour is worth millions and the pantry is empty/ Tell me, my dear stomach, how should I fill you?) .⁵⁴ The poem was published on 28 December 1923 – trade was already in the doldrums due to reduced shopping activity and Warsaw, suffering from high prices, was additionally hit by winter problems with food supply.

6. Adaptation strategies – extra sources of income

The drop in the value of real wages forced Varsovians not only to curb their household spending, but also to look for new sources of income. A oneoff inflow of cash could be ensured by the sale of an unnecessary object such as the tailcoat sold by the hero of the novel Przedwiośnie (The Coming Spring).⁵⁵ The extensive classified advertisements section of The Warsaw Courier, where typical ads by shop, company and workshop owners prevailed, also featured adverts by private persons. As the indicated time when a potential transaction could take place were most often in the afternoon, we may assume that such ads were published by working people. A lot of the ads were about the sale of furniture and clothes. For example, the following offer was made at the beginning of August: “For sale: double bed, sturdy with nickel bars, net and mattresses. 16/2 Kopernika Street; from 5–7 p.m.”.⁵⁶ In addition to the sale of chattel, extra income could be obtained by pawning objects, which gave the owner a chance to buy them back once the financial situation in the household got better. However, the options to sell or pawn things were limited, especially in a society which had come out of a war and had struggled with economic problems for a number of years.

Another way to improve the household budget was to look for additional earnings and find work for every family member. Many public servants looked for a second job, a tendency described by Stefan Kozłowski in his study on bank employees.⁵⁷ Wives and children were also forced to undertake paid work. The share of women in the total working population in 1918–1923 was the highest in the entire interwar period.⁵⁸ Even though the professional activity of Warsaw women increased in the second half of the 19th century⁵⁹ and was often a necessity at the time of war, undertaking paid work by women who had children was a limited phenomenon – the traditional family model was dominant among the working class.⁶⁰ This is why, at the time of hyperinflation, wages earned by women and children were perceived as a sad necessity and a sign of pauperization.⁶¹

In the intellectual milieu, women’s work was more common, especially in the creative and progressive circles, but even there earning money by wives and mothers was often seen as an economic necessity. Newspapers describing the story of Leon Brześciński, who was made redundant, mention the fact that his wife found employment only when her husband had been laid off, but her earnings were not enough to support a family of three.⁶² The reason is that work performed by women did not bring as much profit as men’s work, women’s pay being lower than men’s in most sectors of the economy.⁶³

Inflation forced people to rationalise their household budgets and create new forms of saving wherever it was possible. The rapidly depreciating Polish mark could not hold value effectively, which explains the disappearance of the traditional form of saving through putting aside part of the income. In their flight from the mark, people looked for alternative means of hoarding such as non-depreciable goods, foreign currencies and corporate stocks.⁶⁴ Playing the stock market could be a very lucrative activity at the time, the boundary between saving and getting profit from speculating in stock being blurred. The records and memories of the period often mention the “stock market rush” among Varsovians. Józef Świdrowski recounts: “At the time of advanced inflation, stock market speculation was rife. [...] Joint-stock companies mushroomed and people bought stock without asking about the value of the companies or their line of business. One day, I skipped school and went to Warsaw [...] to buy stocks.”⁶⁵ This caused concern as currency depreciation made its impact on the way people treated work – it made them believe that it was possible to achieve success quickly and without much effort. As was noticed by E. Taylor, new models of wealth emerged: „It made the unscrupulous profiteer successful. Thus was the most bitter fruit of inflation born – the ‘moral inflation’, which permeated the entire social structure and cast its shadow on the post-inflation period.”⁶⁶

Press reports of crimes related to inflation and social pauperization other than profiteering are equally numerous. The unprecedented scale of money circulation and the common avoidance of the mark created conditions for various forgeries. People forged banknotes, shares in stock market companies and cut diamonds,⁶⁷ which were popular as a way of hoarding value. Once prices of tobacco increased, counterfeit cigarettes hit the market.⁶⁸

As it was impossible to obtain resources to satisfy basic needs and access to many goods was limited, some people resorted to stealing. The especially popular form of theft took place at railway sidings where loaded freight cars were parked. At the beginning of September, The Warsaw Courier reported that there were organised groups robbing trains in the area of Warsaw.⁶⁹ Theft supplied households in the necessary goods whilst the sale of stolen products offered an additional source of income. We could venture a thesis that stealing basic necessities from trains at the time of the general frustration caused by reports of illegal exports may be interpreted as an act of social justice. On the other hand, the lack of response from the authorities may suggest that there was more tolerance for such offences. Moral qualms related to the breach of social norms and breaking the law had to give way in the face of harsh reality.

7. Conclusion

The experiences of Varsovians with the hyperinflation were to a great extent typical for the whole of Polish society. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in some respects the economic situation varied depending on the region of the country. The process of economic integration was progressing very slowly, despite the fact that in Autumn 1923 the Polish mark came into effect on the whole territory of the Republic of Poland (after its adoption in Upper Silesia on 1 November). Prices varied from city to city and Warsaw was seen as the most expensive one. On 9 November 1923 the magazine Robotnik (The Worker) informed that: “Warsaw, which is the seat of the main commissioner for combating high prices, Mr Bajda, and a ‘dynamic’ section for combating high prices [...], is the most expensive city in Poland, as one might easily conclude by comparing the prices in the following cities: Warsaw, Łódź and Włocławek.

This disproportion grew because of the wage indexation practice. For example, in Cracow the calculations of the Central Statistical Office (GUS) for Warsaw were used as a reference point until April. It was only in June that the local commission calculated the rates for May on the basis of locally collected data. The two-week calculation periods, which were introduced in Warsaw in August, were fully applied in Cracow only in December.⁷² The situation of the population living in urban and rural areas differed greatly, with the latter having better life conditions.

As we take a closer look at the economic strategies adopted by Warsaw consumers and entrepreneurs, we can clearly see that, faced with everyday hardship, they pushed their individual interests to the fore focusing on the overriding objective of obtaining hard-to-find products and offsetting losses caused by the quick drop in the value of money. Moral and social considerations were usually given less importance. The practices described above also created conflicts and made society very polarised, which is why the state tried to influence the worker-employer and consumer-seller relations by putting in place various regulations (cost-of-living index, wage indexation, price control, anti-speculation laws). Such steps, however, could not fully cope with the quickly changing reality of hyperinflation.

Together with the rise of prices and the decrease of real wage value, frustration and discontentment grew. As the economic situation was deteriorating, the inept actions undertaken by the authorities undermined the trust of society towards the young Polish state. In an introduction to one of his leaflets, the socialist activist Tadeusz Hołówko remarked: “Life was better under the Moscow rule! – this kind of curse may still cross the lips of women who watch the rising price of bread and the basic necessities with despair and who can buy only a half of what they used to buy with their husbands’ earnings before the war.” In this very publication he tried to explain “what the Polish worker has gained from independence” and emphasized the significance of political and national freedom as well as the achievements in the scope of law on social policy.⁷³ Five years after November 1918, economic difficulties were dampening the joy of the newly regained independence.

The government itself, hardly able to contain the worsening economic situation and embroiled in political in-fighting, only exacerbated social tensions. The economically motivated conflict between the government and the people reached its turning point on 6 November in Cracow when striking workers were attacked by the army. 32 people died. The events showed the frustration of the general public caused by the difficult material situation and the resistance to the ineffectual policies of the centre-right government. They reverberated across Poland and in Warsaw where they compounded the feelings of anxiety and threat. They also added fuel to the criticism levelled by the opposition against the government, contributing to its fall in December 1923.

The difficult experiences of the year 1923 affected the attitudes of the society in the years to come. In 1925, when in view of economic difficulties the value of the zloty started to drop and the so called specie inflation occurred, the fear of hyperinflation revealed itself with full force. Even though the level of currency depreciation was far from the one in 1923, people panicked and started to exchange the zloty into foreign currencies. Also, at the time of the Great Depression, the fear of inflation influenced the decisions taken by the Polish government to consistently pursue a policy of deflation.

Inflation-related problems were also an important factor shaping the negative opinion of the parliamentary rule. In his memoir Czesław Bobrowski wrote: “In the years to follow even someone as politically inactive as me would have bitter thoughts about the functioning of the parliament and government on the political as well as economic level (the inability to control inflation).”⁷⁴ Longing for order and strong authority manifested itself in 1926. The aversion towards the centre-right government of Winceny Witos and the unpleasant memories of the events of autumn 1923, paved the way towards power for Józef Piłsudski. In 1926 the socialist activist Jan Kwapiński noted: “After Skrzyński’s resignation, the creation of Witos’s government had to give rise to turmoil in the masses of the society, especially on the left, as it was a challenge mounted to the whole nation. The members of the Polish Socialist Party and Trade Unions were not wrong to say that the working class had to expect the deterioration of their situation. [...] It was assumed that the new government might unleash an even greater storm than that of 1923. All the more so because the economic situation of the country was much worse, unemployment had risen sharply, and following the news about the formation of Witos’s government, the benefits of Grabski’s currency reform were weakened. The dollar cost 11 zloty instead of 6 or 8 as before.”75 It was probably this kind of prevailing mood on the left and the fear of the return of hyperinflation that contributed highly to the social consent for radical solutions and created a favourable climate for the coup d’état attempted by Piłsudski on 12 May 1926, which resulted in the introduction of an authoritarian regime in Poland.

Text translated into English: Mikołaj Sekrecki and Magdalena Macińska

Izabela Mrzygłód. PhD candidate at the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, staff member at the Museum of History of Poland, editor of the book review section of the Internet weekly “Kultura Liberalna.” In the years 2005–2010 she studied history at the University of Warsaw. Her master’s thesis on everyday life in the period of hyperinflation in 1923 was awarded second prize in the Stanisław Herbst Contest. Currently, she is working on a doctoral dissertation on the political attitudes of students of the University of Warsaw and the University of Vienna in the 1930s. She is interested in the social history of the 19th and 20th centuries, history of women, history of the interwar period and German-speaking countries.

ENDNOTES

1Andrzej Wierzbicki, Żywy Lewiatan. Wspomnienia (Warsaw, 2001), p. 336.

2 Wojciech Morawski, Od marki do złotego. Historia finansów Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 2008), pp. 70–71.

3 Jerzy Zdziechowski, Finanse Polski w latach 1924 i 1925 (Warsaw, 1925), pp. 12–13.

4 Stanisław Karpiński, Pamiętnik dziesięciolecia (Warsaw, 1931), p. 314.

5 Feliks Młynarski, Wspomnienia (Warsaw, 1971), pp. 185–189.

6 Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Zarys historii gospodarczej Polski 1918–1939 (Warsaw, 1999), p. 103.

7 Jerzy Tomaszewski, Stabilizacja waluty w Polsce (Warsaw, 1961), p. 31.

8 For the mechanism of inflation tax see Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Gospodarka Polski międzywojennej (Warsaw, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 287–292.

9 Ibidem, pp. 102–103.

10 Ibidem, p. 123.

11 Idem, Robotnicy przemysłowi w Polsce 1918–1939. Materialne warunki bytu (Warsaw, 1971), pp. 164–165.

12 Wojciech Morawski, Od marki..., p. 56.

13 See: Wojciech Morawski, “Stabilizacja waluty w Polsce w latach dwudziestych na tle innych stabilizacji europejskich,” in Zenobia Knakiewicz (ed.), Od Grabskiego do Balcerowicza. Systemy pieniężne w gospodarce polskiej (Poznań, 1997), p. 118; Oskar Lange, “Koniunktura w życiu gospodarczym Polski,” in Przewroty walutowe i gospodarcze po wielkiej wojnie (Cracow, 1928), pp. 347–437; Jerzy Tomaszewski, Stabilizacja..., pp. 15–38.

14 Jerzy Zdziechowski, Finanse..., p. 15.

15 Jerzy Tomaszewski, Stabilizacja..., pp. 56–57.

16 Zygmunt Bauman, “Codzienność nasza niecodzienna...,” in Małgorzata Bogunia- Borowska (ed.), Barwy codzienności. Analiza socjologiczna (Warsaw, 2009), p. 77.

17 “Statistical Yearbook for Warsaw 1923 and 1924”, Warsaw 1926, p. 17.

18 Marian Marek Drozdowski, “Skład i struktura społeczna ludności Warszawy międzywojennej,” in Marian Marek Drozdowski (ed.), Warszawa II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 1968), vol. 1, p. 35.

19Barbara Poznańska, “Skład społeczno-zawodowy i narodowościowo-wyznaniowy burżuazji Warszawy w okresie międzywojennym 1918–1939,” in Marian Marek Drozdowski (ed.) Warszawa II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 1972), vol. 4, p. 143.

20 The influence of inflation on the distribution of wealth is discussed in: Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Gospodarka..., vol. 1, pp. 287–292.

21 Tadeusz Szturm de Sztrem, Żywiołowość w opodatkowaniu: podatek inflacyjny (Warsaw, 1924).

22 Tadeusz Szturm de Sztrem, Płace zarobkowe w okresie dewaluacji pieniężnej (Warsaw, 1924), p. 35.

23 Stanisław Karpiński, Pamiętnik..., p. 299.

24Robotnik, 4 December 1923, p. 2.

25Kurier Warszawski, 30 December 1923, p. 9.

26Robotnik, 1 January 1924, p. 5.

27 Ibidem, 21 December 1923, p. 3.

28 For example, bakeries started calculating wages in zlotys from 21 I: Kurier Warszawski, 11 January 1924, morning supplement, p. 3.

29Robotnik, 1 February 1924, p. 1; 28 February 1924, p. 2.

30 Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Gospodarka... (Warsaw, 1971), vol. 2, p. 97.

31Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 18 July 1923, p. 1. Also on the same topic: Robotnik, 2 August 1923, p. 1; 2 September 1923, p. 3.

32Kurier Warszawski, 13 January 1924, p. 10.

33 Ibidem, 7 September 1923, morning supplement, p. 2.

34 Stanisław Karpiński, Pamiętnik..., p. 304.

35 Rem Sygietyński, “Refleksja finansowa III,” Przemysł i Handel, 45, 1923, p. 668.

36Kurier Warszawski, 1 September 1923, evening issue, p. 6.

37 Zdzisław Kaliciński, O Starówce..., p. 28.

38 “Nasze życie: wrzesień-październik,” Bluszcz, 1923, 40, pp. 382–383.

39Kurier Warszawski, 13 August 1923, morning supplement, p. 3.

40 Władysław Berkan, Życiorys własny (Poznań, 1924), p. 317.

41 Ibidem.

42Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 25 July 1923, p. 1.

43 Ibidem, 1 August 1923, p. 3.

44 Władysław Berkan, Życiorys..., p. 316; Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 23 July 1923, p. 1.

45Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 27 July 1923, p. 2.

46Mucha, 55 (1923), 29, p. 4.

47Kurier Warszawski, 13 August 1923, p. 3.

48 Władysław Berkan, Życiorys..., p. 318.

49 “Przepisy kuchenne,” Bluszcz, 1923, 26, p. 218.

50 Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 23 July 1923, p. 1.

51 Kurier Warszawski, 3 October 1923, morning supplement, p. 2.

52 Ibidem, 2 July 1923, evening issue, p. 5.

53 Władysław Berkan, Życiorys..., p. 318.

54 “Do żołądka,” Mucha, 55 (1923), 52, p. 4.

55 Stefan Żeromski, Przedwiośnie (Wrocław-Warsaw-Cracow, 1982), pp. 268–269 (The Coming Spring, transl. by Bill Johnston, Budapest-New York, p. 327)

56Kurier Warszawski, 7 August 1923, evening issue, p. 14.

57 Stefan Kozłowski, Warunki bytu pracowników bankowych w Polsce w latach 1920–1927 (Warsaw, 1928), p. 26.

58 Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Robotnicy..., p. 248.

59 Maria Nietyksza, “Przemiany aktywności zawodowej kobiet. Warszawa na przełomie XIX i XX wieku,” in Anna Żarnowska and Andrzej Szwarc (eds), Kobieta i społeczeństwo na ziemiach polskich w XIX wieku (Warsaw, 1995), pp. 99–114.

60 Władysław Mierzecki, “Praca zarobkowa kobiet w środowisku robotniczym w Polsce międzywojennej,” in Anna Żarnowska i Andrzej Szwarc (eds), Równe prawa i nierówne szanse. Kobiety w Polsce międzywojennej (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 109–110.

61Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 14 July 1923, p. 2.

62Ibidem, 7 July 1923, p. 1.

63 Working conditions for women in the industrial sector are discussed in: Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Robotnicy..., pp. 248–250.

64 “Oszczędności prywatne,” Bluszcz, 33–34,1923, pp. 286–287.

65 Józef Świdrowski, Moja droga w świat. Wspomnienia 1906–1939 (Warsaw, 1980), p. 108.

66 Edward Taylor, “Waluta,” in Stefan L. Zaleski (ed.) Bilans gospodarczy dziesięciolecia Polski Odrodzonej (Poznań, 1929), vol. 2. p. 243. See also: Edward Taylor, Inflacja..., p. 272–286.

67Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny, 31 July 1923, p.1; Kurier Warszawski, 15 November 1923, morning supplement, p. 6;

68Kurier Warszawski, 12 July 1923, morning supplement, p. 4; 31 July 1923, p. 8.

69 Ibidem, 2 September 1923, p. 9.

70 The Polish bushel (korzec) is an old measure of dry capacity equal to 128 litres.

71Robotnik, 9 November 1923, p. 4.

72 On life conditions in Cracow: Jerzy Gołębiowski, “Podłoże ekonomiczne wystąpień strajkowych warstw pracujących Krakowa w 1923 roku,” in Józef Buszko (ed.) Rok 1923 w Krakowie (Cracow, 1978), pp. 90–91.

73 Tadeusz Hołówko, Co robotnik polski zdobył przez niepodległość (Warsaw, 1923), at: http://lewicowo.pl/co-robotnik-polski-zdobyl-przez-niepodleglosc/ (1/10/2015).

74 Czesław Bobrowski, Wspomnienia ze stulecia (Lublin, 1985), p. 43.

75 Jan Kwapiński, Moje wspomnienia 1904–1939 (Paris, 1965), p. 224.

This article has been published in the fourht issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memories of econimic crises.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

Moderated by Prof. Padraic Kenney
Prof. Wojciech Roszkowski
Dr. Matěj Spurný
Tamás Pesuth
Iga Kozlowska

A panel of invited scholars discusses the nature of economic crises as historical events, with a particular focus on the ways they are experienced, interpreted, and remembered, and also their long-term political and cultural implications. The discussants in this conversation consider what makes economic memory distinct from memories of war and atrocities and, conversely, what makes them similar. They probe new lines of research that explore the sources of economic memory, the kind of language employed when remembering economic events, discursive versus non-discursive memories, economic memory as a tool of political legitimation and alternative memories, to date under-examined.

P. Kenney: First, I would like to explain why I understand that we are here. At one of the first meetings of the editorial board of the journal, I remarked that the study of memory tends to always focus on the same things. These are very important things, like the memory of war and the memory of atrocities, and maybe sometimes also the memory of revolution. Scholars discuss memory in these contexts, and there is a great deal more to say about these issues, especially since we continue to have wars, atrocities and revolutions. But I wondered whether a journal whose focus is in part on memory can explore something new? This was shortly after the Great Recession which began in 2007–2008, and so I thought, “Could we have a conversation about this?” or, “Could we not encourage scholarship focused on the memory of an economic crisis?” I suggested this, and I think everybody agreed: “What an excellent idea! We really should have such a conversation or even have an issue devoted to that topic.”

The journal wants to be at the forefront of trends in scholarship. Maybe in this case we are just a little bit ahead of the trend, and so we found that relatively few people are already working on this question of how economic crises are remembered. I should add that we did receive some excellent articles, and they are published in this issue. In most cases, though, the memory of crisis has not moved to the centre of scholarly research. But we should be confident enough to say that, just because we know relatively few people who are working on it, that in itself is not a signal that this is not an important question. Rather it is a signal that this is something worth discussing at greater length. I think I can be safe in saying that it is not only outside of this room that there are relatively few people working on this particular area. Even inside of this room, perhaps none of us would identify ourselves as working on the memory of economic crisis. And that is fine. The best way to stimulate further interest in this area is to talk about what it might look like. What we can offer in our conversation is something like a roadmap. We have not travelled this road ourselves, but we can see, I hope at least collectively, what that roadmap might look like. My hope is that not only will this be helpful for this issue of the journal devoted to memory about economic crisis, but, since it probably has not happened before that a group of scholars has spent a few hours talking about the memory of economic crisis, by doing precisely this, we can also produce something which will be of use to historians who are just beginning their research or maybe looking for a different approach to familiar areas, whether they are historians interested primarily in economic history or historians who are primarily interested in memory studies, or, for that matter, people outside of history, who work, for example, in the cultural study of memory. I hope that we might, in this way, encourage new kinds of scholarship.

Very often when we have discussion forums like this in a journal, there are scholars who have all written extensively on that topic and can speak from many years of experience working in it. That is not the situation here. We are experimenting, in effect using our knowledge of economic history or knowledge of memory to try to map out an area that would seem to be useful and productive. We have different kinds of expertise around this table representing different parts of the region. Since more expertise around this table deals with economic history, I would first like to ask, “What place is there for the study of memory within the field of economic history? How can we bring the study of memory into economic history?”

W. Roszkowski: Taking a step back, I would first like to express my anxiety about certain differences between what we call the study of memory, politics of memory and history in itself. I think that they are very often confused with each other. Politics of memory is basically politics. It uses history, while explaining or appealing to memory, or trying to prove certain things referring to memory which do not necessarily ring true. Anyway, it is a kind of instrumental approach to memory. Secondly, the study of memory is a field, a scholarly discipline, one that is very difficult to intuitively grasp, because memory is very hard to measure. First of all, there is the problem of collective memory, which is a philosophical issue. I do not believe in collective memory, but rather in the sum of individual memories. Next, I would like to ask how we can measure concepts such as hunger, joblessness, etc. as memories, and not as they were actually experienced in real life. Basically, we have a problem here with an image perpetuating the idea that economic memory can be remembered in terms of very simple words such as “hunger,” “fear,” “losing jobs,” “poor pay,” “good pay,” things like that. Usually, economic memory stores bad experiences rather than good experiences. And then there is another field of expertise. There is history itself, the history of events. Of course, in this case it is also “told” by someone and to some extent it is never really true. And the final question here is language. A great deal of memory is stored in simple terms, but the economic reality is told in scholarly economic history using pretty complex terms. If I explain to somebody who is praising the Gierek years here in Poland in the 1970s, that the productivity of fixed capital was declining, then we are instantly moving in different worlds. He is going to say, “Well, I remember Coca-Cola. I remember the Maluch, you know, the small Fiat, but what you just told me is beyond my comprehension. What does productivity of fixed capital mean?” Yet this concept is crucial to understanding the economic decline or the indebtedness of the 1970s. People did not care about the indebtedness, because it did not affect them directly. What affected them were the shopping queues, the length of the actual lines they had to stand in to buy groceries.

P. Kenney: Don’t we also remember wars or atrocities in simple terms?

W. Roszkowski: We use simple terms when we speak of individual memory. Whenever I say something about the general events of the war, usually somebody stands up and says, “No, no, no, my story is different.” So there is a certain collective experience, and then there are individual stories. Usually, they accumulate to form this general image, but there are individual exceptions.

P. Kenney: So, in the case of war, people want to share their individual experiences and think of them as very individual experiences, whereas in the case of economic memory their story might not be so individualistic. Instead, they would say, “I too was hungry, I also had a problem,” or, “I was part of something that everyone else experienced.”

T. Pesuth: Because Professor Roszkowski mentioned the difference between collective memory and individual memory, I would like to start with a joke that is connected to this theme. An economist says: “If my neighbour’s friend is unemployed, then we speak about an economic downturn. If my neighbour is unemployed, then that’s a recession. And if I am unemployed, then that’s a crisis.” Memory studies is an instrument or tool that can be applied to economics. If we take a look at the history of economic history, then we can see that over the past 20 to 25 years, there has been nothing but cliometrics. Cliometrics is all about using economic tools to analyse a historical event, but only from a quantitative approach. I think that since the crisis of 2007–2008, this has changed, because we can now adopt qualitative approaches, while taking into consideration cultural, political, and other contexts. Stanley Fischer, the former Governor of the Bank of Israel and now the Vice-President of the Federal Reserve said, “I think I have learned as much from studying the history of central banking as I have from knowing the theory of central banking, and I advise all of you who want to be central bankers to read history books.”

P. Kenney: Well, after all, if we are looking at how people behave economically, they behave in a particular way because of things they know. In other words, things they remember.

T. Pesuth: We always say that people act rationally, but that is not true. There is also an emotional aspect to our activity that is sometimes derived from memory.

M. Spurný: I am a social and cultural historian, but now I understand it is not so easy to find experts specialising in the memory of economic crisis. I also liked very much the distinctions which Professor Roszkowski proposed, because I think it is important to differentiate between the politics of memory and the study of memory. If we are going to talk about remembering an economic crisis and instrumentalising this memory within a political context, then this is a great topic and we will really have plenty to talk about. I think, for me, as a social historian, one of the crucial notions which might connect these topics is the concept of legitimacy, in the Weberian sense of the legitimacy of a system of domination. Remembering economic crisis may even be more important than remembering wars and conflicts. The mid-20th-century crisis of liberalism in its entirety and the Great Depression are both crucial topics. Remembering of the Great Depression acted as crucial justification for the legitimacy of all types of fascism, corporatism, and of course socialism as well. One of the ways forward is to study the memory or acts of remembering connected to different generations. The generation that remembers the Great Depression is dying out, and the ensuing political elites obsessively used remembering of the Great Depression as a symbol of the economic crisis of liberal capitalism in order to legitimise themselves. This was very effective in the 50s and 60s, and maybe even partly in the 70s, but this approach lost its impact in the 80s, because there were no longer as many people old enough to remember what it means to be unemployed or hungry. But this has not been a popular topic within memory studies, so I agree that historians should pay attention to the memory of economic crisis, because it may not only serve as an important framework for understanding change and the decline in the legitimacy of state socialism, but also the turn towards neoliberalism in the discourse dominant in the West in the 70s.

W. Roszkowski: From what Dr. Spurný said, I see another distinction which I think is very important, and that is the memory of events that people were witness to and the memory of events that people were told about. This is particularly noticeable in Poland, because my generation, for instance, very well remembers the Gomułka years, the Gierek years, and Martial Law. My son was 3 years old when Martial Law was introduced, but he remembers standing in lines for groceries with his mother. But someone who was born in 1988 or 1989 has no memory of economic decline whatsoever. And that constitutes a big difference. I think that the study of memory should not only focus on the things that people remember, but also on the things that people do not want to remember. This reminds me of what was said about the decline of liberal thought and the approach to liberalism in the 30s, 40s, and so on. Currently, how much do people remember of the decline of the command economy? Very little. They do not want to remember it, because it was so humiliating. They do not want to remember this terrible time in which they were forced to do things they did not want to do. They were wasting time and energy. It was a wasteful experience.

P. Kenney: Perhaps memory of economic crisis is really a fundamental kind of memory relating to the legitimacy of regimes, and thus we can best understand the decline or the success of some regimes by how people remember economic experience. This suggests that scholars of memory should be spending more time looking at this kind of memory rather than the memories of atrocity and war taking place during the period between regimes. If you are remembering World War II, you are remembering something between regimes. At the time, it was not obvious that we were between regimes, but now we know that was a period when the world was about to change from one set of regimes to another. Revolutions, wars and atrocities, all unusual situations, can be viewed as those periods in between. And Dr. Spurny is suggesting, and I think this is very compelling, that in fact, a central memory story of the 20th century is the memory of how things are “most of the time.” At the same time, there are things that people do not want to remember and often this is the experience of humiliation, of not having a job, not having enough food, not being able to take care of one’s family, having to stand in line. These are things that people suppress from their memories, so on the one hand, these are possibly the most important memories, and on the other hand, they are memories that people do not want to talk about having. This is where I would like to introduce the concept of non-discursive memory. Maybe what has happened with memory studies is that, quite naturally, people have studied discursive memories, things that everybody writes about and have the language to write about. We sometimes say that writing about atrocities is beyond our ability. The Holocaust is a case in point. Yet thousands and thousands of people who experienced the Holocaust have written about it. There are mountains of literature about that, so this is very much an instance of discursive memory. And here we are talking about memories that in a way do not get written about. So is it useful to make a distinction between discursive memory and non-discursive memory? And if we are talking about a kind of memory people push aside or suppress, or at the very least do not write about, well, then, what can a historian do?

M. Spurný: I have a slight problem with this distinction between discursive and non-discursive memory, especially when we are talking about economic crisis. Let me give an example. The most significant social protest of interwar Czechoslovakia was the so-called Most Strike. Most is a city in Northern Bohemia with a tradition of coal extraction. There was a protest in 1932, which resulted in dozens of dead and injured miners. This protest had already become a big topic in the inter-war period, with leftist intellectuals who supported the miners participating in the discourse. Afterwards, especially after the war and within post-1948 state socialism, this memory was reinforced a great deal. Miners wrote down their memories of the crisis and the strike. Hundreds of these memories were put together, and up to the 80s, three hundred publications and articles were written about this event. It was a crucial topic for the leftist narrative of inter-war Czechoslovakia, as well as Czech history embracing the entire 20th century. This is just one example that begs the question of whether we can really talk about nondiscursive memory.

P. Kenney: Also in Poland in the 1930s, memoirs of the unemployed were collected, and this was a very powerful collection. That is another good example where something clearly not discursive became quite discursive.

T. Pesuth: We have to distinguish between having memory and understanding it.

P. Kenney: It seems that discursive memory is that which can be explained and non-discursive memory is that which cannot be explained. For example, a memory connected to the Holocaust can dictate certain behaviour. Some people may say “Well, we don’t want to travel to Germany or perhaps to Poland because terrible things happened there generations ago,” and that is something that can be passed on and explained through memories of the Holocaust. On the other hand, if someone in the family insists on buying 40 kilograms of potatoes in November, she might not say “Well, I’m doing this, because in 1932 we were very hungry.” So in that sense, it’s a non-discursive memory. You just say, “It’s what we do, we buy a lot of potatoes and that’s why the closet is full of potatoes,” and nobody says “that’s really strange, why is there a closet full of potatoes?” So in that way it is a memory which is not explained. At some point, there will be a generation that says “Why do we have so many potatoes?” and nobody is quite sure why that has happened.

M. Spurný: I agree with you that memories of economic crisis are more difficult to understand and explain to subsequent generations in a manner that allows them to internalise them. However, I do not think that people failed to speak about these experiences, because we have studies, publications, articles and collections of workers’ memories of economic crisis. We know from interviews that people actually quite often told stories about economic crisis when with their families. For example, people who were born before WWII and who were loyal to the communist system, would tell their children, “You don’t remember what it means to be unemployed, but we know how humiliating that can be. Of course, we see a lot of failures in this communist system, but at least we had a job and were not hungry.” As important topics emerged in the 70s and 80s, such as human rights and environmental devastation, this argument became less convincing for subsequent generations. On the other hand, maybe there are some differences between remembering war or deportations, and remembering economic crisis, because every human has some experience of physical pain, whereas it is probably more difficult to internalise the experience of scarcity, of not having enough, of being exploited. This slight difference may be important for answering the question of why remembering economic crisis is so bound to single generations, yet loses its impact or meaning for subsequent generations.

I. Kozlowska: With regard to the question of discursive and non-discursive memory, as a sociologist of memory, I think it may be interesting to treat this distinction as a spectrum or a process of moving from non-discursive memory – maybe we can call this bodily memory, the sort of memory encapsulated in the hoarding of potatoes – to that memory being mobilised by some groups or actors in such a manner as to become explicitly discursive. For example, people could walk past a building that survived the war and not notice it, even if someone important lived there. We can say that that is a non-discursive memory in that it fails to communicate any meaning or message. But then maybe some people in the community get together, and say, “We should commemorate this building by putting a plaque on it.” That social action then transforms the status of that object or that memory from non-discursive to discursive.

P. Kenney: We can think of massive efforts right after the war to collect memories of people who had survived the war, especially within the Jewish community. There was a very conscious effort to take something which many survivors could not speak about or did not know how to speak about, and to make it discursive. This happened quite quickly and to the extent that it became almost a default position. There is almost an expectation now, or has been for the last 25 years, that if you experienced something in the war, you are almost obligated to talk about it. It is a default thing and it is discursive. There was a similar effort from a very political perspective that sought to highlight the memoirs of the unemployed in the 1930s. So it is often a political intervention. It is the politics of the Jewish community after the war that says, “We need to collect these stories,” and it is in particular leftist politics in the 1930s, either in Most or in Poland, that says, “We need to collect these stories in order to make a particular political point.” It is a political effort that makes a non-discursive memory become discursive.

W. Roszkowski: But I wonder, first of all, what are the sources on which study of memory is based. I think we should start with this. Published and recorded memoirs plus interviews and nothing else? What more is there? I think that we should focus on the representativeness of the sources of study of memory. Because to make the study of memory as watertight as possible, as precise as possible, we should really take care to ensure the representativeness of the sources, i.e. focus not only on the language, but also its representativeness.

M. Spurný: May I be a little bit subversive? So you are making a distinction here between the politics of memory, or maybe something like collective memory, and an authentic individual memory? Yet there are many examples that would appear to suggest that very often the question of the authenticity of this individual memory is of paramount importance, because very often it is a function of the politics of memory. There is a connection between these two logoi. In fact, there is no sharp division between these two areas. Everybody who conducts interviews knows that the manner in which stories are told depends on the contemporary values that are dominant in a given time and place.

W. Roszkowski: I do think there is something useful about the concept of collective memory. I just do not believe that there is a collective mind, but rather, that there is a kind of sum of individuals’ memories. But I would like to go back to the question of how we can explore non-discursive memory. I think this can be achieved through reading between the lines. Economic history is not just about the economy. It is about many other things. It is about culture. Culture is in fact very often underestimated in economic history studies. So what are that other factors that co-exist “between the lines” if you ask a person about economic memory? I think that there are at least two. First, there is national feeling. For example, Germans are reluctant to think about the wartime atrocities. They prefer to remember the public works of Hitler in the 1930s and the big reduction in unemployment. Why? Because they are Germans. The Poles do not think about the liquidation of German unemployment. They think about their wartime experiences. In addition, they reflect on these using very specific language. For example, when posed the question, “Who occupied Poland? The Nazis or the Germans?” visitors to the Museum of the Warsaw Rising in Warsaw from Germany or other countries may say, “Oh, yes, those Nazis were terrible.” And the guides usually say, “You know, we have a problem with that, because in Poland we remember the Germans, not the Nazis. They were not all necessarily party members. They were German soldiers, German policemen etc.”. Therefore it IS important to find out what lies between or behind words that a person is using. Is this contemporary language or the language of the past? Are we dealing with the experience of this person shaped by economic experience alone, or does national feeling also play some role? Secondly, national feeling co-exists with faith. For example, what emerges from a lot of Gulag memoirs is something that hardly anyone speaks about. Frequently, people who survived the Gulag were people who believed in God. I do not know if this correlation is measurable, but it is clear that purely economic circumstances are not the only factor affecting economic memory.

T. Pesuth: To follow up on Professor Roszkowski’s focus on national feeling and faith, I would like to add that the most important thing is culture. I am doing my research on the 2008 financial-economic crisis and its effect on banking culture. I am not primarily concentrating on macroeconomic factors and employment, liquidity, etc. According to my thesis, the main factor contributing to the crisis was the banking culture, the improper banking culture especially prevalent at the “too big to fail” multinational banks, compounded by the shortcomings of the regulatory bodies. Let me use the German example. Despite the 2008 crisis and the Greek crisis, German society, German academics, German politicians and German bankers still remain under the influence of the post-Nazi regime. To this day, their very negative experience with hyperinflation legitimates what is in effect a national consensus on anti-inflationary rules. This is why it is these central bankers that most strongly disagree with the measures that have now been adopted by, for example, the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. In other words, memories of economic crisis can play an important role in contemporary economic policymaking.

P. Kenney: What seems to be a problem here is that economics is assumed to be an entirely objective science, so the case of the German bankers is wonderful because the assumption is, “They are German bankers, they’re the best bankers in the world, they are professionals!” It becomes very difficult to say, “Well, yes, but they have a particular perspective and a particular policy, which is shaped by history and the memory of economic crisis.” As a social historian, I was thinking about the memories of people standing in line, hoarding potatoes and so on. But what you pointed out is that there is another group of people that has memories of economic crisis, and they are bankers, corporate leaders, politicians, trade union leaders etc.

T. Pesuth: Economic memory has an important place in contemporary politics. For example, during the Greek crisis, Greece pointed out that Germany should remember that, when they were in a very bad economic situation, the Greeks helped Germany by forgiving their debt under the terms of 1953’s London Agreement. So now, why can they not do the same for Greece?

P. Kenney:P. Kenney: I think that there are a couple of closely related problems that keep coming up that I would like to put back on the table. One is the problem of sources of memory and the other is a problem of the language with which people talk about economic crisis. It seems to me that these are related because the source problem is partly a language problem. If the sources that we have are created by, perhaps, political activists who decide that it is important, for example, to interview unemployed workers or to get them to tell their stories, or artists or novelists who decide that it is important to write about an economic crisis like the one in Most that was mentioned, then we have a particular view of the economic crisis. That is the story of course of the literate people and also expressive in particular ways. It may be that as a result we lack a full panoply of sources that could really produce a good understanding of economic crisis. At the same time there is the problem of language. The point was made earlier that we tend to think about the economic crisis in very simple terms: “It was bad,” or conversely, “Things were good”. We mentioned the Gierek era and the 1930s in Germany. They are both post-crisis eras that people can remember as, “Life was good. Things worked. I had access to goods that I didn’t have before.” Therefore, given the simplicity of language and the bias of sources, it seems to me that the historian trying to capture the memory of economic crisis faces a real challenge. So, what do we do?

T. Pesuth: Concerning the issue of contemporary language, we have to distinguish between language that is understandable or not understandable. If I talk to a person who has never studied economics, and I tell him or her that actually the bankers reacted rationally on the basis of financial incentives, they won’t understand. But if I tell them that the bankers were selfish or greedy, they will understand. So this is something that we should change. It is a crucial problem that economists only talk to other economists about using their technical language.

P. Kenney: So this should be changed, so as to give people tools to be able to talk about their experiences?

T. Pesuth: Exactly.

W. Roszkowski: But the language problem is rooted in different understandings of objectives. For a banker, robbing the depositors seems rational, while for the depositors it is unfair. It is an injustice. So there are different points of view I’m afraid. Can these be brought together in such a manner as to definitely state that there is one common denominator of evaluation?

M. Spurný: Another thing that makes remembering economic crises difficult is that there is rarely a clear distinction between victims and oppressors. This is also the problem when it comes to remembering late socialism, where it is unclear whether the regime or the society is to blame. It may be even more difficult when it comes to remembering economic crisis: people know where an injustice has occurred, but there were also people who benefited financially from it. Maybe a banker ends up in prison, but generally it is hard for people to make sense of an economic crisis. So it is not only the language that is of significance, but also the nature of what happened.

P. Kenney: It seems to be precisely a language problem, because sometimes one can say, “Yes the banker is the oppressor,” or the capitalist owner is an oppressor who has thrown people out of work. Or it might be obvious to somebody that it is the banker’s fault that they have now lost their apartment or their home. But most of the time it is just a little bit harder to see that. And of course it is not the banker who shows up at your house, and says, “You must leave.” It is somebody whom the bank has hired or maybe it is the police. Being unable to say “I know who the oppressor is,” makes that story much more difficult.

I. Kozlowska: I think there is something really important about the facile distinction between the oppressor and the victim when it is applied to cases of remembering war or atrocity as opposed to those involving the remembering of economic crisis. I think this is really important, because frequently one of the goals of collective memory is to build some sort of collective identity. And, historically, that has been a national identity. In the process of nation-building, for example in Germany and Poland, collective memories were important in defining who “we” are in opposition to who the “Other” is. We are Poles, and they are Germans. With memories of economic crisis, the “Other” is less clear, and maybe that is why economic crises are harder to understand and remember.

W. Roszkowski: I would like to bring up a question that I do not think we can avoid: Can the study of memory be normative or can it not? Is it good that people have a certain type of memory or not? I think this question is critical because the kind of memory that exists in certain communities or societies very often creates a certain type of politics. If people are brought up in a false reality which they have been taught at schools, or exposed to in the family home or by the media for generation after generation, then they are different people. They become people that we sometimes cannot communicate with. Because if I say, “Well A is the truth,” and the person has been told by his grandparents and parents and by teachers at school for his whole life that A is bad then difficulties in communication naturally arise, because a person like this simply does not know the facts.

P. Kenney: I think the idea of legitimacy actually helps us put more weight on popular memory of economic crisis. Because in the end it does not matter if it is true or not that people remember the depression in one way or another, or if their memories of the communist period are true or not, or their memories of the recession of 2008 are true or not, because those memories create actual facts. People process that story in a particular way, and then they assess the current regime in a particular way. So if a politician asks, “Are you better off now than you were ten years ago?” the answer becomes a political fact, and in a way it is kind of useless for the historian to say, “No, no, no, actually that’s not true that you were better off under late communism,” or whenever it might have been.

M. Spurný: I actually do not understand the view that the perceived role of historians is to correct people’s misconceptions. If there is a reason for historians to consider memory, then it is to help extract alternative memories. For example, in post-socialism, it is very difficult for ex-party members or people who were collaborating with state security agencies to remember the past because there is a dominant narrative which makes these people semi-criminal. If they talk about their past, then all that is left for them to do is to apologise or to search for some way to justify what they did. As historians, we have to historicise. That in practice means that we should not only write about the prominent narrative, which is the narrative of those who fought against the regime, but also to show that different narratives are legitimate, and in an extreme case, the narratives of the Nazi oppressors or SS officers are as well, because they are important for understanding why things happened the way they did. There is a trend in German historiography active since the late 80s that recognises that ordinary people were also part of the Nazi regime’s power machinery, and for that reason their perspective is also important. For me as a historian, it is always important, through historicising events, to relate alternative narratives and to describe the very different positions of different social groups, because all of these groups have the right to remember.

T. Pesuth: Besides uncovering alternative memories, the study of economic memory is also an important factor in reconciliation and even in economic cooperation. One Hungarian economist stated that historical knowledge and historical awareness are factors that can increase productivity. For example, on the Slovak and Hungarian border, there is a Suzuki car factory. About half of the workers are Hungarians and half are Slovaks. If they only had a very simplified knowledge of history, the Hungarians might dislike the Slovaks because, following the Trianon Treaty, “they stole our mountains,” and the Slovaks might dislike the Hungarians because, “they were always exploiting us.” It is important that simplified economic knowledge and awareness is developed into something more substantive, so that the two groups can get along and work well together, thereby increasing economic productivity and economic cooperation within the European Union.

P. Kenney: One of the things of importance that we have neglected so far in this conversation is the vital role of gender in understanding economic memory. If we think about how people remember economic crisis, surely it would be the case that people’s different positions in a society would be relevant. For example, women who are homemakers or who are standing in line to buy food are going to remember that story in a way that is different from men who are operating differently within the economy. How would we advance the discussion about gender in economic memory?

W. Roszkowski: I think it depends on the role of women in economic life at the particular time and place. I think in terms of employment or unemployment, for instance, the memory of men and women under communism in Poland would not differ very much, because most women worked and most men worked. That is not the problem; the problem was the sharing, or not, of all the duties within the household. The memory of women in Poland during communism therefore definitely differs not in terms of whether they worked or not, but in terms of the fact that they had to combine their professional duties with household duties.

M. Spurný: I would not agree. I do not think this is some kind of anthropological constant, though there is of course a long tradition prevalent since the 19th century that women functioned in the private sphere and men participated in the public sphere.

I. Kozlowska: When we are talking about women’s experiences in economic crises, I think it might be interesting to look at periods where there was economic prosperity sometimes experienced by women as a crisis. One such memory that is very prevalent in the feminist historical narrative in the U. S. is that of women’s employment post-WWII. During WWII, there was mass employment of women in traditionally male, blue-collar jobs. In factories, and so on. When the men returned from the war, many women were pushed back out of the labour force, in what was of course a very economically prosperous time. So it might be interesting to look at transitional moments. In post-1989 Poland, for example, there was of course a difficult economic situation, but it was also a moment of great potential for economic development and many women did in fact lose out, as they were the first to be pushed out of the labour force.

M. Spurný:M. Spurný: A similar thing happened in post-WWII West Germany. Some historians talk about normalisation in the 50s when, more than in any other period, women were pushed out of various functions they had held in society. However, it is not only the question of gender differences in remembering, but also maybe one of recognition. The notion of recognition might help us to understand how things are remembered and why they are remembered. Everybody wants to be recognised, whether they are women or men.

W. Roszkowski: Recognition is a good word, because I think, in terms of language, very often in Poland this raises the question of whether women actually work at home. Are household duties work or not? In terms of national income, they are not. Somebody once said that if a man marries his housemaid, he decreases the GNP because it ceases to be a market relation. From the point of view of recognition, what matters in memory is appreciation.

P. Kenney: Thinking about housework makes me think about an essay by the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić, where she recalls her grandmother, who had drawers full of recycled aluminium foil that she saved and pressed out and folded in drawers. Raising her children during World War II, there was nothing that she would throw out. This is the kind of thing that is remembered, in this case only because Slavenka Drakulić opened those drawers, remembered them, talked to her grandmother about it, and is then able to create a memory out of this and connect specifically to the war. She also reflects upon herself and the way that she saves things, and how she is different from her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s and who remembers things entirely differently. Drakulić even sees that she has difficulty in communicating with her daughter about the shortages that she herself does not really remember, since she, Drakulić, was born in the late 1940s. So she does not even have these memories of shortage herself, but somehow tries to convey them to her daughter for whom shortages have no meaning. So these kinds of memories are reconstructed precisely because of the lack of recognition and despite the fact that none of these women, Drakulić’s grandmother, Drakulić herself, or her daughter, are able to articulate these experiences and relate them to clear economic processes.

Years ago I did research where I interviewed people who were workers in the 1940s to learn about their everyday lives. I found that when I interviewed men, they wanted to talk entirely about high politics. They wanted to explain communism to me, which of course was entirely useless information. When I would speak to women, they would respond very differently and say, “I remember nothing from those years.” They too assumed that I must want to talk about politics, and they did not feel competent enough to talk about that or they really did not feel like they had anything additional to say. But when eventually it became clear that I wanted to ask about daily life in a factory or about buying food, all of a sudden they had an incredible amount to say, and it was actually far more interesting. So I had to make it clear to them that their daily life is history too and that the experience of the workplace is history.

M. Spurný: I think this is a very good point. Many people think when you interview them that they have nothing to say. Sometimes it is very difficult to explain to them that they do have a lot to say, and this is also gendered. Maybe women talk about their studies and what happened during the war, and then the children came. But after that there is no story. I would like to hear from them what it was like to raise children in the 50s and 60s, but it is very difficult, because there is a deep fear that “I” wasn’t really a part of the history of that time. It is very difficult for people to remember normal life.

P. Kenney: Because it has no narrative. If you are deported, there is a narrative. Just taking care of children, you do not have a narrative. Maybe the children have a narrative of growing up. Other people have a narrative of working. That makes it very difficult to pull out that history or that memory. Again we have a memory that is lacking in structure. So a common memory in Poland of the late 1970s, and then especially in the “Solidarity” year and a half, is this idea that there was nothing in the stores. You would go to the store and there would be nothing but vinegar in the store. There is a common trope of “nothing but vinegar” and yet clearly you know there was something sometimes in the store and people were able to buy food.

I. Kozlowska: I think maybe one of the goals of memory studies that focus on women and men’s relative experiences of economic crisis may be to point out different gendered experiences and the historical moments where we see those things changing, rather than to make generalisations like “women are like this and men are like this, and it never varies through time.” Historians should try to historicise and contextualise men and women’s experiences under different conditions in different periods of time.

M. Spurný: I agree. It is not our task to say in which ways men and women are different and in which ways they are the same. Rather our task is to really show that, historically, there have been different roles for women and men and of course this shapes different memories. This also shapes how boys and girls are brought up, and this division between public/private, men/women runs very deep in societies. As historians, we have to show that perceptions are different, because people have different experiences and they remember different things.

P. Kenney: One of the things that seems to me, from this discussion, to be different about memory of economic crisis is that, broadly, and I am sure we can think of exceptions, if we ask a large number of people about memories of atrocity they may remember different things but their judgment of that thing would be largely the same. No one could say, “Well, actually, deportations, you know, there were some good things about those.”. It is going to be a negative memory, and it is not even going to depend on things they have read. With economic crisis, we have a different situation, I think, where people can regard an experience with different emotional attachments. We have a few examples that gender actually helps us to get at. We might take a period of crisis, and on the one hand, the man who has lost his job would remember it with deep shame, so much so that it would be difficult to talk about such a shameful event. Whereas the women might say, “Well, it was difficult and I felt sorry for him but you know we continued on.” Conversely, we had situations, like in late socialism, where the man might say, “Things were great. I finally had my car and I had these various opportunities.” And women might say, “My God, it was such a hassle to buy food and to feed everyone day after day.” They would remember things entirely differently. Am I correct in saying that economic crisis is a different kind of event, because people would actually disagree even about whether it was bad? Gender might not be the only way in which things are remembered differently, but it might be one of the ways that memory of the economic crisis could be differentiated even from a qualitative point of view.

M. Spurný: I do not think there is a difference between economic crisis and “other” topics, the Holocaust of course being an extreme example. If you take other war experiences or post-WWII experiences like forced expulsion, these memories too depend on the positions of people at that time. Memories of those who were expelled would differ from those who were offered the house of someone who was expelled. People’s memories also depend on their contemporary political position. Whether someone thinks that it was great that the Germans were finally expelled and we could finally have our country back, or that it is always bad to force someone to leave their home, no matter who has been forced to do this, will depend on that person’s current political position. There were probably many people who, as late as the 40s or 50s, continued to remember the early 40s or late 30s and the Aryanisation of property as a great time, because they got rich. But you cannot say that today, so memory is silenced because of the contemporary value system. Again, any difference in remembering does not depend on whether what is remembered is an economic crisis or some other event, but rather on the common values present in a given time and place.

I. Kozłowska: We have not yet brought up the practice of commemoration. Thinking about what makes the memory of economic crisis different from the memory of war or atrocities, it seems that we have many statues for war victims or war heroes, but we do not generally commemorate economic disasters or hardship. Professor Kenney mentioned the woman with the drawers of nicely folded aluminium foil, and I visualised a statue of a woman pulling this neatly folded aluminium out of a drawer.

P. Kenney: That would be a powerful image. Anthropological museums try to recover life of the 1930s, for example, or the communist period. A colleague of mine has recreated the kitchen of her parents in Lódź. At the moment it is a virtual museum, but she is trying to create a real museum out of it in Lódź, where you can walk into her family’s kitchen. And there might be a drawer that is full of the folded tinfoil. There is a monument to the Irish famine in New York, and there are several in Ireland. There are also monuments to the Ukrainian famine. These are exceptions that prove the rule because they are then recast as atrocities. They are not only memories of hunger but also of the intentional starvation by Stalin or by the British. In a way it does not matter how intentional the Irish famine was or the Ukrainian famine. The most important thing is that they get commemorated as atrocities and not simply as economic crises.

M. Spurný: You had these commemorations in the communist times, especially of heroic workers on strike and of workers as victims of capitalism. These existed in many towns and some are still there, but people do not know what they mean any more. Again, it is a question of our contemporary values, and if we historicise, we see that these monuments are commemorating victims or heroes somehow connected to economic crisis.

W. Roszkowski: You are right that, as far as monuments are concerned, we never see an image that represents an economic event.

M. Spurný: There was this Stalin monument in Letná Park in Prague which showed workers and peasants standing in a row around Stalin, and because they were standing, people would say that it was a queue for meat (Czech: fronta na maso). It was a humorous redefinition of what the monument was supposed to symbolise.

P. Kenney: That is actually a great example. You cannot have a monument of a bread line under communism. You can only have one if you have Stalin in front of a “line” that is then reinterpreted as a bread line. That is an excellent point. And I think it is a good point on which to end. Thank you all very much.

The discussion took place on 23 October, 2015 in Warsaw at the offices of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.

Pardraic Kenney. Professor of History and International Studies, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, and Chair of the Department of International Studies at Indiana University (USA). He has written on the experience of workers in early Communist Poland, on the gendered nature of anti-communist opposition, on social movements in the fall of communism in Central Europe, and on Eastern Europe’s road from communism. His most recent book, on political prisoners in the modern world, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He is the Vice President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He has received many research fellowships, including from the German Marshall Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright-Hays Program.

Wojciech Roszkowski. Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Silesian Voivodeship with the Law and Justice party. He sat on the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgets and was a substitute for the EP Committee on Culture and Education and a former member of the Delegation for relations with Japan. From 1980 to 1983 he was a Member of the independent self-governing trade union Solidarność. He is a former fellow of Collegium Invisible and the Wilson Center in Washington D. C., and a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

Matěj Spurný. Senior lecturer and member of the Department of Social History at Charles University in Prague. His fields of research include modern social history, nationalism and multiethnicity in the Czech lands in the twentieth century, and the history of modern European dictatorships. In 2010, he completed his PhD at the Institute of Economic and Social History, Charles University. His dissertation was titled, “Not like us. The social marginalization and integration of minorities in the Czech borderlands while ‘building the new order’ (1945–1960).”

Tamás Pesuth.Assistant Professor at the Department of Finance at Corvinus University of Budapest. He lectures on finance, monetary policy, banking regulation and international financial institutions. He is the Honorary President of the International Circle of Hungary and the Secretary-General of the Hungarian Association of Foreign Affairs.

Iga Kozlowska. Doctoral Candidate (ABD) in the Sociology Program at Northwestern University. Her research areas of interest include (trans)national identity, gender, collective memory, post-communist societies, and European affairs. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Transnationalizing Historical Memories: Memory Entrepreneurs and the Invisible Iron Curtain.” She received a Fulbright Award (2015–16) to support her dissertation research on memory entrepreneurs in Poland. In her spare time she blogs about transatlantic relations at frommoscowtowashington.wordpress.com.

This article has been published in the fourth issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memory of economic crisis.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

ABSTRACT

This paper describes and analyzes the everyday effect of hyperinflation through the example of public transportation. In everyday life in Budapest, trams were traditionally the most important means of mass public transportation. The stressful atmosphere of tram journeys is revealed through the complaints written by passengers. In January 1946 the state extended the administration of instant punishment to the employees of the transportation company as well. The employees did not leave their job, because the company provided them with food. Hyperinflation loosened the ties within society, the traditional cooperation mechanisms of society became weaker, yet anomie did not lead to anarchy.

This story is about the micro impacts of the macro scale processes that baffled Eastern European Countries in the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II. What kind of macro scale processes are we talking about? The Eastern European extension of the Soviet Union’s economic and political influence behaved differently in countries that emerged from the war victorious from those that lost the war. The funding for the recovery of the Soviet economy was taken from Eastern European countries. In victorious countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia the economic and political transformation to conform to the reality of the new power structure progressed faster. These states had already carried out monetary reforms and nationalization in 1945, what’s more, they had introduced the framework for a planned economy earlier. In the years following 1945, reconstruction’s growing need for money caused financing by inflation in these countries as well.¹

Nationalization and the introduction of a planned economy – i.e. the buildup of a new economic and political framework – progressed somewhat more slowly in those countries that lost the war. As far as these countries were concerned, the Soviet Union was interested in exploiting their economic resources as intensively as possible. In the years following 1945 the losers had to fulfill reparation payments, provide dismantled factories as war trophies, and sign economic contracts that were only beneficial for the Soviet Union. These liabilities forced the defeated countries to export capital in a situation in which restoration was also vital. And so inflation was much higher in these defeated countries compared to those that emerged victorious. In Hungary’s case, reparation payment amounted to 600 million dollars, in contrast to the 200 million dollar contractual obligation, according to calculations by László Borhi.²

Historical literature discusses Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945–1946 as a unique phenomenon.³ The reasons for its occurrence were explained by the financing of Hungary’s war reparation payments (issuance of unsecured banknotes) as well as by expenditure related to the support of Soviet troops stationed in the country (between 500,000 and 700,000 people). The increasing inflation of the wartime Hungarian currency, the pengő, lasted from July 1945 until the end of July 1946. In the summer of 1946 people could purchase hardly anything in the shops in exchange for their pengős, practically the only available options were barter and the illegal black market. All this meant that masses of people living on fixed incomes were sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and had to exhaust their pre-war savings to make ends meet. Finally, on August 1, 1946, the introduction of the new currency – the forint (Ft) – put an end to hyperinflation.

This study aims to present the everyday effects of hyperinflation through the example of the public transportation of Budapest. Archive material in itself is not able to shed light on every detail of this story. The most precious part of the documentation – the minutes of the Directors Board Meeting of the Budapest Székesfővárosi Közlekedési Rt. (Budapest Transportation Company Ltd., hereinafter BESZKÁRT) – mainly reflect events from the point of view of the management struggling to keep the company going. Only partial archival data remained on several questions considered to be sensitive issues at the time (e.g. food supply of the employees of the company, discipline at work). Besides the written complaints of passengers, visual resources (photos, tram posters and drawings expressing the point of view of passengers) bear witness to the signs of social anomie and the everyday trials people were facing during the months of hyperinflation.

In everyday life in Budapest, trams were traditionally the most important means of mass public transportation.⁴ As a result of the war, BESZKÁRT suffered mainly from the loss of its rolling stock. During the siege of the capital city, 80 % of the tram cars were damaged, but the tram tracks remained in relatively good condition. By August 1945, of the 1860 damaged tram-cars the employees of the company put 1114 back into operation, which took an enormous effort. However, as a result of the provisional repair works, the number of functional tram-cars began to decrease as soon as the beginning of 1946. In January-February, 1946 only 830–920 tramcars operated on a daily basis.⁵ By April 1946 the tram system could only be sustained at the expense of eroding the rolling stock: trams were taken apart and their parts were used to mend broken vehicles.⁶ By July 1946 some 400 trams, which had been repaired in the course of the previous year, were unserviceable. The transportation overload of vechicles further accelerated their amortization. The tram track network did not suffer similar damage during the war. By the end of 1945, 90 % of the 191 km long electric street car system was in a serviceable condition. The quality decline of this network started in 1946 since the maintenance works of the previous year had failed to take place. In January 1946 the company had 18,000 employees. In 1945 the trams carried only some 208 million passengers. Performance boomed and in 1946 the trams covered as much as 80 million kilometers with as many as 410 million passengers.⁷ Nevertheless, this was still about 44 % less than the transport capacity registered in 1943.

The new board of directors of BESZKÁRT, which was owned by the capital city, started its operation at the beginning of August 1945, just before the local government elections held in the fall of that year. Political parties, the state and the leaders of the capital city all appointed their representatives to the board. Naturally, the company management and the representatives of the employees shared the workload of this body. The weekly board meetings were headed with great skill by Sándor Millok, a social democratic politician who managed to avoid the sharpening of political counter interests among the parties. During the period 1945–1946 board meetings were not characterized by heated debates. The board, in which the delegates of the parties were especially active, quite often failed to support the proposals of the operative leaders of the company. The majority of the board’s time was spent on discussing the current tariff increase. In 1945 alone, fares were increased eight times. During the period January 7, 1946 – July 9, 1946 tariffs were upped on 20 occasions. I present the increasing trend in travel fares by using one ticket type – the cheapest one available – as an example, the so-called through ticket. (Figure 1.) In 1944 the price of the ticket was 0.4 pengős. The data below were taken from a collection documenting the tram transportation of 1946 by compiling the passenger information posters, which were placed inside trams.

Table 1 The price of the tram through ticket in pengős in 1946⁸

From July 9 the travel fares were not calculated in pengős anymore but in a new currency, the so-called Tax Pengő.⁹ From this point forward it is impossible to follow the up-to-date price increase in the archived documents. The reason for this is that information for the public about tram fares was not printed out each time it were changed, instead the company stuck the new rates on top of the old ones. (Figure 2.) The last known fare is from the period preceding the introduction of the forint on August 1. On July 25 one through ticket cost 500,000 Tax Pengős.

Theoretically BESZKÁRT had to maintain its operations from the revenues collected from travel fares.¹⁰ This, however, proved to be impossible, they even had to take out loans to be able to pay employees’ wages on time. The rate of tariff increase – due to political considerations – followed the rate of increase in wages but with a delay. The prices of raw materials and consumer goods demonstrated an even greater rate of increase. Lacking financial resources, BESZKÁRT was unable to purchase even the most necessary goods (gas and motor oil) during the winter of 1945–1946. In addition, in Hungary, due to the general lack of coal, the use of electric energy had to be limited as well. All this had an effect on mass transportation: during the bitterly cold winter months the trams did not run in the mornings in Budapest. The inhabitants of the capital city were cold, hungry and forced to take long walks on a daily basis.¹¹

The operation of BESZKÁRT reached its worst stage in July 1946. At that point travel fares were 8 % of the price rate of 1938. The travel fares were insufficient for the maintenance of service operation even on the very day of their introduction. This was when the company management suggested – as a stopgap solution – to suspend traffic temporarily on a 41 kilometer network section. Given the incident-prone network of tracks, the missing street-cars and the limited number of ticket conductors, it was impossible to keep to the timetable. The board of directors did not agree to the suspension of operation because this plan was politically unacceptable. They decided to “maintain transportation at all costs even if it meant severe damage to the running stock” .¹² Nevertheless, the limitation of public transport by tram had long been in existence. Following the forced outages of 1946 to save on electricity, the company operated a significantly lower number of trams (921 instead of 1027) than the number identified on the timetable. The month of July 1946 was made even more difficult due to the higher than average absence rate of employees: many of them returned to their homeland to give their families a hand in harvesting the crops.

Traveling conditions

On tram vehicles most often consisting of one car – apart from the driver – one conductor was on duty. The conductor basically had two tasks. Theoretically s/he had to get off at every stop and then – after making sure that the passengers were safely boarded – s/he was to blow a whistle for the driver to start the tram. During the time between the stops, the conductor walked through the car and sold tickets to passengers not having a season ticket. This work schedule worked well during the pre-war times when the trams were not overloaded yet. However, after the war the guards did not get off at every stop anymore because there were no guarantees that they had room when they wanted to get back on the tram. Instead, they leaned out of a window to start the tram. To reduce the crowdedness and to create more standing room, from February 1946 the company started to remove the middle row seats.

BESZKÁRT tried to have the police prevent passengers from traveling on the steps of the trams which was extremely dangerous.¹³ From time to time the management turned to the mayor to have the police deal with those traveling on the steps by heavily penalizing them. In August 1945 during a five-day action conducted by the police, masses of people taveling on the steps had their identity cards checked. But the police were also short of staff, they did not have the energy to focus on such insignificant matters. However, there were cases when the customers did not only occupy the steps in the direction of travel but also the opposite ones, moreover, they also climbed up on the roof.

Unfortunately the accident statistics of 1945–1946 cannot be compiled due to lack of data. The incomplete monthly reports which remained show an extreme and ever decreasing standard. Between November 21 – December 20, 1945 a total of 145 accidents of bodily harm occurred, of which 10 were fatal while 97 were severe. During the first three months of 1946 tram transportation was the cause of 502 accidents involving bodily injuries. Fifty died and 254 were severely injured. During this period of time, trams collided with other vehicles in 498 cases, the number of derailment cases was 131. Surprisingly, neither the managers of the company, nor the board of directors paid attention to the extreme injury indicators. No measures were taken to reduce the number of incidents.

The atmosphere on the trams was extremely tense. The stressful atmosphere and discomfort of tram travel are revealed by the complaints written by passengers. Interestingly enough it was not the circumstances of traveling (trams running rarely and overcrowded, service outages, accidents) that tested the tolerance level of passengers but the behaviour of conductors. Week in, week out, letters were sent to the company headquarters by upset passengers. The core message of these letters is the following: traveling by tram is not an enjoyable experience, why do conductors make it even more unpleasant? Don’t we have enough problems of our own, must we endure their rudeness as well? The passengers were convinced that the behavior of the conductors had changed over the previous years because they no longer wore individual identification numbers on their uniforms. Before the war there was a number on the hats of conductors. However, in 1945 one of the trade unions managed to get these identification numbers removed.¹⁴ Passengers frequently found themselves in a situation where they did not know who to complain about.

The conflicts between a conductor and a passenger almost always followed the same pattern: the conductor, irritated by the stressful work conditions swore and/or raised his hand against a passenger and the passenger found his behavior unacceptable. The second part of the conflict was spent on who was who and that the conductor should provide proof of identity immediately.

The increasingly rude tone used towards the end was also infused with political swearing and threats which had nothing to do with the original conflict. The written complaints mailed to BESZKÁRT are examples of verbal or, in certain cases, even of physical aggression. From the specific case descriptions here are some rather typical ones. Not one but two witnesses signed the complaint according to which the conductor tried to push off a passenger who was traveling on the tram steps while the tram was moving at high speed. In another case the conductor deliberately pushed off the hat from the head of a passenger thus forcing him to jump off the tram while the vehicle was in motion to save his hat for “a hat is priceless these days”.¹⁵

At another time, because the conductor was being rude, the passengers joined efforts and prevented the tram from leaving the stop. According to less extreme case descriptions the conductors gave the start signal to the driver while not every passenger who wanted to get on was able to board the tram. The company investigated the cases here and there but not too intensively. There was a general text according to which the conductor at fault was punished, reprimanded and was instructed to behave politely again.

There was one, albeit unusual, letter of praise as well addressed to BESZKÁRT requesting that a conductor should be rewarded for her outstanding behavior. The conductor lady was very polite – wrote the passenger – which was a rare experience to have on trams: “people from the countryside got on the tram with a big baggage and she treated them in the most polite manner possible and made sure that when these people were getting off, the whistle blower (the person whose job was to start the tram with a signal) did not start the vehicle, lest these people should fall off the tram, etc. This lady was behaving so nicely that several passengers noticed her and acknowledged appreciatively that such conductors also existed. I would have really liked to have all passengers traveling on that tram sign a sheet of appreciation.”¹⁶ An amusing incident related to this matter is that BESZKÁRT did not consider the rewarding of this conductor to be reasonable. The conductor lady only acted as we instructed her to behave, therefore she is not entitled to any special praise – reads the response of the company.

“the payment ethics of our passenger base are notoriously quite loose”¹⁷

As much as the passengers blamed the conductors, BESZKÁRT accused the passengers. The company incurred losses not only because the number of passengers traveling free of charge was high¹⁸

but also because of the characteristics of the tariff system. The response people gave to hyperinflation was reasonable, the number of pre-purchased tickets and one-week passes was showing a strong increase while the value of these items was declining. This was not cheating on their behalf, travelers simply took advantage of the opportunity. By May 1946 some 50 % of paying passengers traveled with a weekly pass.¹⁹ However, with the dynamic spread of weekly tickets the losses incurred by the company increased. In order to curb losses, the company limited the use of weekly passes, according to the new regulations weekly tickets could only be used for traveling to work and only those were entitled to purchase a weekly ticket who could show a proof of entitlement from their employer. Not surprisingly, the stricter rules imposed on people did not deliver any result. Employers also went along with the evasion of the regulations and issued their proof of entitlement enabling ticket purchasing to anyone without consideration. “The mass of requests placed for weekly tickets is ‘unprecedented and beyond all expectations’, ‘major companies, factories and even institutions in the capital city are issuing proofs by neglecting the rules.’” – states the record taken at the Board meeting held on June 18, 1946.²⁰

The conductors also took advantage of the rapid tariff increase of tickets, while the management of BESZKÁRT was considering different actions to fend off the latest forms of fraud. This was a cat-mouse game in which it was always the company who was put at a disadvantage (was forced to take action). The fraudulent game conductors played was that on the day before a tariff increase they would purchase all of the tickets from their own budget and sell them to the passengers the next day at the new, higher rate. The counter action of the company: the conductors were only allowed to sell those tickets marked with a serial number, which they were given at the beginning of their shift each day. The conductors’ reaction to this measure was that they asked all passengers getting off the tram to return their tickets, which were then resold to the new passengers. This trick had a tradition at BESZKÁRT which can be traced back all the way to the 19th century. And the story went on and on.

The point of the passengers’ frauds was aimed at ways to avoid payment. Given the passenger overload on trams, the tricks were not too subtle. Since in a crowded tram car the conductor had difficulty moving around, s/he was not able to reach many passengers to check their tickets. Those traveling without a ticket – if caught red-handed – defended themselves by saying that they wanted to purchase a ticket but the conductor did not come to them. The response of the company was that they sent conductors to work in civilian clothing.²¹ The conductors monitored passengers on both ends of the tram in order to spot those who deliberately wanted to avoid ticket purchasing. They were relying on the movements of travelers to determine fare evaders. Not surprisingly, this way of ticket control did not deliver major results: in February 1946 only some 380 penalties were imposed. Naturally, travelers could also evade purchasing a ticket if they did not even try to get into the middle of the tram but they remained on the outer steps, or – which was extremely dangerous – they grabbed the rear bumper and sat on it. Considering the overcrowded tram cars, traveling on the outer steps did not automatically mean that those traveling there were all trying to avoid payment. The guards had a vested financial interest in the reduction of the free rider base because their salaries also depended on the number of tickets sold. According to an estimate by the board, the number of free riders was 15 % of the total traveler base. This was based on the data showing the rate of increase in the volume of tickets sold on one tram if two conductors were in service instead of one. However, the free rider counts carried out in March 1946 were not followed by the introduction of a second conductor. The company also lacked staff.

A crack in the wall of work culture

At the beginning, the company attempted to prevent the decline in work ethics and discipline by influencing the conscience of employees. (Figure 3) How is it possible that in 1944, while the war was still ongoing, the company was able to achieve a higher transportation performance with a lower staff than now in 1945–1946? Why were employees more disciplined back then and why aren’t they now? These were questions to which there was no simple response. “You worked more and better for those who had driven the country to ruin! This is the sad truth.” – reads a poster with a touch of reproach.²² These softer forms of pressure were not effective. In October 1945 BESZKÁRT had an – albeit failed – attempt to stop renunciations due to lack of labor by a bureaucratic ban. Referring to their public interest activity, the management was actively lobbying for the government to prohibit denunciation of their employees. However, their efforts failed. Nevertheless, as a result of declining social conditions, in January 1946 the state extended the administration of instant punishment to the employees of BESZKÁRT as well.²³ From that point forward every employee who was caught stealing company property immediately faced instant punishment and the threat of the death penalty. No documents report on whether there were actual cases of this.

A very telling proof of the decline in the discipline at work is that the company introduced a separate bonus for all those who turned up at their workplaces on each workday. The relativity of the obligation to show up at work was triggered by the lack of food on a national level. In February 1946 one of the members of the board suggested that each employee should be given several days off every month in order to procure food. Naturally, such a regulation could not have been made. Absence from work could not have been legalized, nor could they have been penalized. The company management tacitly acknowledged this situation. In February 1946, they introduced a bonus which was 12,5 % of the monthly salary. The conditions of receiving the bonus were not strict. Theoretically only those who worked every workday were eligible for the bonus. Practically it was given to everyone.²⁴ From the benefits encouraging employees to work those were the valuable ones, which were given in kind not in money. In 1945, as a Christmas gift, the employees were given a can of food, two eggs and some apples. In the spring of 1946 the company launched a work competition with the following prizes: 200–500 kilograms of coal, 200–500 kilograms of firewood and 10–20 liters of petroleum.

Therefore, due to the fact that wages lost their purchase power, the importance of having a job was not so significant. Wages barely covered the cost of a basic standard of living. Despite all this, employees did not leave their jobs in high numbers. The reasons for this were multifold. During the months of inflation, the small communities of BESZKÁRT employees attempted to get though the difficult times also by supporting and relying on one another. Instead of the depreciating value of wages, the fringe benefits of the employment became truly important.

BESZKÁRT provided food supplies – although at a low standard – to their employees. In the shops of the company the employees were able to receive their food rations. They were able to purchase a bread ration of 20 decagrams, or flour, lard, coffee substitute, etc. In addition to the food distribution shops, even more important were the canteens of the company. BESZKÁRT operated 12 company canteens where each employee and their family members received a hot plate of food for lunch. The extensiveness of canteen services is reflected in the fact that in December 1945, 48,000 portions of meals were consumed per day. This was enough to stay alive yet, quite naturally, it was not enough to trigger a sense of well-being.

But where was BESZKÁRT able to acquire food from? Theoretically the company – in possession of food purchase permits issued by the government – had to be served by the producers and vendors from the countryside. However, farmers were reluctant to sell their produce at a significantly lower price than the black market rates, therefore they denied having any stock. BESZKÁRT, however, had a great advantage: it owned transportation vehicles. The products located by the company’s procurement staff were transported to Budapest on company trucks. Buses, trucks, even trains pulled by BESZKÁRT’s own diesel engine ran back and forth several times a week between Budapest and target stations in the countryside. The company concluded barter agreements with the producers. From these affairs, only one of them survived in written form. The contract is not about food but firewood. The company transported the logged firewood to the capital city, in exchange the owner was to sell a part of the firewood cargo to BESZKÁRT at a lower rate than its black market price.

In order to eliminate the tension surrounding food supply, in the fall of 1945 BESZKÁRT gave permission to its employees to travel to the countryside on the food transporting trains.²⁵ Employees had plenty of room in the empty cars running from Budapest to the countryside. However, problems occurred on the way back. The company procurement staff and the employees carrying increasingly large food packages cooperated in the distribution of storage space. All this resulted in the fact that less and less room remained for the transportation of products required for the public supply of employees. Due to transgressions, BESZKÁRT was imposing stricter controls over the use of the vehicles transporting the goods for travel purposes. They defined a top limit for the number of persons allowed on board, the weight of luggage allowed to be carried and finally, from April 1946 they refused to transport people altogether.

To sum up the content of the previous pages, in addition to impoverishment, the lack of goods and the decline of work culture, hyperinflation also had another consequence impacting the deeper levels of social structure. The rules of social cooperation – both written and unwritten – fell apart. All the players participated in the creative interpretation or avoidance of these rules, including private individuals, companies and, moreover, the state itself. Nevertheless, the methods and the tools were different depending on the possibilities and the power of the players. For instance, the method of the state power was that it kept moving the goalposts all the time adjusting them to the situation of the given moment. For example, the rule was that BESZKÁRT had to sustain its operations from its revenues. However, since this rule was impossible to adhere to, the state was continuously subsidizing the company. BESZKÁRT and Hungarian State Railways had a mutually accepted rule that – in possession of travel permits – the employees of the companies were able to travel from their home to their workplace by using each other’s services free of charge. In reality this meant that every railway or BESZKÁRT employee wearing a uniform travelled for free. This was all public knowledge, even the management of the transportation companies were aware of this rule breaking practice. What did the people do? They kept track of the changing rules and found ways to avoid them. When BESZKÁRT introduced the provision of a bonus in the case of employees who were not absent from work, the employees realized what this rule actually meant. It was not obligatory to go to work every day.

The traditional cooperation mechanisms of society became weaker, hyperinflation loosened the ties of society, yet anomie did not lead to anarchy. Many still remembered the similarly extreme inflation rates which evolved after the first world war. People had experience on how to survive such a situation. On the other hand, the people of Hungary had a very strong hope that after August 1, 1946, with the introduction of the new currency, their lives would get better. And indeed, as the new currency made its debut, shops were reopened, even though the world of food coupons did not come to an end for a very long time after that.

Several people voiced the experiences of BESZKÁRT regarding hyperinflation at a board meeting held on November 19, 1946. The company management is not only to ensure the prosperity of the company – stated one of the delegates – but should also maintain the peace of mind of its employees. Someone else talked about the fact that at the time of inflation the monthly wage of people had been equal to the price of half a kilogram of potatoes and that the time had come for people to live a decent life.²⁶ In that situation demanding a decent life only meant: the shops are selling lard right now, the company should pay the year-end bonuses now. But this all leads us to another story.

What is this story actually about? In everyday life, hyperinflation was a temporary situation. Its outcome could be foreseen: the introduction of the new currency. It was extremely important, as it meant hope for everyone. The devaluation of money relativized the traditional cooperation mechanisms of society. Travel was stressful and hostile, moreover there were many serious and fatal accidents. The empolyees of BESZKART worked for food and a hot daily lunch instead of their wages. Discipline at work got weaker. Both the conductors and the passengers participated in swindles concerning tickets. The rules of public transportation were flouted regulary.

Zsuzsa Frisnyák. Born in 1960. A senior research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Until 1996 she was curator of the Transport Museum in Budapest. Her area of research is the history of transport and infrastructure in Hungary in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her Ph.D thesis was a historical statistical analysis of data about rail transported passengers and goods from the 19th century. Recent publications include “Közlekedés és politika. 1945–1989” (Transport and policy) Budapest, MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, and “A magyarországi közlekedés krónikája 1750–2000” (Chronicle of Transport in Hungary 1750–2000) ed. Ferenc Glatz, Budapest, 2001.

ENDNOTES

1. According to data by Tamás Réti, the amount of money in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was nine times larger than ten years earlier. In Poland inflation was even higher. The soviet state claimed the German assets that were invested in Czechoslovakia and Poland during the war. Tamás Réti, A gazdasági rendszerváltás és a korlátozott szuverenitás Kelet-Európában 1945–1948 között.

2. László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956, pp. 141–153

3. János Honvári (ed.), Magyarország gazdaságtörténete, pp. 447–451. Iván Pető and Sándor Szakács, A hazai gazdaság, pp. 58–60. William A. Bomberger and Gail E. Makinen, The Hungarian Hyperinflation, pp. 803–804, 806–807. William A. Bomberger and Gail E. Makinen, Indexation, Inflationary Finance.

4. This study does not focus on bus travel which was marginal at the time, being limited on only one or two operating lines. Similarly, it fails to include the discussion of the metro line because the performance of these two means of mass transportation cannot be compared to that of the tram. Nevertheless, the crisis situation outlined in this study was also relevant and observable in the case of these two public transport modes in the city.

5. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on February 12, 1946. BFL. XI. 1919. c. 145. doboz.

6. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on April 12, 1946. and Economic audit of the BESZKÁRT BFL. XI. 1919. c. 15. doboz.

7. István Káposztás, “A fővárosi közlekedés,” p. 286.

8. Source of data: Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.” (Public advertisements 1946) Private ownership.

9. Beatrix Paal, “Measuring the Inflation of Parallel Currencies,” p. 4.

10. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on Januar 8, 1946. BFL. XI. 1919. c. 15. doboz.

11. Passengers understood the reason for the limitations in traffic but not its method. Why didn’t they stop the tram service in the evening hours? During the day we must go about collecting food and „long distance walking impacts people who are particularly suffering with run down shoes or having no shoes at all.” Letter of Mrs. József Kismarosi to BESZKÁRT on December 13, 1945. BFL. XI. 1519.h. 145. doboz, 010108/1945.

12. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on July 2, 1946. BFL. XI. 1919. c. 16. doboz.

13. The letter of BESZKÁRT to the Mayor of Budapest, 3 Januar 1946. 1289/1946. BFL XI. 1919. h. 146. doboz.

14. The company explained the disappearance of ID numbers by claiming that they received a high number of groundless complaints. In reality, the objective was to make it difficult for passangers to file a complaint.

15. Complaint of passengers to the Directorate of BESZKÁRT, December 10, 1945. BFL. XI. 1519.h. 145. doboz 010541/1945.

16. Irén Gerecze to the management of BESZKÁRT, December 6, 1945. BFL. XI. 1519.h. 145. doboz 010194/1945.

17. The letter of BESZKÁRT to the Mayor of Budapest, May 22, 1946. XI. 1519.h. 147. doboz, 003800/1946.

18. Approximately 19 % of the passengers did not buy a ticket. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on February 12, 1946. BFL. XI. 1919. c. 15. doboz.

19. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on May 22, 1946. BFL. XI. 1519.c. 16. doboz.

20. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on June 18, 1946. BFL. XI. 1519.c. 15. doboz.

21. Memo about checking of passengers, October 31, 1948. BFL. XI. 1519. n. 3. doboz.

22. Past and present. The dark side of reconstruction. BESZKÁRT poster, 1945. Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.”

23. Announcing instant punishment. Proposals. January 4, 1946. BFL. XI. 1919. h. 146. doboz.

24. Decree No. 3213/1946 on the Provision of bonuses and the regulation of fringe benefits. BFL. XI. 1519.h. 147. doboz.

25. Decree, December 29, 1945. 000110/1946. BFL. XI. 1919. h. 146. doboz.

26. Minutes of the BESZKÁRT Board of Directors Meeting taken on November 19, 1946. BFL. XI. 1619.c. 17. Doboz

List of Figures

Figure 1. Passenger information poster placed inside trams. Fares of July 2, 1946.
Source: Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.” Private ownership.

Figure 2. Passenger information poster put up inside trams. The current fares of the day were stuck over the previous ones. At the very top the status of July 25, 1946 is shown.
Source: Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.”

Figure 3. BESZKÁRT propaganda poster to improve discipline at work, 1946. The text says: “Tram Conductor Colleagues! We were able to perform the checking and handling of the tickets of (...) one million passagers by putting (...) conductors into service per day. (...) however for the same task we had to employ (...) people per day. Any further decline in the performance may result in a breakdown of service!”
Source: Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.” Private ownership.

LIST OF RESOURCES

Budapest City Archives. Budapest Székesfővárosi Közlekedési Rt. BFL. XI. 1519.c. 14–17. doboz, 1519. h. 145–147. doboz, 1519.n. 3, 15 doboz.
Collection called “Hirdetmények 1946.” Private ownership.
Newspaper: Ludas Matyi, Szabad Száj, Pesti Izé.
www.fortepan.hu

LIST OF REFERENCES

Aldcroft, Derek H. (2001) The European Economy 1914–2000 (London-New York: Routlege).

Berend, T. Iván (2006) An Economic History of Twentieth-Centrury Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Bomberger, William A. and Gail E. Makinen (1980) “Indexation, Inflationary Finance, and Hyperinflation: The 1945–1946 Hungarian Experience,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 550–560.

Bomberger, William A. and Gail E. Makinen (1983) “The Hungarian Hyperinflation and Stabilization of 1945–1946,” Journal of Political Economy, vol 91, no. 5, pp. 801–824.

Borhi, László (2004) Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956 (Budapest-New York: Central European University Press), pp. 352+8.

Botos, János (2006) A korona, a pengő és a forint inflációja 1900–2006 (Budapest: Szaktudás Kiadó Ház).

Frisnyák, Zsuzsa (2001) A magyarországi közlekedés krónikája 1750–2000 (Budapest: MTA TTI).

Frisnyák, Zsuzsa (2011) Közlekedés, politika 1949–1989 (Budapest: MTA BTK Történettudományi Intézete).

Honvári, János (ed.) (1997) Magyarország gazdaságtörténete a honfoglalástól a 20. század közepéig (Budapest: Aula kiadó).

Juhász, Erzsébet K. (1996) “A budapesti közforgalmú közlekedés újjászervezése 1946-ban,” Városi Közlekedés, pp. 173–177.

Káposztás, István (1988) “A fővárosi közlekedés felszabadulás utáni történetéből (1945– 1967)”, Új Magyar Központi Levéltár Közleményei 3, pp. 279–318.

Paal, Beatrix (2000) “Measuring the Inflation of Parallel Currencies: An Empricial Reevaluation of the Second Hungarian Hyperinflation,” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research SIEPR Discussion Paper No. 00–01. http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/669 (last accessed 8.9.2015)

Pető, Iván and Sándor Szakács (1985) A hazai gazdaság négy évtizedének története 1945–1985 (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó).

Réti, Tamás (1991) “A gazdasági rendszerváltás és a korlátozott szuverenitás Kelet-Európában 1945–1948 között,” Közgazdasági Szemle, pp. 1143–1158.

Siklós, Pierre L. (1989) “The End of the Hungarian Hyperinflation of 1945–1946,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 135–147.

This article has been published in the fourth issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memory of economic crisis.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

Clothes sewn according to patterns from catalogs and Burda, treasures found at bazaars and in second-hand stores, re-designed parents’ clothes, trousers dyed anew, blouses made from cloth diapers, shoes with special designs cut out - any method of acquiring an original costume was ok.

If at the end of the 80s someone from behind the Iron Curtain wanted to look good, he or she had to show off with a lot of real inventiveness. This happened differently across the map of Eastern Europe, but the proletarians of all the countries there were united in their enormous creativity.

PRL (People's Republic of Poland)

The main inspiration came from western films, music videos and photos found in foreign newspapers. Some people sewed clothes they had spied before at the tailors, others tried to copy them at home by means of dyeing old clothes or narrowing trousers legs or sleeves, either manually or on their own sewing machines. On special occasions, clothes were bought in stores of the dollar network Pewex, but as an imported blouse cost there as much as three average salaries, only a few could afford shop regularly in this paradise, tempting as it was with its real scent of the west. Fashion depended on the environment.

The most elegant young men in the humanities faculties wore black trousers, white shirts and classic denim jackets, of course dyed black. On their shoulders hung light leather bags, the straps slung diagonally, in a military style, across their slender chests. They wore suede lace-up shoes, sometimes beige, but preferably black. Their girlfriends usually wore long black skirts, and in the autumn a long coat was compulsory. Those who wanted to demonstrate their independence and freedom reached for surplus military jackets, usually American or Canadian. In the movie "Siekierezada", Janek Pradera wore a Canadian army jacket. The movie, based on a book by Edward Stachura, perfectly matched the freedom myth. Teenagers sewed skirts, dresses and blouses out of cloth diapers, usually putting the stitches in by hand.

The advantage of these clothes was that you could dye them any color in a cooking pot. Socks and scarves were dyed a furious yellow-green with Rivanol, which unlike clothes dyes, was available everywhere at that time. In general, the height of any girlish dream was to pick up an outfit from Hoffland. As the risk of meeting someone in the same clothes at a party was very high, most fashionable ladies crumpled logos under brooches and other added features, or subtly altered their dress or trousers before they joined the ballroom battle.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia

There were no Pewex stores, second-hand shops or clothes bazaars. The biggest dream was an item of clothing, sent by family from Poland – this was the method by which Baltic young people got their hands on jeans (or the regional "justy" that left ones legs a ghostly bluish hue after a rain storm) and colorful dresses. The Polish church did not provide packages with clothes, so as not to attract the attention of the authorities; it was usually limited to chocolate, dark yellow cheese and salted butter from the Netherlands.

Attending religion lessons or mass itself was a form of rebellion against the order established by the authorities. In the Baltic states, there was no question of a sudden outbreak of garish, bright purple, winter jackets sometimes designed by Polish manufacturers, so the streets were dominated by drab greys and dark, dull autumn colors that are difficult to define. A stretched sweater, knitted by grandma, and original combinations of dad’s shirts and your older brother’s trousers allowed you to stand out from the crowd.

The avant-garde girls wore long skirts, sewn by their mothers or aunts. It was hard to get any material in the shops, so teenagers who wanted to wear something original altered their parents’ and grandparents’ clothes. They narrowed bell-trousers and shortened skirts from the 60s that their mothers had worn. Fathers’ shirts that hung on skinny girls like the caricature of a dress were very helpful in the creation of a certain image. Scarves, which gave each face a unique frame, were very popular, and soon became a mandatory accessory for school uniforms, suits, sweaters and coats.

GDR

Thanks to parcels from families living in West Germany, East Berlin was the nearest western fashion capital for eastern countries. There, you could see real denim jeans and jackets on the streets (these had been "thrown" over the Berlin Wall). People also wore cotton blouses with ironed-on prints depicting the idolized faces and hairstyles of foreign musicians, as well as slogans in English.

Some of them were pretty odd -nobody really knows why white, disposable paper jackets with logos for engine oil or butter brands on their backs were very popular. There were many other examples of creativity: interesting shoes, jackets and coats could be purchased from friends who had richer relatives abroad. Many people made a living from selling on these gifts. East Germany was the land where the hand-to-hand trade flourished the most. Groups of friends gathered, in a state of pious adoration, around those of their number who had access to an incoming wave of clothes.

When information about a new delivery spread, you had to come running to the apartment of the happy "redistributor", or else others would be faster in this hunt for interesting items of clothing. In 1989, in the east of Germany, there was no money for expensive materials, decorations or buttons. Therefore the leather-like "Dederon" and other chemical textiles were invented. The jeans brands "Shanty", "Wisent" and "Boxer", which sadly didn’t match up to their counter parts from the west, were also produced there. The magazine "Sibyl", which showed contemporary fashion in eastern Germany, was very popular. As only some people could afford exclusive or western fashion ,a sewing machine was standard equipment within each family.

Romania

Kent cigarettes (with their golden stripe) were the informal currency in Romania, and the clothes' world was ruled by jeans or classic trousers and nylon sports jackets. Absolutely everyone had one of these jackets, and it didn’t matter whether they came with a stand-up collar, a hood or standard collar. They were mostly navy blue, just the same hue as the blue of the Romanian flag.

However, people generally also loved to wear black, brown or white jackets, and women often chose red or orange. Young people wore hoodies and cotton blouses under the jackets, while the older folk wore patterned sweaters and classic shirts. The real dream items, which would really make you stand out from the crowd, were leather jackets and duffel coats. Elegant Romanian women paraded in black skirts and jackets and white blouses or classic black dresses. Baggy parents' clothing was also re-designed by tailors.

The collars of shirt or the waists of old grandmother's skirts were made smaller. To get original sweaters you had to rely on the knitting skills of your mother or grandmother. Unfortunately, it was not at all easy to get hold of wool. Romanian stores, even in the greatest crises, never lacked oranges and olive oil, but to obtain wool you had to dismantle old sweaters. This was, without being ironic, the real beginning of recycling: the same raw material produced several generations of clothes.

Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, richly decorated folk costumes were the inspiration for fashionable girls. In a country where there have been traditional songs sung and dances performed in every bar and restaurant for centuries, folk costumes were, like the traditional salads with peppers and vinaigrette sauce, evergreens, and relatively easy to get hold of.

There was no shortage of talented embroiderers and seamstresses, so their products had a myriad of patterns and all the colors of the rainbow. To achieve an original effect, it was enough to combine an embroidered folk blouse with modern trousers. In winter, traditional fur hats were worn as accessories to coats. The Bulgarians were not embarrassed to wear their folklore and therefore the streets of Bulgaria were dominated by a "merry" styling, which was absent in the other countries of the so called people's democracy.

Like everywhere else in southern Europe, the most popular costume for men was a suit and white shirt - a look that never goes out of fashion. The black suits and simple white shirts worn with classic suit trousers are still popular in Bulgaria today, both for special occasions and as everyday wear. On the golden shores of the Black Sea, girls spied the newest clothes trends on guests of the hotel 'ghettos' for currency holders from the rotten West.

With a little luck you could buy jeans or a cotton shirt - maybe even from a Pole or an East German in coastal towns like Kamcia. In this way the natives acquired original clothes, and the tourists got to spend their extra cash on Bulgarian watermelons and souvenirs.

Czechoslovakia

Czech ballerinas, also called “cwiczki”, with their flexible thin rubber soles, pure cotton fabric and elastic band across the instep, were cult footwear in Czechoslovakia. They were pretty and comfortable. Almost everyone wore them in the land of stewed cabbage and dumplings, and ladies in all of Czechoslovakia’s neighboring countries dreamed of owning a pair. To stand out from the crowd, people dyed them in all possible colors, cut out patterns in them, or sewed in colorful details on the shoes. What else? Young people tended to wear denim uniforms and long sweaters. Blouses with wide sleeves and men’s shirts were hits – these were best a few sizes too big, of a funny style, and taken out of granddad’s wardrobe before being dyed anew a strong color. Short jackets that gave the impression they were a little too small were very popular - they were hard to get buttoned up.

The avant-garde youth mostly opted for leather motorcycle jackets, and the greatest winter prize was a fur-lined American pilot’s jacket. The Czechoslovakian Pewex was called Tuzex and, like in Poland, you could buy western trousers or tops there. A lot of clothes were brought from Poland, Hungary and East Germany, and jeans were sewn by the Vietnamese minority in Czechoslovakia. Sometimes you also came across interesting clothes in department stores in Prague and other big cities like Brno and Bratislava.

Hungary

Thick roll neck pullovers or stretched (worn out) sweaters, white coats and surplus jackets distinguished trendy Hungarians from the more conservative people, who dressed in suits, and finally from those who were indifferent to fashion and wore jeans, cotton T-shirts and checked shirts. A sweater was the sign that you were dealing with a member of the intellectual elite. It was usually black, with a simple pattern, knitted most often by a grandmother, aunt or mother. Music videos and western record covers were a good source of inspiration for the creation of fashionable outfits. Usually the Beatles or Led Zeppelin performed the role of arbiters of elegance. Wrangler jackets and dungarees, spotted on American stars in music videos, were particularly desired. A long woollen scarf, the longer the better, was a compulsory accessory.

Elegant ladies ordered clothes at the tailor's or re-designed their old things themselves.

Many contemporary Hungarian designers like Dóra Abod have taken inspiration from the fashion of the 80's. In her collections she attempts to evoke the rock scene atmosphere from 25 years ago and is quick to reach for leather and shiny fabrics. Fans of turtlenecks and classic clothes can these days dress themselves in USE Unesed garments, and Nanushka is popular among lovers of large shirts.

Many ideas for the creation of original clothes were repeated in different countries, where people were weary of looking at the empty shelves in communist shops where clothes were sold only in theory. What could the people do? An old, popular saying goes: "the tailor cuts his coat according to his cloth". But even in these melancholy times, the communities cut off from the clothes that had been introduced in Paris, Milan, New York, did not allow themselves to be pressed into one common format.

The Czechs had their “ćwiczki”, Poles had their great clothes bazaars and master tailors, the Bulgarians made use of their tradition, and the Germans surfed on the wave of the West. And even though the streets were dominated by greyness, there were always people who wanted, and were able, to shine thanks to their great imaginations, stubbornness and creativity.

Bibliography:

Viktor Tarnavskyi, „Dzieci swoich czasów. Ruchy młodzieżowe w Rosji a zmiany kulturowe po upadku ZSRR, Wydawnictwo Trio, 2007

Beata Łaciak, „Obyczajowość polska czasu transformacji, czyli wojna postu z karnawałem”, Wydawnictwo Trio, 2007

Jacek Kurczewski, Mariusz Cichomski, Krzysztof Wiliński, „Wielkie bazary warszawskie”, Wydawnictwo Trio, 2010

Przemysław Zieliński, „Scena rockowa w PRL. Historia, organizacja, znaczenie, Wydawnictwo Trio, 2007

Moda. Historia mody XX wieku, Taschen, 2012

The writing of the section about clothes in Poland was assisted by the recollections of, among others: Wojciech Stanislawski, historian and editor of "Rzeczpospolita", Jacek Kaminski, longtime editor of "Gazeta Wyborcza", who currently works with “Lampa” magazine, and the theater expert Maryna Bersz.

The writing of the section on clothes in the Baltic countries was assisted by the recollections of, among others, Marija Paskevic, a Polish woman who grew up in Lithuania and was a high school student in 1989. She now lives in Norway, where she works in a bookstore and studies pedagogy.

The writing of the section about clothes in Romania and Bulgaria was assisted by the recollections of, among others, Hubert Kropielnicki, editor of the weekly "Przekrój", who spent his holidays in these countries in the years around 1989.

The writing of the section about clothes in Czechoslovakia was assisted by the memories of, among others, Ján Krivoša, First Secretary, Embassy of the Czech Republic, and also used the websites: www.pagyna.wz.cz/80leta.html and www.mezizenami.cz/clanek/nesmrtelna-80-leta as useful references.

The writing of the section about clothes in the GDR was written with the help of, among others, Joanna Janecka, Department of Culture, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Warsaw, and also used the website: http://www.zeitklicks.de/ddr/zeitklicks/zeit/alltag/leben-in-der-ddr/mode-im-sozialismus/ as a useful reference.

by Katarzyna Szczerbowska

The role of Evangelical churches during the Peaceful Revolution has become a part of the public narrative on the events of 1989. According to this narrative, churches acted as a catalyst in the process of the overthrow of the regime. When discussing the Peaceful Revolution and last months of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), one can point to certain events, immediately associated with churches, which seem to be pivotal.

These are the protests in East Berlin, which significantly grew over the summer of 1989 and were brutally suppressed during the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the GDR and Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig culminating in a demonstration attended by nearly 70,000 people, which gave an overwhelming victory over the GDR regime. However, these events, to which I will briefly refer, are to be seen as an outcome of complex processes. Therefore, reflection upon the role of Evangelic churches during the Peaceful Revolution requires answering two questions: what was their position in the GDR? In what ways did churches support oppositional activities?

Churches and demonstrations in the autumn 1989

Protests in East Berlin in the months that had proceeded the fall of the Berlin Wall were directly connected to falsification of local election results, which took place on Mai 7, 1989. Since then, there were regularly protests every 7th day of each month. At that point, Gethsemane Church in East Berlin became a center, which was opened to critically-minded activists. Form October 2 onwards, peace prayers were held for the detained protesters from Leipzig. The commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of GDR were scheduled to take place exactly on October 7, that is when the demonstrations were expected. This highly politicized ceremony additionally attracted a lot of attention due to participation of Mikhail Gorbachev. Given this context and growing social disillusionment, clash between the state and the protesters on October 7 was inevitable. As a result of the violent riots, many people were severely injured, detained and some of them managed to flee to Gethsemane Church, which gave shelter to the protesters. Within days Gethsemane Church became a center, where information about the arrested participants of the protest could be obtained and where the so-called ‘memory protocols’ were written down.

Demonstrations were held across the whole country. A crucial role played St. Nicholas’ Church in Leipzig, where weekly piece prayers were held since September 1982. They later resulted in famous Monday Demonstrations. In the 1980’s the numbers of people attending piece prayers varied, but in 1988 and 1989 they started to grow significantly. After the protests in East Berlin had been brutally crashed on October 7, the next Monday Demonstration was only two days ahead. This was awaited with fear and anticipation, because the state resorted earlier to violence on an incomprehensible scale. Despite great risk, on October 9, the number of protesters amounted to 70,000. This completely unexpected number of people caused the state to refrain from using violence. The Berlin Wall came down exactly within a month.

East German churches in the first post-war decades

The position of the Evangelical Church (predominant denomination in East Germany after the war) in relation to state was precarious throughout the years. In the immediate post-war period, state sought to gradually constrain its activities, which was not an easy endeavor, given the size of the institution and its connections to West Germany. Religious beliefs were overtly in opposition to state’s attempts to build new identities and remodel values. This process, though it varied by years, encompassed secularization and ideologization of all spheres of public life. Organizations such as Free German Youth (FDJ) as well as political ceremonies were means of conveying new socialist values and remaking of persons. So was the Jugendweihe, a youth ceremony introduced in 1954, during which young East Germans pledged their loyalty to the state. The intention of the regime was to altogether replace Christian confirmation with an atheist celebration. Consequently, also children’s participation in religious instruction was at odds with secular education in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism.

The end of the 1960s brought relaxation in relations between the state and churches. After the Berlin Wall had been erected and GDR successfully sealed off, state appeared to be in a position to gain fuller control of its citizens and institutions. These developments naturally significantly obstructed communication and cooperation between churches across the German border; until the end of 1960s Evangelical churches in both East and West Germany were formally subordinated to a single all-German Evangelical Church in Germany (EDK). Due to political expectations and growing pressure, East German churches founded the League of Evangelical Churches in the GDR (BEK). This split, which can be interpreted as a way of coming to terms with the emerging political situation, did not, however, put a definitive end to contacts between various Evangelical representatives and individuals rooted in religious communities in both German states.

Towards engagement in political matters

Support given by churches to those opposing the GDR regime has a longer history than it is commonly assumed. Although many associate Evangelical churches in the first place with oppositional activities and demonstrations that took place in the autumn 1989, it should be noted that churches played an important role and facilitated critical engagement with socio-political issues already back in the 1960s and 1970s. This made the state resort to new strategies, which were aimed at eliminating any potential threats, and thus preventing acts of civil disobedience. One of them was a rule concerning public events, which came into force in 1970. According to this regulation, any prospective public events, with the exception of strictly religious ones, had to be reported to state authorities in advance, in order to obtain a permission. At that time and especially over the subsequent years, hardly any meetings organized by churches were entirely devoted to religious matters, and churches were becoming more and more supportive of social, political and environmental discussions relevant to society. Religious character of these meetings (they were for instance preceded by a service) often allowed to avoid the intrusion of the state into internal affairs of the Church. The regulation introduced at the beginning of the 1970s, paradoxically fostered within the next two decades cooperation between churches and groups actively engaged in the freedom movement. Intended as an impediment to political activities, the policy on public events became a leverage and enabled dissident activities under the roof of the Church.

Church as a realm of freedom

Over the years, Evangelical churches enabled many initiatives, which normally could not take place anywhere else, and would not be officially endorsed by the state. Some of them evolved into oppositional activities, such as for instance “Offene Arbeit”, which was a model of Christian social work with youth deemed by the state anti-social. These circles formed a basis for the establishment of “Kirche von Unten”, a protestant movement, which gathered oppositional-minded activists, who voiced their socio-political and environmental concerns. Organizing summer and winter academies opened to all interested participants, churches served as a platform enabling discussions on various socially relevant topics. They provided space for oppositional meetings, printing of underground press, exhibitions, screenings. A good example provides the Environmental Library [Umwelt-Bibliothek] founded at Zion Church in East Berlin, which, on the one hand, gathered banned literature and allowed to distribute materials concerning environmental and socio-political issues and, on the other hand, was a place, where oppositional groups could meet and discuss their activities. Churches also contributed to the development of alternative youth culture in the GDR. The so-called Blues-Messe attended by young people was a type of a service, which encompassed mainly blues music not played otherwise in any state-clubs geared towards East German youth. Also members of punk bands, who, due to their attitude not matching “socialist morals”, were denounced as anti-social, could find their place within the Church. As the discussed examples show, the scope of initiatives, which churches welcomed and supported, was quite large at the time.

Rethinking the role of evangelical churches

25 years after the fall of Berlin Wall the positive role of churches within the context of 1989 seems undisputed. However, it should be also noted that not all of the churches followed suit. In fact, only a handful of churches in big cities such as East Berlin or Leipzig welcomed prayers for peace or some forms of oppositional activities. Former opponents of the regime bring to attention the fact that churches provided space, and thereby supported freedom movements, but they also point to the complex relationship between activists and Church representatives. It is also noteworthy that the origins of the events of 1989 have been differently discussed by various milieus and communities in unified Germany. For instance, a narrative according to which the revolution was religiously-driven has been contested in public discourse by some of the dissidents. These political actors emphasize that it is the ordinary citizens (predominantly atheists) who started the Peaceful Revolution and contributed to the overthrow of the regime.

This study investigates the trop of ambivalence in the historical memory of the “Velvet Revolution” and its legacy in the Czech Republic. As a way of “thinking about the past”, ambivalence emerged after 1989 as a mnemonic attitude through which citizens defined their relationship to the current democratic state, as well as to its foundation moment. Rather than assume that ambivalence indicates the absence of memory, however, this article examines how groups have positively appropriated the trope in constructing new traditions of remembering, in which the “Velvet Revolution’s” meaning and legacy remains unresolved and therefore a site of continuous engagement with the past.

On The Trail of Memory: In Search of the Legacy of 1989

The twentieth anniversary of state socialism’s demise offered scholars of East European memory politics what had been, in the 1990s at least, a rare opportunity: to observe the commemorative habits and rituals of the reclusive anamnesis annus mirabilis - otherwise known as the historical memory of the “year of miracles”, 1989. While a felicitous metaphor, the annus mirabilis perhaps doomed this symbolic moment to a permanent identity crisis. If past experience shapes the present contours of our historical understanding, then the memory of 1989 appears locked in a state of perpetual shadow, haunted by the intuition of a glorious past that it is neither able nor, in some cases, willing to overcome. As far as foundation myths go, ambivalence appears to have become part of the legacy of 1989.

That ambivalence has become a familiar trope, and that this attitude is often viewed with concern, can be seen in this interview with noted British historian Timothy Garton Ash for RFE/RL in Prague. Addressing the eventfulness of 1989, Ash noted that while the basic “facts” of those years are more are less known, we are still unable to synthesize them into a universal meaning and message, and this has implications beyond academia: “...the memory of 1989 is divided, ambivalent, and weak. It's divided between East and West. It's ambivalent even in Central and Eastern European countries, you see that here. And it's quite weak among the young generation. And if you don't know where you're coming from and what it was like before, you've got a problem.” (Ash, 2009)

The following analysis explores the coupling of the trope of “ambivalence” with the diagnosis of “problem” in constructing meaning out of history. It focuses on the “memory community” (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994) of young people who actively participated in 1989 and students who came of age afterwards. “Memory communities” are bound together by personal experience and common understandings of history. Transmission of historical meanings from one generation to the next can indicate moments where first-hand experience coalesces into a durable framework for representing and remembering that past to those without first-hand knowledge of the event. In this case, Czech and Slovak[1] university students played a crucial role in catalyzing the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia after November 17, 1989, when police brutality galvanized them to organize a nationwide student strike. The feeling of ownership towards the revolution’s legacy was particularly strong in student circles afterwards. Therefore, students and young people provide an ideal case study for investigating how ambivalence works not just to constrain, but also to enable possibilities for remembering.

The purpose of this article is not describe how specific historical narratives articulate, represent or challenge particular aspects of the Czechoslovak “Velvet Revolution”, nor will the analysis provide an comprehensive overview of public opinion on the various interpretations of history in the Czech public sphere.[2] Instead, the present study proposes to investigate the trope of ambivalence as a mnemonic attitude, focusing on memory practices that some Czechs have determined appropriate for the commemoration of the end of state socialism in their country. Rather than concentrating on the content of the “Velvet Revolution’s” narrative, therefore, the article looks at the forms under which Czechs feel its story can be (re)told and its legacy can be authentically appropriated. Starting with the twentieth anniversary, the article traces moments of engagement with the legacy of 1989 back to the revolutionary months themselves, in order to illuminate one facet of the culture of commemorating 1989: the construction of ambivalent distance in order to authentically engage the past.

In other words, could the persistent fears about a deficient memory of 1989 be in fact an appropriate way of engaging the past? As James Young asked regarding German preoccupation with commemorating the fascist era, “it may also be true that the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution.” (Young, 1993, 21) While this comparison at first may seem suspect – how can we say that the glorious overthrow of communism compares with the shameful history of fascism? – I argue that, although for different reasons, in both cases the construction of meaningfulness was complicated by succeeding events. In the case of the legacy of 1989, I argue that ambivalence stems not only from disillusionment with the post-communist present, but also from the politicization of the past under communism, which had problematized the naïve construction of “foundation myths” of brave new beginnings and heroic origins. This impacted the possibilities for meaningful engagement with the past in the 1990s, and some of the tropes emerging at this time, in particular ambivalence, appeared in the succeeding decade as common themes for articulating the legacy of 1989.

My discussion draws upon Henri Vogt’s concept of societal ambivalence, which he observed as a partly generational phenomenon for coping with the collapse of communism. (Vogt, 2006, 103-139) Ambivalence can be broadly understood as the situation where two mutually incompatible states or ideas are equally desirable and thus held in a state of tension, without collapsing or assimilating one into the other. Unlike psychological ambivalence, which is located in individual pathology, Vogt’s notion of societal ambivalence highlights the co-existence of different times, spaces, and norms during periods of rapid social transition. It is precisely the notion of perpetual tension and the awareness of distance (between experience and reality, between the ideal and its realization) that opens up new windows of understanding how individuals in particular memory communities ascribe meaning and purpose to remembering the events of 1989.

How can we separate out this discursive construction of the narrative of ambivalence from the actual work of social remembering? It is necessary to note that the moments of ambivalence discussed here do not paint a total picture of the commemorative practices of the “Velvet Revolution”, or even of the main anniversary commemorating the events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia, November 17. Rather, they are moments in which memory acted as a “changeable script”, not recreating the past as a whole but providing a flexible template through which individuals and groups could engage historical memory. (Sturken, 1992, 17) If the trope of ambivalence was being realized in the actual commemoration and remembering, how did it get there, and more importantly how is this narrative embedded within an evolving “tradition” of commemoration whereby the memory of “1989” as event is being transmitted through time?

We Have Something To Celebrate!: Commemorating 1989’s Twentieth Birthday

Foundation myths recount a political community’s beginning: as the key stories by which a state or nation explains its origins to itself, these narratives of mythic collective birth allow individuals to inscribe their own pasts into the “official” memory of the current government. (See Gillis, 1994; Bucur and Wingfield, 2001) Of course, different groups often offer competing interpretations of the past, and determining which stories are told often results in contestation, not just over the past’s meaning, but whether its legacy is being properly realized in the present. In the Czech Republic, November 17 is the “official” anniversary commemorating the “Velvet Revolution” (in 2000 it became an official state holiday, the “Day of the Fight for Freedom and Democracy”).[3] In response to the perceived lack of official enthusiasm over the twentieth anniversary, however, civic organizations mobilized (continuing a trend started at the tenth anniversary, discussed below) to make sure that the date was appropriately remembered. At Prague’s Charles University, a group of students organized the group Inventura demokracie (Democracy Inventory) to not only celebrate “with fireworks” but to critically reflect on the day as a living symbol of freedom and democracy to which everyone must contribute.[4] Their founding manifesto begins with the following declaration:

“Our democracy is celebrating its twentieth birthday. For some time massive street celebrations have been prepared – and they will probably take place as usual: on the podiums will sparkle the pop starts of the past forty years, the politicians will thank themselves for how well they navigated the (jagged) rocks of emerging democracy, and the majority of the nation will extend their weekend and disappear somewhere.

As long as it remains this way, there will be a missed chance for this November anniversary. The twenty year jubilee is simultaneously an excellent opportunity: not only for the usual look back, but for a straightforward inventory of our democracy.

Our democracy has existed twenty years. Even after twenty years, we continuously make excuses, saying that we are [still] somehow at the beginning, that our democracy is still not yet mature. In this way we explain lots of abuses, almost everything. Only that the slow development is not the main problem. Our democracy in fact may not ever develop or strengthen. The events of the past year are but a sign of the decline. It is high time to take care of our democracy.” (Inventura demokracie, 2009)

To that end, the students organized not only commemorative events but also political events, organizing debates over topics such as “coming to terms with the communist past”, governmental transparency and education, including arranging meetings with local politicians to discuss public issues. Their anniversary program culminated with a second petition, “Give us a present for our twentieth birthday”, in which they called upon Czech politicians to redress four major legislative deficiencies. Although the petition’s demands ultimately went unsatisfied, Inventura demokracie continues to operate as a student lobby group on governmental issues.[5]

Another group established out of anxiety over the anniversary was Opona (Curtain), an independent civic organization created by Czech artists with the sole purpose of publicly commemorating the anniversary. According to one organizer, the idea emerged when they realized that no official program was being prepared for the twentieth anniversary, and they were afraid that public apathy would leave the day neglected. The centrality of legitimating the anniversary’s value to their commemorative program appears directly in the name: “20 years after the Iron Curtain Fell - We Have Something to Celebrate!”- in order to show that Czechs took to the streets for ideals, not just for refrigerators[6]. The celebration included symbolically toppling a wall in front of the National Theater. (Ceska Televize, 2009; Opona, 2009)

A speech by Opona co-founder Marek Vocel stated that Czechs do have something to celebrate, despite the many suggestions to the contrary. Rejecting the idea that a deficient present democracy negated the value of the past, Vocel argued that the freedom they had gained twenty years before was not, as they had “naively” believed, the same thing as happiness, and he called upon his fellow citizens to proactively overcome their disillusionment with politics and participate in strengthening democracy: “Today we can’t expect another revolution. We don’t want one, we have the regime that we longed for (po kterem jsme touzili). From many different mouths we hear the truthful saying that we have the kind of democracy we deserve. Let’s all of us go now each in their own personal way and with a sense of responsibly collectively create our society in such a way that we feel the least ashamed of it.” (Vocel, 2009)

Groups such as Inventura demokracie and Opona were only among the most visible of the private civic organizations that took it upon themselves to orchestrate the twentieth anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution”. While tens of thousands of Czechs took to the streets in unofficial commemorations, the Czech state came under fire by reporters for “forgetting” to plan its own birthday celebration. (Stat zapomnel na oslavy, 2009) The Czech government was the only state in the former Eastern Bloc not to host any major official commemoration on its own in 2009, with the government limiting itself to a few state-centered events. In the article “The state has forgotten to commemorate November 17th”, an official from the Office of the President denied that a lack of “grandiose” celebrations implied official disengagement. Explaining the Czech state’s minimal participation, which differed greatly from the lavish spectacle put on by the Germans at the Berlin Wall, he said, “Our tradition is different. It’s more civilized, kmornejsi (intimate, closed-quarters) and can also be more immediate.” (Stat zapomnel na oslavy, 2009) Both former president Vaclav Havel and then-president Vaclav Klaus explained their aversion to pompous ceremonies was a matter of preference: they wanted to be “among the people.” Local authorities had varying degrees of input into celebrations, but even here the “tradition” of state deference to public initiatives emerges: for example, the Prague municipal government declined to organize its own events, and instead provided the funding for the dozens of private initiatives who independently organized the conferences, concerts, demonstrations, street theater, and other events around the capital.

According to President Klaus, he preferred to commemorate the day “among the people and with the people”. Considering Klaus’ reception at the main monument to the “Velvet Revolution”- a plaque commemorating the site where state police brutally dispersed a student-led demonstration on November 17, 1989 - located on National Street (the Narodni trida monument), one questions the wisdom of this “intimate and immediate” tradition for Czech politicians. As he lit candles at the monument the crowds reacted some with heckling and abuse, including “Klaus isn’t our president” and flying the European Union flag (Klaus was infamous for his antagonism to the regional organization). Police had to step in to calm down the situation. (Stat zapomnel oslavy, 2009) Klaus, however, reacted to the verbal sparring with equanimity: “I expected worse”, he said. Stating later that this was “natural” in democracies, he concluded that the anniversary was “a great success” in that “people can shout at the President or the Mayor without Police attacking them. It is a victory that not everyone appreciates.” (Mach, 2010)

A final moment of ambivalence in the representation of the “Velvet Revolution” in 2009 concerned the construction of a new memorial by Czech artist Jiri David, who worked with mobile service provider Vodafone to collect over 85,000 keys in October and November 2009 from Czech citizens (in exchange for free texting services). Jingling keys had symbolized the merry revolution on the streets, as demonstrators had used them to signal to the communists “it was time to go home”. Unveiled in March 2010, David had constructed the “key sculpture” (klicova socha) out of the thousands of donated keys, fastening them to iron mesh shape that vertically spelled out the word “revoluce” (with the “R” letter the largest, slowly dwindling down to a small letter “E”). According to the website (and the authors’ own viewing of the sculpture), the letters of the word “revolution” are constructed from different fonts, each of which represents a particular style of writing from a communist-era item or commodity (for example the R was shaped in the style of newspapers like Rude parvo, the E from communist-era toilet paper; etc. (www.klicovasocha.cz) Describing his reasons for making the statue, David connects the statue’s shape to “ambivalence” and the dwindling hopes for the revolution: “The Key Sculpture (Klícová socha) represents a personal polemic on development within the Czech Republic in the last 20 years. Of course, it’s neither a celebratory monument nor simply a critical piece. The sculpture expresses the ambivalence I feel when I look at present-day society and politics...” (Ptacek, 2010) Whether expressly and aesthetically articulated (as in David) or as a subtext (Inventura demokracie’s tension with the current regime or Opona’s argument that there is cause for celebration), and in the state’s (apparently willing) aloofness in commemorating a key official holiday, these moments of collective remembrance share a common theme. Namely, they share the self-conscious distancing of collective or social remembering from “official” commemorations or narratives in order to preserve an “authentic” commemorative agenda. This commonality allows us to set aside the question of representation and contestation for the moment and problematize the social construction of memory itself. Not only is the memory of a particular past “constructed”, but it carries a normative value implicit in its social usage: to assert that someone must remember something is to imply that the very act of remembering has value beyond utilitarian recall. The concept of anamnesis was advanced by both Plato and Aristotle to characterize the “effort of memory”, the search for an object that is feared lost, emphasizing the struggle against forgetting rather than the spontaneous act of recall. In explaining Aristotle’s use of the term, Paul Ricouer writes that anamnesis implies intentionality in the act, as well as the possibility of failure. (Ricoeur, 2004, 17-19) This intentionality of memory underpins the legitimizing “why” used by advocates to commemorate: their arguments invoke not just the meaning of that history but its existential significance for those asked to remember - what Gil Eyal calls a “will to memory” (Eyal, 2004) Remembering is stimulated by awareness of a past that can only be known through its being absent from the present. That is at the essence of remembrance and contrasts this action to forgetting - the effort to remember is the conscious struggle against a perceived potential loss of the past - we can only forget what we remember to once have known. (Ricoeur, 2004, 30) The trope of ambivalence is made visible here as part of the overall mnemonic code, not just as a state of remembrance but as the prompt to remembrance itself.

This brings us back to the connection between ambivalence and individual and public memory of the Velvet Revolution. The will to remember demands the appropriate vehicle for remembering. Declaring that 1989 was forgotten or neglected presupposes some standard of measure as to what an appropriate or adequate remembering the “Velvet Revolution” was supposed to do. Advocates for or against commemoration argued their case not just over the meaning of the day itself, but on the basis of the assumed surplus value of remembrance for those who participated (e.g., a closer relationship to democracy). The twentieth anniversary represents a particularly fruitful nexus of narrative and mnemonic practices, because it showcases the encoding of narrative tropes as they are transmitted from the lived experience of the immediate transition to post-communism, to the received experience of life in a post-communist state.

Therefore the ambivalence that appears in such diverse forums as the sculptor David’s collaboration with Vodafone and the invocation to commemorate by students and artists alike can be seen not just as a societal phenomenon, but as constituting part of the cultural formations of collective memory. That this desire spanned generations and social groups indicates a broad base, and here I argue that in part it is the artifact of the post-communist experience. Sociologists have long described the emergence of ambivalence as a cultural formation of the postcommunist era (see Misztal, 1996; Bauman, 1994; Sztompka, 2010) The ambivalence of post-communist culture has been linked with remembering in particular by anthropologist Svetlana Boym in her discussion of nostalgia in post-communist states. (Boym, 2001) Boym’s discussion of nostalgia describes the “affective community” created by sharing a common fantasy: that of a “home that no longer exists or has never existed.” (Boym, 2001, xiii) Breaking down the idea of nostalgia etymologically, Boym distinguishes between restorative nostalgia, which focuses on the nostos, the home (including national mythologies, nostalgic returns to “Golden Ages” and a desire to escape from the present into a utopian past) and reflective nostalgia, which revels in the algia, the longing and displacement that is necessary to maintain the love affair with a place and time that has no real spatial or temporal coordinates anymore. Reflective nostalgia refuses any eternal truths or “Golden Eras”, and remains stubbornly ambivalent, multi-valenced, looking not backwards but sideways, privileging “unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads.” (Boym, 2001, xvi) “Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt”. (Boym, 2001, xviii)

Marek Vocel’s speech for Opona suggests the reflective nostalgia was at work at the twentieth anniversary. The Czechs gathered to affirm that they had something to celebrate acknowledged that they had “the state that we longed for”, the purpose of commemoration was not a return to the past: rather, it was the refusal to put the past to rest, calling for continuous civic participation as necessary to maintain the democracy they wanted, or forestalling the final homecoming indefinitely (or as long as problems with Czech democracy are perceived to exist). While disillusionment with the present certainly fuels ambivalence towards the legacy of 1989[7], this analysis suggests that ambivalence in the commemoration of the events of 1989 has another side, one in which distance has preserved intimacy and critical engagement. Perhaps we have been looking for a restorative memory of 1989 while ignoring the significantly reflective nature of the Czechs’ commemorative practices.

Ambivalence both for and against Monumentality

As with all memory, it is those who create it that shape it, but in order to shape it the activists must draw upon mutually-understood cultural meanings and codes. We proceed along the lines of James Young’s description of “collected memories”, the public manifestation of mutually interpenetrating practices of memory built upon shared, but often divergent, experiences. (Young, 1993, 280) The focus brings into relief the work of memory activists, in the case of 1989 in Czechoslovakia includes especially students, whose collective identification with November 17 and the beginning of the revolution is multi-valenced and intimate. This focus not only narrows the discussion from the unwieldy universal “collective memory”, or public memory, encompassing the entire state structure, entire society, or an entire social group within society - concentrate instead on tracing specific patterns and instances of memory transmission amongst groups with shared perspectives within broader patterns of memory-making. Unlike under state socialism, democratic regimes don’t have one narrative; post-modern, post-national public memory is inherently contested. (Gillis, 1996, 16-20)

There are still frameworks that condition the form and content of memory being passed down, as collective memory is produced through shared reservoirs of cultural meaning that set parameters for when remembering is considered correct and appropriate. Remembering must be considered “authentic”. Collective memory cannot simply appear out of thin air; how we remember is as much part of the labor to faithfully render past experience as what we remember. In order to be considered genuine, collective memories must retain some sense of fidelity to an experience or narrative of the past; and the trope of ambivalence, as is argued here, has emerged in the past two decades as central components to public efforts to authentically come to terms with the end of communism. Here, poetics and performativity help engage the subtle contradictions and interstices of meaning that characterize the historical consciousness of the events of 1989, which in turn shape the contours of the broader symbolic meaning within collected memories. As Iwona Irwin Zarecka explains, the “reality of the past” being reconstructed occurs through the organized effort of memory work designed to “give presence to the previously absent or silenced past.” By self-consciously and intentionally appropriating the tasks of public remembering, memory activists “through explicit editorials and unabashed creations of new symbolic resources… expose the presence of social and political control over memory to the public at large. In that sense, their importance goes beyond the immediate results at hand, as memory projects reclaim more than a past, they reclaim the power to define it.” (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994, 133)

Rather than considering narratives as articulations of the past, the analysis of ambivalence leads us to investigate the politics of appropriate commemoration. “How” to most authentically remember 1989, as will be seen, constituted just as important an issue for Czechs seeking to remember 1989 as “what” should be remembered. Commemorations emphasize the process of constructing the past, not just in relation to present concerns but also to previous cultural understandings of the politics of memory. The level of attention to public remembrance has become a standard barometer for measuring the importance of the revolution in Czech collective memory; among other things it was the paucity of organized remembrance during the 1990s, reaching a low point at the end of the decade when the anniversary was marked by only few routine commemorative acts.

Creating commemorative space for the “Velvet Revolution” was problematic in part because of the communist appropriation and over-politicization of historical memory. State anniversaries and official holidays have traditionally played key roles in mediating between official and vernacular memory; the official calendar creates a temporal landscape of memory which symbolically institutionalizes the state’s visions of the past and shared identity. Official representations of the past transmit the dominant values and shared identity through national memory. However, as Katherine Verdery argues, the Party’s ideological project politicized the connection to the past across the board. The politics of memory under communism thus engaged personal memory in the public sphere through a particularly polarized division of official and unofficial or collective memory. (Verdery, 1999) Rejecting the specific formulation of official/unofficial spheres of remembrance thus opened up space for constructing new “traditions” of public memory that envisioned this relationship along new ideological principles. During the period in which the mnemonic code of the “Velvet Revolution” was formed, the early period of post-communism, the commemorative code of national remembering had been delegitimized, and the monumentality of the communist era was rejected in favor of smaller, privatized commemorations.

Anti-monumentality, in contrast the monumentality of communism, was small, human in scale, and made no attempt to freeze time in space. The monument at Narodni trida was constructed in 1990 as a perfect example of the mnemonic will towards anti-monumentality (protipominkove): built in 1990, the small, unassuming plaque contained just bronze reliefs of the hands (representing the unarmed students on the street who were beaten by police) and the date. As Hojda and Pokorny point out, it was only the “unmelodramatic (nepateticke) and humble manner of commemoration” that allowed the installation of the memorial without any major debate. (Hojda and Pokorny, 1996, 230-231) The human scale of commemorations became an enduring feature of collectively remembering the “Velvet Revolution”.

“The Nation Has Arisen”: Heroic Public Memory during the Revolutionary Events

Creating a “usable past” for 1989 meant navigating not only the experiences but also the previous use of history for the purposes of state legitimacy, and “official” history in the post-communist period found itself at a particular disadvantage vis-a-vis “vernacular” due to highly politicized nature of collective memory under communism. This was not problematic at the first month anniversary, however. The narrative of impending victory and success resonated with popular celebrations, in particular through “happenings”[8]. Young people in particular had used happenings, or impromptu street theater, in the latter half of the 1980s to challenge the regime’s stranglehold on the public sphere, and the practices were integrated into the peaceful uprisings in late 1989. Happenings as memory practices here mirrored the values of the revolution itself, as seen at the first month anniversary. One of the most common banner slogans of the period, “Narod zavel, bude to Havel” (The nation has awoken - it will be Havel) reflected the heroic narrative of a nation rising up to reclaim its destiny that remained the dominant motif of the commemorations. Other happenings were more informal and invoked a number of themes, including Czechoslovak nationalism as well as a public sense of ownership for the revolution. Civic Forum artists at Prague’s Manes galerie hosted the “Drakiada”, setting loose red, white and blue kites on Letna plain “in honor of November 17, which will undoubtedly become one of the nations’ svatky (anniversaries)”. (Vytvarnici, 1989) In Plzen, students unveiled their “message” to the people of Czechoslovakia, flying kites (draci) from the tower of the Church of St. Bartholomew with the national colors and the peaceful message “Be good to one another”. They encircled the town and let off 250 colored balloons that carried the banner “Narod zavel, bude to Havel”. (V nedeli, 1989)

The motif of bringing people out onto the streets manifested itself in several forms, playing in particular on the themes of tolerance and understanding. Perhaps the most obvious example of using the first month anniversary to create a new historical record can be seen in Prague, where students organized a memorial march of their journey from the month before, making their way from Albertov to Narodni trida (National Street) to Wenceslas Square. Participants in remembering the “last straw” that the nation couldn’t take - stopped at Narodni trida where they sang hymns in remembrance of the students hurt there - the end of the procession was a demonstration at Wenceslas Square. (Stepanek, 1989, 1) The procession followed the same track only this time, unlike on November 17, 1989, the demonstrators made it to their desired destination, Wenceslas Square, where the atmosphere was completely different from one month before. On Narodni trida people had already converged and were laying candles and flowers at spots where the demonstrators were beaten.

This unambiguously – and unashamedly - heroic narrative did not outlast the first few post-revolutionary months. The crisis of representation emerged in autumn 1990 through public debates about how to commemorate as well as what to commemorate. Debates over commemoration were embedded in competing interpretations of the revolutionary mandate. But the trope of ambivalence extended beyond discussion of what had actually happened; it also enveloped how to best remember what happened. There was also significant discussion as to the most appropriate way to commemorate the revolution, in particular a distinct ambivalence towards official commemorations by the state’s use the anniversary in order to further the revolution’s goals.

Beyond the “Great November Velvet Revolution”: Ambivalence and Liminality at the First Anniversary

In his study of young people in post-communist states during the 1990s, Henri Vogt found two types of ambivalence that characterized their experiences after communism: post-revolutionary ambivalence, in which the old and the new systems co-existed side by side, and post-modern ambivalence, in which uncertainty became sedimented as a permanent feature of life. (Vogt, 2005, 104-105) For the early commemorations of November 17, the concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-synchronicity), the different paces of change coinciding during the early period of transition.[9] Applying this concept to early commemorations of November 17 unveils interesting parameters to mnemonic practices. The question of ownership here seems to be less who owns the story of the past - the narrative of memory - but who owns the right to remembering? The reaction of the Czech public to the first anniversary of November 17th reflects this ambivalence.

Part of defining the event of 1989 was defining the language within which it would be described; this necessitated a discursive subverting of communist language in which to remember 1989. One of the groups in society best-authorized to bear the revolution’s memory were students. Their collective memory was tied to the events of 1989 through their mobilization especially during November and December 1989, in particular their direct connection to the foundation event of the police crackdown which in the narrative of 1989 acts as the beginning. The desire to safeguard November 17 from being commercialized or tainted by communist commemoration was also implored by those who held no such irony towards it. Take for example this student criticizing normalization-era pop star Michal David’s song “Sametovy listopad”. In addition to commercializing the 1989 events, the student says,

“We have been hearing this poetic adjective - velvet - practically everywhere recently. From the poem the misappropriated word penetrates our ears without us realizing its meaning. It is becoming common, so common that it loses its power. It has lost so much strength that songwriter Michal David, and not a poet, reaches for it as if for an ordinary word. Let’s preserve it. Let’s think of something new, or better yet let’s stop speaking altogether on the great things of the past and begin to think about the great things of the future, so that thanks to our linguistic ability we don’t create out of VRSR a VLSR (Velká listopadová sametová revoluce), Great November Velvet Revolution.” (Matula, 1990, 3)

The communist system’s own revolution had worked to ideologically transform reality by separating the referent from the referred, so that peace meant war, assistance meant invasion - it was part of the ideological reality that had been created during totalitarianism. In addition to naming, a particular commemorative vocabulary associated with the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Czech Velka rijnova socialisticka revoluce, or VRSR) had been disseminated throughout all East European satellite societies through commemorations, education, speeches, etc. The association of November 17 and 1989 with a discredited idea of Bolshevik-style revolution in the grand European tradition - which the Bolsheviks had appropriated and transposed to their Eastern European satellites – was in itself problematic. In other words, to treat the cultural imaginary of “1989” as a foundation event in the traditional sense of the word meant in effect to besmirch it. In order to create a viable collective and public memory of 1989, one that could be commemorated in a separate way from the previous regime, an entirely new vocabulary had to be created, and this would not be an easy task.

These various trends converged at the first anniversary. A number of student groups also came out with calls not to celebrate November 17 in the weeks leading up to the anniversary, culminating the in petition Vyzva ke spoluobcanum III. The Student Parliament announced that it would not celebrate a "Great November Velvet Revolution" and left it up to individual university faculties to arrange their tribute. The petition called upon citizens not to celebrate November 17 because the revolution had been stolen - reform had not gone far or quickly enough and communists remained in prominent positions of power. This was no time to congratulate the nation, it was time for a renewed emphasis on pushing forth the revolution. (Vyroci bez oslav, 1990; Zadne oslavy, 1990; Wooley, 2007)

At the first anniversary, Civic Forum didn’t even release a proclamation for the anniversary of November 17 itself; instead choosing to release a proclamation for the first anniversary of its founding on November 19. Instead of reflecting the clean break with the past argument that had been adopted by others, the proclamation adopts the Havelian line that the line of totalitarianism runs through everyone in explaining why the transformation would be harder than expected. It states that “We don’t want to make a legend out of November. What is important is the spirit that bound us together back then. Let’s not lose it!” (Civic Forum, 1990) Moreover, calls for “apolitical” commemoration were part of November 17th’s mnemonic repertoire from the beginning. After receiving considerable support for their decision not to commemorate the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution”, some student leaders relented and decided that the anniversary indeed warranted a commemoration, but one that was specifically "dignified" (důstojný), not “celebrations with flags and fireworks.”. (Martin Mejstrik…, 1990, 7) The students met with government leaders and persuaded them to hold a public ceremony on Wenceslas Square to guarantee that the anniversary would not be "politically abused", in the words of student journalist and leader Pavel Zacek. (Zacek, 1990, 6) According to student leader Martin Mejstrik, who had earlier explained that this symbolic location had picked because one year earlier it had been a place of solidarity and toleration, the first anniversary’s public meeting - or mass demonstration, rather - would counteract the increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the country referred to in the students’ petition “through a collective expression of interest in the radical progress of reform, in the genuine cleansing of society!" (Studenti dekuji, 1990, 7)

It is worth considering exactly what apolitical means in this context, as on November 17, 1990, Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel and American President George Bush presided over the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The several hundred thousand people who had convened at Wenceslas Square that cold Saturday afternoon were treated to a number of challenges to the official narrative. Anarchists delayed the ceremony half an hour by blocking the passage of the presidents to the speakers' podium. These conflicts paint early political challenges to the official appropriation of the Velvet Revolution by Civic Forum, one that the Republicans would continue to exploit in narrative form through various claims to a stolen revolution. In the middle of George Bush's speech, right-wing supporters of Miroslav Sládek's Republican party shouted "Down with the totality of Civic forum!" and "Mr. Bush, do you know that you are supporting the communists? (Neomaleny protest, 1990, 2)

Havel first responds to the trope of public disillusionment with defensive statements such as his response to the Vyzva ke spoluobcanum III, in which he said that despite the widespread feelings of disappointment, most people were ignoring the things that had been done, such as negotiating the withdrawal of Soviet troops. (Havel, 1990, 4) Havel’s unwillingness to identify with the disappointment with the results of 1989 at the first anniversary can also be seen in his speech to Wenceslas Square that day, when he reinterprets the students’ proclamation as mainly a call for “meditation of each of us. Yes, let’s today think each one of us about ourselves. Let’s try to think calmly about our public life, with a broad view and in the light of our own consciousness. Let’s try each of us to look into ourselves and from a wider, so-called human perspective let’s try to realize, what kind of view our often too provincially numbskull actions have in the eyes of the world!” Onlookers such as Vladimir Schoedlebauer were unimpressed with Havel’s overly abstract language, although he did enjoy the U.S. President’s speech, especially when George Bush left the “Aquarium” that had been built for him to walk amongst the spectators. (Schoedlebauer, 1990, 2)

The first anniversary of 1989 is immersed in the politics of coming to terms with the past, lustration and dealing with communist property and personnel, and securing a viable political and economic program for the future. The question of keeping the anniversary “apolitical” was difficult to uphold. The first year anniversary is also the first major conflict during the commemoration that challenges the interpretation being put forth during the ceremony itself. Although in rhetoric there had been battles between radicals and gradualists, students and Civic Forum, etc. throughout, with the petition, the proclamation that challenged the “official” interpretation being held by the government (which itself was being challenged within the government), it was two groups representing extremes in society - the Republicans and the anarchists, who actively disrupted the ceremony. This pattern of conflict during the revolution would continue throughout the first years of the revolution as a large amount of political turmoil kept the anniversary a symbolic point of protest, but at the first anniversary the unofficial narratives in the anniversary held great sway.

Ambivalence Encoded in the Commemorative Narrative

When discussing early commemorations of November 17, what is striking is not so much the conflicts over interpretations of meaning and content - which do exist - but the consistent effort by many to delay the final interpretation until the time is more ripe. A great deal changes in the contemporary political and social context between the one-month and one-year anniversary in 1989 and 1990, and discourse concerning the public memory of the revolution reflects both these changing immediate priorities as well as a shift in attitude towards its mnemonic function. The problematizing of memory reached a critical point at the first anniversary, which set a standard debate that would occupy commemorations of November 17 throughout the 1990s: how to commemorate the event properly, which included a set of arguments that the anniversary should not be commemorated at all, with the inference that the revolution itself was not finished and thus the time to begin memorializing - or historicizing - the memory had not yet occurred. Arguments for or against commemoration played out in a transforming discursive plane. One main forum in which this played out being newspaper discussions about whether or not to commemorate the anniversary. At this time newspapers were experiencing an enormous upsurge in readership, and the focus on popular attitudes towards the anniversary is notable. One of the most widespread themes was that there was nothing to celebrate.[10] The day November 17 was seen as a time of symbolic reckoning about how far the Czechs had come in the last year, and one of the most widespread tropes in this discussion is disillusionment and disappointment that the promises of the revolution had not been kept. Many times this supposed “disillusionment” is projected onto others and used as an argument for a change in the contemporary situation, as seen below in the response to the student petition. This is a way of commenting on the social condition by projecting one’s own beliefs about the state of the world onto an “other” that is meant to represent the general society. The theme of disillusionment is also posited as the “inevitable” outcome of revolutionary euphoria, as here: “It is almost a year since the domestic communists shook hands across a half a century with the German fascists and had unarmed students beaten. A year which has gone by so quickly, that has been so incredible, that maybe only with the passage of time will we manage to separate out everything correctly, to evaluate and judge. After the November and December euphoria there necessarily had to come disappointment (rozcarovani), dissatisfaction (nespokojenost) with the slowness of change, intolerance and disillusion.” (Sevcik. 1990, 1)

Sevcik’s discussion of the disillusionment with post-communist change highlights the link between post-communist disillusionment and ambivalence towards the legacy of 1989. But the trope of ambivalence emerges in other ways, too, such as Mirka Spacilova’s anecdote about her friend “Josef”, who she states is meant to be an everyman from the street, the tram, a fellow classmate. Josef was born on November 18 and after last year he considers himself lucky to have escaped his father’s fate. Josef Sr. was born on May 1 (International Worker’s Day) and was never was able to come to terms with his own birthday because other people were always reading into it meanings it didn’t have - if he wanted to celebrate in a pub with friends, for example, other pub-goers thought the group was there for May 1, and that they were therefore either true believers or else provocateurs about to subvert the proletariat’s anniversary. Josef Jr. always felt sorry for those born on November 17, and Spacilova understands:

“...the extreme symbolism of the anniversary is embedded in us deeper than it seems. One person says that after a year of the “gentle velvet” there isn’t anything to celebrate - because, as a certain cashier in one Prague beauty salon maintains, “everything’s going to hell again”, because once more people are jumping off of Nuselske bridge - and celebrating from that perspective is a call verging on a miracle of any kind of merrymaking. The other person, on the other hand, falls prey to similarly general and boundary-less opti mism and with that we already have experience, they are offering an all-encompassing enchanted celebration which again doesn’t have the uncelebrated well-known obligatory voluntariness. Both stances remind me dangerously of the ever-present threat of Josef’s unwanted birthday guests.”

Her solution is toast with Josef whenever both he and she - at the exact same moment - are hit with the same burst of emotions, whether skepticism or ecstasy, and in this altered state maybe she’ll come up with a new style for state holidays “with one basic rule: to celebrate one day later.” (Spacilova, 1990, 8)

With this anecdote, Spacilova ascribes her reluctance to embrace the anniversary in the suffocating presence of the state holiday structure itself: there doesn’t seem to be any room for personal experience in the experience of commemoration itself. Through a burst of spontaneous, completely unchecked (but still collective) emotion, she and her friend create a new collectivity that opens up space to redefine the official calendar, if only on a personal level. And the use of birthday as the metaphoric parallel is significant, because it is at once a highly symbolic and personal event, but also the way in which many people experienced the events of November and December 1989. The overwhelming shadow of official memory – even in the post-communist era – alienates Spacilova from public memory, to the point to where she attempts to put temporal distance between her own commemorative gestures and that of the “official” public – by celebrating every state holiday “one day later”. The self-conscious creation of temporal distance illustrates the reflective stance of Spacilova’s engagement with the anniversary: on an individual level, the day-after anniversary seeks to “cherish shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space.” (Boym, 2001, 49) The construction of a parallel calendar of public memory, as an authenticating alternative to the overwhelming presence of official memory (in any form), reflects the awareness of multiple dimensions of time co-existing in tandem, and the navigation between them as the most comfortable spot to practice mnemonics. The “invented tradition” of the day-after anniversary exemplifies (if only virtually, not in reality) the reflective stance towards the legacy of 1989.

Challenging “official” forms of commemoration as a means to create an authentic tradition for also appear in the practices left over from the previous regime. In particular the communist practice of combining sports events with commemorations - thus creating a healthy national history and body- suffered from direct assault. The co-optation of communist forms of commemoration could have different symbolic meanings. There was nothing particularly new about this - memorial marathons, swim meets, academic competitions, and other contests had been held as part of the official (communist) November 17 holiday for a number of years. In Olomouc, the twentieth anniversary of the 17 November Memorial swim tournament - an international event with swimmers from across the Eastern Bloc, was held as per usual, the main contest still being the Jan Opletal trophy for the only difference this year being that it now commemorated International Students Day and the first anniversary of the November Revolution - for which reports said the swimmers’ performance was a dignified commemoration of both. (Memorial 17. listopadu v plavani, 1990) This didn’t seem to engender any major uproar in the community, although it is difficult to tell since the main student newspaper in Olomouc, Pretlak, had by that time stopped publishing.

However, in Prague the planned November 17 marathon, which was specifically designed to commemorate the 1989 events with the starting and ending point at Albertov, retracing the original 1989 student march, was the subject of a number of articles condemning its connection with the anniversary. While the committee planning the November 17 Marathon (Beh 17. Listopadu) worked in coordination with both student movement and Civic Forum leaders, not all in the student community were happy. (Usneseni Rady OF, 1990) One Studentske listy

journalist points out,

"You think that November 17th doesn't have anything in common with [1948's] Victory February? For forty-one years we celebrated February and only now are we learning about its background. Now SOMEONE is preparing this society for the first celebration of November 17, but what do we know about the behind-the-scenes workings of this day? Therefore, even though I have enjoyed sports since childhood, I will avoid the November 17 run. But what if next year it will be a compulsory event?” (Sved, 1990, 8) As part of an effort to keep the first anniversary authentic, Studentske listy journalists and fellow sympathizers decided to sabotage the marathon by acting as human blockades.

On the day of the run, as several thousand participants geared up to start the course, the runners heard rumors of the planned attempts to block their course and when the mass of people unfortunately jumped the gun, literally, taking off before the official start, in the general chaos they couldn’t be reined back in by security guards. In what became a breathless race to stop the runners, business owner Ceslav Vancura managed to catch up with the lead group about two kilometers into the race and, plunging headlong at the head runner, managed to throw him off course so that he began running back towards the start line. (Beh s studentstkymi prekazkami, 1990, 1,8; Maji jine mineni, 1990, 10)

Reading about the battle over the marathon in Olomouc prompted N. Hanak to contemplate the Czechs’ ambiguity (dvojznacnost, suggesting two features) relationship towards anniversaries. Clearly distinguishing his remarks from the “compulsory commemorations of the past”, he says that freedom isn’t just freedom of possibility but freedom of will and of execution. He attributes it to the occupation of the Czech lands and their heightened sensitivity (precitlivelosti) to commemorations, the “premrsteny cit” (unreasonable/eccentric/hysterical) feeling about symbols and jubilea. It takes just one mocker to ruin the whole celebration. (Hanak, 1990, 2). Hanak specifically refers to the first anniversary’s “November 17 Run” showdown when discussing what he sees as the Czech ambivalence towards commemorations, going on to state:

“The reaction to Saturday’s commemoration, or non-commemoration, is a precise picture of the contradiction in us - on the one hand a resistance against any kind of celebrating, on the other hand indignation towards undignified commemorations. The marathon “a la Rude parvo[11]” upset me as well, understandably, but I have the impression that the attachment of the students to some kind of pieta can in the future end in the same thing. But is it really possible to avoid this? I think not - every commemoration is in time ossified, every symbol fossilized. It is better to fight for the authenticity of action in the future than the memorials of the past. Despite that, if I were to wager as to how to commemorate November 17 next time for real, I would suggest that the time and place of the given action be disseminated again only through whispered by ear and in the mass media it be thoroughly denied for certainty’s sake.”

Hanak’s formula for an appropriate commemoration of 1989 with authenticity, as with Spacilova, achieved authenticity on the personalized, but not privatized, level.[12] Clearly separating out the collective and social memory practices from the national (spreading news of the event by word of mouth, not the official media) is reminiscent of the everyday “countermemory”, the “oral memory transmitted between close friends and family members and spread to the wider society through unofficial networks.” (Boym, 2001, 61) Ambivalence is here encoded into the very traditions of transmitting information: ellipses, absences, half-words and silences all spoke to a common societal collusion against the state. (Boym, 1994) As Istvan Rev makes the point that after the fall of communism, the need to construct new social frameworks of remembering left past experiences in limbo in the 1990s: “Reconstruction [of the past] makes sense only in the framework of a new narrative. In order to compose a new story, elements of the old are restructured, rearranged, refigured, left out, put aside, overlooked, dismembered - forgotten. Forgetting an event, like remembering it, makes sense only contextually.” (Rev, 1995, 9) In an effort to maintain the authenticating dichotomy between public and private, to keep the legacy of 1989 from ossifying (a certainty in the course of time), the only recourse is to build into the very commemorative practices itself an element of destabilizing uncertainty. I suggest that the trope of ambivalence emerged as part of the reconstruction of the social frameworks of memory in the immediate aftermath of the communist system’s collapse, and it has reappeared as an element in later commemorations through the constant need to re-engage with a past feared lost and forgotten.

Tenth Anniversary: Ambivalence Re-Interpreted

During the 1990s, ambivalence towards the “Velvet Revolution” was reflected in the relative paucity of official and social commemorations. Until 1999, commemorations tended to be small, often private affairs – individual politicians laying wreaths at the memorial on Narodni trida, small conferences or exhibits of pictures, sometimes in town halls, and often at universities or theaters where the activists of the revolution reunited. By 1999 the immediate post-communist period has become somewhat normalized. Yet ambivalence and distance towards official commemorations of November 17 remained, in particular through the discussion of post-revolutionary disillusionment (most famously encapsulated in 1997 with Vaclav Havel’s diagnosis of a “blba nalada”, or bad/stupid mood, in Czech society caused by dissatisfaction with post-communist transition). At the tenth anniversary, the same cohort of students who had spearheaded the “Nothing to Celebrate” petition in 1990 joined in to commemorate the tenth anniversary in order to counter public apathy and provide a proper commemoration.

Society ‘89 was created in late 1998 as a planning committee for the tenth anniversary. The group was headed by former student leader Jan Bubeník and his partners Martin and Sona Poduskova decided to plan the tenth anniversary themselves when, as Poduskova said, when they realized that no government or state bodies were planning any major commemorations. (Poduskova, 2005) Setting a trend that would be replicated in the 2000s, civic, non-governmental organizations spearhead the commemorations. This civic organization consisted of an honorary committee including the heads of state (Havel, Klaus, Zeman), top political leaders, and the mayor of Prague along with prominent dissidents and personalities; their organization was affiliated with the EastWest Institute and had as media partners Czech TV and Czech Radio; and they had a special committee for former student leaders to plan the anniversary. (www.spolecnost89.cz) Although this was not formally an “official” anniversary planning committee, it carried the implicit stamp of state or government sponsorship and with it the assumption of upholding the status quo.

Society 89’s concept for the anniversary, as expressed by its leader and in its project proposal, was to be not only a retrospective remembrance of the events of 1989 and the ensuing changes, but also a critical evaluation of the negative and positive results of those events. Bubenik said that the aim of the organizations’ commemorations was to both remind society that things really had changed for the better since 1989. (Wooley, 2007) Above all their focus was on recreating the euphoria of November 1989 and the emotions that brought everyone together to reinvigorate civil society. In an interview with the author, co-founder Sona Poduskova explained that the organizers wanted a “dignified” and “apolitical” commemoration which would not want be used by any groups for political or extremist ends and would include all levels of society. (Poduskova, 2005) Society ’89 aimed to present a unifying interpretation of 1989 and the communist period before it, placing the popular uprisings and public euphoria on the same level as the events at the domestic and international political elite level. It was also aimed at stimulating positive changes in society; not, however, at delegitimizing the government. Society ‘89’s week-long commemoration program consisted of a broad array of themes, including events concerning the former student leaders (the book launch of the oral history One Hundred Student Revolutions (Sto studentskych revoluci)) and Civic Forum (whose ten-year reunion was held on November 19). A conference representing the international sphere included most notably the Ten Years Later conference inaugural panel. On the evening of November 17, the main political leaders from each side of the Cold War conflict commemorated together. Representing the ‘East’ were former Polish opposition activist Lech Wałęsa; his Czech counterpart Václav Havel, who was doubling as President of the Czech Republic; and the former General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev. From the ‘West’ came the former US President George Bush, the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the former (West) German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and the widow of the former French president François Mitterand, Danielle Mitterand. Not only did this raise the prestige of the commemoration overall, but it also located Czechoslovakia as a key player in the wider global changes in 1989. (www.spolecnost89.cz; Statnici, kteri pomohli…, 1999, 3) However, there was one more subject of Society ‘89’s commemorations, which was the Czech society of 1989 itself. The events aimed at the general public were the culmination of the commemorative week. In addition to laying flowers and lighting candles at Narodni trida on 17 November, an event open to the public in any case, and a photo exhibit hosted by Mlada fronta Dnes of the society-wide events in 1989, there were several events which specifically were designed to show society to itself. On the one hand they were designed to recreate the euphoria of November and December, as with the Concert for All Decent People on November 20.[13] However, they were also designed to remind Czechs that the communist period should not be nostalgically remembered. This group included both the day of Czech communist television, which also occurred on November 20, and the "open-air museum" on Wenceslas Square, the site of the original protests, was the site of key chains being handed out with "10 let pote" (Ten years later) stamped on them in recognition of the spontaneous key-jangling during the 1989 demonstrations in both Wenceslas Square and Letna field. The public was framed as civil society - it was civil society that Jan Bubenik wished to reinvigorate. The skanzen totality represents an interesting facet of ambivalence. Unlike the twentieth anniversary petition from Inventura demokracie, the skanzen was meant to re-create the communist experience in order to “remind” citizens of how bad it actually was during the previous regime (lest they fall prey to nostalgia for communism, at that moment beginning to emerge in the Czech Republic.) The open-air museum to communism had actually emerged during the “Velvet Revolution” itself (the first proposal, if short-lived, was at Bezpravi near the Orlicke hory) when Czech and Slovak citizens, as in other Eastern European states, began to relocate the statues and paraphernalia of the communist regime to impromptu “museums”, thereby rewriting the communist past by consigning its artifacts to history. The musealization of communism in this instance worked not to isolate but to congregate; the entire bottom portion of Wenceslas Square transformed overnight into its mirror image from the last days of the communist regime, complete with students from local universities acting out the roles of police, merchants, and demonstrators.

Contrary to Society ‘89’s fear of the tenth anniversary slipping past unnoticed, there were many more local and small group commemorations of 1989 documented in media than in previous years. A number of other official and non-official actions remembering November 17 were connected to individuals or private groups. The main commemorative site was Narodni trida, where commemorative activities involving lesser luminaries from the Czech government, including the Senate memorial service, the other political parties laying flowers at the Narodni trida memorial, and the feting of the former world leaders by the Prague Mayor and the Senate Chairwoman. (Pravo, 1999, 2) As part of the ritual of November 17, these commemorations did not necessarily make a statement about the contemporary political situation. However, active contestation of these narratives did occur. During the candle-lighting ceremony the ex-communist boss of Prague Miroslav Stepan showed up at the Narodni tride memorial to the student demonstrations of 1989 with Ludvik Zifcak, the StB (Czechoslovak communist secret police) agent who had acted as the dummy "dead student" during the 1989 revolution, holding a mini-rally for the "obety kapitalismus", the victims of capitalism. (Na narodni znovu horely svicky, 1999, 2; Oslavy svobody…, 1999, 1-2) Even non-communist hecklers showed up to the candle-lighting, flower-laying ceremony attended by Zeman, Klaus, Benesova and Havel to heckle "Milosi, koncime" (Milos [Zeman], we're finished) and "Klaus 1989-1999". (Na Narodni znovu horely svicky, 1999, 1-2; Zklamani a poboureni, 1999, 5). Both of these protests, in different ways, called into question the positive interpretation of 1989.

Unlike these open contestations of the victorious post-communist narrative of democratic change, some young people in 1999 found ways of distancing themselves from the official narrative through happenings. For example group of students from the School of Economics staged a mock Socialist Youth Organization medal-awarding ceremony as a happening. They began with a “lantern procession”(lampionovy pruvod), which was a direct reference to 7 November and the Great October Socialist Revolution commemorations of the communist era. When I asked student organizer Martin Moravec why the students had planned a parody of a communist-era collective event for the commemoration, and what they wished to gain by this, he said that the parody was one of the few ways that they could legitimately commemorate 17 November in the post-communist environment:

“So people in the Czech lands don’t much like doing any kind of official commemorations. Because it reminds them that again someone is saying: Take a flag and go to the procession to commemorate, let’s say 17 November. People here simply don’t like doing that. [...] And so far as 17 November was maybe about students, and about young people, and precisely about, like to fight with the former establishment and with all of those idiocies, so such a thing you can commemorate only with difficulty by organizing some big, formal, organized action, because that would be basically in the exact opposite spirit of 17 November. [...] Therefore when I say that it was like a joke, I mean it in the way that, granted, it was a joke, but at the same time everyone realized very well like what they were making fun of and so on. But that form of making a joke was what made it possible to organize anything at all.” (Moravec 2006)

Moravec’s quotation illustrates a moment of transmission of ambivalent mnemonic codes from one generation (that came of age under communism) to the next (who were too young to fully participate in 1989). Another example the 1989 student march at the fifteenth anniversary in 2004, which juxtaposed a strange amalgam of lived and interpreted experiences, and official and unofficial narratives on Narodni trida. For the fifteenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the Student Council at Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty (FF UK) planned a commemorative action entitled “With Apathy Forever?”. (Studentska rada Filozoficke fakulta UK, http://strada.ff.cuni.cz/listopad) Their program included a recreation of the 1989 student march ending with a rally featuring distinguished public intellectuals. Carrying banners reading “1939 - 1989 Nezapominame” (1939 - 1989 We won’t forget) and chanting slogans such as “Don’t be apathetic!”, the students marched along the same route as taken by their predecessors fifteen years previous. There was a moment of tension, however, when the procession arrived at National Street (Narodni trida) and found their way blocked by the anniversary concert sponsored by then-Prague Mayor Pavel Bem, who had placed a large performing stage in the middle of the street. The concert, which was already underway, was briefly interrupted as the marching students shouted for passage through the throngs of spectators which had gathered around the stage.

Although the students were finally allowed through and the tension subsided, the recreation of the march is an important means of transmitting a particular legacy. Five years earlier a similar political began at the tenth anniversary and while it wasn’t organized by the original students from 1989, but by students ten years younger, it was at the end of this march that the petition “Thank You, Now Leave” was read at Prague Castle that sparked the protest movement against the Zeman-Klaus opposition agreement with a narrative of the Velvet Revolution that (politely) rejected the political status quo and the transformation narrative. This petition, which should be understood as an outgrowth of the original first anniversary petition, is less important for its immediate political impact and more important for the fact that 200,000 people had signed it in the space of a few weeks - a signal that the potentials for an alternative reading of the events of 1989 were not only still possible, but politically had mobilizing force. (Wooley, 2007) Moving towards the twentieth anniversary, various groups representing themselves as “society” apart from the state appropriated to themselves to do the memory work that other revolutionary regimes such as the Russians and French eventually took on for themselves. By 2009 the call to remember had become part of the legacy itself, and one that looks to society rather than the state. This attitude is reflected in a petition released by FF UK organizers as part of their “With Apathy Forever?” event. In it, they described their relationship to 1989, ending with these words: “We, the current students, experienced 17 November 1989 only as children, thus we know its atmosphere only from stories. But its legacy is for us current and alive - and we will work so that it is not forgotten.” (Studentska rada Filozoficke fakulty UK, 2004) Student activists and memory workers have redefined the legacy of 1989 from liberation from communism to an active project to maintain democracy.

Apathy, then, need not only be interpreted in the collective memory as the turning away from the past; in student activists the perceived apathetic society can reignite the relevance of the past by keeping at bay the final victory of democracy. Another aspect of a constant anxiety of apathy in society is the need to mobilize to address the problem. This ambivalent interplay of reality and possibility reflects what Vogt calls the “plurality of utopia”, maintaining possibilities as a constitutive part of everyday life (what Vogt calls the “transformative element of human life.” (Vogt, 2005, 77) Rather than constituting democracy itself as a utopian formation, it becomes a project in constant need of perfection.

Conclusion: Ambivalence and the “Velvet Revolutionary” Tradition

We return now to the twentieth anniversary and the invocation to remember as a guiding theme of the commemorations. Post-communist disillusionment has undeniably played a role in inserting the trope of ambivalence into discourse of the collective memory of the “Velvet Revolution” and 1989 in the Czech lands. However, this analysis has argued that the “revolutionary hangover” thesis obscures some of the ways in which post-communist mnemonic practices constructed a memory culture using precisely the medium of ambivalence to infuse memory projects with meaning and purpose. Redirecting attention from content to form alerts us to the way that constant anxiety and debates over “appropriate” commemorations resulted in the invention of new traditions of remembrance such as happenings, as well as civic organizations which emerge specifically to combat the amnesia and apathy with the cry that there is something to celebrate. Without the apathy and political discontent, perhaps these organizations would never have emerged. In that case, of course, the lessons of 1989 being transmitted across the generations might have been different.

The intimate, human, anti-monumental and ambivalent commemorations showcased here represent one facet of the commemorative culture of the “Velvet Revolution.” However, these examples also caution against taking the trope of ambivalence in mnemonic discourse at face value. Looking back to Spacilova’s “brand-spanking new” tradition for “day after” state anniversaries, the motif of intimacy through distance suggests an informative paradigm of social practices of remembering. Although the Czech “traditions” of commemoration at the twentieth anniversary may have not have rivaled Berlin’s grand commemorative spectacle, in the Czech lands the legacy of 1989 seemed to be a living presence, in part embodied by people on the streets, through informal gatherings whose congregation both re-embodied and re-enactment the drama of the street. The remarkably personal and social dimension of “Velvet Revolution” commemoration makes the absence of official spectacle all the more noticeable. Groups displaying this reflectively nostalgic relationship with the memory of 1989 are pragmatic, yet ambivalence towards the present allows them to retain a little utopian hope that the future can be better through their own actions. The 2009 students released a petition called on politicians to “give us a present for our twentieth birthday” itself represents the collective appropriation of the past, echoing the personal/state birthday motif used by Spacilova almost twenty years before. In utilizing the legacy of 1989 to preserve a critical distance from the present, some groups in Czech society found a way to appropriate the state’s holiday on their own terms.

Maybe the day-after anniversary is not such a crazy idea after all; if the “Velvet Revolution” model of peaceful mass mobilization against dictatorships could be exported (with varying degrees of success), why not the “Velvet Revolutionary” tradition of ambivalent commemoration? Although foundation myths can be victorious returns to a collective’s origins, exploring reflective modes of commemoration shows other ways in which Czech citizens engage with their past, where an emotional attachment to historical memory is achieved by perpetually holding the object of desire at arm’s length. Perhaps a glimpse of the reclusive anamnesis annus mirabilis, at least for the first two decades of its life, is best captured not by looking up at the sky for a transcendent mythic story, or down on the ground at the ashes of destroyed revolutionary ideals, but sideways at the unfulfilled potentialities of the present.

[1] I focus on the Czech lands here, as Slovakia’s separate path after 1993 demands a separate treatment specific to that country’s own conditions. However, I am not saying that my analysis of ambivalence only applies to the Czech lands, only that the scope of this article limits itself to that region of the former Czechoslovakia.

[2] For examples of historical work on the memory of the “Velvet Revolution”, see Wooley, 2007; Krapfl, 2008; Suk, 2003; Mechyr,1998; Otahal, 1998. In a recent study based upon public opinion polls on Czech attitudes towards the Velvet Revolution, Lyons and Bernardyova found that, by twentieth anniversary, a “dominant narrative” of the “Velvet Revolution” had emerged, in which a majority of Czechs believed that 1989 was a revolution, it was for political (as opposed to economic) reasons, and over 30% believe it was led by the people; a further one in four believe it was led by dissident elites, while 37% have no opinion. (Lyons and Bernardyova, 2011)

[3] Until 1999 November 17 was the unofficial anniversary of the start of the “Velvet Revolution”, recognized on the calendar as a “vyznamny den”, a significant day, but not a bank holiday. November 17, 1989 witnessed the student demonstration in Prague, whose crackdown precipitated the popular mobilizations against the communist state in Czechoslovakia. This day, until 2000 called the “Day of the Students’ Fight for Freedom and Democracy”, first entered into the calendar back to the institution of November 17 as International Students’ Day in 1941.

[4] Current Information for Inventura demokracie can be found on their website, http://www.inventurademokracie.cz/. Information relating to their activities at the twentieth anniversary, including their anniversary manifesto, can be found at: http://stara.inventurademokracie.cz/studentske-prohlaseni/index.html.

[5] Their most recent (2013) activities include lobbying on the financing of political parties. See http://www.inventurademokracie.cz/nase-temata/.

[6] This statement reflects a deeper division in the legacy of 1989 – whether it was carried out in the name of pragmatically implementing Western-style consumerism, or whether it was for more idealistic political goals such as participatory democracy and national renewal.

[7] Lyons and Bernardyova’s view of post-revolutionary ambivalence, which is held by many, functions closely with themes of “disillusionment” and “disappointment” with the post-communist era, i.e. as the necessary result of a “revolutionary hangover” after the euphoric days of November and December 1989 and the inevitable betrayal of the grand ideals of the revolutionary community.7 Similarly, Keller offers one of the many illustrative examples of this theory, arguing that the state of disillusionment in 2004 (at the fifteenth anniversary) was the result of “unfulfilled aspirations” including the desire for a more accessible consumer society, a return to the pre-1948 political system, and incursions on national sovereignty. See Keller, 2005, 472)

[8] Happenings, or guerrilla street theater. They become a prominent mnemonic practice to commemorate November 17 starting at the tenth anniversary with the “skanzen totality”, although happenings parodied the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, November 7, start occurring as early as 1997.

[9] (Vogt, 2005, 109). Vogt references one of the best-know theorists of non-synchronicity, Claus Offe, whose triple transition (political, economic and societal) conceptualized multiple tracks of change after communism. Additionally, Vogt points to inter-generational discontinuity in terms of how different age groups experienced the transformation.

[10] This sentiment was echoed in a number of other articles in the newspapers. See for example (Ševčík, 1990, 1); (Spacilova, 1990, 7). Additionally, there were a number of opinion polls with both the actors in the revolution and "ordinary people" who had been on Narodni trida. November 17 was seen as a time of bilanz, or of evaluating the past year, and this connected the revolution with the aftermath of the revolution and the problems of transition.

[11] The main newspaper organ of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

[12] Discussing the first anniversary of November 17 specifically, Andrew Lass brings up a similar point about the movement between individual remembering and the social construction memory, or in his words, from memory to history. He draws upon Hegel’s differentiation between remembering and recollection to pose the question “what makes history thinkable? “ (Lass, 1994, 92) and emphasizes how Czechs in the first months after 1989 made sense of their individual biographies within narratives that were already becoming sedimented, in particular “collective narratives” such as the story of dissidents like Havel or borrowing aesthetic motifs from movies and literature in order to make sense of the events. I suggest that one of the reasons that ambivalence becomes a durable framework for memory, at least for some people at the time, is because it allows for a balance between the violence done to the raw data of memory, or the recollection of lived experience, by remembering, or the rethinking of that experience in understandable terms.

[13] A reprise of the Koncert pro vsechny slusny lide, which was held on December 20, 1989.

Deanna Wooley is a Ph.D. candidate in Eastern European and Cultural History at the Department of History at Indiana University-Bloomington, USA. Her dissertation explores the cultural history of the “Velvet Revolution” from the perspective of the 1989 Czechoslovak student movement, and she is the author of several articles on the student movement and the collective memory of 1989 in the Czech lands. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and can be reached at deanna.wooley@gmail.com or wooleyd@ipfw.edu or via mail at the IPFW History Department, 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd., Fort Wayne, Indiana, 46805-1499.

Article written as a part of the Freedom Express project - an international social and educational campaign launched on the 25th anniversary of the “year of changes” – the year 1989. The project is organised by European Network Remembrance and Solidarity with the support of ministries of culture from Central European countries and in cooperation with many institutions dealing with the history of the 20th century.

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the difficulties of Irish remembrance of the Great War from 1923 to 1930. This period of the Irish Free State, newly independent of the British Empire, demonstrates the difficulties for a new state in crafting their national identity in the wake of empire and the problem of remembering events that do not easily fit into a new national narrative. The different spheres of remembrance that interacted and influenced the way the Irish came to understand their Great War experience are examined.

Wars are rarely integrated into a national narrative with ease, particularly for a new nation. While the Great War was interwoven into the tapestry of British history, it remained a difficult subject for the Irish. Although the Irish voluntarily sent 210,000 Irishmen to war, roughly forty percent of their service age population, between 1914 and 1918 the postwar period was rife with questions about loyalty, empire, and remembrance. For men like James Clifford, who served at the Battle of Gallipoli and lost his arm at Loos, the 1920s in Ireland represented a repression of the war experience. His brother’s wife, an ardent nationalist, forbid discussion of Clifford’s service and threw away his medals and mementos of the war out of disdain for these symbols of an oppressive imperial conflict. ¹

The familial censorship by Clifford’s sister-in-law was not unlike what would happen in the public realm during the 1920s. It was during the early 1920s that the Irish experienced significant violence in their bid for independence, and in the wake of this violence, the Irish had to decide what an independent Ireland would represent. The rise of the republicans and their contextualization of the Great War as an imperial one meant that official and popular remembrance of the war was fraught with tension. Yet despite this current of chaos, on a personal level many Irish people found ways of remembrance and commemoration that were solidified during this period. During the 1920s the Irish Free State was in the most nebulous period of its relationship with the experience of the Great War. It was during this era that the Irish people negotiated what role the Great War would have in their society. Because the government took an ambivalent stance on remembering the Great War, the fate of war remembrance was fought out in public sphere. Ultimately dissension over this issue, as played out in the public, relegated memory of the war to the personal level. Men like James Clifford had to find their own ways of commemorating a war that irrevocably altered so many lives.

While scholarship on Great War commemoration in Ireland has increased in the past fifteen years, these discussions often focus on one aspect of commemoration, most commonly monuments, parades, or memorials. Too few have examined the interplay between official, popular and personal forms of remembrance in the Irish Free State. These spheres of remembrance influenced and communicated with each other. Therefore we must consider each of them to fully understand remembrance of the Great War in the Free State. This is important, not only to gaining a more complete understanding of this moment in Irish history, but more importantly, this illuminates a little studied aspect of remembrance. Perhaps the Irish case can provide insight into other nations with difficult pasts to better understand how official, popular and personal remembrance interact, contest, and compete with each other.

Collective war memory, sometimes regarded as monolithic, is comprised of a complex interaction of official, popular, and personal remembrance. These spaces of memory communicate with and influence each other. Official spaces of memory often convey a specific meaning behind a war experience as endorsed by a government. This realm of memory can be contested, supported, or even ignored by popular or personal remembrance. Popular remembrance, sometimes called public memory, is represented by the differing layers of the populace which can find expression in newspapers, public speeches, song, etc. Personal war memory is expressed through private acts of remembrance like the creation of rituals within a family, by an individual, or through personal documents meant to encapsulate the memory of an event.

In their seminal works, George Mosse² and Jay Winter³ attempted to flesh out the complexities of grief and the impulse to memorialize the Great War in Britain and Germany. What emerges from these works on Great War memory is that there were attempts across Europe to cope with the bloodshed of the war through commemoration and remembrance. While these attempts occurred at various levels, it is important to note that remembrance of the war was a phenomenon across Europe. Public and private attempts at commemoration were fueled by individuals because “states do not remember; individuals do, in association with other people.” ⁴ Therefore, as Winter argues, understanding the process by which individuals remember the past is important because it informs the public manifestations of remembrance. ⁵ So then individuals are the core of memory, and in the case of Winter’s study, Great War remembrance. He also asserts that groups of like-minded individuals form collectives that interact with other collective remembrances of the war.6 With this precedent set, this article pushes Winter’s premise further to reorient discussion of the memorialization of the Great War around the interaction of these layers or collectives of remembrance to better understand how war memories are created and sustained. This article argues for the importance of the interaction of these layers: governmental apathy and dissension within the popular sphere forced remembrance to the personal level.

In Ireland, instead of official methods creating a commemorative atmosphere with a semblance of popular support, there was a struggle to create either form of memory due to deep political divisions within Irish society. Yet people “needed to find a kind of solace, a way to live with their memories.” ⁷ 49,500 Irish soldiers died in the conflict and thousands returned, many with debilitating chronic emotional, physical, and psychological problems stemming from their war experience. Forty percent of the Irish service age population volunteered and a quarter of them never returned. This meant that significant portions of the Irish were impacted by the war directly through war service or indirectly through family or friends. Personal remembrance occurs in every war-torn society, and the Irish certainly were not alone in their difficulty of post independence commemorations of wars fought under an empire. For the Irish it was at this personal and private level that remembrance of the Great War became isolated yet preserved as the only effective level of remembrance due to questions of imperialism and national identity. This article contends that in the early Free State we can see the contestation between these different layers of memory: ambivalence on the part of the government forcing the role of the war to be violently decided within the populace, the outcome of which was that the republican sentiment prevailed and individuals and families had to commemorate on a personal and private level in order to avoid slanderous claims of imperialism and anti-Ireland sentiment.

Official Remembrance

The end of the Great War was not the end of violence for the Irish. They were almost immediately plunged into a War for Independence against Britain which culminated in Irish independence in 1921. Under the treaty provisions with Great Britain, Ireland was partitioned, which meant that the northern six counties remained part of the United Kingdom, while the southern counties became the Irish Free State. Many republicans who had fought against the British during the War of Independence felt that partition was a sham committed by the British government, while others felt it was the best possible compromise. This disagreement over whether or not to accept the treaty led to the Irish Civil War, which ended in 1923, and the permanence of partition. As the newly independent Free State moved on from the horrors of almost a decade of war, this meant deciding which events and symbols would make their way into the new national narrative. While the 1916 Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War entered the arena of potential inclusions alongside the Great War, each would find difficulty finding a seat in the emerging pantheon of Irish history.

The 1916 Easter Rising is often touted as the birth of independent Ireland. If any event of the early twentieth century offers the most clear-cut potential for inclusion as a site of memory for the Irish Free State, it is this. Yet even this event did not easily fit into the new Irish state. While the Rising with its heroes and idealistic hopes for Ireland seems the inception point for a birth of the state myth, in actuality remembrance of the rebellion was not an all-encompassing, uniting force. Both pro- and anti-Treatyites claimed the martyrs of the rebellion, which was untenable in the post Civil War period. The fact that both sides claimed these men and the event itself begged the question: How could the Rising be the creation of a state that had gone to war with itself? Politicians of all stripes attempted to claim the rebels of 1916 at one time or another to legitimize their party. ⁸ The Rising was often dragged into political debates in service to contemporary desires, and thus it was a fluid event that never became a coherent rallying point for the state. The specters of the dead “constantly disrupted all attempts at origin, continuity and history itself.” ⁹ Additionally, because “emphasizing one interpretation of the past necessarily meant marginalizing another,” the Rising might be usable to reconcile the pro – and anti-Treatyites but it would still marginalize Unionist and nationalist interests in the Great War. ¹⁰

The Rising was sometimes pitted against the 1916 Battle of the Somme. The Somme became a badge of honor for the Unionists, who viewed their bloodletting on this battlefield as evidence of their loyalty to Britain and a reinforcement of their contract with the Empire. ¹¹ This was contrasted with the Rising, which reinforced the nationalist Catholic agenda for independence, and was soaked in the religious connotations of martyrdom, redemption, and sacrifice. ¹² These events became counter-narratives to each other and to the larger debates that had long faced Protestants and Catholics in the country. The Somme was held up to “contrast the centrality of the Rising” and the Rising allowed republicans to emphasize their opposition to the Unionist/Protestant agenda. ¹³ These diametrically opposed positions on two of the most important events of the early twentieth century in Ireland dramatically affected how the Great War was understood in the Free State. While the Rising was not easily commemorated, the Great War became associated with the Unionist/Protestant agenda such that “discursive imaginings of the First World War are thus inextricably connected to the dynamics of political conflict and divided loyalties in Ireland, and are themselves contested.” ¹⁴

If the Easter Rising did not clearly fit into a new Irish narrative, how could the Great War, the War for Independence, or the Civil War, all of which were arguably even more complex in their meaning for the Free State? They were uncomfortable reminders of the tensions between the government and ardent republicans. ¹⁵ The War for Independence, seemingly destined for commemoration, was marred by intense Treaty debates and the Civil War which followed. The ghost of the Civil War hung over the memory of the War for Independence, making it difficult to use it as a unifying event, since it led to more war. The Civil War presented a challenge since, as all such conflicts do, it had divided the nation, and celebrating the pro-Treaty victory was seen as only furthering those divisions. As Anne Dolan argues, the Civil War was difficult to integrate into the Free State narrative, partially because both the pro- and anti-Treatyites wore their service proudly, which begs the question, “After civil war can the winners honour their victory; can they commemorate it [...] with the blood of their comrades still fresh on their boots?” ¹⁶ Though President Cosgrave attempted to use the Civil War to boost his Cumann na nGaedheal party, which took power when the Civil War ended, ultimately the conflict did not retain a prominent position as a commemorative event in the Free State. The complexities of remembering an event that tore the nation asunder and continued to breed bad blood proved too difficult. This war had been a dirty one, won through “atrocity and execution, lacking the requisite laurels and blazes of glory,” so it became necessary to repress some memories in order to get on with governing the Free State after 1923. ¹⁷ The Civil War became the dividing line for politicians in the Free State and “rehashing the old row seemed somehow more alluring than the reality that politics had retreated to the unheroic inanities of living the independence they had coveted for so long.” ¹⁸ For much of the Free State, the Civil War was not past, but present. The fact that it was constantly affixed to political parties and arguments meant that commemorating it, at least publicly, was a difficult endeavor. Much like remembrance of the Great War, this remembrance was also relegated on a private level, as noted in Anne Dolan’s work. While the two events bear some similarity in this fact, they are vastly different, in that the Civil War difficulties in remembrance were due to destruction of Irishman against Irishman in a fight for the direction of the independent state, whereas remembrance of the Great War came to represent a battle of national identity and the rejection of empire.

The constant struggle against the British government led many republican leaders to shun any residual connections with the Empire after independence. Other European nations sought to commemorate and make sense of the Great War tragedy in the 1920s. After 1923 Ireland sought to establish itself as a new nation. Though Ireland, like Finland and Czechoslovakia, was newly independent after the war, Ireland’s independence came at the cost of both a war for independence and civil war that further embedded fierce dissension over their former imperial rulers. Unionists, predominantly Protestants, rejected this new independence from Britain. Because Unionists treasured their imperial connection, commemorating the war was far easier than for Irish republicans, who were predominantly Catholic. During the 1920s those few Unionists within the Free State became inextricably linked by the government and in the public eye with Great War commemoration. In its attempt to eschew British ties, the Free State government also eschewed ties with the Great War. Because the Irish fought in the Great War under the British flag it was seen as a British war for imperial gain and had no place in the new national narrative of an independent Ireland. This attempt to eradicate British ties would have significant consequences for ex-serviceman, their families, and the families of those who did not return.

The 1920s was a decade of tremendous contestation about the perceived imperial legacy of the Great War in the Free State. The government had to walk a fine line of allowing Armistice Day ceremonies, while also appearing as a strong nation independent of Britain. It was so near to the end of the war it would have been politically inadvisable to disallow such commemorative activities. President W. T. Cosgrave’s administration did not desire to stop them altogether, yet Armistice Day celebrations were not government funded, nor were they attended by major leaders. The administrations of the 1920s essentially walked a tightrope between republican sentiment, which desired a total excision of everything British (and therefore imperial), and the rest of the Irish population. They were trying not to look too British, while acknowledging that there was a demand for these services. Ultimately the administration of the 1920s allowed parades and services but did not endorse them. The Great War and its combatants were not part of the new Irish nation and therefore would not garner its support. This would cause debates over the role of the First World War and its potential as an imperial symbol to be negotiated in the public sphere.

Armistice Day parades, which commemorated the end of the Great War, took place in many European nations and often served as a national moment of mourning and commemoration. Though the government allowed Armistice Day parades in the Free State, many members of the government and their affiliated agencies felt such commemorative acts were imperialist in nature and would only cause violence. Military marches involving British Army uniforms, standards, the Union Jack flag, or anything deemed militaristic in the parades were regarded as especially dangerous, prompting this response from Chief Superintendent of the Ennis Garda Edward O’Dufy in 1928,

“The Armistice parade [...] was a definite Imperialistic display, and not a commemoration to the war dead, as it ought to have been. The continuance of exhibitions of this kind which are hateful in the eyes of nine-tenths of the people will undoubtedly court trouble. It is not suggested that any action should be taken against the men concerned on this occasion, but I respectfully beg to renew my recommendation to have permission for such displays refused in future years.”¹⁹

O’Dufy viewed the parade as a demonstration of the British Empire which would only cause problems among those who viewed the Empire as a former oppressor. In his request to have such parades banned O’Dufy was not alone. A letter stamped “secret” to the secretary of the Department of Justice argued that these marches were “intended much more as a military display than a bona fide commemoration service for the dead, to which latter there can be no objection, though there appears no necessity to perpetuate this form of ceremony.” ²⁰ It is clear some government officials felt that commemorations were not necessary to the Free State, although they were willing to allow them as long as such events were devoid of military displays which promoted the British Empire. In both cases, the authors note that if such an event was devoid of imperial symbols and tone and was purely an act of remembrance, parades would be acceptable. Herein lies the larger difficulty for the Irish of the Free State: how intertwined was the Empire and postwar commemoration? As to whether or not remembering the war could be extricated from the Empire, that would ultimately be decided in the public sphere.

This perceived intertwining of empire, the war, and Armistice Day caused the Free State government concern that Great War remembrance activities were causing more harm than good. The early morning violence of November 11, 1928 seemed to bear this out. At various locations around the island, bombs exploded near monuments to British kings and poppy²¹ depots were ransacked. A movie theater was raided and the film Verdun, set to show the next day, was stolen. ²² Such violence against symbols of the war was problematic for the Free State government and though they did not endorse such violence, they did not endorse the commemorative symbols either. The new government was stuck.

The Irish Free State government attempted to appease the organizers of the Armistice Day celebrations while simultaneously withholding direct support to mollify republican sentiment. Although they took an official stance of ambivalence towards the symbols and ceremonies of the war, this period of post-civil-war tension was one of negotiating the new state’s symbols. Symbols are integral to the visualization of a new state “and they play an important role in creating emotionally charged bonds of social solidarity.” ²³

Just as symbols can breed solidarity and national identity, they can breed dissension. As the Irish of the Free State attempted to craft an independent national identity they had to decide which symbols would represent them. Officially the state chose the green, white, and orange tricolor flag, a symbol born out of the republican movement, as the official state flag. This decision was highly contentious since those who had won the civil war and were in government chose it, while the losing side also felt the tricolor was their symbol. Enter into this debate the Union Jack and “God Save the King,” traditional symbols of the British Empire and its army. Republicans saw these symbols as evidence of an imperial minority representative of the centuries Ireland had endured under the boot of the British Empire. ²⁴ As such, the Union Jack and British anthem become inextricably linked with empire and the Great War in this heady era of negotiating national identity. What is unfortunate about this simplistic view is that it does not allow for more complicated understandings of these symbols. While there were undoubtedly many who sympathized with the British, there was also a strong contingency of those who saw these symbols as commemorative of the Great War rather than imperial fervor. It is this debate over symbols and the identity of the Irish nation that would come to a head in the public sphere over popular remembrance.

Questions over a permanent representation of war through a memorial also fueled debates over the role of the war in Ireland’s identity. While England, Germany, and France were busily erecting war monuments in the 1920s, the proposed monument in the Free State caused outcry and debate. War memorials and monuments present an opportunity for people of a nation to reflect and grieve. ²⁵ The arguments and delays that would plague the Irish attempt to create a national memorial for the Great War demonstrate a loss of this opportunity to reflect and grieve publicly.

From the initial proposition in 1919, the national war memorial took twenty years and multiple redesigns before it came to fruition. These delays and arguments demonstrate how divided the government and Irish public was over commemorating the war. The first proposal for a memorial veteran’s home, submitted by the Comrades of the Great War organization, was rejected by the government on the practical grounds that, although they had raised £50,000, the group had no long-term plans for funding. Changing tack, in 1924 a second proposal was submitted to the government for a war memorial in Merrion Square in Dublin. This proposal met with stiff resistance in the Dáil (parliament). Some argued that a memorial was a poor way to assist ex-servicemen, many of whom were disabled and would benefit from social services, as evident in one Irishman’s comment, “If the Irish Imperialists wish to show an appreciation of the heroism that gave Britain and her Allies the victory of 1918, let them attend to the survivors of the War who are in need of such help. Dead men cost nothing to maintain.” ²⁶ This was a prevalent opinion among many Irish people who believed that a memorial did little to ease the suffering of ex-servicemen. The author’s equation of the Comrades Association with imperialists shows how supporting remembrance of the war publicly became interlinked with support of the British Empire.

Dissenting voices from the government often argued that such a physical representation of the war would ultimately be a memorial to the British Empire and send the wrong message to the world about the new Irish state. Placement of the memorial in Merrion Square, disturbingly close to the seat of government, was also a point of contention. While some government leaders argued that a memorial was acceptable, they disputed the Merrion Square location, contending that it should be farther from government buildings, so as not to give the impression that the Great War was in any way connected with the Free State government. ²⁷ Here, as with debates over the usefulness of Armistice parades, “private grief and public acknowledgment constantly conflicted with each other.” ²⁸ The government sought to allow the expression of remembrance, as long as said remembrance did not taint the identity of the new state with its perceived imperial symbolism.

By 1927 there was no consensus on the memorial and the proposal was withdrawn from the Dáil. Undaunted by the amount of controversy the memorial created, the planners restructured their next proposal for a memorial archway to Phoenix Park, the largest park in Dublin and central to the city. This proposal was rejected in 1928. Within a decade of the first proposal the Dáil had rejected three memorials, at which the organizers inquired if any area of the park would be amenable. They were offered Islandbridge, an area far from the seat of the government, and in 1931 a model for a memorial on the site was approved. Construction began in early 1932 and President Cosgrave requested that Irish ex-servicemen comprise fifty percent of the work force. After a decade of political wrangling, the Great War national monument was finally approved, although it was not government funded. The Free State government’s approach to this problem of remembering a war with perceived imperial tones demonstrates the larger concerns over Ireland’s new identity. While the monument was completed in 1939 on the outskirts of Dublin, it never had an official opening ceremony and almost immediately fell into disrepair. The monument could hardly have been less integral to the new state’s national identity, thus demonstrating that the Free State government saw no place for the Great War in Ireland. While the government did not ban Armistice parades or the monument, they established a stance of ambivalence and apathy which forced discussion of the war’s role to take place in the popular sphere.

Popular Remembrance

Questions over national identity and the place of the Great War found expression and debate in public remembrance. While official remembrance was marred by internal ambivalence bordering on the hope that such commemorative activities would soon dissipate, popular memory was far more openly opinionated. The debates over the National Memorial engendered commentary from the public; some believed that a stone monument was not the best way to assist the ex-servicemen. In the poem “Broken Soldier” S. J. Fitzgerald wrote “Stone crosses help not those who languish/In fetid slum – in want and cold” noting later in the poem “They need no monument, psalm or psalter, /But a chance t[o] live; they are destitute.” ²⁹ Many Irish recognized the plight of returned soldiers yet felt the best way to help them was not through parades or monuments but through social programs.

Others voiced their dissent of an imperial display more starkly, “We are pleased to know that the renewal effort to make Merrion Square a permanent monument to British jingoism, while men who took part in the different bloody battles are in want and dire hardship, is not likely to be successful.” ³⁰ The connection of the Great War to the British was made all the more evocative by a contributor to Honesty³¹ in November 1926, who argued that memorials to the Irishmen of the Great War were tantamount to memorializing the Black and Tans. The Black and Tan police force, utilized by the British during the War of Independence from 1919–1921, had a sinister reputation in Ireland for their wanton use of violence. In response to the Merrion Square proposal the author argued, “Have we not... quite sufficient memorials already up and down through the country to the memory of the infamous ‘Black and Tans’ in the shape of the many crosses... that mark the scenes of their brutal murders?... No further memorial of a kind such as is contemplated in Merrion Square is needed.” ³² The comparison of Irish soldiers of the Great War to the Black and Tans, a group perceived by many Irish as brutes of the Empire, was, perhaps, the most incendiary connection possible. By arguing that “For an Irishman, therefore, Poppy Day is simply a memorial to the ‘Black and Tans’,” the author implied that Irish soldiers were no better than the men that had terrorized the Irish during the War of Independence. ³³ The author’s assessment of the Irish exservicemen shows that for some republicans, an Irishman in British uniform was no Irishman at all. The fact that the Black and Tans had terrorized the Irish people and the Irish soldiers had fought in France, Gallipoli, etc. made no difference. Irish soldiers were guilty of being imperialists because of the uniform they once wore. Because of their service to Britain they were guilty by association.

The emotional fervor attached to the question of imperialism fueled violence, particularly against ex-servicemen or those participating in commemorative events. One aspect of Armistice Day commemorations that resulted in violence was the wearing of the Flanders poppy. The poppy was a symbol of the Great War across Europe and was sold to raise money for the British Legion, an organization which provided services for ex-servicemen. Antipathy for this symbol of the imperial war was widespread among Irish republicans. On November 7, 1925 John Brennan wrote in the newspaper Honesty, that the poppy was “the emblem of sleep for the dead and ‘dope’ for the living.” ³⁴ Brennan observed the dire situation of ex-servicemen in the Free State and noted that no one was helping them find employment. They were offered “instead, a poppy flower once a year – a little insidious flower, from which is gathered the opium to drug and enslave the masses of India and China, and the workers of England and Ireland.” ³⁵ Furthermore, in Brennan’s estimation, the republicans did not deny the bereaved their grief or need to remember, rather they were concerned that the popularity of the poppy was “an attempt to fasten the minds of the workers on the glory of sacrifice for imperial purposes, so that when again the recruiting sergeant makes his appearance in our streets – and our pulpits – he can call upon the ‘poppy seeds’ to go across the seas and renew the blood-red crop.” ³⁶ So within the popular sphere of remembrance was a concern that the bereaved were duped by imperialists into wearing a symbol of empire to commemorate their dead and wounded: “you whose dead lie in foreign fields or in Irish prison graves, remember your dead in your prayers, but do not play England’s game by swallowing the poppy drug and wearing England’s emblem this November eleventh.” ³⁷ Like the arguments of government officials, this author contends that if remembrance could be stripped of imperial symbols, in this case the poppy, then it could accurately commemorate the dead. What begins to emerge here is the republican wish for the symbolism to disappear, yet it is often within the symbols that people found solace and solidarity.

Others were angrier than Brennan in their assessment of the use of the poppy on Armistice Day. In an open letter to Honesty an anonymous writer rages against the poppy sellers, “Your motives are hatred of Ireland, rather than love of the dead... You know that as well as I do, but your mission is Imperialism, your tools the ex-soldiers...” ³⁸The author goes on to suggest that the Irish are willing to pray for ex-soldiers and the dead of the Great War, but that if these imperial symbols are not disused, violence will ensue. ³⁹ Such virulent reactions to the poppy demonstrate the enormity of the debate over identity, symbolism and memory in the Free State. To some the poppy was a physical representation of the soldier’s experience, particularly on the Western Front, of the horror and bloodbath of war. To others it was a symbol of Irishmen sent to fight, yet again, for the British, in an imperial war that only caused the Irish harm.

Far from being just words, this tension over the remembrance of the Great War took to the streets. On Armistice Day 1925 Dublin experienced violence between the commemorative crowd and republicans. Smoke bombs were thrown at the Celtic Cross at Trinity College while members of the crowd attempted to continue singing “God Save the King.” The Irish tricolor flag was flown alongside the Union Jack, causing no end of frustration to those who saw these symbols as antithetical to each other. The smoke bombs caused chaos resulting in poppy wearers chasing non poppy wearers, with the Irish Civil Guard in hot pursuit. The day was also marked by the burning of a Union Jack by college students in front of Trinity College. ⁴⁰ The city of Cork also experienced violence during the 1925 Armistice Day events. A Celtic Cross memorial was the focus of an explosion. Originally built to honor the dead of the South African War, after the Great War it became the focus of Armistice activities. This was the second attack on this particular memorial and the Cork Examiner notes that, prior to the attempted destruction, an Armistice wreath was burned. ⁴¹ According to the Cork Examiner, 5,000 ex-servicemen participated in the Armistice parade that year; the newspaper noted that both Catholic and Protestant church services were held for the purpose of commemoration. ⁴²

Acts of violence toward commemorative acts and sites were frequent in the Irish Free State in the 1920s, yet not all resulted in such direct violence. During a 1926 Dublin memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral (Anglican Church of Ireland) a crowd of ardent republicans consisting of thirty Fianna Fáil scouts demonstrated outside. One young man argued, “We won’t recognize Imperial demonstrations. We respect these people’s church: but we won’t have Union Jacks flying.” ³ These comments indicate that the young man saw a separation between protesting the Protestant church itself and protesting the memorial service. He took offense specifically at the memorial service and the imperial symbolism of the Union Jack. The crowd marched outside blasting bugles and shouting “Up with the IRA!”. ⁴⁴ This public attempt by republicans to disrupt the memorial service was a less violent, yet revealing incident. Though the demonstrators may have seen themselves as protesting commemoration of the Great War that happened to take place in a Protestant church, ultimately they were protesting at an Anglican church holding a memorial service for the dead. This shows just how inextricably the war was bound up with the British Empire. The public sphere of remembrance was increasingly overshadowed by the violent rejection of perceived British imperialism.

The frequency of these types of protests at Protestant churches furthered the republican concept that the war and those who commemorated it were imperialists and/or Unionists. Clearly not all protesters drew a direct connection between their demonstration against imperial symbols and the Protestant church, as evident from the young man’s statement above. Even so, these confrontations were often violent or, at the very least, drew attention and made newspaper headlines. This brought attention to the protests and, for those republicans who did equate Protestantism with the empire and the war, furthered their own belief and helped

Even as acts of violence were occurring, in Cork in 1925 there were also attempts to remember the war in a more honorary manner. On the local level, sometimes small memorials or commemorative plaques were created for the fallen of that town. On Armistice Day 1925 the Cork Young Men’s Association unveiled a Memorial Room and tablet in Gregg Hall of the Incorporated Church of Ireland in honor of their members who fell in the Great War. In attendance were families of the deceased, members of the British Legion and the Independent Ex-Service Club. Fifty-nine men from the Young Men’s Association died in the war and it was noted that, “their names, which were engraved on the tablet would never be forgotten; they would be remembered with pride and gratitude (applause). They did not fail in their great fight for justice and right.” ⁴⁵ Even as contingents attempted to tear apart Armistice Day events, local groups sought to remember and commemorate. That this, like so many across the Free State, was a Protestant church event attended by the British Legion, an organization seen as the pinnacle of imperial vestiges by many, further intertwined war remembrance with supporters of the Empire.

Some businesses, predominantly Protestant owned, also attempted to memorialize the war. Guinness published a commemorative book, the Roll of Employees Who Served in His Majesty’s Naval, Military and Air Forces, 1914–1918 in 1920. This book listed each name of the 800 Guinness employees who served in the war, including the 100 who died. ⁴⁶ This book was published not for public consumption, but for the men who served and the families of the fallen. The intent of the volume was to provide some recognition for the men’s service: “To those who fell we render reverent homage; to those who survive we offer this small, but none the less sincere, expression of heartfelt gratitude.” ⁴⁷ The short introduction alludes to the perspective of the company on these men’s service, “who gave their services – and in many instances, their lives – for the defense of the Empire at the most perilous and critical period of its history.” ⁴⁸ It is important to note that this book was published during the War for Independence between Ireland and Britain, yet the Guinness Company was able to differentiate between the service of the soldiers and the contemporary conflict. Even so, the connection of the war as one for the protection of the British Empire was ingrained during the 1920s Irish Free State. The Congested Districts Board and the Bank of Ireland also produced commemorative books for the families of their employees. These publications were easier to justify for Protestant-owned businesses due to long-held connections between Protestants and the British. These commemorative books were small succor for the loss of a father, son, or brother but they were a gesture of support for those affeccted by the war.

Despite acts of violence and harassment towards those who strove to publicly cope with their grief, there were those who supported open remembrance that sought to distance remembrance from the imperial stigma. In response to the success of Cork’s Poppy Day, held on November 14, 1925, the Cork Examiner offered this assessment, “to the generous spirit of Cork’s citizens, who, recognizing the debt of gratitude which is owed to the erstwhile defenders of ours whom the times have treated harshly, gave freely and ungrudgingly, and in token wore the Flanders Poppy ‘In Remembrance’.” ⁴⁹ This article distanced the poppy and those who wore it from the imperial stigma, asserting that many people were buying them out of gratitude for the soldiers’ sacrifice rather than in support of Britain. A year later the newspaper furthered their argument concerning the true nature of the poppy as a symbol: “[...] the Flanders Poppy, chosen because [...] for us in these islands the Western Front was the centre of our interest, and much of that eight hundred mile battleline ran through Flanders fields, where in its season the poppy showed its brilliant red on every side – its emblem of the red carnage of war.” ⁵⁰ Others sought to reclassify the Great War in Ireland as one that deflected the darkness of German imperialism, arguing that “theirs was the task, and what greater or nobler under the heavens, to aid those who were answering the Prussian demand to rule the world with a spirit-stirring ‘No!’ that was thundered high above the dreadful diapason of Germany’s greatest guns.” ⁵¹ The rhetoric of anti-imperialism raises its head again, yet the author of the newspaper article attempts to shift the tone of his criticism towards German imperialism rather than British. This was an attempt, however unsuccessful in the long run, that at least tried to reorient discussion of the empire and the Great War toward the continent, rather than Ireland’s long, checkered past with Britain.

Violence against supporters of commemorations juxtaposed with this minority of supportive voices meant that republican sentiment prevailed in the fight over the role of the Great War. Even those who supported public remembrance did so for different reasons, some out of imperial allegiance, others out of satisfaction that German imperialism was defeated, and still others out of gratitude for the willing service of the soldiers. While no war engenders one unified popular memory, what is significant in the case of Ireland is just how violently the popular memory of the war was torn apart and how, within only a short time, the war was inextricably linked to the British Empire in a way that would preclude public commemorations devoid of the imperial stain. Ultimately, the decreasing interest in Armistice celebrations stemming from this violent disagreement over the role of the Great War worked in the government’s favor. In the opinion of many government leaders, the war was a British one, and they only bowed to public pressure in allowing commemorations. The public debate over the role of Great War remembrance was ultimately won by republican sentiment.

Personal Remembrance

Despite the problems in creating official or popular remembrance, those affected by the war found other ways to remember and commemorate because “families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric.” ⁵² Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering on the American Civil War gets at the core of the difficulties in commemorating the dead of a war when those dead seemingly have no positive place in the national narrative. She argues that regardless of which side the dead fought for, their relatives felt compelled to restore meaning to their deaths. This is similar to the Irish affected by the Great War. Personal grief and strife rarely follow political boundaries; many families affected by the war simply wanted to remember, and entered into the identity debate when accused of being imperialists. “Death without dignity, without decency, without identity imperiled the meaning of the life that preceded it,” and many affected by the war felt compelled to bestow some meaning upon that loss. ⁵³ When told that a relative’s sacrifice in the war was unworthy of commemoration because it was conducted in service to the British Army, it is reasonable to suggest that many Irish resented that the meaning they bestowed on death and service was stripped away. Approximately 50,000 Irish families were bereft of a member and 150,000 coped with an ex-serviceman’s survival. Personal remembrance endured despite the violence and ambivalence of the 1920s and found a way to express itself in a less public, more private manner that enabled distance from ardent republican accusation.

For some Irish, this personal remembrance began during the war, as Irishmen were felled across the Western Front. Diaries of the women left at home provide significant insight into how remembrance of the war was created on a personal level almost immediately. The diary scrapbook of Mrs. Emilie Harmsworth provides just such an insight. In lieu of a funeral and burial for the fallen, this scrapbook takes the place of a physical manifestation of mourning. This commemorative scrapbook contains only information relating to the death of her brother. It is a relatively thin book of about forty pages of letters and other documents. There is no inscription on the front cover and the documents immediately jump into information concerning Emilie’s brother. Clearly from the organization of the book it was intended for herself and her family, who would already be familiar with the background of the situation.

On October 24, 1914 Emilie received the devastating telegram that her brother Henry was killed in action at the Battle of Ypres. In the British Army since 1894, Henry was a captain in the Leinster regiment. Emilie and Henry were the youngest of thirteen children born to a barrister in Finglas, Co., Dublin, and were only a year apart in age. By the time of the Great War both had entered their early forties, yet Henry never married. It is significant to note that the War Office telegram, in addition to all major communication concerning Henry’s death, was sent to Emilie rather than their older siblings. That she was designated as his next of kin speaks to the closeness of their relationship. Although the death letter informed Emilie of the end of Henry’s life, it was the start of a much longer process for her, because, as Faust notes, for survivors “...death was literally endless.” ⁵⁴

This process began with three years of letter-writing for Emilie, starting almost immediately, when she wrote to members of Henry’s regiment for his affects and confirmation that he was, in fact, dead. For a month after the telegram, Emilie feverishly communicated with soldiers in the Leinster regiment, hopeful that her brother was instead a prisoner of war. After several letters confirming her brother’s death and burial, by early 1915 Emilie shifted her letter-writing to having Henry’s last possessions returned to her. ⁵⁵ From her actions it is clear that Emilie was emotionally traumatized by her brother’s violent end. It is not unusual that she was this fixated on the events surrounding his death. It is almost as though she believed that more information might equal understanding of what seemed to be a senseless death.

Each letter written to her concerning locating and mailing her brother’s possessions was carefully incorporated into the scrapbook. Each bit of evidence of Henry’s death, letters of condolence from his regiment, the death telegram, Emilie’s last postcard returned, and Henry’s last postcard were carefully included. Even the War Office listing that accompanied her brother’s possessions is included in this memento of her brother’s death. As Emilie’s letter-writing campaign shifted from determining if Henry was a POW, to gaining her brother’s possessions, to ascertaining the details of his last moments, she carefully kept the reply letters that indicate her ongoing desire to accumulate everything concerning Henry’s death. ⁵⁶ While Emilie created the scrapbook to preserve the memory of her brother’s death, it was also a physical means of passing on his memory to her children. They were old enough to have known their uncle but, given the closeness between Emilie and Henry, it is reasonable to suggest that she most likely worried that his absence from the rest of their lives would cause him to fade in their memories.

Like so many heartbroken women before her, by tracking down the physical remnants of Henry’s life, Emilie attempted to make his death real because lacking a body made acceptance difficult and denial easy. ⁵⁷ Funerals allow the bereaved a public and formal method of expressing their grief. ⁵⁸ In lieu of this act of mourning women like Emilie had to create their own methods of mourning, and in her case, the scrapbook about Henry’s death was that method. Like the survivors of the American Civil War, Emilie and thousands of Irish families had to integrate the experience of war death into their lives often without the benefit of traditional death ceremonies. ⁵⁹ The scrapbook of Henry’s death was his funeral, his tombstone to be revisited through the years in remembrance.

Like Emilie Harmsworth, ex-servicemen also struggled to remember a war they had survived while so many died. With the atmosphere of commemoration making public remembrance uncomfortable at best, and violent at worst, during the 1920s ex-servicemen increasingly found their own quieter moments of remembrance. These were devoid of disparaging comments accusing them of being imperialists. For some, like Bartholomew Hand, a veteran of Gallipoli, taking his son Paddy, to the War Memorial at Islandbridge every time they rode their bicycles in Dublin was a way to remember his service and his comrades, and to pass along that experience without the tumult of the organized events. On these bicycle rides Hand showed Paddy churchyards where his fellow Gallipoli veterans were buried. Paddy recalled that it was not until later in life that he realized this had been a pilgrimage for his father. ⁶⁰

Other ex-servicemen also had difficulty remembering the war and their fallen comrades in the politically tense atmosphere of the 1920s where attending commemorative events branded them as imperialists. Many of these men saw themselves as Irishmen and republicans and found this branding contemptible. Still, they desired a way to commemorate their experience. Like Bartholomew Hand, Bernard Flood found attending Armistice Day activities difficult, viewing them as bombastic events in honor of a horrible experience. However, Flood found his own way to remember his fallen friends. Every year Flood laid a wreath at the war memorial in Drogheda. ⁶¹ Though Flood refused to discuss his war service, he commemorated it with his own pilgrimage, devoid of the political tensions over imperial symbolism.

Some men braved Armistice Day events in spite of the imperialist slander they were often branded with. After the war Kieran White had to contend with this imperial slander from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) men. White confronted one these men and a fight ensued, in which White was the resounding victor. White later explained that he did it “so [he] could always hold [his] head high.” ⁶² He further challenged the expectations around him by making appearances at local Armistice Day events regardless of gossip. In an era where the IRA represented some of the staunchest republicans, White’s willingness to defend his British army service demonstrates that ex-servicemen were subjected to harassment based on the sole fact that they were former British soldiers rather than members of the IRA. Some ex-servicemen chose not to engage with this harassment or commemorations for fear of persecution. White chose to defend himself and to attend Armistice Day activities, knowing full well the tensions inherent in doing so.

Memoirs also represent personal forms of memory. In the 1920s Frank Laird wrote of the harrowing experience on Gallipoli in 1915. He wrote only for himself and had no intention of publishing his account. He wrote “the memory of D Company remains supreme as a possession forever and to meet an old D company man afterwards was always to find a friend.” ⁶³ It was after his death in 1925, as a result of wounds to his lungs sustained on Gallipoli, that his wife and sister organized his writings for publication. So while Laird’s writings were very personal and intended to memorialize his experience and fellow soldiers, the publication by his family was yet another expression of personal remembrance. These women clearly regarded the publication as a way to remember Laird.

Mementos of the war often provided ex-servicemen or their families a venue for remembrance. Sometimes a war medal, a last letter or postcard, the death telegram, or, in the case of Jeremiah Fitzgerald, a photograph, became a constant venue of commemoration. At sixteen Fitzgerald enlisted in the British Army and fought at the Battle of Mons and Ypres. During the war he came into contact with Father Francis Gleeson from the Dublin archdiocese. Father Gleeson was a cherished addition to the Royal Munster Fusiliers, Fitzgerald’s regiment, credited with organizing the men for a counterattack against the German forces after the officer corps had taken heavy losses. This act, unusual for a member of the religious corps, was regarded as one of the utmost bravery. Father Gleeson’s courage, held in high esteem by Fitzgerald, led him to keep a picture of the Father with him for the rest of his life. ⁶⁴ This was a positive and touching homage to a man he well regarded. A photograph, maintained for life, in this case is a clear memento of remembrance.

Others were tortured by their war experience and that of their families. William Grey of the Irish Guards enlisted following the death of his brother Edward at the Battle of Mons. Lacking specific details about Edward’s death, William enlisted to find out what happened. While in France William lost a length of bone on the Somme in 1917 and was discharged in 1918. Yet despite his emotional and physical losses, William did not uncover more about his brother’s fate. In the postwar period William agonized over Edward’s death and his failure to find out the facts. William was so tortured by Edward’s death that he frequently wept, saying, “Where is Eddie? What happened to him? Is he still alive?” ⁶⁵ Such concerns occupied his thoughts for the rest of his life, and William died not knowing his brother’s fate. This obsession is an example of the personal grief that could find no respite and was indifferent to the politically tense realm of governmental ambivalence and popular anger.

So while the government saw no use for the Great War in the Free State and the discordant voices in the public argued over the potential imperial nature of commemoration, families and ex-servicemen were left to cope and remember largely on their own. Though Armistice parades carried on through the 1930s, the 1920s marks a period of negotiation over the symbols of memory and ultimately the new state’s identity. Questions over identity and the Great War’s role were fought out in the public realm with the government taking a backseat. As acts like wearing a poppy or attending a parade increasingly became contentious, families and ex-servicemen turned inward; this is a trend that would continue in the 1930s. Arguments over the new Irish identity would ultimately rule in favor of republican sentiment and the sphere of popular remembrance of the war would almost completely dissipate by the 1940s. Then it was only at the level of personal remembrance that the war was commemorated, even in the smallest ways. Ultimately the disputes over commemorating the Great War were a matter of whether or not a war fought under Britain could be included in an independent Ireland. It could not be integrated, as evident from the violent opposition and the resulting focus on more private commemorations. While official frameworks faltered and popular memory tore itself apart over the question of imperialism and identity, personal memorialization distanced itself from overtly public displays of remembrance in order to avoid the taint of imperialism with which republicans had branded the war.

Mandy Townsley. Doctoral candidate at Washington State University in the United States. Currently she is preparing a dissertation focusing on the concurrent remembering and forgetting of the Great War in Ireland during the Free State period.

ENDNOTES

1 Neil Richardson, A Coward If I Return, A Hero If I Fall: Stories of Irishmen in World War I (Dublin: O’Brien Press Ltd, 2010), p. 44.

2 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

3 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the 20th Century (London: Yale University Press, 2006).

4 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the 20th Century (London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 4.

5 Winter, Remembering War, p. 4.

6 Winter, Remembering War, p. 4.

7 Winter, Remembering War, p. 7.

8 Rebecca Graff-McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), p. 77.

9 Graff-McRae, p. 76.

10 Graff-McRae, p. 93.

11 Graff-McRae, p. 85.

12 Graff-McRae, p. 85.

13 Graff-McRae, p. 86.

14 Graff-McRae, p. 90.

15 Graff-McRae, p. 44.

16 Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4.

17 Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War, p. 200–201.

18 Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War, p. 201

19 NAI, JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Chief Superintendent Edward O’Dufy of Ennis Garda Nov. 12, 1928.

20 NAI JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Letter from Coimisineir to the secretary of the Dept of Justice, Nov. 8, 1928.

21 The Flanders poppy was the designated symbol of Armistice Day across Europe, having grown on the Western Front.

22 NAI, JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Letter from the Chief Superintendent of the Garda to the Secretary of the Department of Justice, November 21, 1928.

23 Ewan Morris, Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in 20th Century Ireland

24 Morris, p. 136.

25 Catherin Reinhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 2.

26 Honesty, “Bread or Stones for Heroes. The Merrion Square Memorial-A Precedent from the Past,” January 16, 1926, 10–11.

27 Fergus D’Arcy, Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland since 1914 (Dublin: Government Stationary Office, OPW, 2007), p. 176.

28 Nuala Christina Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 91.

29 S. J. Fitzgerald, “Broken Soldier,” Honesty, January 30, 1926.

30 Honesty, “Hands off Merrion Square,” July 21, 1926, p. 12.

31 Honesty was noted by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean in Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth Century Ireland as a fairly progressive publication that addressed the taboo subjects of divorce, children borne out of wedlock and other issues of public morality (see page 116). It was a weekly journal published from 1925–1931 at which time it merged with the National Democrat to form Nationality.

32 Honesty, “Poppy Imperialism,” November 13, 1926, p. 9.

33 Honesty, “Poppy Imperialism,” November 13, 1926, p. 9.

34 John Brennan, “Poppy Dope for the Irish Workers,” Honesty, November 7, 1925, p. 5.

35 John Brennan, “Poppy Dope for the Irish Workers,” Honesty, November 7, 1925, p. 5.

36 John Brennan, “Poppy Dope for the Irish Workers,” Honesty, November 7, 1925, p. 5.

37 John Brennan, “Poppy Dope for the Irish Workers,” Honesty, November 7, 1925, p. 5.

38 Honesty, “An Open Letter to the Promoters of Poppy Day,” November 14, 1925, p. 6.

39 Honesty, “An Open Letter to the Promoters of Poppy Day,” November 14, 1925, p. 6.

40 Cork Examiner, “Smoke bombs thrown, Exciting Incidents in Dublin,” November 12, 1925, p. 7.

41 Cork Examiner, “Cork Explosion, Attempt to Blow Up a Monument,” November 16, 1925, p. 5.

42 Cork Examiner, “Cork Ex-Servicemen, Armistice Celebrations,” November 16, 1925, p. 8.

43 Cork Examiner, “Fianna Scouts, Demonstration Outside Dublin Cathedral,” November 9, 1926

44 Cork Examiner, “Fianna Scouts, Demonstration Outside Dublin Cathedral,” November 9, 1926.

45 Cork Examiner, “Cork Ceremony Unveiling a Memorial,” November 12, 1925, p. 7.

46 Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd, Roll of Employees Who Served in Hist Majesty’s Naval, Military and Air Forces, 1914–1918, (Dublin: Anthony Rowe Limited, 1920), p. 5.

47 Guinness, Son & Co Ltd, p. 5.

48 Guinness, Son & Co Ltd, p. 3.

49 Cork Examiner, “Cork’s Poppy Day,” November 17, 1925, p. 9.

50 Cork Examiner, “Cork’s Poppy Day,” November 12, 1926, p. 8.

51 Cork Examiner, “The Heroic Dead,” November 12,1924, p. 5.

52 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, (New York: Albert Knopf, 2008), XIV.

53 Faust, p. 268.

54 Faust, p. 144.

55 NLI, MS 46, 536 Papers in relation to Henry Telford Maffett, 2nd Batt Leinster Regiment.

56 NLI, MS 46, 536 Papers in relation to Henry Telford Maffett, 2nd Batt Leinster Regiment.

57 Faust, p. 146.

58 Faust, p. 153.

59 Faust, p. 267.

60 Philip Orr, Field of Bones: An Irish Division at Gallipoli (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2006), p. 220.

61 Richardson, p. 212.

62 Richardson, p. 215.

63 Frank Laird, Personal Experiences of the Great War (An Unfinished Manuscript), (Dublin: Eason and Son, Ltd, 1925), p. 48.

64 Richardson, p. 146–7.

65 Richardson, p. 169.

List of References

Primary Sources:

Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd. (1920) Roll of Employees Who Served in His Majesty’s Naval, Military and Air Forces, 1914–1918 (Dublin: Anthony Rowe Ltd).

Laird, Frank (1925) Personal Experiences of the Great War (An Unfinished Manuscript), (Dublin: Eason and Son Ltd).

National Archives Ireland:
NAI JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Letter from Coimisineir to the secretary of the Dept of Justice, Nov. 8, 1928.
NAI, JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Chief Superintendent Edward O’Dufy, of Ennis Garda Nov. 12, 1928.
NAI, JUS/8/684 Armistice celebrations and “Poppy Day” Department of Justice and Equality 1928–1936, Letter from the Chief Superintendent of the Garda to The Secretary of Dept of Justice, Nov. 21, 1928.

National Library Ireland:
NLI Papers in relation to Henry Telford Maffett, 2nd Batt Leinster Regiment: MS 46, 536.
NLI, Cork Examiner November 17, 1925, “Cork’s Poppy Day,” p. 9.
NLI, Cork Examiner November 12, 1925, “Cork Ceremony Unveiling a Memorial,” p. 7.
NLI Cork Examiner, November 12, 1925, “Smoke Bomb’s Thrown, Exciting Incidents in Dublin,” p. 7.
NLI, Cork Examiner, November 9, 1926, “Fianna Scouts, Demonstration Outside a Dublin Cathedral.”
NLI, Cork Examiner, November 12, 1926, “Cork’s Poppy Day,” p. 8.
NLI Cork Examiner, November 16, 1925, “Cork Explosion, Attempt to Blow Up Monument,” p. 5.
NLI Honesty, November 7, 1925, “Poppy Dope for Irish Workers,” p. 5.
NLI Honesty, November 14, 1925, “An Open Letter to the Promoters of Poppy Day,” p. 6.
NLI Honesty 16 January 1926, “Bread or Stone for Heroes. The Merrion Square Memorial – A Precedent from the Past,” p. 10–11.
NLI Honesty 30 January 1926, “The Broken Soldier.”
NLI Honesty 21 July 1926, “Hands off Merrion Square,” p. 12.
NLI Honesty, November 13, 1926, “Poppy Imperialism,” p. 9.

Secondary Sources:

D’Arcy, Fergus (2007) Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland since 1914, (Dublin: The Government Stationary Office, OPW).

Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick (2004) Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth Century Ireland, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

Faust, Drew Gilpin (2008) This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Albert Knopf).

Howe, Stephen (2000) Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Jeffery, Keith (2000) Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).

Johnson, Nuala Christina (2003) Ireland, the Great War, and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Johnstone, Tom (1992) Orange, Green and Khaki: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–18 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan).

Lee, J.J (1985) Ireland: 1912–1985 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).

Morris, Ewan (2005) Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in 20th Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press).

Mosse, George L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers, Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press).

Nora, Pierre (1992) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press).

Orr, Philip (2006) Fields of Bones: An Irish Division at Gallipoli (Dublin: Lilliput Press).

Reinhardt, Catherine (2006) Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (New York: Berghahn Books).

Richardson, Neil (2010) A Coward If I Return, A Hero If I Fall: Stories of Irishmen in World War I (Dublin: O’Brien Press Ltd).

Winter, Jay (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Winter, Jay (2006) Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the 20th Century (London: Yale University Press).

Winter, Jay (2008) “Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Errl and Ansgar Nünning (New York: Walter de Gruyter).

This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

ABSTRACT

By the winter of 1916–1917 most Varsovians likely believed their world was coming to an end, as their city was being visited by rapidly escalating incidences of starvation, disease, death, and conflict over increasingly scarce resources. Overshadowed by the greater horrors of a war yet to come, the existential crisis of Varsovians during the Great War has largely been forgotten. This article draws on various theoretical perspectives from the field of memory studies, particularly of the political and cultural structures which create silences, in an effort to explain why the First World War is likely to remain Warsaw’s forgotten war.

By the winter of 1916–1917 most Varsovians likely believed their world was coming to an end, as their city was being visited by rapidly escalating incidences of starvation, disease, death and conflict over increasingly scarce resources necessary to sustain human life. Were it not for copyright law, the title of Tadeusz Konwicki’s famous novel, A Minor Apocalypse, would serve as an apt heading for a study of the impact of the world’s first total war on the daily lives of the inhabitants of one of central Europe’s great cities. Overshadowed by the greater horrors of a war yet to come, the major apocalypse of devastation and destruction which characterized Warsaw’s amply-documented experience of the Second World War, the deprivation and desperation marking the existential crisis of Varsovians during the Great War has been largely forgotten. In Warsaw today, one is hard pressed to find any sign or site of public memory that might recall or reflect on the suffering of its citizens during the Great War, even as minor apocalypse. This is in stark contrast to the innumerable commemorative plaques, memorials and monuments devoted the Warsaw’s experience of the Second World War that dominates the city’s memory culture.

Not surprisingly, the historiography on Warsaw during the Great War is extremely limited, while that devoted to Poland more generally occupies little more than a shelf in the stacks of the Warsaw University library. Again, the contrast with the ever-expanding literature on the city’s experience of the Second World War could not be more striking. Moreover, in the traditional Polish national narrative that has dominated the existing sparse scholarship on the First World War, Warsaw figures little more than the major urban political setting in the larger story of the recovery of an independent Polish state (Królikowski and Oktabiński 2008; Wyszczelski 2008). One glance at the existing Polish-language secondary literature reveals an overwhelming preponderance of outdated titles on the military history of the war, devoted primarily to battles in which Polish legions participated, along with accounts tracing the activities of political parties and personalities during those years, especially those identified with the struggle for Polish independence. This has been supplemented in recent years by important German and English-language scholarship on the German occupation regime, which established its seat in Warsaw following the Russian evacuation of the city in August 1915 (Polsakiewicz 2009; Kaufman 2008). However, inasmuch as Warsaw appears in these studies, it does so mainly as a setting or target of German occupation policy, rather than a subject worthy of study in its own right.

The only real scholarly treatment of the experience of Warsaw’s inhabitants during the Great War is the one written by Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz, published nearly forty years ago (Dunin-Wąsowicz 1974). While Dunin’s focus was directed partly at the material condition of the population and the demographic consequences of the war, his short monograph is descriptive rather than analytical and interpretive, and lacks any kind of comparative perspective. Given the context in which it was written, Dunin’s book also ignored important issues related to class, ethnicity, gender, and culture that have inspired the best recent scholarship of the wartime experience of other capitals and major cities. Three years earlier, Dunin was also responsible for the publication of the only significant anthology of memoirs on the First World War in Warsaw, which informed and shaped his later study (Dunin-Wąsowicz 1971). The perspectives presented, as we shall see, were predominantly those of the male Polish intelligentsia and, as such, they focused more on wartime political developments than on everyday life.

Truth be told, literature on the urban experience of World War One in European metropolitan centers is still in its infancy. The pioneering volume of essays on the war’s social history in London, Paris and Berlin, Capital Cities at War, edited by Jan Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, was published only in 1997. This was followed by a second volume devoted to a cultural history of the war in the three capitals in 2007. In between, Belinda Davis, one of the contributors to the first Capital Cities volume, published Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000). Outside of the “Big Three” capital cities, David Rechter published an analysis of Jewish politics in wartime Vienna in 2001 (The Jews of Vienna and the First World War); but the real breakthrough came with Maureen Healy’s Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (2004) with its focus on shops, street corners, schools, pubs, and apartment buildings, everyday sites of conflict and “communal disintegration” on the home front as a consequence of growing hunger, violence, and the deterioration of social norms. More recently, Roger Chickering’s The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) adopted a comprehensive methodological approach to a micro-history that illuminates the wartime experience of a medium-sized frontline city.

If the literature on the social and cultural history of the Great War in major European urban settings has yet to extend much beyond London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna to places like Warsaw Budapest and Prague, there is even less to be said of studies of war-related memory and memorialization in these latter cities. In Warsaw’s specific instance, one basically needs to start from scratch. In its attempt to initiate such a discussion, this article draws on various theoretical perspectives in the field of memory studies, beginning with the classic “socio-constructivist” approach to memory originally developed in the 1920s and 1930s by Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1980), as well as its significant amendment by Jan Assmann to account for institutionalized commemoration through cultural evolution (Assmann 2011). It has also benefited from the considerable theoretical contributions of Pierre Nora and his collaborators, particularly those related to the “places” (or “realms”) of memory, an academic enterprise developed over several decades (Nora 2001 and 2007). Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the relationship of power to silences in memory, commemoration, and the production of historical narratives (Trouillot 1995) is especially relevant to this study, which focuses not only on what has been forgotten from Warsaw’s lived experience of the First World War, but also why it has been forgotten. At the same time, this article will contrast the forgotten war with the minimally memorialized one. Commemorating the social and economic experiences of non-combatants in wartime is a challenge in any case, but a monument constructed in 1925 in Vienna’s Central Cemetery depicting a grieving mother who was just as likely to have lost her child to malnutrition and disease as to battle during the war, suggests at least one possibility (Healy 2006, 54). Present-day Warsaw’s memory landscape of the First World War, as we shall see, contains nothing of the sort.

A Past Buried by Memory

Over twenty years ago, in his famous discussion of the recovery of memory of the Second World War, the late Tony Judt argued that in contrast with Western Europe, the problem in post-communist Eastern Europe was not a shortage of memory, but its reverse: “Here there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw. [...]” (Judt 1992, 99). For our purposes, Warsaw’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Grób Nieznanego Żołnierza) in present-day Piłsudski Square offers a case in point. In 1923, a group of anonymous Varsovians, inspired by state-sponsored monuments and commemorations originating in Britain and France, placed before the Saxon Palace, then the seat of the Ministry of War, a stone tablet commemorating the unknown Polish soldiers who had fallen during the years 1914–1920. This effort at commemoration already conflated two wars, the Great War of 1914–1918 and the Polish-Soviet War, not to mention the border wars and armed conflicts with Ukraine, Lithuania, and Germany. Soon enough, the initiative for an official tomb was taken up by the War Minister, General Władysław Sikorski; some forty battlefields were considered by the Ministry for removing and transporting to Warsaw the remains of an unknown soldier, and ultimately Lwów during the Polish-Ukrainian War in eastern Galicia was selected. On 2 November 1925 the ceremonial reburial was accompanied by a twenty-one gun salute and the lighting of the eternal flame by President Stanisław Wojciechowski (Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowy 2005).

The burying of memory of the Great War, by heaping on it more recent memory, had clearly begun. In fact, it was already in process before the appearance of the tablet of the anonymous citizens in front of the Saxon Palace. Without a doubt more unknown Polish soldiers had died on the battlefields of the Great War than in independent Poland’s subsequent border wars and war with Soviet Russia. Accompanying this process of historical production were more fundamental silences about the everyday experiences and sufferings of Warsaw’s non-combatants, who died in even greater numbers than did its soldiers fighting in various armies during the First World War.

Let us return for a moment to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Ministry’s decision to use the site of the tomb to honor those who had died fighting for an independent Poland since 1794 contained a silence about the majority of Poles who had died fighting in the Great War in the service of the imperial Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian armies. Of the thirteen battles of the years 1914–1918 currently inscribed on tablets at the site, all of them involve Polish legions and brigades which fought – presumably for the idea of independent Poland – under their own banner, but as part of other armies, particularly the Austro-Hungarian and French. If the reality of Pole fighting Pole (rather than for independence) for the greater part of First World War contradicted the emerging narrative, so too did the collaboration of Polish political elites with ruling regimes and occupation authorities, even if those elites were divided in their support of the Entente and Central Powers. This includes those rival political figures now credited through their combined efforts with the restoration and defense of an independent Poland, Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski, to whom statues, squares, and roundabouts have been dedicated in Warsaw.

In any event, the thirteen battles featured in Piłsudski Square are not representative of Polish combat during the First World War. However, they are overshadowed by twenty-four battles from late 1918 to 1920, the years of the Soviet-Polish war and of Poland’s border wars with its Ukrainian, German, and Lithuanian neighbors, when Polish soldiers were mobilized and fought for a Polish state. The Battle for Lwów, as mentioned, fits this category, and that one of its battlefields, Gródek Jagielloński, was selected over dozens of others for the removal of the remains of an unknown soldier was not accidental. General Sikorski had commanded troops there in fending off a bloody Ukrainian siege in January 1919 (Wapiński 1997, 471). The wars of 1918–1920, too, would be dwarfed after 1945 by the seventythree inscriptions commemorating land, naval, and air battles of World War II in which Polish forces fought, or, like Katyń, were buried. They would also be bracketed by fifty-two “battles” prior to 1914, including terrorist attacks on Russian troops during the revolutionary years of 1904–1908. Thus, of the 162 battles featured at Poland’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, approximately 45% are dedicated to World War II, 32% to the period 972 to 1914, 15% to the wars of 1918–1920, and only 8% to the years of the Great War – none of which, again, commemorate the thousands of Polish soldiers who died in the service of imperial armies. “Commemorations,” according to Trouillot, “impose a silence on events they ignore and fill that silence with narratives of power about the event they celebrate” (Trouillot 1995, 118). Whatever the intentions of the Warsaw citizens and their homemade tablet in 1923, the state-driven narrative at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is about the state, and those who fought and died for it for nearly a millennium. The tomb embraces accompanying themes of victimization and martyrdom, while excluding and trivializing what does not fit the conceptual framework which shaped its creation and evolution. The effective silencing of Polish military casualties during the Great War is not the result of conspiracy or even a political consensus. Instead, its roots are structural. This memory structure is also reflected in Warsaw’s larger monument landscape, which, in its few references to World War One, emphasizes its outcome – namely, independent Poland – at the expense of its actual course.

One can hardly expect military cemeteries, even symbolic ones like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to commemorate non-combatants of any era, yet as Katrin Van Cant has shown in her analysis of the nearly eighty open-air monuments erected in Warsaw between 1989 and 2009, the emphasis on the heroes of recent Polish military history and particularly those of World War II is similarly pronounced in the city’s streets (Van Cant 2009). ¹ 30% of these monuments are directly related to World War II, the majority of which commemorate the Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising. By comparison, only 6.5% of the new statues refer to World War I. “The most natural explanation for this,” according to Van Cant, “is that in Polish national memory, this war, despite the terrific human and material losses on the Polish side between 1914 and 1918, mainly has a positive connotation, because of its outcome” (Van Cant 2009, 98–99). In other words, the Great War does not easily fit the dominant narrative told by Warsaw’s monuments (any more than it did the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), “of Poland and the Polish people as victims of their history, nevertheless always displaying an indestructible will to fight for the existence and freedom of the nation” (Van Cant 2009, 113).

However, if we look closely at these monuments, we will see that there is more to the story. None of the monuments in Van Cant’s study refer to the Great War as it was experienced by non-combatants in Warsaw, but to its “positive outcome” for the Polish nation. That outcome had been a relatively taboo subject in the communist era, during which not a single monument was erected to commemorate a person or event that took place prior to 1945, with the exception of the monument to the Polish communist and founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzierżyński, in the city center. ² The 1998 Memorial to the Military Action of the Polish American is dedicated to Polish-American soldiers who fought under the command of General Józef Haller in France and against the Ukrainians in eastern Galicja in 1918. There is also the 2005 memorial to Father Jerzy Skorupka, a chaplain in the Polish army who died in 1920 during the war with the Soviets. In the 1990s three statues were dedicated to Piłsudski, the acknowledged “founder” of the interwar state, and a final one to Dmowski in 2006. Due to Dmowski’s primacy of place in the pantheon of Poland’s radical right, the monument and surrounding roundabout in his name proved the most controversial, despite Dmowski’s “positive” role at the Paris Peace Conference.

Also honored, in Skaryszewski Park, is Colonel Edward M. House, advisor to the American wartime president Woodrow Wilson and “friend of Poland,” whose 1932 statue was removed by the communists in 1951 and restored in 1991. ³ Wilson and Herbert Hoover are two other Americans connected to the First World War honored in the Polish capital. Tellingly, Wilson is honored with a plaza (plac in Polish) for making an independent Poland one of his Fourteen Points and an American war aim. Constructed in the interwar period as a major transportation hub, plac Wilsona and its name survived through and beyond the communist era. Meanwhile, Hoover, the head of the postwar American Relief Administration responsible for saving thousands of lives, is honored with a skwer (which really isn’t a square) adjacent to Warsaw’s most prominent boulevard, Krakowskie Przedmieście. Skwer Hoovera remains the only physical marker of Warsaw’s existential catastrophe of the Great War. In 1922 a monument “of gratitude to America” had been erected in Hoover’s honor that portrayed two women holding children who had presumably been saved from starvation as a result of American relief efforts, but by 1930 the sandstone sculpture was already falling apart and had to be removed from the square. It was subsequently destroyed during the Second World War. Under the communist regime, the square was stripped of Hoover’s name along with the pedestal for the original monument, but the square’s original name was restored in 1992, accompanied by a stone memorial. Plans to restore the original statue of 1922, however, have not been realized to date (Hoover Institution 2005).

Two groups, as Van Cant shows, are completely underrepresented in Warsaw’s public monuments – women and Jews. Three of Warsaw’s currently standing monuments commemorate Jews, all of them directly related to World War II and the Holocaust, of which only one was erected after 1989, in the distant suburb of Falenica. Women come off slightly better, with four new monuments since 1989, raising the total to seven, which honor “the fighting (and caring) woman and first-class patriot” (Van Cant 2009, 109). Primarily viewed as non-combatants during the First World War, no member of either group is remembered for this time period. More significant, however, is that Varsovians themselves are woefully underrepresented in the monuments and statues of their own city. Only a few local heroes have been honored with their own monument in Warsaw, and none of them are connected to the First World War. The emphasis is clearly on the national rather than the local. As Van Cant explains, “Warsaw as the capital fulfills the role of visiting card to the entire country” and the narrative delivered by its monuments is firmly focused on the later history of twentieth-century Poland “because it was extremely traumatic and [because] the scars inflicted by those events are still very fresh in the national consciousness” (Van Cant 2009, 112). However, the problem with remembering the First World War in Warsaw may run much deeper than a preoccupation with what came after it, but with how its “history” was recorded in the first place, in its very sources.

The Root of the Problem

The recording of history, Assmann argues, gives rise to “a dialectic of expansion and loss,” the latter “through forgetting and through suppression by way of manipulation, censorship, destruction, circumspection, and substitution” (Assmann 2011, 9). According to Trouillot, “[Sources] privilege some events over others, not always the ones privileged by the actors [...] Silences are inherent in the creation of sources, the first moment of historical production” (Troiullot 1995, 48 and 51). If, as Trouillot argues, “History is the fruit of power” and “in history, power begins at the source” (Trouillot 1995, xix and 29), what can be said of the sources available for an examination of the everyday lives of ordinary Varsovians during the First World War?

Let us begin with the archival evidence. Warsaw was under Russian rule during the first year of the war, until early August 1915, after which the city came under German occupation. The documents written and compiled by these political authorities obviously reflect a certain perspective, if not always from the top, then from various ranks of administrations concerned primarily with the preservation of order and control. Seldom do we hear from those who are the subjects of these documents, except when they offer resistance to or come under suspicion of the authorities. The most significant archival collection of Russian administration for the first year of the war, the files of the Warsaw Superintendent of Police, demonstrates a preoccupation with requisitioning and evacuation, along with ungrounded fears of Jewish espionage on behalf of the Central Powers. ⁴ No attention is paid to the steady deterioration of living standards caused by the war and requisitioning, at least in the documents available to us. And what is available to us represents only a small fraction of the written record, since many documents were deliberately destroyed during the Russian evacuation, while others were transported from Warsaw, never to return. Thus what have survived are fragments, such as the files of the requisitions commission for Warsaw’s fourth precinct, ⁵ which historians may take as representative – at least for a particular process.

The documents of the German occupation authorities in Warsaw fared no better, in fact, even worse. Again, there was purposeful destruction. The majority of the most important and secret documents from the Warsaw Governor-General’s office were burned in November 1918, as described in his memoirs by Bohdan Hutten-Czapski, the principal “Polish expert” of Governor-General Hans von Beseler (Dunin-Wąsowicz 1971, 478–479). Nevertheless, some 980 volumes were preserved, as were those of the Chief of Administration, and deposited in the Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN). Following the German invasion of 1939, these documents were packed off in their entirety to Potsdam, where they were destroyed in 1945 during the siege of Berlin. Meanwhile, fragments from Beseler’s personal collection had been preserved by his family and after World War II were transferred to the German federal archive in Koblenz. Some were reproduced on microfilm and photocopies and returned to Poland. Today, some thirty-six files as well as fragments from fifteen others, only a tiny fraction of what had once existed, are available to researchers at the Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD). ⁶ These consist primarily of Beseler’s reports, the quarterly reports of the Chief of Administration, and a small number of announcements, declarations, orders and petitions. The collection of the Imperial German Presidium of Police in Warsaw contains only a few random documents, which are practically useless, since it is difficult to place them in larger contexts.

Nonetheless, the available German documents, taken as a whole, reveal more about wartime living conditions in Warsaw than the Russian documents, perhaps because their political implications grew as the war continued. Official quarterly reports, for example, discuss the refugee crisis the Germans encountered upon entering Warsaw, high inflation and unemployment, threats to public health, tensions in Polish-Jewish relations, fraternization of German troops with Polish women, and especially issues related to the food supply – its control and distribution, and associated activities, such as smuggling. Appendices to the reports of Chief of Administration contain particularly valuable statistical data on various diseases and levels of employment. What is striking, however, is the absence of references in these documents to the political situation in Warsaw, perhaps because these were precisely the kinds of documents that were purposefully burned in November 1918.

In an early report from the Fall of 1915, Beseler claimed that one of his main tasks was “to contain or deflect political propaganda” for independence. ⁷ To do so, the German occupation regime first permitted cultural expressions of Polish (and Jewish) national sentiment and, as the war continued and the Russians failed to sue for peace, the establishment of quasi-state institutions and self-governing bodies such as municipal councils. Among the former was the Provisional State Council (Tymczasowy Rada Stanu – TRS), a consultative body formed to work with German and Austrian authorities to design state institutions in the occupied Polish Kingdom. Before it was replaced by one of those institutions (the Regency Council), the TRS lasted some seven and a half months, from 14 January to 31 August 1917. It is estimated that over 25% of its archive survived the Second World War, ⁸ a far higher percentage than that of its successor, both of which are located in Warsaw’s AAN. Whereas one is hard-pressed to find references to the political situation in the German documentary collections housed in Warsaw-based repositories, this appears to have been a primary concern of the TRS, whose files reveal a careful monitoring of the Warsaw press, both legal and underground, thanks to which we have some evidence of incidents of unrest – food riots and student strikes in May 1917, demonstrations and political vandalism following the arrest of Józef Piłsudski in July 1917. However, such documents afford us only fleeting and fragmentary glimpses into the lives of ordinary Varsovians during the First World War, and these through lenses trained on other objects.

The same could be said of the collections of private papers of individuals who served in these “Polish” institutions which are also housed at AAN, principal among them the Dzierzbicki and Drzewiecki papers. ⁹I mention these two in particular because of the positions held during the war by Stanisław Dzierzbicki and Piotr Drzewiecki, respectively. A civil engineer by training, Stanisław Dzierzbicki was a dedicated public servant who, during the war years, became involved in the provision of relief and assistance to victims of the war, most significantly as the president of the Main Welfare Organization (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza – RGO), after which he became a member of the Provisional State Council and Minister of Agriculture under the Regency Council. To judge by his papers, Dzierzbicki was concerned primarily with issues related to funding, provisioning, and the distribution of assistance before 1917 and, as his functions changed in that year, by outbursts of unrest in Warsaw’s streets and universities. Piotr Drzewiecki, who had presided over a number of industrial and commercial boards before the war, was one of the founding members of the Warsaw Citizens’ Committee, an NGO formed with imperial Russian approval in August 1914 in order to deal with war’s side-effects, economic or otherwise, on the Warsaw home front. As the war continued and the needs of Warsaw’s inhabitants mounted, the Citizens’ Committee became the main welfare agency in the city. Following the Russian evacuation, its executive branch was transformed into the Warsaw city administration, where Drzewiecki served as vice president. Drzewiecki’s papers for this period reveal the perspective of an administrator dealing with German demands for labor, unwelcome German supervision of the city’s judicial and educational institutions, and a strained city budget. They also reveal a National Democrat concerned with electoral politics, in this case, the newly formed Warsaw City Council. In both the Dzierzbicki and Drzewiecki papers, with the focus on the administrative and political, only side-glances are offered toward the quotidian struggles of those whom they presumably served.

The best view of these struggles from the archives, at least for the first twenty-one months of the war, is contained in the minutes of meetings of the Warsaw Citizens’ Committee and its presidium, which are available in the Warsaw city archive. ¹⁰ The minutes of these meetings are quite detailed and demonstrate how the committee’s responsibilities expanded in conjunction with the needs of the city and its population. From concerns about the city’s unemployed, waves of refugees, energy supplies, and setting price ceilings in the early months of the war, to the provisioning of public kitchens, food rationing, the spread of infectious diseases and drafting an electoral ordinance during the first year of the German occupation, the challenges facing the Committee are well documented. However, while the Committee’s discussions of the reports of its sections and sub-sections appear in the minutes, they are abbreviated, while the reports themselves – which would provide an even closer view of everyday life on the ground – are not available. Thus, what we often see is in the aggregate – the number of refugees sheltered, or meals served in public kitchens over a particular period – instead of the specific. Far less complete are the archives of the Committee’s successor organizations, the Warsaw city administration and the Warsaw city council, although what is available provides evidence of financially strapped city institutions trying to make ends meet while dealing with an implacable occupier and growing urban unrest, including a strike of municipal employees. ¹¹ Basically, the documentary evidence is far more robust for the first year of the war, when Warsaw remained under Russian rule and before the Warsaw Citizens Committee and its sections were transformed into organs of self-government, than in the last three-plus years when the general economic crisis experienced by the city’s inhabitants was gradually transformed into an existential catastrophe.

Indeed, a similar imbalance can be noted in a reading of the mass circulation press, the principal chronicler of everyday life. The difference can be explained by censorship, whose constraints were fewer under the Russians than the Germans. In part, this was because Warsaw’s Polish-language daily press, by and large, was pro-Russian, as were the National Democrats, who possessed the strongest political organization in the city. Greater press freedom was also a consequence of the Revolution of 1905, which led to a veritable explosion of press titles in Warsaw, including those in Yiddish and Hebrew. Compared to its Polish counterpart, the Jewish-language(s) press in Warsaw was viewed with far greater suspicion by the Russian government during the first year of the war, to the point that it was shut down entirely as the Russians prepared their evacuation from Warsaw in the summer of 1915 (Zieliński 2005, 116). While reporting on the situation at the front, especially as it drew closer to Warsaw in the fall of 1914 and again in the summer of 1915, was largely taboo, the Polish press remained free to express itself on practically everything else, including the now perennial “Jewish question.” More to the point, through featured sections titled “Z miasta” (“From the City”), dailies such as the long-standing Kurjer Warszawski, with its close ties to the city’s Polish political and cultural elites, as well as Nowa Gazeta, representative of Warsaw’s assimilated and liberal Jewish elite, were able to offer relatively clear snapshots of how the city’s residents sought to negotiate the hardships of the war’s first year, although the accompanying commentary reflected the biases of journalists and editors.

This situation was reversed under the Germans, who were well aware of the politically destabilizing effects of the ever-deteriorating living conditions in the city, to which their policies of requisitioning and control of resources were the main contributing factor. Thus, reporting on those conditions and their consequences became increasingly taboo, particularly following the establishment of preventive censorship on 25 September 1915, which specifically targeted “all rumors, news and commentaries about the decisions of the occupation authorities, whether civil or military” and “all articles about incidents, accidents, epidemics and poverty.” ¹² While some circumvention of the censor was possible, as I have discussed in another article devoted to a discussion of Warsaw’s “barefoot” phenomenon (Blobaum 2013), the issues had to appear politically innocuous to avoid scrutiny. One will therefore find no mention of Warsaw’s major food riots of June 1916 and May 1917 in the officially registered Warsaw daily press – a most dramatic instance of silencing. What we know about these riots come from other sources – a list of ransacked grocery stories subsidized and administered by the city that Nowa Gazeta and other legal dailies intended but were never able to publish, as well as accounts in the clandestine press. Interestingly, even in a media outlet whose self-proclaimed goal to provide information that could not otherwise appear in the Warsaw press, news about the May 1917 riots appeared in its back pages, this despite the fact that looting had lasted an entire day. ¹³

As if in compensation, the German occupation authorities were more than willing to permit public expressions of Polish national pride in commemorations, the most significant being the celebrations of the anniversary of the Constitution of 3 May 1791, and in the press commentary leading up them. Particularly welcome was the discussion of events in Polish history that had an anti-Russian flavor, such as the 1830 and 1863 uprisings. There was another form of venting, however, that proved even more valuable to the Germans. After an initial attempt to put a lid on public expressions of Polish-Jewish hostility in order to prevent disturbances in the rear of their armies, as the war continued the German authorities gradually began to lift it in order to release steam from frustrations built up by their own policies. By the end of the war, the vitriol in Polish-Jewish press polemics in Warsaw matched that of the last years of Russian rule.

The point here is that, over the course of the war, as everyday struggles in Warsaw literally became a matter of life and death, the Warsaw press moved away from these struggles in its coverage. One might blame the German censor in the case of the legal press, but the issues of malnutrition and starvation were not a priority of the uncensored “independent” press, even when the collapse of living standards resulted in food rioting.

Memoirs are often taken by historians as a more suspect type of primary source, even if they place too much faith in the value of archives and contemporary press accounts. However, it is important to raise questions about which memoirs get published and with what objective. A look at those compiled by Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz in his anthology for Warsaw during the First World War is instructive here. As mentioned, despite its claim to represent a cross-section of perspectives, the anthology displays a clear bias in favor of political activists and journalists from the male Polish intelligentsia. Bogdan Hutten-Czapski, a landed Polish aristocrat close to the Kaiser who arrived in Warsaw as a member of the entourage of Governor- General Beseler, is the sole voice of the German occupation authorities in the anthology, while the perspective of the of the imperial Russian regime lacks a single representative. Despite Warsaw’s pronounced demographic feminization during the war, excerpts were taken from the writings of only two women, Maria Kamińska and Władysława Głodowska-Sampolska, activists with ties to the radical left, ancestors of the communist regime which ruled Poland at the time of the anthology’s publication in 1971, but who were politically insignificant during the war years. Further exaggeration of the role of proto-communist formations is evident through the inclusion of memoirs written by male activists Bronisław Fijałek and Aleksander Tomaszewski. The anthology also appeared three years after that regime’s 1968 “anti-Zionist” campaign, a purging of Jews from the state bureaucracy, party apparatus, and positions of prominence in Polish society. Excerpts from the memoirs of two assimilated Jews – those of Kamińska (whose real name was Maria Eiger) and the journalist Aleksander Kraushar – do make an appearance, but their authors’ ancestry remains unacknowledged by the editor. Wartime Warsaw thus appears in the anthology as ethno-religiously homogeneous, and without a single mention of Polish-Jewish relations, the defining issue of local politics following municipal council elections in 1916.

This is not to suggest that Dunin-Wąsowicz’s anthology is worthless for the study of everyday life in Warsaw from 1914 to 1918. As mentioned, Dunin’s book on Warsaw during the First World War pays a great deal of attention to material conditions and their deterioration, and his anthology does provide space for the memoirs of social workers. One of the most revealing comes from Franciszek Herbst, who served as secretary of the Labor Section of the Warsaw Citizens Committee and continued to serve the city administration following the Committee’s dissolution. Yet even Herbst writes that the distribution efforts of the Citizens Committee were exclusively carried out by women volunteers (Dunin-Wąsowicz 1971, 306). If women were in the front lines in the distribution of aid during the war, the direct recipients of this aid, first and foremost, were also women. These two categories of women are absolutely crucial to understanding the experience of war in Poland’s once and future capital, but their voices are nowhere to be found in Dunin’s anthology. Nor will we find them in the works of professional historians.

History and Memory

Pierre Nora has succinctly defined historiography as “the scholarly construction of memory” (Nora 2001, xx). Michel-Rolph Truillot ties that “scholarly construction” to power and to “the size, the relevance, and the overwhelming complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia” (Trouillot 1995, 19). “The value of a historical product,” he argues further, “cannot be debated without taking into account the context of its production and the context of its consumption” (Trouillot 1995, 146). In this sense, history – as the story about what happened – becomes part of continuous myth-making and sanitization processes that include the creation of sources, the social construction of memory itself, and its cultural organization, commodification, and institutionalization through ceremony and commemoration. Despite professional historians’ belief in scientific history and an ability to set aside their own preferences and stakes, only broad and profound transformations of consciousness and identity can create new ways of understanding the past – for example, of the kind in France identified by Nora which gave birth to memory studies.

In Poland, while the beginnings of such transformations may be perceptible, national consciousness and identity are still largely shaped by feelings of victimization and the “struggle” for independence which, in turn, have provided the conceptual framework that makes some narratives rather than others powerful enough to pass as accepted history. Except for its outcome, as we have already noted, the First World War ill fits this framework and the everyday travails of non-combatants on the Warsaw “home front” during the war even less so. To demonstrate this point more specifically and the way that “history” can be made to fit an established and accepted framework, let us return for a moment to how women and their wartime roles are featured in the few studies devoted to them.

As mentioned previously, Warsaw’s women, broadly speaking, can be divided into two categories. The first, to borrow Belinda Davis’s term used throughout her study of wartime Berlin, were the “women of lesser means” (Davis 2000), who, in the case of Warsaw as well as Berlin, comprised the vast majority of women. In Warsaw this included the laboring poor, but more significantly the female unemployed, particularly former domestic servants, who before the war comprised the largest number of employed women in Warsaw and whose jobs were lost due to the evacuation of Russian officials and the growing impoverishment of middle-class and intelligentsia households. Joining these “women of lesser means” were single mothers and wives left temporarily or permanently without male partners due to wartime circumstances of conscription and labor out-migration. Among the most publicly and politically visible women in this category were the rezerwistki, soldiers’ wives whose sense of entitlement was publicly acknowledged – that is, until it came to be perceived as a threat to the existing social order. Finally, there were the “women of loose morality,” as they were referred to in the press, occasional prostitutes whose numbers increased significantly in the midst of the city’s economic destitution.

The second kind of women in Warsaw were similar to those identified by Maureen Healy in her study of wartime Vienna, defined as a vocal minority among affluent women who spoke on behalf of “women” in general, including “women of lesser means” (Healy 2004, 167). Although the numbers of women of affluence, if anything, declined in Warsaw during the war years as economic misery traveled up the social hierarchy, the size of the minority speaking on behalf of women grew noticeably as a small number of prewar feminists of conviction were joined by a much larger group of feminists of wartime circumstance. The latter can be defined as the female members of prewar social and cultural conservative elites whose perspectives and, ultimately, demands were shaped by their wartime experience in philanthropy, social work, and public assistance. These women, conservative in their political outlook but well aware of the importance of their wartime social roles, made and ultimately won the case for women’s suffrage and equal political rights by the end of 1918.

Neither of these two groups of women, however, is featured in the scant literature on women during the First World War. Instead, the focus has been placed – or misplaced – on those women who served as volunteers in auxiliary military organizations, particularly those which supported the Polish Legions. These organizations, with a combined 16,000 members by the middle of 1916, were also the largest wartime women’s associations on Polish lands. As noted by Joanna Dufrat, their agenda included the promotion of equal political rights (Dufrat 2008), but to assign the achievement of those rights to these organizations is to exaggerate. To claim, moreover, that “the most significant role” played by Polish women during the war years was their work in auxiliary organizations (Kuźma-Markowska 2011, 267), trivializes and even silences the wartime home front roles played by the majority of women, as consumers in dire need of philanthropy and public assistance and social workers attempting to meet that need, especially in urban centers like Warsaw.

The fact that women are featured at all in the Polish narrative of the First World War – even as patriots contributing to the recovery of an independent state – is the outcome of a slight alteration in the conceptual framework resulting from the introduction of women and gender studies to Polish universities since 1989. An even more fundamental change has occurred in the discussion of Polish-Jewish relations, starting in the late 1980s and accelerating with the publication of Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross in Polish (Gross 2000). Over the last couple of decades there has been a great deal of new research into the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in Poland (Blobaum 2005) and on the parallel and interrelated trajectories of modern Polish and Jewish politics (Porter 2000 and Ury 2012). For the period of the First World War, the work of Konrad Zieliński particularly stands out (Zieliński 2005).

There is a danger, however, in reducing the histories of Poles and Jews in the modern era to their “relations,” to the emergence of radical nationalism and anti-Semitism, and more generally to the rise of mass political organizations. I raise this issue as someone who recently has become conscious of his own participation in this distortion and, therefore, in the neglect of other possible narratives. As Assmann reminds us, the past is not something that can be “preserved,” but is “continually subject to processes of reorganization according to changes taking place in the frame of reference of each successive present” (Assmann 2011, 27). In this instance, professional historians have become prisoners not only of a fashionable historiographical trend focused on the rise of modern and competing nationalisms, but also of sources that confirm their own predispositions, in particular the writings and memoirs of political activists and intellectuals, as well as the articles and columns which characterized a highly politicized Polish and Jewish press. In the process, we have taken evidence of political mobilization, the development of national identities, and growing antagonism between Poles and Jews to shape what is becoming an accepted narrative, while ignoring evidence to the contrary: namely, that majorities of Poles and Jews, even in Warsaw’s hothouse, were not politically mobilized, and that the numbers of those who were not only waxed, but also waned.

During the First World War, only a minority of eligible voters participated in Warsaw’s first-ever municipal elections in 1916. What then can be said of the even larger numbers of Poles and Jews, especially women, who were not embraced by the limited suffrage in the electoral ordinance approved by the German occupation authorities earlier that year? In the end, identity politics were likely of secondary or even tertiary concern to the majority of Poles and Jews who by circumstance should have been, and were, focused on pursuing strategies of surviving the wartime existential crisis, even if it came at the other’s expense and, truth be told, at the expense of fellow co-nationals.

According to Trouillot, historians, whether amateur or professional, are full participants in the processes of historical production, of shaping and reshaping of conceptual frames of reference that determine what is thinkable and unthinkable, and of making the unthinkable a “non-event” (Trouillot 1995, 98). Warsaw’s two major food riots during the First World War, clear expressions of concerns at the street level, have thus become non-events in conceptual frameworks that contain space only for events of political and national significance. Recovery of the lived experiences of ordinary Varsovians during the war and the capacity of such a narrative to pass as accepted history require a fundamentally different, if not directly competing, framework. The odds, at least in the short term, are against its emergence.

Conclusion: An Imagined Centennial

The hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War is rapidly approaching. It will be interesting to see how this event will be commemorated in Warsaw, or if it will be treated as a “non-event.” Given the layered structures of memory, commemoration, and historical production, one can imagine possible scenarios. As a consequence of the war’s “positive” outcome in November 1918 – the restoration of an independent Polish state – the centennial of August 1914 may not pass by entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a wreath will be laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in honor of those Poles who died as members of the Polish legions, to the neglect of those who did not. Perhaps honorable mention will be made of women who served in auxiliary organizations supporting the legionnaires. One might expect to hear speeches of politicians in front of Warsaw’s two monuments to Józef Piłsudski, likely in competing claims to the founder’s legacy. This expected accentuation on the end point of independence may not be entirely exclusive, however. Perhaps newspapers and magazines will publish articles by local, non-academic historians focusing on the nuts and bolts of the city’s history to include stories from the war’s first days and weeks – of a city in motion, of the run on banks, of panic-buying, of the shortage of coin to make spare change, of the prohibition on sales of alcohol.

Such stories, if they do appear, will not challenge the existing conceptual framework. No mention will be made of the thousands of young men who volunteered to serve in the Russian army, or of the support of Warsaw’s political elites for the generally popular cause of Russian arms. No mention will made of the thousands of young women who volunteered to serve on the home front as nurses and nurses’ aides in treating the Russian wounded. No mention will be made of the Russian government’s financial support for and fruitful working relationship with the Warsaw Citizens’ Committee in managing the immediate economic consequences of the war’s first weeks and months. Mention might be made of Warsaw’s most popular political figure during the war’s first year – Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, co-founder and presiding officer of the Warsaw Citizens’ Committee and the city’s first president following the Russian evacuation – but a proposal to honor his contributions to the city’s well-being and his efforts to fend off existential disaster is extremely unlikely. After all, in November 1918, Piłsudski technically seized power from the Regency Council, one of the quasi-state institutions created by the German occupier and headed by Lubomirski who had “collaborated” with not one, but two imperial regimes. To date the sole tribute to the well-meaning prince’s activities during the war remains the publication of the diary of his devoted wife (Pajewski 2002).

Just as Lubomirski’s profile fails to fit the statuary mold of hero and martyr, so too does that of Dr. Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka. Trained in France as a specialist in tuberculosis Budzińska-Tylicka began practicing in Warsaw in 1908, where she became an early pioneer in the area of women’s health and formed part of the leadership core of the prewar feminist movement that focused on equal rights. During the war years, Budzińska-Tylicka organized courses in the delivery of first aid and organized a field hospital for treatment of the wounded, while also continuing her advocacy of women’s rights. In September 1917, she presided over the Polish Women’s Congress, whose most prominent delegates came from the fifteen organizations that comprised the Union of Polish Women’s Associations. Following the meeting of this “small women’s parliament,” as Nowa Gazeta called it at the time, ¹⁴ Budzińska-Tylicka and the executive committee of the Women’s Congress intensively lobbied the Warsaw city council and administration to revise the electoral ordinance of the previous year, while organizing mass meetings to pressure male elites into granting voting rights at both the state and local level. Following the war and the death of her son from the Great Influenza, and with the success of the suffrage campaign behind her, Budzińska-Tylicka became a prominent spokesperson for planned parenthood and birth control. Budzińska-Tylicka’s support for “conscious motherhood,” including abortion, was condemned at the time by Poland’s interwar Roman Catholic Church and would be condemned now by its more powerful and more politically influential contemporary version. Moreover, Budzińska-Tylicka opposed the Sanacja regime established by Józef Piłsudski following his coup d’état of 1926 (Sierakowska 2006, 80). Thus, despite Budzińska-Tylicka’s prominent place in the successful women’s suffrage movement of the war years, we should not expect to see a public monument constructed in her honor any time soon. A more likely candidate would be the better known “national feminist” Iza Moszczeńska, who, as founder of the Women’s Military Auxiliary League sought to merge women’s desires to participate in the struggle for independence with their emancipatory aspirations as early as 1913 (Dufrat 2008, 118). Moreover, Moszczeńska was an early twentieth-century defender of the more traditional notions of “Polish” motherhood (Blobaum 2002, 807), and thus better fits existing conceptual structures for commemorating women in Warsaw. That said, the odds against a Moszczeńska monument are long as well, given the general paucity of public statues devoted to women in the Polish capital.

There remains the monument of the desperate mother and her two hungry children which once stood prominently on Hoover Square – to my mind, the most symbolic representation of everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War. The planned reconstruction and resurrection of that monument, originally announced in 2006, has been inexplicably delayed. I can imagine no better moment than the centennial of August 1914 for a ceremonial unveiling of that statue, not necessarily “in gratitude to America” (the inscription on the original statue), but in remembrance of a forgotten war and its horrific impact on the lives of the majority of city’s non-combatants. After all, a conceptual framework once existed to accommodate that statue in the heart of Warsaw. The question is whether one exists in the present.

Robert. Blobaum. In Eberly Family Professor of European History and Director of the Transatlantic MA Program in East-Central European Studies at West Virginia University. His books include Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907, which was awarded the Oskar Halecki Prize, and Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, both published by Cornell University Press. He is currently working on a book devoted to everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War.

ENDNOTES

1 Being interested primarily in the “street scene,” Van Cant’s study deliberately excludes cemeteries.

2 The monument to “bloody Feliks,” whose hands were repeatedly painted red by politically-inspired vandals in the 1980s, was removed immediately after the 1989 revolution.

3 This according to the inscription on the base of the statue.

4 Archiwum Państwowe m. st.Warszawy (APW), Zarząd Oberpolicmajstra Warszawskiego (ZOW).

5 APW, Komisja Rewizyjna IV Rejonu Miasta Warszawy (KR).

6 These are available in three collections: Cesarsko-Niemieckie Generał- Gubernatorstwo w Warszawie (CNGGW), Szef Administracji przy Generał-Gubernatorstwie w Warszawie (SAGGW), and Cesarsko-Niemieckie Prezydium Policji w Warszawie (CNNPP).

7 AGAD CNGGW 1, Beseler to the Kaiser, 23 October 1915.

8 Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Tymczasowa Rada Stanu w Warszawie (TRS), description of collection.

9 AAN, Akta Stanisława Dzierzbickiego (ASD) and Akta [Piotra, Ludwika i Wiesława] Drzewieckich (AD). The Drzewiecki collection, in addition to the papers of Piotr Drzewiecki, also contains those of his brother Ludwik and Ludwik’s son, Wiesław.

10 APW, Komitet Obywatelski Miasta Warszawy (KOMW), 1914–1916.

11 APW, Zarząd Miejski m. st. Warszawy (ZMW), 1915–1919.

121 APW, Redakcja Nowej Gazety (RNG) 1, Circular #12 of the Press Department of the Chief of Administration under the Warsaw Governor-General, 6 October 1915. This collection of documents from the editorial board of Nowa Gazeta contains communications and announcements from the German occupation authorities and offers a rare perspective on how one Warsaw daily dealt with German censorship.

13 See “Rozruchy żywnościowe wybuchły w Warszawie,” Komunikat Informacyjny 1 (9–11 May 1917), p. 4. The same could be said for Rząd i Wojsko, an “independent” press organ published by Piłsudski’s supporters; see “Głód i polityka” and “Rozruchy w Warszawie,” Rząd i Wojsko 18 (20 May 1917), pp. 7, 8.

14 “Po zjeździe kobiet”, Nowa Gazeta 446 (10 September 1917), p. 1.

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This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

ABSTRACT

The Stadtfriedhof Tübingen has three burial sites connected to wars. The Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71 and the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 contain and commemorate soldiers who died in Tübingen hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. The Gräberfeld X is a burial and memorial site for the mortal remains of victims of Nazi rule whose bodies were used in the university’s anatomical institute. Analyzing and interpreting these three local war memorial grave sites and putting them into the larger national context of remembrance shows how the German memory culture of wars has changed over time from warriors to victims.

Introduction

The town of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, in southwestern Germany has one of the country’s oldest universities, the Eberhard Karls Universität, founded in 1477. A great number of its professors have been interred in the Stadtfriedhof, the city’s central cemetery, dating to the first half of the 19th century and located near many of university’s academic and medical buildings. Moreover, this graveyard is particularly known for the burial sites of famous Tübingers such as the German Romantic authors Ludwig Uhland and Friedrich Hölderlin, as well as Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, third chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, there are also burial plots that commemorate the casualties of three wars that have shaped German history in the past 140 years. While the Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71 and the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 commemorate and hold the remains of soldiers who died in Tübingen hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, respectively, the Gräberfeld X is a burial and memorial site for the mortal remains of victims of Nazi rule whose bodies were used in the anatomical institute of the university’s medical faculty. What can these commemorative graves, whose only commonalities, it seems are their close vicinity in the same cemetery and the wreaths dedicated to the victims of war laid down each November on Volkstrauertrag (German Memorial Day), tell us about the memory of the aforementioned armed conflicts in Germany history? By analyzing and interpreting these three local war memorial grave sites and their architecture and putting them into the larger national context of remembrance, this article aims to show how the memory culture of Germany’s last three European and interconnected wars and the focus of commemoration has changed over time, from warriors to victims, and what this can tell us about the meaning attached to these conflicts.

Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71

The defeat of France by a Prussian-led coalition of German principalities in the War of 1870 resulted in the creation of the Reich, or German Empire, in 1871 – the first unified German nation. While its emperor was the Prussian king, the Reich itself was a federation made up of the various German principalities, among them the Kingdom of Württemberg. The latter’s university town of Tübingen on the Neckar had, during the war, housed wounded German soldiers from various contingents in its hospitals. A number of these soldiers died, and thereby constituted a problem: How to commemorate them (Hoffmann-Curtius 1986, 45)?

The Napoleonic Wars sixty years earlier had seen a change in how the war dead were remembered. After earlier armed conflicts, it had been princes or generals who received post-war monuments and equestrian statues to celebrate their leadership and battlefield heroism. With the mass armies and accompanying mass casualties of the armed conflicts in the early industrial age, the common soldier began to be the focus of remembering a war, especially the dead who had sacrificed their lives on the altar of the evolving notion of a “nation.” This particularly found expression in architecture: the names of fallen soldiers of a community were engraved in public plaques, often on church walls. By doing this, a community commemorated the loss of its sons and thereby showed its gratitude for their sacrifice for posterity (Rieth 1967, 11–12; Vogt 1993, 16ff.).

On the other side of the Atlantic, it was the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 with its approximately 620,000 casualties that spawned an outpouring of monuments to the memory of its casualties. Often in the form of a statue of a common soldier, these memorials, erected on battlefields and town commons, commemorated the heroism of the rank and file and the part that they had played, at least in the eyes of Northerners, in saving the Union, or nation, as well as remembering the ultimate sacrifice of the fallen. Therefore, battlefield heroism and death, as well as the concept of the nation, were entwined in the North’s memorial culture after the war. National cemeteries were built on important battlefields to inter and commemorate those who fell far from their homes. (Piehler 2010, 224–227).

The situation in Tübingen after 1871 was both different and similar to that in America. The war between the Union and the Confederacy was a civil war, while the Franco-Prussian War was not. ¹ Both wars, however, were nation-building conflicts: the outcome of the American Civil War was that the United States would, after the defeat of the slave-holding South, be based on the North’s principles of industrialized free labor, while the War of 1870 resulted in the unification of Germany under Prussian domination. Although the German princes had fought alongside each other against France, the Reich’s political map was still characterized by the regional nature of various principalities, from duchies to kingdoms, and an accompanying sense of Heimat that was very much rooted in local identities. The victory over France rekindled nationalist sentiments that had been smoldering since the wars of liberation against Napoleon and during the absolutist restoration period that had followed, ultimately leading to the proclamation of the Prussian king as German emperor in the mirror hall of Versailles in January 1871.

Tübingen’s role as a university town with continuously expanding medical faculties and its spatial proximity not far from the battlefields of France had made it a Lazarettstadt, a military hospital city that received wounded soldiers from different principalities’ military contingents. Fourteen of them died and were to be laid to rest in situ. This posed an issue: How, in what form, were these soldiers to be remembered? Shortly after the end of the war, in 1871, this question was addressed. It was decided to commemorate the dead with a monument in the cemetery where they were interred – the Stadtfriedhof. A debate ensued about the architectural form of the monument, and from among a number of designs one was finally chosen (Hoffmann- Curtius 1986, 47f.).

The result was a stone obelisk, adorned with old swords and helmets, laurel wreaths, and an Eiserners Kreuz (Iron Cross), with the names, ranks, and regiments of the deceased soldiers engraved on the sides, and the words

VIERZEHN /
DEUTSCHE KRIEGER /
IM KAMPFE /
FÜR /
DAS VATERLAND /
SCHWER VERWUNDET, /
BIS ZU IHREM TODE /
IN UNSERER STADT /
VERPFLEGT /
RUHEN HIER /
IN HEIMISCHER ERDE /
1870–72 /²

Unlike monuments erected for the commemoration of regiments that were tied to a specific city, such as that of the Naussauisches Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 87 garrisoned in Mainz until 1918, and thereby deeply rooted within a certain locale, the Kriegerdenkmal on the Stadtfriedhof Tübingen³ addressed the memory of soldiers who did not hail from the town were they are buried. This was because of the nature of the Franco-Prussian War and the set-up of the German armies, together with Tübingen’s role as a Lazarettstadt.

From an architectural perspective, the newly-found nationalism of the Reich after the War of 1870 expressed itself in the Iron Cross on the Kriegerdenkmal obelisk. The Iron Cross was a military decoration for common soldiers to acknowledge their bravery that had been instituted by Prussian King Frederick William III in 1813 during the wars of liberation. ⁴ While the Christian cross would have been the usual and religious choice as the symbol of decorating graves, selecting the Iron Cross, a symbol of Prussia, points to the need to subsume the fallen from different German states under a sign that symbolized the new nationhood of the Reich. This also replaced traditional religious notions with the symbolism of a nation by overarching the heritage of single principalities and constituting a new and higher order (Vogt 1993, 35ff).

Moreover, as this was a monument to commemorate dead soldiers in a cemetery and not a leading general or prince in a more central locale such as a public square, and as these soldiers’ sacrifice in the fight for the newfound nation was a thing to be remembered, their names were engraved on the obelisk for posterity – for future generations to be reminded of what these soldiers and their deaths (or, to go by the inscription, being wounded first in the fight for the fatherland) had accomplished for the new nation symbolized by the Iron Cross. Still, their regional identity and heritage was deemed important, as was the mention of their regiments, which were closely tied to regional identity. But they rest “IN HEIMISCHER ERDE,” which again emphasizes the shared fatherland they had fought for, despite their regional backgrounds. They are buried at home away from home.

In addition to pointing out the regional and regimental affiliation of the dead soldiers, a distinction is made between their ranks. The name of a fallen lieutenant is not found on the obelisk, but received a separate grave slab. ⁵ The social gap between the officer class and the rank and file, was becoming increasingly permeable, especially for members of the upper middle-class after the Napoleonic Wars, ⁶ and therefore also the German social hierarchy of the time; here it finds an embodiment both architecturally and spatially.

Furthermore, the architectural design of the obelisk signifies the fashion of the time. Implementing swords reminiscent of old Greek edged weapons and a helmet from the same time are examples of the Neoclassicism that swept the western world at the time (Hoffmann-Curtius 1986, 48). The previous century had seen a renewed interest in antiquity, its architecture and literature (Watson 2010). By using Ancient Greek armaments, reference was made to heroic legends, such as the Iliad, thereby also denoting the dead soldiers buried and commemorated in Tübingen as heroes of the successful recent war for unification.

Looking at monuments for the participants of the Franco-Prussian War in other regions of Germany, we detect similarities to the Kriegerdenkmal. ⁷ In the square in front of the train station of Bad Dürkheim, a wine-growing town in Rhineland-Palatinate, then part of the Bavarian Rheinprovinz, a large ashlar of sandstone erected in 1911 commemorates the town’s participants in the War of 1870. Their names are arranged in order of importance (alongside soldiers who served in Bavarian regiments are some civilians, including women, who contributed to the war effort) and therefore according to social status. All around the ashlar are Ancient Greek helmets and laurels. In contrast to the Kriegerdenkmal on the Stadtfriedhof, the statue of a lion holding a shield adorns the Bad Dürkheim monument. The use of allegorical representations of animals on war memorials was common at the time (Rieht 1967, 12); most likely, the lion stands for the coat of arms of Bavaria, while the shield might represent the proximity of the Palatinate, or Rheinprovinz, to France and Bavarian troops acting as defenders in the first days of the war. Another War of 1870 memorial is in the neighboring village to the south, Wachenheim, this one adorned by an eagle. What the Bad Dürkheim memorial lacks, though, is the Iron Cross. This is perhaps due to Bavaria’s reluctance to join the new Reich and the strong feeling of Bavarian patriotism, creating an aversion to the centralized power of Prussia throughout the Kaiserreich. Of course, it should not be forgotten that these two monuments commemorate local participants of the war against France, while the Kriegerdenkmal remembers non-Tübingeners, which might attest to the lack of national symbolism.

Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18

The War of 1870 and the French cry for revenge after a humiliating defeat and a loss of territory (Elsace-Lorraine) were among the factors, such as Germany’s military stockpiling and saber-rattling, that contributed to the outbreak of another war between Germany and France, a conflict that started locally, with a mortal injury to the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, and became global with the involvement of European imperialist powers’ colonies and the 1917 entry of the United States. The Great War saw the clash of mass armies in industrialized modern warfare and unprecedented numbers of casualties, about two million military in Germany alone. Tübingen, which had become a garrison town in the late 19th century, extending its medical faculties, and Germany on the whole, had to deal with the vast number of war dead and the political and ideological aftermath of the Kaiserreich’s defeat and the effects of the Treaty of Versailles. In this context, the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 on the Stadtfriedhof Tübingen can be seen as a culmination point of issues concerning local and national war remembrance.

The debates on a monument for Tübingen’s veterans of the Franco-Prussian War, and thus on commemorating an earlier conflict, heated up once again in the early 1910s, but were overtaken by the events of the time (Hornbogen 1995, 155). With the influx of wounded to Tübingen’s medical facilities, the Württembergian city once again faced the task of both interring and remembering the war’s dead, but now on a scale that by far superseded the War of 1870. In addition to the great number of casualties, the end of the war, Germany’s capitulation, and the Treaty of Versailles played important roles in giving significance to the war and its dead.

In 1921, the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 was inaugurated. Its name shares the “Krieger” of Kriegerdenkmal. Choosing to use not Soldat (soldier) but Krieger (warrior) is already an interpretation. Krieger conjures up images of Germanic or medieval warriors, both legendary and real, already familiar to German schoolchildren at the time, with an added connection to heroes like Siegfried from the Nibelungen epic or medieval Helden such as Kaiser Barbarossa or Emperor Frederick I. ⁸ These figures were appropriated to create an overarching national German history and identity, as well as role-models in the highly militarized culture of the Kaiserreich, with its emphasis on soldiering, loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice. This is emphasized by the inscription on the large central stone wall of the Kriegerfriedhof, DEN HELDEN DES WELTKRIEGS – “to the heroes of the world war.”

And just as Siegfried was murdered from behind by the unfaithful Hagen von Tronje in the medieval epic, the Dolchstoßlegende emerged after World War I. Because the Reich had not been, for the most part, a battlefield⁹; because the real brunt of a war economy with food shortages only had real effects on the civilian population in 1917–18; because German troops were successful on the eastern front, forcing Russia to sign a separate peace contract; because the reversals of the German spring offensives of 1918 and the subsequent retreat to defensive lines nearer to Germany itself were played down by the Oberste Heeresleitung’s propaganda; because the armistice, planned by the military but signed by the new democratic government of November 1918, seemed to many Germans sudden and unexpected; and because the revolution of 1918 to 1919 was, in part, accompanied by Bolshevik-inspired Arbeiter – und Soldatenräte, the myth that the German armies, allegedly unbesiegt im Felde (undefeated on the field of battle), had been stabbed in the back by the revolutionaries and the new Social Democrat government took hold in Germany, especially in conservative and right-wing circles. The Treaty of Versailles with its implications of territorial losses on the outskirts of the Reich and of its overseas colonies, the scaling down of the German armed forces, and especially the article that stipulated that Germany alone was responsible for the outbreak of the Great War added insult to injury; it was, in German eyes from the extreme left to the extreme right, a Schandvertrag, a shameful treaty that insulted Germany’s honor (Krumeich 2001, 585ff).

Therefore, Germany had to grapple with a number of questions. Why was the war that seemed heading toward a victory suddenly lost? Who was responsible? And what did almost two million German soldiers die for? Some of these issues were addressed in architecture, most prominently war memorials, of which the Kriegerfriedhof in the Stadtfriedhof Tübingen is one example.

The warrior cemetery was inaugurated on October 30, 1921 in the presence of participants of a number of groups that shaped the commemoration of the Great War during the Weimar Republic, most prominently the Kriegervereine. These veterans' organizations had emerged after the War of 1870; its members wanted their contemporaries and future generations to appreciate what soldiers had accomplished during the war. They did this by funding and erecting monuments, through reunions that took place in the public, and lobbying through the media. At the inauguration of the Kriegerfriedhof, the Kriegervereine were present, along with other military veteran organizations and student fraternities, standing at attention, holding flags, singing martial tunes, commemorating dead comrades, and giving speeches. In one speech, a motif that runs through the remembrance of the First World War’s casualties in Weimar Germany is that their sacrifice for the fatherland should not have been in vain (Hornborgen 1995, 157). The underlying sentiment was to take revenge for the lost war, and especially the Treaty of Versailles.

Architecturally, the most important motif was the Feldgrauer. Just before the Great War, the contingents of the different principalities that made up the imperial German army had adopted a field-gray uniform, a drab color that was suited to the trench warfare of the First World War. In 1916, the German imperial army introduced the Stahlhelm, the steel helmet with its distinctive design reminiscent of certain Germanic medieval helmets. The Feldgrauer figure that was representative of all German soldiers (Jeismann and Westheider 1988, 9) therefore derived his name from this uniform, with the addition of the iconographic silhouette of the steel helmet.

In the Kriegerfriedhof, a Feldgrauer’s head is engraved on a centrally placed stone memorial reminiscent of an ancient tomb. His face stares determined into a distant future. This is a metaphor expressing that Germany had not really been defeated – or that it was, at least, going to set things straight, to revise the Treaty of Versailles, in a future conflict (Hoffmann-Curtius 1986, 58). Similarities can be found in other World War I memorials all over the Germany. In Düsseldorf, the Ehrenmal für das Niederrheinische Füsilier-Regiment Nr. 39 memorial shows columns of armed Feldgraue marching straight from the tomb into a new battle, while in Worms four Feldgraue representing the Infanterie Regiment Prinz Carl (4. Großherzoglich Hessisches) Nr. 118 stand at attention. In the Palatinate town of Herxheim am Berg, three stone field-gray-clad soldiers march forward, their rifles at the shoulder. In the oldest church of Lindau on Lake Constance, the Peterskirche, a marble Feldgrauer lies on his deathbed – still fully clothed with helmet, overcoat, boots, belt, clutching a rifle in his hand, ready to spring up and do his duty again at a moment’s notice.¹⁰ The war memorial of Hardenburg, a district of Bad Dürkheim, depicts a Feldgrauer on the ground, at first glance looking beat, holding a broken short sword in his hand – but he is not yet completely defeated, as he is still propped up on his arm. The small Palatinate village of Forst’s World War I memorial, though, is not as aggressive or revisionist. Here, Feldgraue without helmets rise from their deathbed and pray to Jesus Christ. Similarly, religious undertones can be found in the First World War memorial in the Swabian town of Burladingen, where an angel takes a Feldgrauer in its arms. ¹¹

But as in the example of the Stadtfriedhof’s Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71 and its contemporary memorials in other German towns, the Kriegerfriedhof lacks the rootedness in the city where it is situated. Its connection, however, is to an important part of Tübingen – its medical facilities. As during the War of 1870, soldiers from all over Germany were treated here, and, in some cases, died here. Their sheer numbers also necessitated that the Kriegerfriedhof be much larger than the Kriegerdenkmal. While the latter is located in a small area with only an obelisk, some steps leading to it, and a low wall all around, the Kriegerfriedhof is an actual cemetery. About 261 soldiers – among them some allied soldiers – are interred in the warrior cemetery (Hornbogen 1995, 156). Instead of putting all their names on a single architectural structure, as with the Kriegerdenkmal obelisk, each soldier got his own marker. The rank and file received small marble stones with their name and their year of death. These markers are arranged in subsequent lines according to the years 1914 to 1919. The large number of markers and their arrangement are representative of the mass casualties of World War I, and evocative of the lines of soldiers going over the top that were mowed down by one of the latest instruments of modern warfare, the machine gun.

As with the Kriegerdenkmal, the rank and file in the Kriegerfriedhof are separated from officers and non-commissioned officers. The latter received actual crosses bearing their names, ranks, units, and complete date of death, while the common soldiers’ markers only bore their names. Additionally, there is a path between the long rows of small stone markers and the smaller number of crosses, which are nonetheless equally arranged by years and in rows. The spatial separation of the graves symbolizes the separation of the (non-commissioned) officer and common soldier’s classes, a continuity from real life, where officers had more privileges even in death, as in the Kriegerdenkmal, thereby showing the class-based system of the Reich.

The cult of the Feldgrauer, together with its implications of martially repealing the Treaty of Versailles, continued into the Third Reich. After 1933, the university quickly expelled Jewish professors and ideologues like philosopher Theodor Haering (Hantke 1991, 179ff). After the re-introduction of general conscription in 1935, new military garrisons for the Wehrmacht were built, among them the Hindenburg Kaserne. Its entry was adorned with a statue of a Feldgrauer (Vogel 1991, 45). In addition, a monument celebrating composer Friedrich Silcher was erected in the Platanenallee on the Neckar. Below the statue of Silcher himself, it depicts, on the one hand, a pair of lovers, Silcher’s Volkslieder celebrating the Heimat. On the other hand, two Feldegraue are part of the monument. One of them is marching forward, while the other has been struck by a bullet and falls at the feet of his comrade. This is a reference to “Der gute Kamerad,” a sad poem by Tübingen Romantic author Friedrich Uhland about a soldier’s loss of a comrade in battle, written during the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty years later, Silcher composed a tune for this poem, and “Der gute Kamerade” became (and remains) a staple of German military songs, especially when commemorating dead soldiers during funeral ceremonies. Unveiled just before the invasion of Poland in the summer of 1939, the Silcher Denkmal with its Feldgrauer iconography not only pointed to the past and to the sacrifices of World War I, but also to the future, where more German soldiers were to lose their lives on the battlefield (Loistl 1991, 171ff). Unlike the Great War, however, the commemoration of World War II and Nazi rule dead would take a different turn in the post-war years.

Gräberfeld X

On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Millions of people, soldiers and civilians alike, had died during the Second World War in Europe. In contrast to the end of World War I, though, Germany was completely occupied and a process of demilitarization, denazification, and democratization was set in motion by the (western) Allies to prevent Germany from ever starting a war again. In Nuremberg, high-ranking Nazi officials faced a war crimes trial for instigating the war and causing the deaths of innocent civilians. The liberation of concentration camps, which Allied soldiers often forced German civilians from nearby towns to visit, and the release of films documenting Nazi atrocities showed the world and the German public the results of Adolf Hitler’s reign. Several other war criminal trials were conducted over the next years. Many Germans, however, tried to forget the twelveyear Tausendjähriges Reich and began rebuilding what the war had destroyed in their respective occupation zones. Nonetheless, some did not want to forget.

An organization of those who were once politically persecuted, the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN), opened the discussion on the Gräberfeld X¹³in the Tübingen Stadtfriedhof in 1950. They demanded that victims of the Nazi state that had been interred in the Gräberfeld should be commemorated. During the late 1930s and the war years, the anatomical institute of the university’s medical faculty had received a large number of bodies for dissection; many of these people had been executed because they had opposed the Third Reich, or just because of their alleged racial inferiority. Among them were German passive resisters who had doubted the successful outcome of the war, as well as forced laborers from German-occupied countries who had been intimate with German women and thereby violated the 1935 Nürnberger Rassegesetze, all offenses punished by death under Nazi law. After their execution – whether official ones in prisons or unofficial ones in labor camps, all in Württemberg – their corpses were used for study purposes at the anatomical institute, and some specimens might have been been used as late as 1990 when the medical faculty had some questionable specimens removed from its collections and interred in the Gräberfeld X (Hayes 2013, 50–52; Schönhagen 1987, 7–10).

These were victims of Nazi rule with its racist and anti-opposition ideology. With Germany having been liberated from this rule and the war criminals being punished, those who were persecuted and had survived their ordeal wanted the memory of their dead fellows to be preserved, not least to keep future generations from letting something like the Third Reich happen again. The Tübingen city council decided to erect three stone crosses with the inscription “1939–1945,” an architectural form common for remembering the (military) dead of World War II and symbolizing Christ’s crucifixion and reconciliation. Through this general depiction, though, different types of casualties were subsumed into a larger community of the victims¹⁴ of World War II, regardless of whether they belonged to the armed forces of the aggressor nation (Germany), civilian victims of air raids, for example, or to ethnic or political groups persecuted by the Nazis (Hayes 2013, 40–42; Schönhagen 1987, 11). This is also shown through the ubiquity of these three crosses in war cemeteries all over Germany. They can be found, for example, in the World War II victims’ memorial in the Tübingen Bergfriedhof commemorating most of all those Tübingers who had died serving the German armed forces during the war (Hayes 2011, 133–144; Hayes 2013, 40–41).

In the early 1960s, new demands arose. Especially in light of the fact that the Gräberfeld X was run-down, unkempt, and overgrown, the city decided to clear it and, because of the continual demands from various groups, opted to add a plaque to specify more who was buried here. After heated debates, the following inscription was chosen:

HIER RUHEN MEHRERE /
HUNDERT MENSCHEN /
VERSCHIEDENER VÖLK /
ER DIE IN LAGERN UND /
ANSTALTEN UNSERES /
LANDES EINEN GEWALT /
SAMEN TOD FANDEN /
¹⁵

But despite being more specific than the three crosses with “1939–1945” on them, this wording is still very vague, and it does not really specify who exactly is buried in the Gräberfeld X, or why they were killed (Schönhagen 1987, 14–15). The difficulty of finding an appropriate way of honoring the victims of Nazi rule buried in the Gräberfeld X represents the difficulty West Germany had with its Nazi past during these years. While some wanted to forget or felt that it was enough to commemorate all victims the combined, regardless of why they were killed, others saw importance in adequately and frankly remembering different victim groups. In turn, this struggle of defining national remembrance shows on the local level of Tübingen, where groups with different opinions clashed. The 1962 plaque was a compromise between those who wanted to remember and those who felt at least some obligation to do so, but were not willing to be more specific and who, moreover, wanted to be rid of the past – a Schlussstrich. Getting more concrete would have meant dealing with what had actually happened in their immediate vicinity, that is, in the city of Tübingen, and the surrounding region of Württemberg. In turn, this would have shown that the crimes of the Nazi regime did not only happen in a distant occupied territory, but right at home as well (Hayes 2013, 42–43; Schönhagen 1987, 14). Thereby, the disconnectedness of Nazi crimes and the Heimat that pervaded the early post-war attitude of not having witnessed or even knowing the Third Reich’s crimes in the fatherland was perpetuated, something that, in hindsight, is hard to believe, as forced laborers, euthanasia clinics, and concentration camp death marches occurred right before the Germans’ eyes16; but in the postwar years, forgetting the past was the rule, with a few exceptions.

Therefore, it took another twenty years before the Gräberfeld X became a focus for the Tübingen public once again. As in the 1960s, the Gräberfeld had overgrown, and was in need of re-structuring. A published photograph of a bulldozer left by a gardener on top of some graves resulted in public outcry from many sides, as this was seen as dishonoring the victims of the Nazi regime. The Gräberfeld X was back in the spotlight. Shortly thereafter, bronze name plates were set next to a path that led to the three crosses and the 1962 stone plaque. On Volkstrauertrag 1985, the Tübingen Oberbürgermeister Carlo Schmid held a speech at the Gräberfeld X for the first time, connecting what happened on the Tübingers’ doorstep, and putting this in the larger context of the Nazi policy of extermination.17 He also announced that the city government of Tübingen would commission a study of the backgrounds of those interred there (Hayes 2013, 47–50). While the political group of the 1950s had known some of the people’s fates, it was historian Benigna Schönhagen’s 1987 study that tried to establish how many victims of Nazi rule were actually buried in the Gräberfeld X,18 as well as some of the individuals’ stories, thereby exposing the interconnectedness of Tübingen and the Third Reich – of local and national history.

This new type of remembrance can be seen in the larger context of remembering the casualties of World War II in Germany. It took almost forty years until special emphasis was added to the general remembrance of all victims, commemorating those who perished as a result of Nazi policies, until what is today called Vergangenheitsbewältigung became widespread (Hayes 2011, 132–133). Some have attributed this to the temporal distance from the war years and the aging or dying out of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators, and therefore also their disappearance from the public. While there had been war crimes trials up until the 1960s, such as the Auschwitz trials, the crimes of the Third Reich were mostly attributed to a small group of high profile perpetrators, leading Nazi figures like head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, or lower-ranking but influential people like Adolph Eichmann. It was only over time that both historians in academia and amateurs in local historical societies began unraveling the mechanics of the Nazi regime and the participation of many population groups, thereby providing a more nuanced picture of the Täter, or perpetrators, how much the “average” German knew or was him – or herself involved in, for example, profiting from Arisierung, or being involved in Nazi organizations such as the Hitlerjugend. Moreover, the student revolt of the 68er and their questioning of what the Vatergeneration had done in the war – if their fathers had “only” served the fatherland or had, in the course of the war, participated in crimes – added to a more critical perspective on a past that was not so distant, both in space and time. Concentration and labor camps had been spread all over Germany, forced laborers had worked for farmers and corporations, and the depiction of the Wehrmacht as a clean army removed from the Weltanschauungskrieg (as opposed to the ideological Waffen-SS) began to be overturned as well.19

As such, this critical reception and interpretation of the Nazi past also deviates from how earlier wars were remembered in Germany. While the War of 1870 was a victory and the First World War a conflict whose outcome was disputed, World War II had been a total defeat that was seldom glorified.20 This led to neither the creation of an idealized past where the military had helped build Germany, as with the Franco-Prussian War, nor to the sense of an important foundation for the strength of the country, as with World War I and the instrumentalization of its memory by the Nazis (leading to the next world war, and even more disastrous results). The Second World War and the Nazi years came to be seen, over time, as a dark chapter of German history that should not be repeated. Instead of glorifying the fallen heroes – soldiers – the critical reception of the past that continues in Germany to this day does places no emphasis on remembering the military casualties of World War II, but the victims of the Nazi regime, for which the German armed forces was an instrument of power. The heroization of a martial past instrumentalized for nationalism is less the focus than the remembrance of the victims of a criminal regime and a historical imperative never to repeat the Third Reich or to achieve political aims through war.

In the Gräberfeld X, this type of remembrance is visible in a variety of ways. For one, like the soldiers’ graves, the identified names of victims are represented in a number of bronze plaques set on both sides of a trail leading to the main architectural monuments to keep their memory alive. While the three stone crosses are still there, another plaque was installed, founded by the university and thereby acknowledging the part that the medical faculty played (Hayes 2013, 50–54). It finds more concrete words for the people buried in the Gräberfeld:

Verschleppt Geknechtet Geschunden /
Ofer der Willkür oder verblendeten Rechts /
fanden Menschen Ruhe erst hier /
Von ihrem Leib noch /
forderte Nutzen eine Wissenschaft /
die Rechte und Würde des Menschen nicht achtete /
Mahnung sei dieser Stein den Lebenden /
Die Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen /
1990.21

Soon though after its inauguration in 1990, the plaque was violated by people who painted swastikas over it, and a new version was installed (Hayes 2013, 53). Before entering the Gräberfeld, which is surrounded by a hedge, just as the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 is, a signboard gives detailed information about the Gräberfeld and its history of commemoration – unlike the two soldiers’ cemeteries, which are devoid of any inscriptions indicating to their historical contexts.

While all three burial sites receive wreaths on Volkstrauertag and some graves at the World War I cemetery are adorned with flowers, there are often events in Gräberfeld X, especially on days like May 8, the day of the German capitulation in 1945, where anti-Nazi groups and historical societies meet, sometimes with family members of some of the deceased present. Some dedicated individuals try to keep the memory alive of those interred in Gräberfeld X by researching individuals’ stories and establishing contact with their families, often from Eastern Europe, to provide information about their relatives’ fates (Hayes 2013, 55–58). In general, there are various individuals and societies in Tübingen, such as the Geschichtswerkstatt and the Verein Lern – & Dokumentationszentrum zum Nationalsozialismus e.V. Tübingen, which research the past and cultivate its memory, and especially its lessons, and present them to the public through lectures and publications.

Conclusion and Outlook

The Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71, Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18, and Gräberfeld X on the Tübingen Stadtfriedhof are, at a first glance, no more than three burial sites connected to the past three European wars through their German participants and their spatial proximity. Looking more closely, however, we see they are also intertwined because of their connection to Tübingen medical institutions and their place in the context of commemoration of the War of 1870, World War I, and World War II in Germany. The burial sites are part of the cemetery in Tübingen, but most of those interred are not Tübingers. Regarding the Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71, finding a way to commemorate the dead soldiers of this war from different German principalities was also a task of moving beyond the regionalism of German states to the concept of a nation state. It were not any longer just kings and generals that were remembered, but the sacrifices of the common soldiers on the altar of the nation received a place in memory as well. This development strengthened with the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18. Those who died in Tübingen hospitals were seen as part of the sacrifice of the Feldgrauer in general, and their commemoration as part of interpreting the Great War as a conflict that German soldiers had not lost; its results, mainly the Treaty of Versailles, were revised so that the sacrifice of the war heroes was not in vain. The total defeat in World War II and the Gräberfeld X show how the focus of commemorating war dead shifted from soldiers (seen as warriors) to noncombatants, especially those who were victims of Nazi rule, to illustrate the criminality of said regime. This development needed many decades and re-interpretations to take hold in German public memory. As such, these local burial sites also mirror the changing national memory and debates on how wars and their casualties are remembered in Germany.

While it took a long time before the commemoration of those interred in the Gräberfeld X became a focus of public memory, just as on the national scale, its way of remembering the victims of Nazi Germany has also become the dominant form, just as the historical public consciousness in the Federal Republic of Germany focuses on the Third Reich, its crimes, and its victims. In light of this, the commemoration of earlier wars steps into the background, and the Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71 is also spatially removed in the cemetery, overgrown with moss, just as this conflict has almost vanished from public memory. Still, it is impossible to disassociate the War of 1870, the Great War, and World War II due to their historical relationship, as well as their function as markers of how the memory of wars has changed in Germany in the past 140 years.

Benedict von Bremen. Born in 1984 in Marsberg, Germany. From 2005 to 2011 he studied at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, majoring in Modern History and American Studies. His M. A. thesis was One of the Horrors of War Strayed from His Era into Yours: Ambrose Bierce and Civil War Memory. Since October 2011 he has been a research fellow at the American Studies Department, Tübingen University. He is a founding member of the Verein für ein Lern – & Dokumentationszentrum zum Nationalsozialismus e.V. Tübingen in November 2010. Since June 2012 he has collaborated on “NS-Täterbuch Tübingen.”

ENDNOTES

1 France hoped in 1870 that the southern German principalities such as the kingdoms of Württemberg and Bavaria, which had, for the most part, been aligned with Austria and defeated in the War of 1866, would take France’s side and turn against Prussia and its allies in the Norddeutscher Bund. On the contrary, a nationalistic war fever at the prospect of victory against an old enemy swept through the southern German principalities allied with Prussia.

2 “Fourteen German warriors who were severely wounded in the fight for the fatherland and cared for in this city until they died are buried here, in the soil of the homeland, 1870–72.”

3 Tübingen only became a garrison town in the 1890s (Starzmann 2009).

4 The Iron Cross was then founded again during later Prussian and German wars (Vogt 1993, 18–20).

5 Unfortunately, this slab is now overgrown with moss. At least to the best of the author’s memory, the fading inscription speaks of a lieutenant buried there.

6 Resulting from the need for more officers to lead the growing mass armies of the industrial age, as well as an opportunity for upper middle-class men to rise in the social hierarchy where the rank of officer was strongly tied to the nobility (Rumschöttel 1973, 41ff).

7 The ideas for a central monument commemorating the Tübingen veterans of the War of 1870 did not materialize; a plaque was only hung in a Tübingen church (Hoffmann- Curtius 1986, 52ff).

8 The symbolism of the Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71, as mentioned earlier, was rather Hellenist-inspired.

9 The Russian offensive into East Prussia was stalled by Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s army in September 1914 and only a few southwestern German towns were targets of air raids.

10 In German folklore, Kaiser Rotbart (or Barbarossa) sleeps in a mountain, to wake up one day to save Germany in its darkest hour.

11 World War I memorials in other European countries give the war a different meaning. Many French war monuments depict the poilu as a citizen soldier returning to his family, without the martial undertones of German Feldgrauer depictions (Jeismann and Westheider 1988, 9f). A Great War memorial in the Belgian town of Dinant puts the memory of Belgium being invaded and the fight for its liberation in the foreground (here, German soldiers committed war crimes after allegedly being shot at by franctireurs in 1914, leading to mass shootings of civilians that were taken up, among other similar incidents, by Entente propaganda as the “Rape of Belgium”).

12 Cf. the attachment of 1939–1945 plaques on almost every monument pictured.

13 The Stadtfriedhof is divided into various smaller burial plots, ordered A to Z. Cf. The Kriegerdenkmal 1870/71 is situated in Gräberfeld N while the Kriegerfriedhof 1914/18 is the Gräberfeld S.

14 For an interesting distinction between “sacrifice” and “victim,” see: Hayes 2011, 132.

15 “Here rest several hundred people of various nationalities who found a violent death in camps and institutions of our country.”

16 For example, the author’s maternal grandmother told him in the early 1990s, when he was still a child, how she had witnessed the nighttime evacuation of her hometown’s “insane asylum.” But fearing being sent to a “Konzertlager” (euphemism for concentration camp), many Germans kept quiet.

17 Wreaths had been laid down at the Gräberfeld on Volkstrauertag since the 1960s, but without any special mention of who was buried there or why (Hayes 2013, 44).

18 Before the Nazi years, the bodies of people whose fate was not connected to the Third Reich, but which were nonetheless used in the anatomical institute, had been buried in the Gräberfeld as well; it was more or less the disposal grounds of the anatomical institute. It is still not quite clear how many Nazi victims are buried there–the estimates range from 400 to 700 (Hayes 2013, 39; Schönhagen 1987, 8, 23).

19 See, for example, the heated discussions about the Wehrmachtsausstellung in the 1990s.

20 For changes in how the World War II era was dealt with in Tübingen, cf. Ulmer 2011.

21 “Deported, enslaved, ill-treated, victims of arbitrariness or misunderstood laws, it is only here that these humans could find rest. A science which did not respect their rights and dignity still wanted to use their bodies. This stone shall be an admonition to the living. The Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 1990.”

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This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

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ABSTRACT

The focus of this paper is to discuss the criteria for the meaning of violence in the context of the history of war. To be able to classify the instances of violence during the First World War, the following paper will attempt to present the relationship between different levels of war, and thus to determine the criteria for the meaning of violence. The Great War of 1914–1918 was characterized by the transformation of how war was waged, as well as an unlimited awareness of violence (1./2.). Here we have in mind the most comprehensive of all images of violence: the totalitarian image of man. This begs the question of how we can generate an acceptable relationship between the mechanism of violence and violence awareness and thus bring about the renunciation of violence. This pivotal question can only be answered in the wider context of the history of violence. To understand the failure of reason in the battlefields of the Great War we need fundamental anthropological reflections (3./4.), which encompasses the essential significance of the site (5.).

Introduction

It is generally recognized that history does not boil down to reconstruction of actual life and experience. It also constitutes a process of interpreting which occurs in the minds of the subjects who create it. When looking at historical figures, historians demand that each person takes full responsibility for their own story. In the context of the history of violence and war such a perspective first requires the formulation of rough definitions. A solemn speech about the solid foundation of war, about the father of all things (Ger. Vater aller Dinge) or just about history as a set of rational rules and regulations, expires in the trenches of war. A glimpse at the inter-existential dimension is a look at the everyday reality of war, including the moments of mass killing. “The annihilation of a man as an individual forces us to perceive people as a mass. This is a totalitarian moment. Lenin recognized it, as did Mussolini, Hitler, and others. They perceived war as a powerful fatality in which everything sweeps away, as an uncontrollable torrent and a total power, which ends in nihilism.” (Metz 2010, 191)

John Keegan, an eminent war theorist, also focuses on such an existential perspective, when he embarks on a journey to find The Face of Battle (Keegan 1978). To his mind, the classical military history records create a picture of war which leaves many questions unanswered. They delve into genre scenes and spectacle and create an atmosphere in which bravery, heroism, defeat, and attacks are described from a ruthless point of view. A traditional military historian can find words to describe great military moves and maneuvers, but not the individual deaths and individual lives of soldiers. Keegan, however, is intensely interested in the inconspicuous individuals and events behind the great wars. He sees the efforts to create a historical narrative as entwined with the commitment to comprehend the fundamental position and the existential condition of an individual in a battle. The difference between victory and defeat, which is the main way in which historians, commanders, and chroniclers approach the battle, fades away when we take a closer look at the reality. A soldier has no well-defined picture of a battle in his mind. Enormous danger is a more urgent concern, and therefore his fundamental position is different from the commander’s. If in this way we grant an individual the right to veto, we treat everything less as a revolution in the historiography then, to put it mildly, a glance at the core situation, the bare existence and the image of war.

As we well know, the First World War meant the collapse of civil society. The reasons for this are varied, but they include the negation of what civil society essentially represented: the idea of a free individual who takes responsibility for his actions. Given the mass executions, the mud of the trenches, and the mechanized nature of war, this idea came to an abrupt end. Verdun and the Somme have shaped the face of battle. They represent a turning point in the history of violence as instances of theretofore unseen forms of battle of matériel and massive battles in the death zones of trenches. In the century of violence, war became an independent entity. It became ubiquitous anonymity and omnipresent death; the very essence of war was exposed. Ernst Jünger (1982) formulated a famous and apt description of this turning point: it was not soldiers, but laborers who kept the battle running. They were characterized by their willingness to accept a subordinate role in the anonymous, mechanized, and technological operations, rather than adopting the warrior tradition. The workers who lost their lives in the hail of grenades and machine guns usually could not see their opponents; the enemies remained mostly invisible and beyond reach.

*

Do we have to present the face of battle in all its hideousness, as evidenced here, and in many other historical examples? No; we are aware of the horrors of war, the suffering of soldiers and civilians, the fury of violence, and we do not want to increase our knowledge of it. Nevertheless, we must attempt to remember and to grasp the meaning of the horrors of war; a meaning which is difficult for us to decipher and which is overshadowed by constant doubt concerning our existence. For Theodor Lessing, for example, history in the face of war was an arduous process of making meaning of meaninglessness. Deeply affected by the First World War, he opposed the religious delusion by which history reflects reason and significance, progress and justice (Lessing 1983, 12). He doubted both the idealist and the materialist delusions in history. Hence, he tried not to present history with all its glorifying embellishments, but as an attempt to make meaning out of something which is inherently meaningless. Lessing’s writing was controversial, but the way in which he posed questions was convincing. His aim was not only to demolish the solid foundations of war, but also to explicitly inquire into the criteria for potential meaning – criteria for meaning in the context of the history of war. This fundamental question is still valid as a question. How can sociology and historiography contribute to the understanding of the notions of peace and war in our day? It seems that this question may be answered off the cuff: one should forbid war, avert violence, and protect rights. This may serve as a starting point for the following reflections. To be able to classify the instances of violence and the totalitarian logic of the First World War, the following paper will attempt to present the relationship between different levels of war, and thus to determine criteria for the meaning of violence. The Great War of 1914–1918 was characterized by (1.) the transformation of war which, as we have mentioned, became totalitarian. It also showed (2.) an unlimited awareness of violence, which was not restricted to the mechanism of violence. The distance which was shaped during mass executions was subject to the abstraction of new proportions and it also pointed to the most comprehensive of all violence abstractions: the totalitarian image of a man. How can we can generate an acceptable relationship between the mechanism of violence and violence awareness and thus bring about the renunciation of violence? This pivotal question can only be answered in the wider context of the history of violence. To understand the failure of reason in the battlefields of the Great War we need a fundamental anthropological reflection (3./4.), which encompasses the essential significance of the site (5.). In this context, the role of historiography is far from insignificant.

1. Military capability: The transformation of war

The historical notion of violence can be discussed from various points of view. On the one hand, in the mechanized form of battle we have evidence of the radical, technically-oriented alienation of man: as many as 2.96 million bullets of a total weight of 21,000 tons were prepared to attack the British troops at the Somme. The use of chlorine gas made a new form of nervous impairment of the enemy possible. The massive annihilations of soldiers in June 1916 marked a tragic climax in the history of war. All these factors point to a radicalized, unrestricted, and industrialized form of violence. Hordes of people waiting in the trenches in order to trudge through destroyed devastated area and barbed wire towards certain death: at this point such an image recalls a form of totalitarian destruction which was to become a reality in the war yet to come (Metz 2010, 192; Keegan 1978, 304). Nevertheless, insight into the terrible events of the war also requires the wider perspective of the historian. We can therefore describe the history of the First World War as a process which was characterized by the transformation of war, in terms of a political, as well as material and technological change. After the relatively peaceful period of one hundred years before the First World War, when the five major European powers followed the policy of balance, the German Wars of Unification again raised the question of power. With the emergence of the German Empire a new power also emerged. The developing economic and military power resulted in a new form of imbalance (hereinafter Kennedy 1996; Neitzel 2008; Craig 1989). International relations fell into a trap which they managed to avoid throughout the comparatively peaceful nineteenth century.

Sobering, as these reflections may seem, the nearly ten millions casualties were nothing new when we consider the total population of Europe. The novelty was not in the number of the casualties. The global dimension was not striking either, as it had already come into play during the Seven Years’ War. The novelty was rather in the method, in the way decisions concerning human lives were made, and in the technological dimension of elimination. In the First World War armed countries clashed in a battle between man and machine. Thus we can identify the new military capability as the first “criterion for meaning” in violence analysis. The mechanization of war brought lethal innovations: poison gas, tanks, submarines, but also machine guns, which were invented a long time before, but were now being used on a massive scale. Compared to the war of 1870, over 58 per cent of the soldiers died of artillery fire. Hundreds of thousands of opponents lost their lives as a result of machine gun fire, which, in a symbolic way, marks a turning point in the history of violence. However, let me go back to discuss a distinct military capability of the great powers. When we ask how this “great seminal catastrophe” could occur in this form in the twentieth century, we must not turn a blind eye to the relationship between the production forces and the effective military capabilities. The main factors which promoted, extended, and shaped the war are well known. These were: an early stalemate, Italy’s rather ineffectual entry into the war, apparent exhaustion, and the Russian inability to wage war, as well as America’s crucial decision to join the war. The final collapse of the Central Powers must be perceived as closely correlated with the economic and industrial resources available to the Allies. We assess the actual capability in terms of absolute superiority of the productive forces rather than the quality of leadership and the generals’ aptitude. By way of example, Kennedy (1989, 389 ff.) analyzes the Great War from the point of view of the relationship between economic changes and the military conflict. He perceives the Austro-German coalition at the beginning of the war as a military force with the superior military capability as its front troops operated efficiently and were supported by an increasing number of recruits. Russia and France, on the other hand, had difficulty in coordinating a military strategy. We are able to answer why the Allies did not manage to gain significance three years after the beginning of the war when we take a closer look at the notion of military capability. The Coalition was strong in the areas which could hardly contribute to a quick and decisive victory. For instance, the closing of the German overseas trade caused major damage, but was not as significant as British representatives expected. German export industry focused on military production and the Central Powers were self-sufficient in food supply as long as the transport system could be properly maintained. The Allies outnumbered their enemies, but this did not contribute to their rapid victory, which was partly due to the type of war itself. Both parties used forces which were deployed over hundreds of kilometers. Major operations which were methodically and strategically prepared well in advance and aimed at a decisive blow were in fact split into hundreds of smaller operations on the battlefield. The events on the Western Front clearly show that the fronts on both sides could not achieve a real breakthrough and thus expand short-term territorial gains. Each side was able to make up for its losses through reservists, grenade supply, barbed wire, and artillery, and to minimize the advantage of the assailant. The major image inscribed in the memory of the war is that of prevented offensives and destructive crossfire. The role of the individual in the war is well understood: a growing number of new waves of recruits were mobilized at various sites to compensate for the loss incurred on the battlefields.

Hence, in order to assess the properties of the violence in the First World War, an analysis of the battlefields is insufficient. There is no doubt that the Great War electrified national economies and led to a significant increase in armor volume. Before 1914 armor generated less than four percent of the national income. Since the total war led to the increase of this number up to more than 30 per cent, it was inevitable that the overall production volume of the defense industry grew by leaps and bounds. The wartime governments grew to be in charge of the industry, workforce, and finances. The long-lasting complaints about the chronic shortage of ammunition on both sides ultimately led to the cooperation of politics with business and employment, the aim of which was to provide the necessary supplies. “Given the powers of the modern bureaucratic state to float loans and raise taxes, there were no longer the fiscal impediments to sustaining a lengthy war that had crippled eighteenth-century states. Inevitably, then, after an early period of readjustment to these new conditions, armaments production soared in all countries.” (Kennedy 1989, 389)

2. The mechanism of violence, ideology and war

It appears that the main distinction used to analyze the Great War is therefore the organization of the state system – the separation between the countries’ domestic and foreign affairs. In order to understand the role of separation of politics and economy in all matters directly relating to the war, one needs some additional background information (hereinafter Münkler 2006, 51 ff.). The so-called “Westphalian sovereignty,” which had shaped international relations since 1648, must not be overlooked here. People waged wars for a long time to achieve economic goals, but war itself was less an economic than a political goal. The Westphalian sovereignty was an attempt to place the state in the center of the war on a permanent basis, also with a view to separate religious or economic influences from political ones. The war between the cabinets and the war between the nations are the two classical types of war. For the next 150 years, when war was a matter of cabinets, it constituted a political tool, “which had never been this way before or afterwards” (Münkler 2006, p. 52). In this period the general public was completely excluded from the war events, at least they were not systematically used for defense purposes. The war was a matter of the governments which had manageable and limited purposes. The war was also to a large extent “tamed” so that the civil population in the war zone was as little involved in the action as possible. Opposing forces changed their positions, tried to cut off the enemies from the supplies or to confront them in a decisive battle. The population waited in the background and was responsible for financing the war and yet the costs incurred due to armed conflicts could often be extremely burdensome. (Kant’s plea for republican forms of government addresses this issue). Overall, it can be argued that the war of this period did not acquire an existential dimension. To some degree it remained calculable and, significantly, it was consistent with the justified renunciation of the use of force when the balance of forces was observed.

We recognize a significant turning point in the history of war when both mechanical calculability and moral factors gained significance in the course of battle. When the population, ready to take action and make sacrifices, was put in the balance in the course of revolutions, social power relations were renewed. As regards the form of battle, the era of strategic maneuvers had ended. In the re-defined ideological battles it was important whether “in due time and in the right place one had superior forces at one’s disposal and used them with absolute determination to win here and now” (ibid., 55). War was based on the requirements of the concentration of forces in a specific time and space. This meant a battle set-up which depended on the physical and moral exhaustion. In the early twentieth century this state of affairs was marked by specific military forces and forms of the organization of violence, especially the ability to use fossil fuels for the mobilization and deployment of forces, thereby affecting the speed of the troops’ advancement in the area and going beyond the logistical limits of the war. Civil infrastructure became a central element of modern military capability, leading to a long-lasting merge of civil economy and military establishment. The unreasonable alliance between the state and war became visible (Krippendorff 1985). Its ideological aspect, however, should not be neglected. The “levèe en masse” and the people who constituted the nation contributed to the fact that politics was no longer limited by the national borders. The violence mechanism that we observe in the age of extremes (Hobsbawm) goes back to the moral factor, in a sense that the nationalist fervor of the people became the resources of military capability. The turning point that we can observe here is complex and contradictory. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was the idea that a republican society, unlike an aristocratic one, would avoid and tame war, since it corresponded to the common sense of the citizens concerned, and it could now decide on questions of life and death. This idea was inextricably linked to the notion of political freedom, but it did not obtain the desired confirmation during the revolutionary wars. The war of modern times was a civilization war which was waged as an ideological and moral battle by those with the “right” attitude. The revolution engaged civil society again in the war. Out of the ideologization of war there emerged a new form of military force which, in turn, severely affected the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this broader sense, the military capability and the violence mechanism encompass an expanded notion of violence awareness. The new army was a mass army characterized by unlimited recruitment possibilities. As a result, it could afford much heavier losses, provided that war was perceived as an existential notion (Metz 2010, 80 ff.). The total war of the nineteenth century became a totality, insofar as it introduced the possibility of exhausting human resources on the battlefield.

This form of a mass, total warfare was formed in the nineteenth century on the condition that the psychological mobilization of the masses was a consequence of revolutionary nationalism. Such a mobilization was then extended by means of technological and infrastructural resources. Factors such as crowd, technology and ideology formed the face of total war and, as a result, created the experience of physical and mental exhaustion which, in turn, resulted in the horrors of war. It is common knowledge that the economic performance of the countries involved in the war decreased throughout the war, and that the moral exhaustion of the entire population was also visible. The long war was also a battle against the enemy’s flow of resources and supplies: England took advantage of its superior navy to build a long blockade against the Central Powers. Germany to some extent relied on submarine warfare in order to cut off the enemy from essential supplies by sinking merchant ships. Toward the end of the war one could see the signs of the future air warfare, when the infrastructure of the enemy was destroyed by bomber fleets (Münkler 2006, 57). Is it possible to summarize the “meaning” of the war, in terms of the organization and transformation of violence, in the way presented above? Ultimately, we are talking about a war whose aim was to let the enemy bleed to death at the risk of one’s own heavy losses. The only conceivable way to gain victory would be by means of mass slaughter in the form of subsequent attacks at the death zones – which were not militarily successful but certainly stemmed from the “reasonable” calculations. This is clearly visible in the German attack at Verdun, which cost 700,000 casualties in the period of ten months; an event where the war turned into “a blood pump, attached to a human material used for military purposes” (Metz 2010, 93). As early as this instance of senseless battle and rational military leadership we observe a turning point in the history of war, for which there are no compelling definitions.

3. Political existentialism: The failure of reason

Having discussed the criteria of violence organization, we can look at the First World War as an attempt to penetrate into the heart of the enemy country in a battle. After 1866 and 1870 it was certain that such a war was feasible. August 1914 marked the beginning of a war in which a seemingly unbearable tension culminated and was defused. To many people it seemed a liberation from existential emptiness. The ecstatic celebration of the August events was apparently followed by apathetic killing and anonymous deaths in the trenches. The longing for the existential human illumination and purification during the war were followed by dirt, stench, and death. When the following sections inquire into the causes which led to the failure of reason, and when we further inquire into the possibility of remembering the horrors of war, it is to be understood in a specific way. It is not simply about drawing “lessons” from history, but rather about gathering criteria for meaning from the history of war, criteria which appear to be fundamentally political notions.

Quite reasonably, the political explanations for the outbreak of war turn attention to the threat resulting from the Franco-Russian Alliance (1894), which Great Britain joined in 1904. The idea of preventive war was virulent, not least due to the fact that the progressive development of infrastructure made it technologically possible to use mass transport. Beyond this, however, we must ask why the failure of reason occurred, and to what extent politics and diplomacy prioritized the logic of military confrontation. We must ask how the limits of diplomacy could be reconciled with the unleashing of violence. Also, we must not forget that there were definite attempts to let the leap in the dark (Bethmann-Hollweg) follow solutions involving the limited renunciation of the use of force. When in November 1914 there was no hope left for a quick military success, Falkenhayn asked Bethmann-Hollweg to negotiate a separate peace with Russia, then with France, in order to be able to confront England, the opponent, on an equal footing (Neitzel 2003, 136). This initiative was based on the notion of adhering to the policy of escaping from the war as soon as all the military resources had been used. The political leadership could not take a firm stand on this matter, as there was disagreement early on in defining Germany as the main war opponent. Although some models of freedom through victory were devised based on Germany’s central geographical position, they still lacked a clear goal orientation. There was a policy that prioritized geo-strategic interests over reason. While the negotiation of a separate peace with Russia was postulated, at the same time Germany was trying to maintain influence in South-East Europe and the Middle East. Although the Foreign Office initially rejected the idea of freedom through renunciation, there were still Danish mediation attempts to explore the theoretical possibility of a separate peace with the Tsar. These “peace negotiations,” as a result of which Danish State Council Hans Niels Andersen travelled to Saint Petersburg in 1915, did not go beyond exploratory talks. The successes on the Eastern Front boosted hopes for the “status quo ante” peace. There was hope to build bridges for Russia on which it could walk with its head held high. Although the Russian army suffered heavy losses, this did not have an impact on its determination to wage war. Russia adhered to the treaty of 1915 and avoided the exclusion from the War Coalition. In retrospect, one could definitely say that the path toward peace was obstructed by many parties. The Tsar and his political advisers were unable to define the load limits of the country. The Central Powers, on the other hand, probably due the understanding of their limited military capability, offered a push for peace but rejected the serious general Peace Congress vehemently (ibid., 137).

In this context it is worth asking why the only serious and genuine proposal of Pope Benedict X suggesting a solution to the exhausted Europeans was rejected, or why the policy of balance and a temporary limited peace never had a real chance of victory. Why could moral clarity be created only through a one-sided victory, by the “peace of defeat” (Metz 2010, 96)? At the beginning of the war there was euphoria which there was hope of preserving for domestic policy and which also, to some extent, led to absurd expectations concerning the aim of the war. There appeared, for instance, memoranda of Pan-Germanism which called for far-reaching annexations and assumed an imperious and hegemonic role of Germany in Europe. The war and its supposed first “successes” awakened desires, fantasies of power, and a lust to establish the German Reich as global power which, together with the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, would form the core of world powers (hereinafter Neitzel 2003, 132 ff.). The tentative and ambivalent attempts to walk the path of non-violence in the face of imminent defeat were therefore problematized. In early September 1914 Bethmann-Hollweg, for example, established guidelines for a potential preliminary peace. According to the Chancellor, the main purpose of the peace dictated by Germany should have been to secure its own country from the eastern and western side for good, i.e., if possible, France was to be weakened so that it could not regain its status as a superpower and Russia was to be pushed away from the German border. Based on these symptomatic points we can see the core demands of the German policy concerning the aim of the war, extensive territorial claims and grandiose plans which, from the beginning, rejected the idea of returning to the status quo ante. The focus on a clear victory through peace was indeed strong and visible in all warring parties. The adviser of the U. S. president had to realize in 1914–1915 that there was no readiness in Berlin, London, and Paris to agree to a temporary renunciation of violence. In terms of the areas of influence and territorial borders, the warring parties, politicians, and military officers focused on improving the status quo. It seemed impossible at any time that a lasting peace could be established without moral clarity, and that the negotiated solutions could be taken into account, considering the military force of the enemy. This was clearly reflected in the German foreign policy since the spring of 1917. When, after an unsuccessful mediation attempt, President Wilson made an appeal to negotiate peace without victory on the basis of the nations’ right to self-determination, the German Reich communicated the peace conditions in order to show trust, but at the same time, engaged in the submarine warfare again with equal commitment. This political move led to the demolition of political relations, the entrance of the USA into the war in April 1917, and to the escalation of the long-term war which, with hindsight, was not an objective inevitability. More specifically, in order to understand why the path to a tentative renunciation of violence remained blocked, one has to consider the perception of reality of the German leadership, as well as the increasing powerlessness of politics against the independent military forces. Politics at this time could no longer be regarded as “a possible chance for peace” (ibid., 157). Until 1918 people were led by the conviction that one could achieve peace through force. This may be illustrated in the peace treaties of Brest-Litowsk and Bucharest, which sort of reflected the aim to extend power at the expense of others and, even more, the degree of the denial of reality which was determined by the strategies used by military forces until the final shedding of blood. The forces which did not strive for settlement and the post-war order, but attempted to reach what appeared enforceable by means of their own military capability were key.

The fundamental notion of the turning points and the aspects of violence can be fragmented into various intertwined issues. From a historical point of view, it is crucial to realize that the extreme severity and relentlessness of the war was rooted in the unconditional desire to gain power. Is it sufficient for the purpose of this paper to point out the alleged lust of the decision-making elites, the circulating ideas of Social Darwinism, the excessive desire to gain prestige, or the overwhelming nationalism? Or is there be some other criteria for meaning that could be included in the summation? Nevertheless, the failure of reason remains enigmatic: nine million soldiers were killed before the end of the war, probably around the same number of civilians lost their lives as a result of hunger and disease. Is it estimated that, in Germany, around 800,000 people died of hunger due to the British naval blockade – all this apparently could not change the internal logic of politics. The War of the Nations headed for the “peace of defeat,” and for four years a fixation on one-sided victory precluded the conclusion of separate tentative peace, which was still conceivable in the wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What remains worth mentioning is the a priori enmity which apparently constituted the approval of the senseless suffering. Even millions of deaths could not break the iron will of the governments. In a fight without a real winner, those who had greater military capability and power at their disposal determined the victory morale. As such, the meaning criterion of violence is not only technological, but also ideological. The willingness to wage war can ultimately be explained by the absoluteness of evil embodied in the enemy. Real redemption of the world through war could only be achieved by defeating evil, an obviously blind mechanism, which continued even after the horrors of Verdun. In this respect it is necessary to pose fundamental anthropological questions from the quagmire of political and state regulations and to disclose the criteria for the meaning of violence and non-violence in the context of historical experience.

In other words, how to explain the discrepancy between the civilizational accomplishments of the war between the nations and the historical evolution toward universal condemnation of the concept of war? The unrestricted nature of both world wars raises a legitimate question of why there were wars even after the consolidation of the modern statehood. Let us keep the devastating effects of war in mind. Then the question needs to be posed: How did it happen that an idea of war remained so firmly anchored as a signifier of meaning: as a means to an end, as apparently legitimate continuation of politics, as a guiding principle which nations adhere to? To understand this, it does not suffice to steer clear of the axiom of war as a political means (see Clausewitz), since this is anachronistic. Quite on the contrary, it requires insight into the political existentialism of a given time. A glimpse at the philosophical concepts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals an additional moral aspect. Fichte, for example, based his reflections in the Address to the German Nation (Ger. Reden an die deutsche Nation, 1808) on the civilizational existential crisis in Prussia. He aimed at the concept of the true war of his times, which was no longer a dynastic war of a sovereign, but a legitimate war that had to be a total, so that the people could be formed into a national unity. We can see how discrepant – or how similar – the nineteenth century was in relation to the beginning of the twentieth century, in the conviction that the war was no longer interpreted as an isolated political or military action, but rather that it embraced all of life. In the people’s war “people fight for their own definition of a purpose, not for the conceived interest of a person who is born and dies in separation from them, and is certainly not one of them. But the real purpose is infinite, one can approach it but not reach it” (Fichte 1813, as quoted by Stadler 2009, 94). It is not easy for us today to comprehend the depth of political existentialism where the terms death, victory, country, and eternity are used in the same context without hesitation. In the history of war, however, it indicates the focus on the moral dimension necessary to understand total war: Fichte discusses the notion of war as a moral effort of the whole nation in its struggle to survive as a free community. If we are talking here about the philosophical struggle to overcome the anti-Napoleonic wars, then we pose a question which goes beyond the narrow historical context, i.e. how a group of people can form a nation.

During a war, a continuous collective battle, people become a nation. This marks a threshold of the national and moral awakening of the nineteenth century, which is important to the understanding of a modern total war of the nations. The ambivalence becomes evident: if we no longer perceive war as a means to an end, or as a calculation used to achieve our clearly defined objectives, but rather as a non-material means of self-constitution, then a totalized meaning dimension becomes tangible. It is no longer simply a matter of rational interests but the existential relationship within large groups. It is necessary to overcome one’s own humiliation and powerlessness, to increase power, glory, and one’s own honor and, hence, to assert one’s own national identity in the fight against what is foreign. The aspect of hostility becomes existential. The aim of a group of people fighting for their existence is to defend their own existence and to preserve one’s own being (Schmitt 1932; ibid. 1963). One’s own being becomes a “fundamentum incomcussum” (Waldenfels 1997, 46), an opinion and decision-making body that defines a case of emergency. One’s own being does not require an external entity to satisfy its own interests in itself, it is a categorical entity which disposes of the external being. These philosophical reflections express the depth of the existential hostility which we noticed in the lasting failure of reason during the long war. We can comprehend the political situation of the early twentieth century only when we consider the criteria for the meaning of violence over an extended period of time. The development extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was marked by the sign of a promising replacement, the essence of which is reflected in the conversion of eschatology into utopia. One set hope for salvation not in transcendence, but in worldliness. The focus was on the question of who or what would occupy the vacant position of metaphysics, who or what ought to serve as the highest and safest reality and, therefore, the final legitimate point of historical reality. It is known that there appeared at least two new worldly realities. The demiurges of “humanity” and “history” changed the legitimacy of the old policy and would manifest its historical-anthropological categoriality: the drastic destruction of a given reality, mediated by religious, political, or ideological stipulations is a contradiction to pure and autonomous self-disposal. The tragic climax lies in the fact that, in principle, a man cannot lead an ex nihilo life. This terrible freedom pertains to a type of historicity that may be based only on something which is predetermined existentially. The general meaning criteria may stem only from this “perplexity.” This leads to a theory of history which results from the immediate functionality for a pragmatic and cooperative action but which aims at a more radical obligation: war as an act of political self-constitution.

4. On the role of historiography

Corpses with arms ripped off, parts of skulls, blood and carcass could be found everywhere. In this way a Bavarian soldier described the battlefield of Sedan on the day after the fight. The image of the bursting grenades, which literally tore victims into pieces, was “horrible.” The Battle of Sedan lasted only one day, but it surpassed anything “that anyone has ever seen” (Lorenzen 2006, 143). The Prussian-German army stored their entire artillery under a central command and aimed their fire not only at the enemy’s artillery posts, but also at the enemy soldiers. The trenches which characterized the First World War did not yet exist. However, Sedan anticipated some elements of the following world wars: the totality of the war in which all human values are lost. What, then, is the role of history if it does not include an element of superficial morality or a politically manageable “meaning”? In order to answer this question we also need to take a wider perspective and inquire into the criteria for the meaning of reason and non-violence as reflected in the human ability to create meaning. One of such creation of meaning is visible in the still-relevant idea of war removal which was pointed out at the beginning of the twentieth century as a possibility. The First World War brought an end to the bourgeois era in Europe (Mommsen 2004); despite growing discrepancies, it was a period of economic prosperity and thus growing wealth. Slowly, democratic structures emerged in the European structure, but this process found no reflection in constitutional norms. All these factors – the idea of peace, increasing prosperity, vague democratization – could not, of course, prevent the acrimonious struggle of the European powers. There emerges a pivotal question which has been discussed in history studies to this today, i.e. that the narrative of non-violence could not gain acceptance, even though it was theoretically possible. It is important to emphasize one thing here: the explication of the meaning of political violence should include different aspects, i.e. political criteria for the meaning of the key functions of government, the sociological and technological dimension of the specific military capability of the rival powers, but also some fundamental anthropological criteria. Only in combining these aspects can we approach a profound sense of the understanding of violence.

Was the war inevitable? In 1899 and 1907 the Hague Peace Conferences were organized, with a view to creating an international legal framework for the prevention of war. Their effects were short-lived. Bourgeois pacifism, which now acted in public independent of church and religion, as well as of the state and its logic, remained abrupt. The international peace societies in London in 1843, in Paris in 1889, and later in Germany and Austria, agreed on nothing other than the idea of the global peace. Their operations were far-sighted and visionary. The International Mediation Institute, the formation of an international court of justice and the establishment of a league of nations were the requirements which became reality as late as at the end of the following century. International successes such as Lay Down Your Arms (Ger. Die Waffen nieder 1891) by B. v. Suttner or the establishment of the Army Medical Services were possible at that time. Inspired by the battle of Solferino in the Franco-Sardinian war against Austria, Henry Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino and sent it to the leading political and military figures. Under the impression of 40,000 casualties and the injured, he stimulated the formation of voluntary aid organizations. A conference in Geneva took place as early as the year of the report’s publication. During the conference such proposals were discussed. The “Geneva Conference” created the framework which was later followed by European countries forming the first landmark agreement of international law. In other words, humanitarian ideas and the possibility of the renunciation of violence and peace as a bourgeois principle of reason were more than just lofty ideas.

All the possibilities of the renunciation violence beg the question of how the European, and especially German elites could engage in the nationalist transformation of politics and the world war, which surpassed the radicalism of previous conflicts. The vast majority of European societies were in a transitional phase, characterized by sensitivity and fragility. The key functions of the government were in the hands of a few elites, all this taking place in spite of voting rights, which were becoming widespread. It was simple to appeal to nationalist sentiments during political upheavals. Nationalist movements gained momentum. Under the influence of the zeitgeist, they developed into imperialist ideologies, which culminated in the demanding attitude of world empires. Only those with great military capabilities were capable of surviving. Only those who had to face the war for a long period of time could survive in the rings of power. These ideas, as we know, survived throughout the extreme twentieth century. The development of mass armies, the pillarisation of powers systems, the development of warfare technologies, the arms race, but also the general consent to the emerging war – all this contributes to explaining this ideological viewpoint. The “leap in the dark” was “inevitable,” as it was politically desirable, but also because it reflected a general mentality of the time (Mommsen 2004, 21–35). European societies of the late nineteenth century were walking a “slippery slope” (ibid., 23) and they were in the atmosphere of thrall until the events of August 1914. In Germany these days were perceived as an “incomparable shared social experience” (Fest 1973, 99). This traditionally deeply divided nation, which suffered for a long time due to its internal conflicts, overcame this discrepancy by means of commitment to the war conflict. Even if this was true for only part of the population, the virtually religious character, expressed in national excitement about the future and war-related hopefulness, was evident. The general consciousness perceived the war as a welcome opportunity to escape from the misery of normality, to succumb to the process of rebellion and to submit to the hegemonic objectives. There were days of solemn deceptions that were ended in September 1918 by the hastily appointed political leadership.

Finally, we will attempt to draw conclusions and describe the turning point of the war. If we do so, we are left with an irritating reflection. It was not reasonable to assume that the masses of republican citizens would join the war. According to Kant, history was no longer about the actions of the minority, but was supposed to reflect the actions of all the people. It was a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness of purposeful action that inspired the political progress of modernity, a form of history, “in which people had only themselves as a goal” (Metz 2010, 189). This “new” meaning was formed as a collective sense, as basic concepts of humanity, nation and proletariat. But, as we know, this future fell apart during the First World War. Which criteria for meaning can we finally gather from this tragic turning point in history?

5. The significance of the site

In 1914 death was looking for a new venue. With its tens of thousands of graves, Verdun is perceived symbolically as a “graveyard of Europe” (Schlögel 2008, 435). This is an inconsistent picture, since it encompasses both orderly arrangement of cemeteries as well as the radical devaluation of human life. It is important to ask how one can now shape the memory of the Great War. The meaning of history is based on the collective perception which is reflected in the notions of the “culture of memory” and “sites of commemoration.” Since the establishment of historiography as a “pure” science, it has been considered essential to separate myth from reality and to narrate the story as it was. One of the most basic views here is that, despite thorough examination and unbiased assessment, history is continuously shaped and reinterpreted, and therefore it is susceptible to political interpretation. This, of course, particularly applies to the history of war: the well-known events of a war, the turning points and battlefields, are more than just space for what is accidental and possible. They are more than nodes of individual memories; they turn into events in the culture of remembrance, in which the battle for sovereignty in interpreting events is ignited and memory takes cultural and political shape. There are a plethora of examples, e.g. Magdeburg (1631), Leipzig (1813) and Sedan (1870), which need not be discussed in great detail here. Nevertheless, the criticism of the form of memory culture, in which “only” the interests of a political formation or calculations are manifested, should be discussed thoroughly in some respects.

Is it possible to preserve the essential moment of a site before it becomes a political instrument? This is an interesting twist in modern historiography. As opposed to the classical way of presenting events in a chronological order, as a temporal sequence, it points to the spatiality of all human beings’ stories. The idea to perceive each historical process as spatial, in which history is expressed by means of an endless effort to control space, is of the utmost importance for the present considerations. It means less political instrumentalization than existential and political reflection. The location-oriented approach may oppose long-lasting deconstruction, the fragmentation of objects, as far as it maintains the mental reproduction of coexistence and allows the retelling of the history of the twentieth century with all its horrors, discontinuities, and fractures. To perceive a site as a historical moment is nothing less than to establish a reference to a single totality of historical formations and to focus more on spatial aspects of political matters.

Let us take a look at one such historical site: the Somme, July 1916. Between Noye and the Somme there is a strip of land which grows the most traditional product of the region – sugar beet. Plowing becomes arduous when, on closer inspection, there appear strange objects, i.e. remnants of the war. Mortars, howitzer grenades, aerial torpedoes and smoke shells have been found on this site up to the present day. The Somme was not the densest battlefield of the Western Front. When compared to other gruesome statistics concerning the use of grenades and the duration of shelling, the Somme did not rank first on the list, but still, for various reasons, the majority of blind shells have been found at the Somme. The region was an extensive attack front, where as many as twenty divisions could meet and use their resources. Here, endless suffering was mixed with impressive short-term triumphs. On 16 September 1916 Great Britain first entered the ruins of the village of Flers in their tanks. 1918 was marked by the success of the first major armored breakthrough in modern military history, whereas earlier the most critical offensive of Hindenburg was brought to a halt. John Keegan presents an image of endless battles, characterized by violent confrontations and miserable terrain: “Between Ypres and Armenteirs, water is found everywhere close beneath the surface and much of the line had to be constructed of sandbag barricades instead of trenches. Almost everywhere, too, the Germans occupied what commanding heights there were: near Ypres, the Passchendaele and Messines ridges; in the coalfields, most of the slag-heaps and, until they were destroyed, the pithead towers. Compelled to struggle for possession of the higher, drier ground, the British had driven their lines in many places almost to within conversational distance of the Germans” (Keegan 1978, 245).

In this place, as in many others, we experience everyday death, but we also recognize the criteria such as proximity and distance. Despite heavy losses incurred by the British troops Flanders became their homeland. Behind the lines the troops often left the trenches and looked around in the villages for a feeling of closeness, a roof to sleep under, a bed of straw, some beer, or even a place to play football. The farmers of the region learned how to make a profit during the war. They opened canteens and cafés, which offered a welcome change. The British troops “conquered” not only geographical areas, but also some attractive places nearby. One can see this from the peculiar way in which some places were named, e.g. “Armenteers” (Armentières), “Wiper”, (Ypern) and “Plugstreet Wood” (Ploegsteert). These terms do not relate to the great battles, but to inconspicuous events occurring in the background of the war. This point of view opens the possibility of commemorating the war in a special way: essential to the orientation of the human world is the inescapable spatial character of experience, the irrevocability, the slope leading to death, the finality of the existential and historical events (Rentsch 1999). Historical acquisition also includes the aspect of vulnerability, powerlessness, and other criteria, such as responsibility and guilt. The relationships which orient us in the human world do not fall to pieces, then to create a form of memory, but rather we recognize the primary forms of meaning. We recognize basic historical facts in the finite totality of the existentially structured orientation space. We can neglect the finite totality of the existential space, conceal it, and keep it from ourselves. However, in this way historical time will never become an objectively defined world history, from which one can distance oneself. There is a basic difference between the unique ability to create meaning for the primary world, the experience that we gain in the world of inter-existentially constituted practice, and the type of experience which is scientifically plausible. Historical experience ends when the existentially political vision of the primary world begins. At that point, all attempts to learn superficial “lessons” from history fail, for the technology available to the community culture during the war does not leave the autonomy of the primary world unscathed (ibid., 110 ff.). The military and technological possibilities penetrate deep into the experience of the common world and thus violate the principles of a singular totality. Therefore, insight into the comprehensive totality of the common life is essential to create historical memory. If ethical principles are to show themselves in the face of war, they must demand nothing less than a fundamental relationship between fragility and the claim for non-violence. In our shared world we can experience practices in which there is always risk of failure; practices characterized by uncertainty and vulnerability, which constitute meaning. The meaning which can be created in this context is secured by a negative. It reflects our groundlessness and elusiveness. We can objectify neither a single totality of life as a whole nor individual outstanding events in the history. We are not able to functionalize historical events in a sense that we perceive them as examples of a greater design. In other words, we can imagine the human experience as neither individually nor politically and instrumentally goal-oriented. The shape of the meaningful life emerges only in fragmentariness, and in the experience of poverty and paucity.

Christian Wevelsiep. Studied educational theory, philosophy, and political science. He finished his Ph.D in special educational theory in Dortmund as well as political sociology in Flensburg, Germany. He is cureently working as teacher in Bochum and as external “Privatdozent” at the University of Flensburg. His main focuses of research are: theory of society, anthropology and ethics, and the history of modern violence. At the moment he is working on a monograph about the history of the war from basic anthropological view.

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This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

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The year 1989 – a Central European ‘Autumn of Nations’ – fundamentally changed the continent of Europe. In our perception, however, the events which took place in the autumn of that year are more like the end of an epoch than the beginning of a new era.

On July 6, 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in Strasbourg to the Council of Europe during which he informed his audience that the Soviet Union would not oppose reforms in Eastern Europe. After such a public declaration from the heart of an empire that it would not, and could not, cling to the peripheral regions of its sphere of influence – an announcement which was greeted with great acclaim all over the world – it was only a matter of time until the proconsuls of the Russian empire in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Prague und Bucharest fell.

But it remained open as to how and where they would fall. What was also unclear was whether Jaruzelski, Honecker, Jakeš, Ceauşescu and Kádár would make use of those means of coercion which they so amply possessed. Just how serious the consequences of such a violent scenario might be was made quite clear to Central Europeans on June 4, 1989, the day when China’s communist rulers ordered the shooting of hundreds of peaceful protestors demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. This occurred on precisely the same day as the first semi-free elections were held in Poland. Not least because of the chilling example set by Tiananmen Square, the men and women opposing the communist regimes in Europe in 1989 deliberately avoided the use of violence. During the decades of their rule, the communist regimes had, by threat and force, squandered all their standing. But despite all the weapons these regimes had at their disposal, they unintentionally taught their citizens how ineffectual the use of violence was.

In 1989 the communist state parties in Central Europe still commanded the necessary weaponry and instruments of power, but they lacked a strong leadership. Only a leadership which did not shrink from spilling blood could have deployed those means the regimes still had of enforcing their will. In 1989 the leaders of the communist parties in the “Eastern Bloc” were no longer sure of their party base, of their cause and, above all, of themselves, and they had nothing with which to counter the revolutionary revolt of the populations in their countries. An antipathy to violence was the only thing many revolutionaries of 1989 had in common commocomm. The revolutionaries were an unusually diverse group. It was not uncommon for reformists to include reform communists, social democrats, liberal intellectuals, nationalists, supporters of a free market economy, church activists, trade unionists, pacifists, a few traditional Trotskyites and many others besides. This diversity was part of their strength and was poison for the one-party state.[1]

The ideological similarities between the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence meant that a threat to or collapse of the communist leadership in one country inevitably weakened the legitimacy of the rest. One characteristic of revolutions appears to be that they erode the legitimacy of the ruling power through cumulative examples. What was new in 1989 was the speed of events. The mass media contributed to the acceleration and the irreversible nature of events. The Hungarians and Czechs, in particular, were able to watch the gradual unfolding of their own revolutions in the news every evening on television. As East Germans sat back to enjoy their daily evening dose of West German television, they were no longer motivated by a wish to emigrate; instead the feeling crept over them that they themselves were the actors of events, whether fuelled by the pictures of the exhumation and reburial of Imre Nágy on June 16, 1989, of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig on October 9, 1989, or by the pictures of students demonstrating in Prague on November 17, 1989.

This exalted feeling, the experience of recovering their own dignity, which the Poles had known in 1980 and had enthusiastically celebrated, now became comprehensible to and reproducible for Czechs, Slovakians, Hungarians, and in a special fashion for East Germans. Within days, the communist regimes had lost something they had previously carefully guarded by repeated sanctions: their monopoly on the flow of information. The fear of standing alone which, particularly in the GDR and in Czechoslovakia, made any involvement in oppositional activities an uncertain and nerve-racking undertaking had disappeared for good.

However in Poland the changes which took place in 1989 have not become a repository of memory which elicits heartfelt joy and deep emotions. In the “Round Table Talks” held between representatives of the majority of oppositional groups and the ruling elite the question was no longer whether the latter would cede or share power, but – in view of the disastrous economic situation – about the manner how this would occur. Practicality and negotiating skills were therefore more in demand than revolutionary fervour.

The “Round Table Talks”, considered a Polish invention, were watched with great interest by oppositional groups in the GDR who considered it an example well worth emulating – a fact which has been largely blanked out in Poland. The “Round Table Talks” in Poland were and are controversial. Representatives of radical oppositional groups have criticised that the Round Table signified an unacceptable arrangement with the enemy. This criticism is repeated regularly and has been reiterated with even greater vehemence over the past few years.

Any description of the year 1989 would be incomplete without a look at the reunification of Germany and the impact on ingrained international perceptions and habits. That year of revolutions strongly challenged those habits and perceptions, a challenge which was far from welcome to many European governments. What had happened? Prior to 1989 there was a general consensus in Western Europe that the German question would only arise when the political conditions were there, that is, when there was a European framework for a lasting peace. The reality looked very different.

France and Great Britain were alarmed by the rise of a supposedly unchecked nation with an 80 million-strong population. For the newly elected government of Mazowiecki, German reunification offered the opportunity to cautiously replace the old obligations of the Warsaw Pact with sovereign relationships and new partnerships forged with the West. The sympathy of the new Polish government for the democratically legitimised Federal Republic of Germany was severely tested by Helmut Kohl’s ten-point plan for reunification presented in December 1989 as it did not address the question of the Oder-Neisse border. The agreement of 1970 only held good for the old Federal Republic of Germany, not for a united Germany.

Gorbachev’s consent to a reunified Germany and its NATO membership was essentially based on the consideration that it would be necessary to give up the GDR and Central Europe in order to focus on rebuilding the Soviet Union and it would be important to obtain the help of the West for that. What remains is his courage and strategic achievement.

Up to now those epoch-making changes which took place in the “Autumn of Nations’ have not become a founding myth – neither for a reunified Germany nor for the 3^rd Polish Republic, nor even for the newly expanded Europe. Jürgen Habermas once described the events of 1989 as “catch-up revolutions”, that is, attempts to catch up and secure those social and constitutional achievements which had long since been attained in the West. This institutional point-of-view fails to appreciate the often different memories, experiences and socialisations in Central and Western Europe, their emancipatory achievements – from the national uprising of 17 June 1953 to Solidarność in 1980/81 – as well as the innumerable testimonies by individual persons and small groups, all of them examples of self-assertion, of freedom of conscience wrested from the state, of hard-won human rights und civil liberties, and of social self-organisation outside the power structures of the single party state.

Even if politically the order of Yalta which divided Europe after the Second World War into a dictatorial East and a democratic West has now been swept away, the memorial cultures of Eastern and Western Europe continue alongside each other, often even in opposition to each other, as if the impositions of a life lived behind the Iron Curtain had carved themselves even deeper into the memory of Central Europeans than was considered possible in the capital cities of western Europe. According to Ralf Dahrendorf, German intellectuals view the year “1989” neither as a deep and decisive break – the way it is perceived by the rest of Europe – nor as a moment in which to rejoice at the triumph of an open society. In contrast to their view Dahrendorf considers “1989” to be not merely a global break, he also believes that “1989” could serve as a founding myth for a new Europe.[2]

The actions of the Central European men and women in 1989 deserve to be included in a European history of freedom where they can serve as an instrumental example of how a civil society can be achieved. The year “1989” should be anchored as a firm repository of memory in a European culture of memory alongside other events. “1989” stands for a revolutionary grass-roots movement for a democratic and constitutional state. It aimed at overcoming borders and demonstrated that, always and everywhere, the dignity and the freedom of individuals are worth asserting and defending. The year 1989 is a European repository of memory because it is what made Europe possible in its present form.

 translated from German by Helen Schoop

[1] Cf. Peter Bender, Deutschlands Wiederkehr. Eine ungeteilte Nachkriegsgeschichte 1945–1990, Stuttgart 2007, p. 229 f.

[2] Ralf Dahrendorf, Der Wiederbeginn der Geschichte. Vom Fall der Mauer zum Krieg im Irak. Reden und Aufsätze, München 2004, p. 213.

Burkhard Olschowsky PhD (born 1969 in Berlin)- studied history and history of Eastern Europe in Göttingen, Warsaw and Berlin. In 2002 received doctor’s degree in Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2003-2005 worked as contractual lecturer of contemporary history and politics in Humboldt University. In 2004-2005 worked in Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing. Since May 2005 research worker in Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2010 research worker in Secretariat of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.

I. Symbols of a transition

For me regime change, the change of the political system, started with a fair amount of crying. I started to shed tears not because of a mass event in the streets, the declaration of the republic or because of the first free elections. I was not even eight years old at the time and my father did not let my younger sister and me go swimming. We used to go to swimming lessons with Uncle Tibi, who wore a frightening beard on his face, but he had a rare gift for teaching us youngsters to swim. I started to cry together with my sister because we liked Uncle Tibi’s classes and we did not really understand the reasons why we had to stay at home. My father said something like we had to watch history in the making on television. It was 16th June 1989. This was the day when Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, who had been sentenced to death in a showcase trial, was reburied along with his fellows in martyrdom. Since then I have watched the sequence of events several times, and my heart sank every time at the sight of the ceremony taking place on Heroes’ Square, one of the most famous places in Budapest. The crowd was dignified, the Gallery of Art, decked in black and white, was very solemn. Well-known actors were continually reading out the names of workers, students, soldiers, and intellectuals murdered during the repressions in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution.

To make the drama of the summer of 1989 perceivable for a child as well, even more complete: János Kádár died on 6th July, the very same day when the Supreme Court officially acquitted and rehabilitated Imre Nagy, whom János Kádár had sent to the gallows. The leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, omnipotent for decades, had lived to see the reburial of his one-time rival. During the reburial ceremony he stood confused, deserted even by his own people, fighting with his demons. He lived to see the lie tumble as a house of cards which once served as the foundation of the whole system. According to this lie, 1956 was a counter‑revolution, our Soviet brothers actually stretched out their helping hands for which we had to be eternally grateful. Luckily, thanks to our leaders – the official explanation went on – since then we had managed to stand on our two feet and our lives had improved. Sooner or later a flat was allocated to everyone and having waited for many years we might even be lucky enough to be able to buy a Trabant or Wartburg manufactured in the Democratic Republic of Germany. Also, a summer holiday at Lake Balaton was more or less everyone’s right. We could even travel to the West – once in three years – and politics more or less left us in peace. As long as you did not criticise too loudly you could go on living your own life. That was a rough summary of the Kádárian deal.

This explanation of the world around us that defined the lives of generations was particularly dangerous because it was not entirely false. Compared to the other countries of the Bloc (but only to them!) things were not that bad in Hungary. The official propaganda did not hesitate to refer to the allegedly lazy Poles, who had critical shortages of goods during the state of emergency, to the rigid Czechoslovakian system, or to the ever darker conditions in Romania.

The Hungarian system was rightly called goulash communism, only the ingredients were rotten. The meat stunk, the vegetables were withered and the potatoes were stale. The dictatorship was founded on fundamental lies: 1956 was not a counter-revolution but a revolution, the Soviets were not helping but occupying, and contrary to all the slogans we were not allowed to live free lives, to travel freely, to start a business freely, to pray freely – all the things that for any citizen of the allegedly decadent West were commonplace. But this was not the only reason why the Hungarian goulash was going off: the Kádárist economic system, falsely presented as pleasant, was also a lie. “You pretend that you are paying us we also pretend that we are working” went the cynical saying of the Hungarian workers about the socialist “economy,” in which basically everyone was lying to everyone. Workers were lying about their work, company directors were lying about the productivity of their companies, and the state was lying just about everything. Statistics at the time of the regime change was aware of about a million of unemployed people “within the gates” whose work was essentially not needed, but they could not be laid off as in the existent socialist system unemployment was not allowed to exist. During the time of regime change there was a moment rarely mentioned, but one that still defined the subsequent years and even decades of Hungary. It was when the prime minister of the last communist government, Miklós Németh, admitted that by the end of 1989 the gross foreign debt of the state had reached 20 billion dollars. He was also forced to confess that the administration was publishing false figures about the debt as early as the middle of the 80s, fearing that they might scare away foreign investors.

So, the ideological and economic foundations of the communist system were false. The description phrased by the political scientist, István Bibó, himself a democrat who was imprisoned for participation in the events of 1956, perfectly fitted the regime. He maintained that one can occasionally lie in politics, but no system can be founded on lies forever. We might add that if one still attempts to do so, one has to pay dearly for a long time for such deception.

This is true even if we already know that without the geopolitical constellation the collapse of the dictatorship would not have taken place in Hungary nor elsewhere in the region. The Soviet Union simply collapsed under the weight of its own internal problems, its economy – except for the military industry – failed to function in almost all areas. It still might have had the strength to intervene in Central Europe, but it no longer had the will to do so. The most dangerous opposition in world history – because it threatened the deployment of nuclear weapons – ended in the Visegrád countries without a bullet being fired. In the period that followed, similarly to other countries of the region, Hungary first joined NATO and later the European Union. The most aching failure of regime change in Hungary was that despite the success of the process on a historical scale, according to every study not only do many people feel nostalgic for the “jolliest barrack,” but also a stunningly high number of citizens are dissatisfied with the performance of the post-Soviet administrations and the general support for the institutions of the democratic system of government is remarkably low. This situation is further worsened by the struggle among the elite that erupted in 1989–1990, manifesting itself in cultural-symbolic matters, and which stunned the observer by its fierce and, at the same time, hopeless nature. It looked as if Hungary in many aspects could not cope with “freedom regained” and its politicians and smaller and larger communities were unable to find common ground even on the most fundamental issues. What is the function of government in the economy? When and how should it intervene? What happened during the process of privatization? What is to happen with the education and the health systems? And in general, what happened to us in the 20th century? In what ways should we remember and think about the Trianon peace resolutions, about World War II, about the Holocaust, about 1956, or about regime change? There are so many controversial issues in which we seem to be even farther from a common ground than we were at the start of the process in 1989–1990.

Without trying to bore the reader with Hungarian internal political developments, it is my contention that the governance of Fidesz (who was given an unprecedented electoral mandate in 2010 since the change of the political system by having gained two thirds of the votes in the parliamentary elections) could be described as an attempt to solve this complex heap of Hungarian problems. The leaders of Fidesz (active student leaders during the period of transition) can be characterized by their occasionally distasteful (ab)use of power, an almost exclusive preference for voluntarism as opposed to compromise, the use of simplifications in their rhetoric wherever possible, and their tendency for arguments of the kind of the “fight of good against evil.” They understood that by 2010 the system, created with regime change, simply used up its own reserves. This was signalled not only by the forward thrust of the far-right, which by riding the waves of hopelessness and despair gained 17 per cent of the votes. The political credibility of the system of regime change was also eaten away by corruption and incompetence, which essentially ruined the social liberal government in power between 2002 and 2010. Ideological capital ran out completely because of the almost civil war-like opposition of the right and the left following the leaking of the “lie speech” given by the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, in 2006. By that time the opposing sides could not even agree on the meaning of words and their strength was enough only to render those in power untrustworthy, but not to have a decisive victory over them. This only aggravated and intensified a very dangerous feeling, the complete lack of trust on the part of a significant segment of the Hungarian population in all sorts of institutions, specifically in the governments in power.

This kind of attitude was present already before the time of the regime change, and it was not by accident that the first freely elected prime minister, József Antall, addressed the citizens of the country when introducing the government program of 1990 by saying, “I call for the Hungarian nation from this place to get rid of the lack of trust that has been engrained in our psyche for decades, and even centuries, to regard the institutions of the country as their own, as institutions that work in their interests, in their protection and in their service.” It is not a coincidence that one of the new buildings of the European Union in Brussels bears the name of this very same prime minister who passed away in 1993. Despite all attempts to prove to the contrary, he was a man of immaculate democratic credentials, and a statesman of European calibre who understood what could poison the public and social relations, as well as the economy of the country that just recently regained its independence.

2. The lack of peaceful disagreement

In Hungary, lack of trust has roots going back farther than communism, but the four decades of dictatorship amplified this phenomenon tremendously. According to the leaders of Fidesz, who regained victory in 2010, which greatly contributed to the prevalence of this lack of trust was that during its first term the freely elected parliament was not able to complete regime change with a symbolic act of jurisdiction, the adoption of a new constitution. They believed that by such a symbolic act it would have been possible to say that “these institutions are already yours, they were set up by the authorization of the Hungarian people, therefore they will work in the service of the Hungarian people.” This lack of completion was also symbolised by the fact that in Hungary communist leaders were not held responsible in the aftermath of 1989. It is also of symbolic importance that it was not until 2013 that the district attorney charged a former minister of the interior, Béla Biszku, of war crimes and other criminal activities for the key role he played in the repressions that followed 1956. After the crushing of the revolution, the accused was a member with voting and decision-making rights of the innermost party leadership, the Provisional Executive Committee, which was the central governing and decision-making body of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and was established in early November 1956. This committee set up a special police force with the aim that in the aftermath of the revolution and war of independence it could function as an organ both securing the peace and assisting in repression, as well as acting against the civilian population. The units of this police force working under the Provisional Executive Committee, with Biszku among its ranks, opened fire with the aim of deterrence against the unarmed civilian population in several major cities and towns in Hungary, killing children and women alike. The fact that Biszku was left unharmed and unaccountable for so long also became a symbol of the unsettled nature of the past, which many ascribe to the accounts of the 1989 constitutional system.

If we want to understand why some considered the issue of the new constitution so central, we have to know that the new democratic constitution, which was accepted at the round table talks of the opposition and ratified by the last parliament of the Party State, was originally also considered temporary by the participants of the 1989 “negotiation revolution.” This was evident by the wording in the preamble to the constitution “to facilitate the peaceful transition into a rule of law that is to establish a multi-party system, parliamentary democracy, and a social market economy.” By 2010 this became a strange anachronism, not only because the first free elections had already taken place in the spring of 1990, but also because by then all the former socialist countries – with the exception of Hungary – had adopted their new constitutions. The fact that the new institutional system still remained operational for two decades is largely due to the Constitutional Court. In 2010, however, the adoption of a new constitution suddenly came within reach, which had been attempted since 1990 by all governing forces in one way or another, proving the need for correction. Voting for a new constitution between 1994 and 1998 – although the necessary parliamentary majority did exist – could never take place due to the disputes between the governing socialists and the liberals. Later, however, the plans could not materialize because of the ever deepening lack of trust among the participants of the Hungarian political scene.

According to the debatable, although strongly supported right–wing evaluation of the situation, the ambivalent nature of the regime change stemmed from the fact that in Hungary the change of the system, the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and the adoption of the new constitution did not go hand in hand. We need to know all this to be able to understand why Fidesz, obtaining on its own the majority necessary for the creation of a constitution, insisted so much in 2010–2011 on drawing up and adopting a new constitution even though the opposition parties, initially cooperating in the work of the parliamentary committee, finally withdrew from the process. Moreover, in their rhetoric they clearly equated the adoption of the constitution and, later the constitution itself, with the current political interests of the government and promised to modify it as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It is not difficult to see that the whole constitutional process, carried out by the governing party and lacking not only consensus but also parliamentary compromise, as well as the attitude of the opposition who viewed even their intentions with suspicion and “welcomed” the outcome with fierce criticism, further strengthened the ideological conflicts already present in Hungarian society, and intensified the lack of trust in institutions as well as in the constitution. Of course, it cannot be excluded that with the passage of time Hungary will also follow the model of the French Fifth Republic. The public system, hallmarked by the 1958 constitution and tailored to Charles de Gaulle, was fiercely attacked by the left and initially criticised by François Mitterand himself, who wrote a book about it entitled “Le coup d’état permanent.” However, upon coming to power in 1981, Mitterand took advantage, perhaps even more than his president-predecessor, of its framework, which provided almost unprecedented power in Western democracies for a head of government in a “republican monarchy.” It is possible that such a scenario may evolve in Hungary because, despite the contradictory government and opposition rhetoric, the new constitution is 80 per cent similar to the old one. This is to say that even the current governmental majority, which proclaimed a complete new beginning, did not distance itself from the main directions of the governmental system and the division of power. Its amendments were, primarily, ideological in nature, or can be traced back to the practice of the Constitutional Court during the past two decades: It could also be considered as an attempt to level out the unevenness of the previous constitution. Still, in case of a political turn to the left, chances are very slim for reasonableness, which can only partially be explained by the politics of power of the right. We are probably talking about something much deeper here. As the English conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, who often visits Hungary, recently perspicaciously noted: “People here somehow seem to be incapable of peaceful disagreement.” What a precise formulation!

Keeping a distance and reflecting upon ourselves and our environment is probably more important and necessary in Hungarian public life than anywhere else. Public life is ruled on a daily basis by decade-long grievances, unforgivable personal animosities, unfortunate half-sentences uttered 15 years ago that are used as reference points, as well as taboos and excommunications that make rational debates impossible. Whereas if we allowed for the contrasting of interests, the emergence of a multitude of opinions, heated debates or – God forbid – even a negative campaign that would by no means spell the end of democracy or a national tragedy. Hungarian public life, despite all rumours to the contrary, is no more evil than the French, German – or let us be more modest – the Slovak, Polish or the Romanian one. My biggest cause for concern is that empathy disappeared from decisive segments of the Hungarian public in relation to different opinions, perspectives, and even narratives. We seem to have an inability to place ourselves into other people’s frames of mind, to understand the motives of the ones standing against us, and to accept the validity of experiences that are fundamentally different from ours. Although our politicians have undoubtedly played their parts in the development of the current situation, only the smaller part of the responsibility can be ascribed to them. Although it may feel good for many to divide the nation into a corrupt and irresponsible political elite that is busy digging trenches and stirring up hatred on the one hand, and unfortunate, deceived voters and citizens yearning for peace on the other, I believe it is a highly misleading attitude. The Hungarian political elite are neither better nor worse than the country they come from. If you like, our representatives and party leaders are reflections of our society. They are like Hungarian football, Hungarian gastronomy or the Hungarian traffic culture. Yes, our politicians throw mud, they are petty and egotistical but do we, citizens, workers of the press, push them in the direction of a different kind of attitude? Despite the continual bashing of politics and the state, in Hungary everyone expects everything from the state: the director making films that nobody cares about as well as the pensioner criticising the local store operated by the local government. Internal conflicts among intellectuals evolve into battles of big politics because the party logo functions as an excellent way of distinguishing between friend and foe, and with a bit of luck, it may also secure us favours, membership on a board of trustees, or may bring us business orders for our enterprise.

This sort of behaviour makes it impossible to conduct constructive debates about the directions of the economy or of foreign policy, as well as about the evaluation of our past. This almost constant phenomenon since the regime change destroys not only the morale of the country, but its competitiveness as well. In Hungary, the majority of those with strong political preferences perceive taking account of or understanding anything that differs from the line – or the perceived line – of their favourite party as a betrayal. This attitude is obvious if one watches the call-in programmes of any television channel, and listens to the arguments of the callers that are ripe with hatred. Hungarian public life and the Hungarian public per se tend to think in a weird winner–loser frame of mind. According to this perception, acknowledging or accepting any comment phrased “on the other side,” however legitimate it may be, weakens the camp of one’s own and its chances at elections. One may accept this way of thinking from a politician, but much less from rational people considering themselves intellectuals.

3. The economic transition and its social implications

One of the longest lasting impacts of regime change from an economic point of view is that while the relatively low, but at least equal, standard of living of Kádárism disappeared, considerable differences of wealth emerged in Hungarian society which came to tolerate them with increasing difficulty. In the first few years following the regime change of 1989–1990, one million jobs disappeared and a stunningly large number of people (typically miners and workers of former state factories representing heavy industries that produced hazardous, but still not competitive products) fled to various kinds of social programs. According to astonishing data, while the number of unemployed in 1990 hardly exceeded 20,000, in 1993 it was almost 700,000. Although this number dropped during the following years, one may imagine the tensions created in Hungarian society by the thirty-fold increase in unemployment.

Moreover, for a segment of the middle class to stay afloat and not hit rock bottom came to be an everyday experience. However, with the passage of time, this became a frustrating experience for an increasingly wider section of the society. It was not only their own lives that took an unwelcome turn, they also had to realise that despite all their efforts, their children were also unlikely to fare any better.

This situation inevitably led to major frustration and was coupled by another kind of dissatisfaction that had political consequences. Similarly to other former socialist countries, Hungary also had to face a clear contradiction in 1989–1990. As described by the co-authors Tamás Kolosi and Ákos Róna Tas, the logic of the political regime change necessitated an extensive change of elite. However, because of the change of the economic system, the importance of market automatisms increased, which, in turn, favoured the previous elite in their retention of power. The political right which formed the first government of the regime change had to face a strange dilemma in 1990: to the extent that they insisted on the change of the elite, to the same extent they hampered the economic regime change as well as the expansion of market conditions, and vice versa. The stronger the power of privatization and market automatisms became, the more likely the economic elite of the previous system was to be successful amidst the new conditions as well.

Only a strong middle class could have been able to come to terms with this contradiction and the tensions stemming from it. A middle class, however, evolved only partially due to the reasons described above. The process of transition of positions by the previous elite led to the phenomenon called “clotted structures” by sociologist Gyula Tellér. This scenario took place not only in the economy but also elsewhere starting from government offices, to trade unions, and security services. Although it was impossible not to recognise the aspiration for positions in the criticism on the part of the political right, in general, this sort of power-transition still deteriorated the chances for the establishment of democratic pluralism, as well as a real parliamentary rotation system. The social historian, Tibor Valuch, stated that in approximately half a decade following regime change and amid increasingly market-type conditions, the role of education, professional skills and expertise, especially convertible knowledge, came to be more highly appreciated. The value of symbolic capital such as relationships, creativity, entrepreneurship and adaptability significantly increased during the social position-transfer. Despite all strategies to the contrary, the increase in disparity of income and wealth was constant and of an accelerating rate ever since the beginning of the 90s. A highly numerous stratum of entrepreneurs, large and small, developed rapidly. In 1997 in every 10 Hungarian households there was one entrepreneur. The number of individual and corporate business people exceeded one million, however, every third one was a member of an enterprise that did not carry out any real activities. This means that there was no direct correlation between the entrepreneurial spirit, self-care, risk-taking and competition that was so much desired and the seemingly large number of entrepreneurs. These processes, taking place in the labour force and the economy, struck the Roma segment of Hungarian society much harder than the general population. Although their partial modernization and integration did take place during socialism, it mostly happened by way of sweeping the problems under the carpet. The Roma workers of low educational background were absorbed by the Hungarian industry as simple labourers, but no further efforts were made at their real integration and education. It was even considered a taboo to discuss their situation. According to studies, during the period following regime change, approximately 70 per cent of Roma heads of households were poor, and this figure in essence has not changed ever since.

When analysing the process of disillusionment we must mention the following: parallel with the economic changes, in effect – using the jargon of journalism – the big story was gone. The dream, although not worked out in all its details but shared universally, dissipated. But what was it all about? Hungary from the beginning of the 90s posed in the role of the “top student.” Building on its previous relative openness it actually carried out everything that foreign advisors recommended or that was useful for foreign enterprises. Among these were many things necessary for the setting up of a market economy, just like a significant part of foreign businesses also contributed to the creation of the new economic system by bringing useful technological expertise and capital to the country. Other companies, however, without even concealing it, were only interested in buying a market in Hungary and acquired the companies, offered at very reduced prices, but otherwise requiring only minimal investment to make them competitive (for example in the food industry, which was profitable even during the dictatorship) only to phase them out in order to make way for their own products and services. With time this economic policy concentrating only on liberalization, deregulation, and privatization – that is exclusively on things that attract capital – caused major social disillusionment and frustration and was less and less capable of mobilizing imagination and setting up new goals.

Not to mention that there was something disturbing in the compliments for being a good student that the first post-regime change governments received from international financial organizations or Western governments. This sort of mentality considered it just natural that the nature of the relationship could be perceived exclusively in the dissymmetrical system of relations between “teachers” (developed countries and international organizations) and “students” (Hungary and the other countries of Central Europe). The representatives of this attitude, initially quite gracious, with time watched with a certain degree of impatience that the “students” were not progressing fast enough with their “homework” and were still not living – and even more annoying – still not thinking the way it was accepted in the West. This sort of attitude simply did not take account of the burdened legacy of communism or of the even deeper historical, economic, and social determining factors. In Hungary, in the first decade after regime change – except for a few marginal and feeble attempts – it was not even conceivable that there might be a different narrative other than the fast process doing away with the state and that in certain cases there is a clear need for a more decisive representation of our national interests. Neither left nor right posed basic questions: the right out of gratitude for winning over oppressive communism and the left for fear of losing its “reformist” legitimacy in the eyes of the West, as well as losing and the social capital that it acquired still as a State party and in its immediate aftermath during the 80s.

As stated by the political scientist of the left, Balázs Böcskei, owing to its deficits of origin, the post-party left governing the country between 1994–1998 and 2002–2010 (pre-party: CMEA, post-party: European Economic Community) wished so much to be compatible with Europe that because of its aspirations to adopt to European patterns it was unable to offer contemporary, let alone left-wing answers for current social conflicts. They managed society (or at least they tried) but did not analyze it. This situation could best be described by the term cognitive dissonance: the country was not perceived in the framework of a world order but instead it was suggested that it was enough to follow European patterns and the country would prosper automatically. This approach does not take note of the fact that European politics itself is also the scene of power games therefore it can be characterized by a lack of balance, uncertainty and a geographical market-based division of labour. Roger Scruton’s criticism of Europe is also received by the technocratic practice of force and inertia: “If a problem pops up we solve it by way of a regulation. However, the solution of one problem leads to another one but that one – just because it belongs to a different part of the machinery or because it is engrained in the future – it is overlooked by the machinery of jurisdiction. What makes things worse, nothing can be reversed that has already been approved by the plan. Under such circumstances, with determining factors of foreign and domestic politics there was not even a chance to discuss, let alone, reach a consensus between right and left in issues of fundamental importance. These issues include: Can the state really be only a bad proprietor? What consequences can the swift liberalization of strategic fields such as the energy sector have? Why is it a taboo to bring up the issue of confining the economic power dominance that stifles the layers of small enterprises and “family capitalism”? This economic power dominance could be controlled by setting up institutions that keep a functioning free market capitalism in check and – where needed – establishing balance between the state and the market, which has been functioning well in most Western countries since the end of World War II or even earlier.

Hungarian society was in a sense chasing a mirage, a fata morgana, the well–known fixture of the Hungarian puszta. When the dream – so widely shared around the time of regime change in Hungary concerning a quick catch-up with the West (by this Hungarians meant catching up with the standard of living of the Austrians with whom they used to live together in a common empire and who also functioned as an eternal reference point for Hungarians) – dissipated, people switched to hope that the accession to the European Union would bring about this brave new world. Then on 2 May 2004 Canaan still did not come and politicians did not do much to help a more realistic evaluation of the situation. It is enough to mention only one renowned item of the billboard campaign of the government about European accession which portrayed one of the privileges of EU membership by suggesting that the one-time Hungarian citizen could also open a coffee house in Vienna. In reality, though, this ideal is much farther from the actual reality of Hungarians than the Hungarian capital is from the Austrian one. After joining the European Union we started to hope that having warmed up a little bit and learned the rules, we would finally be able to catch up with the so much desired object of our dreams – the West. The remnants of this illusion were smashed to pieces by the crisis that started at the end of 2008 and since then we are not even sure what the “Western model” is all about. Is it something epitomized by Germany, France, England, or Scandinavia? Unfortunately, the years of daydreaming were spent in the worst possible way. Just to top off our woes, blinded by the glow of shop windows that we yearned for, we were busy not with the values that the European Union was founded and grew big on (the establishment of clear relations, accumulation of wealth by way of hard work, selfdiscipline, moderation, investments and planning) but above all we wanted to join the happy ranks of consumers. Since we stretched ourselves more than our blankets would have allowed us to do we were forced to apply for loans. From the beginning of the year 2000, the Hungarian state was taking out loans to finance investments and their operations, local governments were applying for credit, aimed at developments, and citizens also became indebted because of their pursuit of products of consumer society. It all amounted to absurd political irresponsibility. This led to a situation when the socialist-liberal government, handing out portions of the budget in the hope of winning the elections of 2006, worked up the budget deficit to 9.2 per cent, a world record at the time. The end result came to be a lethal cocktail: large state debt and budget deficit, indebtedness of both local governments and citizens, which are outstanding even in a European comparison, coupled with weak growth. So by now it is understandable why Hungary was the first country to resort to the IMF for help in the fall of 2008, and why Budapest is known in the news primarily for the tools it tries to use in fighting state debt, budget deficit, and indebtedness.

During the five years since the outbreak of the economic crisis, the social– economic heap of problems came back to haunt us with overwhelming force. We have been carrying all the problems described above ever since the time of regime change although they were somewhat masked by the “top student” success stories of the 90s and the early 2000s. The economic hardships were amplified by the near pathological nature of the conflicts of Hungarian public life that was further worsened by the fundamentally differing assessments of the Hungarian past of the 20th century, a century bringing tragedies one after the other. (For some time, the right has been defining itself against the economic and intellectual mainstream as the preserver of values seemingly abandoned by the West, such as nation, work, family, faith, merit, effort, and enterprise.)

It would undoubtedly be beneficial for the economic performance of the country as well if this state of warlike preparedness subdued so that at the time of the 25th anniversary of regime change at least in a few key issues we would not need to conduct polemics in Hungary.

Bálint Ablonczy. Born in 1981. He graduated as a historian at ELTE Faculty of Humanities in Budapest. As a scholarship-holder he studied in France at University of Marne la Vallée, and also took a degree in modern history at Matthias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. He has been writing a diary since the age of 18. He has been working for the influential weekly Heti Válasz since 2005, and he is also a regular participant in TV and radio programmes analysing the current Hungarian political scene. Balint Ablonczy is also the executive editor of the bi-monthly cultural review Kommentár. Currently, he is the domestic affairs editor of Heti Válasz. In 2010, he was awarded the Junior Prima prize in the media category.

This article has been published in the third issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the consequences and commemorations of 1989 in Central Europe.

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ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyze perception of political transformation in Poland in the years 1988–1990 by Polish independence émigrés in the West. It presents assumptions which guided the émigrés and indicates the objectives of their political activities. The different points of view of the reality in Poland between the independence émigrés and the national democratic opposition are explained. The article demonstrates the dilemmas of the émigré leaders arising from the peaceful transition and gradual democratization of Poland, instead of the expected break with the legacy of communism. The closing paragraphs attempt to clarify the meaning of Polish President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski’s symbolic transfer of authority to Lech Wałęsa, democratically elected in presidential elections in Poland.

The workers’ strikes of August 1980 and the establishment of the NSZZ Solidarność [Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity”] have found their well-deserved place among the most meaningful events in the post-war history of Poland and the entire Eastern Bloc. It was not the first time in the twentieth century that the whole world turned its eyes toward Gdańsk and Warsaw. Interest among political leaders and the societies of the West accompanied Solidarity throughout this multimillion-member trade union and social movement’s nine-year journey: from the August strikes in Wybrzeże (the Coastal Region), through Martial Law, to the non-violent system transformation of 1989.

The events in Poland were also followed by Polish political immigration to the West. Poles living in London or America, although deprived of direct contact with their country for a long time, still considered Polish issues a frame of reference in their public activities. Having spent decades in exile, the emigrants had to face the changes taking place in their homeland and confront them with their own hopes and their ideological and political mission.

In order to depict this confrontation, we ought to clarify, first of all, who the post-war pro-independence Polish émigré community was, and what their goals and values were.

The Indomitable Poles of London

As an outcome of World War II and the arbitrary political decisions made at the Yalta Conference, Poland fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. The shifting of the country’s borders (Poland lost its eastern borderlands, including Vilnius [Wilno] and Lviv [Lwów], to the Soviet Union, and was compensated, at Germany’s expense, with the “Regained Territories”), governed by communists installed by and subservient to the Soviets, was difficult for most of society to accept. The postwar reality was unacceptable for most of the civilian refugees and the soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, who found themselves in Western Europe at the close of World War II. Their opposition to the Sovietization of Poland caused them to stay abroad and wait for changes in the international political situation. This laid the foundations of the postwar Polish diaspora in the 1940s, which was decidedly anti-communist and pro-independence.

At the time, London was the center of the Polish diaspora’s political life. Since 1940, the Polish Government and the President in exile had been based there, by invitation of the British authorities. Since the Constitution of Poland, in force on 1 September, 1939 (the “April Constitution”), allowed the government of Poland to act abroad, the legal continuity of the Polish state was preserved throughout the whole of the war with Germany, fought by Polish armed forces outside Poland. Despite the Yalta agreement and the fact that the United States and United Kingdom withdrew their recognition in July 1945 and established diplomatic relations with the government in Warsaw, most Polish emigrants, including the Polish Armed Forces in the West, still under arms, recognized the authority and command of the London president and government. This fact considerably shaped the profile of the Polish pro-independence émigré community, which took the form of a state in exile. It survived for nearly half a century as such, with a president, government, and a quasi-parliament. The “state in exile,” while rather symbolic, had to be anchored in a doctrine accepted by the émigré community as a whole. The foundation of this doctrine was, first of all, legalism and the conviction of its special importance for the émigrés’ main goals and tasks. The notion of legalism, according to the émigré theorist, should be understood as “an uninterrupted continuity of a legitimate legal order of the state when another, competing, and present legal order of another state comes to exist” (Gawenda 1959, 120). What constituted this competing and present legal order for émigré legalists in the post-war period was the internationally recognized People’s Republic of Poland. The foregoing guarantee was to be ensured by the office of President of the Republic of Poland and his Cabinet, who had the sole right and obligation to represent and act on behalf of the Polish state and nation. As such, only the President and the government were empowered to decide on peace and war, or on the issue of the country’s borders, which was especially important for the Polish emigrants from the Eastern Borderlands. Consequently, this right, according to the pro-independence émigrés, was then denied to Stalin-imposed Warsaw Government, which “Polish London” considered as subservient to the Kremlin usurpers.

Apart from defining the status of the Polish Government in Exile, legalism had two meanings for the Polish emigrants. The first pertained to the sphere of symbols and was crucial to the community which mainly founded its collective life on imponderables. In this sense, legalism was the basis for creating and cultivating a myth of the steadfast existence of the Polish State in Exile. This myth manifested itself in rituals, special celebrations of national holidays and the way the President of the Republic of Poland was worshipped (a word we use deliberately). The President was not only a political leader of the émigré community; he was the symbol of the perseverance and resistance of the Polish diaspora.

The third function, apart from the political and legal role and mythmaking, was the integration of legalism. The symbolic nature of the Polish state in exile involved the establishment of several competing political centers over a period of half a century. Despite this, the part of the émigré community which appealed to legalism, though internally at odds, remained the most significant. The presence of the president in exile in public life turned him into a symbol of the opposition against the Soviet dominion of Poland, and a natural political leader. This perception of the head of state prevented the Polish communities abroad from disintegrating entirely. Obviously, identifying the entire pro-independence émigré community with the legalistic center would be a blatant historical falsehood. After 1945, there were groups which, for various reasons, defied legalism, but by their nature remained political émigré communities. In 1980s the Stronnictwo Narodowe [National Party] kept its distance from the legalist centers, and the editorial team of the Parisian Kultura was fully autonomous in its actions, focusing mainly on affecting the Polish society in Poland, rather than the émigrés. In the present article, however, in analyzing the attitudes of the Polish pro-independence émigré groups, I will focus mainly on the legalist communities, recognizing the President in Exile as the Head of State.

It could be said that the principle of legalism and the form of existence adopted by this group, as a “state in exile,” organized the thinking of émigré elites. The end of the harshest phase of the Cold War, a prolonged stay in a foreign land, and the unforeseeable prospect of the émigrés’ political mission ever coming to an end were accompanied by two advancing processes. One of these was the Polish émigrés’ gradual assimilation into the countries where they had settled; the other was the unintentional narrowing of their viewpoint to intra-émigré matters. The political elites of the émigré circles had contented themselves with partisan pushing and shoving for decades, or with quite serious political games in the émigré “parliaments,” growing increasingly distant from the interests of Poles in Poland, and less and less aware of the intricacies of Polish politics back home. It should be explained here that this is by no means a condemnation. It comes from the very nature of exile: as they were anchored in the law, politics, and symbolism of the Second Republic of Poland (1918–1939), this was quite a natural point of reference for the political émigré elites. Apart from natural generation changes, the inner circle of the Polish communities abroad, for all the time they functioned as a political diaspora, was composed almost exclusively of people who had spent their adult years, or at least their adolescence, in prewar Poland. Subconsciously then, their perception of the contemporary state was shaped by the traditions of the Second Republic. Over the years the pro-independence émigrés’ tendency to mythologize the past did not wane or vanish; on the contrary, it grew stronger with time. The émigré society was growing old, the nostalgia for their country was growing stronger, and the urge to counteract the official communist propaganda falsifying the interwar image of Poland only intensified their idealization of the past (Lencznarowicz 2009, 400).

A lack of understanding of contemporary Poland, despite the best intentions and the desire to maintain ties with the country, manifested itself clearly on the rare occasions when the “old emigrants” made contact with people representing the new, postwar reality of Poland. Adam Michnik’s account of his meeting with Polish émigrés, when he visited London in 1970s as a young representative of the democratic opposition, is typical:

I was learning about a different Poland, one that was completely new to me. A Poland of the ‘Indomitable Poles of London.’ This Poland was alive only in [my interlocutor’s] mind, but still present as a real part of his life. A Poland of the manor houses of the Polish gentry, a Poland of the cavalry, of Piłsudski and Wieniawa, of lancers and the legend of the Polish Legions. A country of his childhood... My interlocutor was aware that Poland as he knew it no longer existed, and nothing could possibly bring it back to life. Therefore, he did not long for Warsaw, Poznań or Łódź; Wrocław and Szczecin were empty words for him; while Wilno and Nowogródek, Lwów and Stanisławów constituted an ineradicable part of his memory. He still stood before a prewar map of Poland (Michnik 1988, 78).

This reflection by one of the leaders of the emerging Polish democratic opposition conveys not only the thinking of some postwar emigrants, but also a cognitive dissonance experienced by a Pole from behind “the Iron Curtain.” This dissonance was caused by a meeting of two people who shared the same language, but actually belonged to two different worlds and two different realities – one “in Poland” and one as an emigrant. Of course, the evocation of the past did not obscure the present for all emigrants. In his article Adam Michnik refers to the Parisian Kultura as an example of a Polish magazine published abroad that focused on dialogue with contemporary Poland. On the whole, however, the paths of the “Vistula Poles” and those living on the Thames had diverged over time.

Problems in communication were not entirely due to psychological differences or to the conflicting identities of the Warsaw Poles and the London Poles. The pro-independence emigrants decided to stay in the “free world,” with a sense of a political mission. The postwar émigrés called themselves the “battling emigrants” (Terlecki 1946), who, having rejected the Yalta agreement, incarnated the idea of Polish opposition against the superpowers’ dictates. Thus, the ultimate goal of the political émigré community was not to encourage Polish domestic policy to head toward democratic reform and to free the country from Soviet dominance, but to overrule the Yalta decisions and to restore an independent Poland. An exile columnist wrote: “Ideologically and politically, the émigré community must remain faithful to the doctrine in its purest form. The doctrine for which they left country in 1939 to fight for freedom, territorial integrity, and the independence of Poland.” (Gűnther 1946).

The “Thaw” after Stalin’s death and the end of the Stalinist terror brought little change to the exile leaders’ perception of the country. It was still a maximalist approach. An undisputed émigré frontrunner, General Władysław Anders, said to the veterans in 1956: “We will never accept a compromise with the occupant. We shall stay true to our program of fighting for a unified and independent country, with Lwów and Wilno in the east and the Regained Territories in the west” (Orzeł Biały 1956). An interesting sketch by Jan Maciejewski and Krzysztof Mazur points out that “this sort of absolutism in the sphere of symbols, the praise of ideological purity and aversion to political ambiguity” was bringing the pro-independence exile community closer to an Icarus approach. This was in the extreme idealization of their political problem: the Polish exile Icarus flew closer to the ideal, melting his wings which kept him in contact with reality (Majewski 2002, 16–27).

The “indomitable Poles of London” had to match their viewpoint with those of the students who protested in 1968 (represented by Adam Michnik, quoted above), or those of workers who fought for their rights during various “Polish months.” For the latter, especially the generation born after World War II, the People’s Republic of Poland was their homeland, albeit one riddled with evil and injustice, governed by tyrants who suppressed student gatherings and gave orders to open fire on workers. Although there were groups and communities with pro-independence programs throughout the communist era, none of the irredentist movements – apart from the anti-communist armed resistance groups of 1940s – in postwar Poland was on a mass scale. Even the KPN [Confederation of Independent Poland], an organization of an openly pro-independent character established in the 1970s, was perceived by many democratic opposition leaders as extreme and fundamentalist. To say nothing of the government in exile, functioning abroad for dozens of years, which rejected the Polish reality on principle.

Solidarity and Martial Law

Most émigré leaders were well aware of the discrepancies between the programs of the pro-independence émigré communities and the emerging democratic opposition, which became plainly evident after Solidarity was established. Though they generally sympathized with the Polish workers who decided to rebel, the exile leaders surely realized that the road to independence would be very long. After years spent in foreign lands and a great many disappointments the emigrants were rather skeptical about the international situation, which they saw as a pivotal factor in the potential for profound system changes in Poland, and which, at the same time, they saw as deeply saturated (too deeply, in fact) with the spirit of détente. Some émigré leaders believed that the emergence of Solidarity had the potential to change international politics; on the other hand – mindful of the experiences of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, respectively – they warned the union against escalating radicalism and provoking Soviet intervention (Friszke 1999, 435).

It should be emphasized that the emigrants, still true to their goals, remained exceptionally tactful with the Polish movement, refraining from imposing their point of view on Solidarity leaders. From 1980–1981 the political émigré community tried to perform a merely ancillary function, providing information, material aid, and political initiatives on the international scene, and did not attempt, with a few exceptions, to interfere with the Solidarity camp tactics or support particular Polish opposition groups. We should note that the scale of the workers’ protests and the scope of concessions they gained from the ruling communist party astonished the émigré communities, who were quite unprepared for a scenario of this sort.

Martial Law was imposed in Poland on 13 December, 1981, radically changing the emigrants’ perception of the changes occurring there. In spite of advance warning signals, General Jaruzelski’s coup d’état was a major surprise for the émigré groups, and, at the same time, pointed the way for further activities. Referring to the developments in Poland, Prime Minister-in-Exile Kazimierz Sabbat said: “The émigré community is now the only spokesman for the will and stance of the country in the free world. Again.” (Machcewicz 1999, 235).

After 13 December, 1981, most of the pro-independence emigrants’ activities focused on humanitarian aid, speaking at international forums for civic freedoms in Poland, and organizing the lives of new emigrants. The mainstream émigré community sympathized with underground resistance in Poland, tried to provide them with any aid they needed, and acted as their advocates in the countries of the free world. The mere existence of the underground Solidarity, often drawing from independence rhetoric and defying the political system in Poland, served to give meaning to their mission. Some significance should also be attached to advances toward the exile circles made by a few opposition leaders, e.g. Leszek Moczulski, the leader of KPN, who recognized the authority of the President in Exile in his official statement in London. The importance of this event, together with the awareness that there were clearly anti-communist forces in Poland, overshadowed other, often negative experiences of “old emigrants” with young and impetuous Solidarity fighters. The old émigré circles also merged to a very limited degree with the new ones that came to the fore under Martial Law (Friszke 1999, 458–459).

To summarize, it can be said that, in the 1980s, the perception of the émigré society resembled, to some degree, that of the late 1940s and early 1950s. With its military oppression, organized underground resistance, and repressive apparatus, the country still validated the existence of the Polish political émigré community and, to a great extent, defined its role. Internationalizing Polish affairs, on the other hand, in the form of restrictions imposed by Western countries after 13 December, confirmed the old émigré thesis that the fundamental priority was to change the politics of the West and abolish the Cold War order. It was no coincidence then, that one of the most important dates commemorated by émigré circles in the 1980s was the fortieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference (London celebrated “Yalta Week,” coorganized by Central and Eastern Europe emigrants). The pro-independence émigré community’s first and foremost task remained the overthrow of the Yalta agreement and its consequences (Tarka 2003, 259–260).

The Round Table

Initially, the émigré community did not attach much weight to either Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms or the attempts made by General Jaruzelski’s government to open a dialogue with the opposition; however, the swift events of the summer and the fall of 1988 did echo in “Polish London.” When, at the end of August of 1988, the government proposed a dialogue with the opposition and the initially vague idea of a “round table,” the expatriate community received it with skepticism. While not rejecting the idea of discussion with the communists on principle, they expressed two major reservations. First, the experience of the 1980–1981 period, combined with a conviction of inalterability of the regime, made them look upon the ruling party’s gestures with the greatest suspicion, and without faith in their good intentions. Expressing his profound mistrust, President-in- Exile Kazimierz Sabbat warned: “The communist party will not relinquish its power, its absolute power, as this would mean its self-destruction. The party will not adhere to any treaties. All arrangements are only a maneuver in a moment of weakness.” (Dziennik Ustaw RP 1989 No. 1 – Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland /in-exile/). Secondly, a dialogue between the troubled ruling party and part of the democratic opposition risked the incorporation of this part of the democratic resistance into the apparatus of the current system, consequently delaying interminably the prospect of restoring genuine independence. This would have been a devastating blow to the ideas represented by the pro-independence expatriates. Nor should it be neglected that the London émigré community maintained a much warmer relationship with those opposition leaders, who – like the aforementioned Leszek Moczulski or Kornel Morawiecki of the Fighting Solidarity – belonged to a group that strongly opposed any negotiations with the communists. Quite naturally, their standpoints and tough stance toward the communists were closer to London’s outlook than the apparently conciliatory attitude of the group gathered around the Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa.

While no formal statements were made by the London expatriate officials openly criticizing Wałęsa and his camp (including the closest aides: Adam Michnik, Bronisław Geremek, or Tadeusz Mazowiecki), it was frequently emphasized that they did not represent the whole of the opposition. “Back home in our country not everybody is involved in the talks. Those who do are dubbed the ‘constructive opposition,’ ready to participate in the elections, which in fact will not be elections. But there is a growing group of activists in Poland, pro-independence assemblies, whose goal is that of the ‘indomitable’ Poles of London and other expatriate towns and cities: a truly independent and free Poland,” said President Sabbat on 1 April, 1989 (Dziennik Ustaw RP 1989 No. 2).

Considering the above, it would be fair to say that, in late 1988 and early 1989, the émigrés’ satisfaction with the increasingly visible decay of the regime was mixed with openly expressed doubts about the role of the Polish opposition in the process of the system transformation. “Polish London” read the idea of the Round Table and the acceptance of Solidarity members as power-sharing partners as a government bluff. It is worth mentioning that this skepticism about the negotiations between the regime and the opposition was shared by the legalist circle in London and Kultura in Paris, who were traditionally more flexible and prone to dialogue. On the other hand, among the few who supported the tactic of negotiating with the communist rule was a long-standing head of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (Friszke 1999, 465–467).

The Round Table talks, which included government officials, some opposition members, and observers representing the Catholic Church, were held between 6 February and 5 April 1989. The most important points to be negotiated were: the government’s consent to relegalize Solidarity, the organization of a semi-free parliamentary election in which non-partisan candidates (including Solidarity ones) could run for thirty-five per cent of seats in the Sejm (the lower chamber); a fully free election to a newly-created upper chamber of the parliament (the Senate), and the restitution of the office of the President of Poland.

The official stand of the legalist circle on this momentous event was drawn up during the meeting of members of the London government and the representatives of political parties in exile, called by President‑in- Exile Kazimierz Sabbat on 5 April, 1989. They did not discard the significance of the talks on principle, and some positive effects were mentioned, like the government concessions, but on the whole, a deep pessimism about the Round Table agreement dominated the statement. It was pointed out, not without cause, that the right of the opposition to run for seats in the parliament was counterbalanced by reinstating the office of President, who was to be endowed with nearly dictatorial powers. The majority of émigré leaders saw the agreement as a device to prop up the shaky system, rather than to provide for real system transformation (Friszke 1999, 469–470).

Admittedly, the leaders of the expatriate community did not call for a boycott of the election (though the Government in Exile did call upon the émigrés not to vote, which almost amounted to the same thing), but, characteristically, they stressed it was non-democratic and that there was risk of ballot rigging. The Government in Exile on the one hand admitted that the electoral success of Solidarity candidates would be in the nation’s interest, but on the other, they sympathized with the part of the Polish opposition who decided to boycott the election (Dziennik Ustaw RP 1989 No. 4).

The result of the parliamentary elections of 4 June, 1989 (the second round was held on 18 June) and the landslide victory of the Solidarity candidates, who took nearly one hundred per cent of the free seats in both chambers, is often considered a symbolic date in the history of Poland. The symbolic significance of the date is not connected with the end of communism as such, but as the most important event in the whole process of political transformation of 1988–1990. Obviously, this point of view was unacceptable for the pro-independence expatriates, and for the legalist group in particular. This group had never hoped that the government in exile would one day return to Warsaw to rule the country. The émigré community had been ready to accept a free decision made in Poland since the end of World War II. What the “Polish London” hoped for was the President of the Government to have the chance to go to the free country and present their insignia of the office to democratically elected authorities. Regulated, quasi-free elections, communist-controlled administration, military, and police forces bore no resemblance to democratic representation. Consequently, this façade of democracy (the “contractual” Sejm was perceived as such) blurred the line between communist regime and independent state. This sort of “soft transformation,” incorporating the opposition into the intact apparatus of oppression, was exactly what the émigrés feared most.

Anxiety about the future course of events predominated the presidential circle leaders’ addresses after the results were announced. The political elites focused on the elections as a sort of referendum. The results were to be seen as a mass disapproval of the current authority, expressed by the whole society. At the same time, the seats held in parliament by numerous significant representatives of the opposition could, as President Sabbat pointed out, result in the neutralization of Solidarity within the communist power apparatus. One ominous harbinger of this direction was the election of General Wojciech Jaruzelski as President, which was announced as a stage in the execution of the Round Table agreement (Dziennik Ustaw RP 1989 No. 4).

One of the most pessimistic evaluations of the situation in Poland was expressed by Prime-Minister-in-Exile Edward Szczepanik during the inaugural sitting of the seventh tenure of the National Council, held on 4 July, 1989 (Turkowski 2002, 83). Choosing this date for the opening of a new term of this semi-parliamentary body, whose members were in part elected, in part appointed by the representation of Polish émigré community, was a clear signal that the expatriates had not yet accomplished their mission and, in fact, were still far from it. In a resolution of 10 June, 1989 the National Council confirmed this point of view, stating that the primary goal of the émigré community, and now the opposition circles in Poland as well, should be to abolish the Yalta Agreement and to restore a fully independent Poland (Dziennik Ustaw RP 1989 No. 4).

On 19 July, 1989, the Sejm of the People’s Republic of Poland, with some opposition deputies voting in favor, elected as president Wojciech Jaruzelski, the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party. On the same day, the President in Exile, Kazimierz Sabbat, died in London of a sudden heart attack. The symbolism of these two events could not possibly be more vivid, as the tragedy of an individual and a generation. After Kazimierz Sabbat was officially pronounced dead, Ryszard Kaczorowski was sworn into office on the same day in the President’s headquarter at 43 Eaton Place. In spite of the changes underway in Poland, the expatriate society stayed as alert as half a century before (Górecki 2002, 238).

Mission Accomplished

While upholding its political stance, the pro-independence émigré community could not neglect the changes in Poland, especially as they started to diverge more and more from the pessimistic forecasts formulated during and immediately after the Round Table talks. The growing unrest in the communist camp, comprised of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s coalition government, made the decay of the old system all too clear and discredited the theory that this was a trap set by the ruling party. When one of the opposition leaders assumed the position of Prime Minster, this was generally warmly welcomed in “Polish London.” Both the legalists and their opponents, the National Party, expressed their satisfaction. It might be said that the pessimistic attitude was giving way to expectations for more rapid political change in Poland (Cichocka 2012, 76).

The pro-independence diaspora spelled out their stance, expectations, and forecasts for further developments during the Third Worldwide Free Poles’ Congress, held in London on 15–16 September, 1989. Apart from the representatives of the pro-independence community, it was attended by delegates representing various organizations and political parties from Poland, including Solidarity, Solidarity of Individual Farmers, the NZS [Independent Students’ Union], and the Confederation of Independent Poland. The Congress referred to the situation in Poland and defined the position of the pro-independence emigration community against the backdrop of the current events in the country. In the final declaration it was emphasized that, despite the positive developments in Poland, the system remained communist and externally imposed. The émigré community appreciated the political achievements of Solidarity, stressing that further support would be conditioned by Solidarity’s commitment to the further “eradication of Sovietism” in Poland. This clause echoed previously expressed fears that the reforms that had started only a few months before would come to a halt. The Congress, having spelled out their approval for Mazowiecki’s team, stressed that they “in particular supported” the “independent opposition,” that is, the extra-parliamentary wing of the opposition camp, including the KPN [Confederation of Independent Poland] and “Fighting Solidarity” (Rynkiewicz 1996, 589–591).

During this congress, there was a discussion on the conditions by which the émigré authorities’ mission could be considered complete. With reference to this issue, Prime Minister Edward Szczepanik stressed that conditio sine qua non was free parliamentary elections in Poland. According to Szczepanik, these could be held when the USSR abandoned the Brezhnev doctrine and all the political forces in Poland were given equal chance to run for parliament. Interestingly enough, Szczepanik estimated it would take dissident underground groups a couple of years to emerge from hiding. Szczepanik’s final condition was the initiation of economic reform (Szczepanik 1995, 8–10).

Curiously, while presenting an electoral ultimatum, the issue of national independence, Szczepanik was relatively soft on the other diaspora flagship: Poland’s territorial integrity. The Prime Minister in Exile voiced his hopes that Krzysztof Skubiszewski, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Mazowiecki’s government, would address the issue of reversing the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Yalta Agreement, consequently restoring the 1921 Treaty of Riga and the Polish-Soviet borders it established. This statement was much milder than an earlier address in the National Council, in which the issue of reestablishing the 1921 eastern borders was among the most inflexible demands (Habielski 1999, 475–476).

In fact, however, these comments diverged dramatically from the foreign policy of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government. Minister Skubiszewski had no intention of raising the question of the eastern border, and in 1990 he stated explicitly that Poland would lay no territorial claims against any of its neighbor states. This official stance of the Polish minister caused some friction in London – the Government in Exile had never officially renounced the right to the Eastern Borderland, reserving this right for the parliament – but no immediate negative response was forthcoming (Tarka 2003, 265). It seemed as if the border issue, so important immediately after World War II, was now only theoretical, and treated halfheartedly by the political émigré community in London.

As a condition for ending the expatriate political mission, free parliamentary elections were also included in the National Council resolution of 2 December, 1989. Hopes were expressed that the newly-elected free Sejm and Senate would be a Constituent Assembly (Dziennik Ustaw 1989 No. 6). The émigré leaders realized, of course, that it would be unrealistic to expect a restoration of the constitution of 1935, though the exile structures had been based on this constitution since 1939. However, they hoped at least to ensure a kind of symbolic continuity of the state, to avoid a situation where the émigré authorities would return the insignia of the office to representatives of Polish officials functioning on the basis of the Stalinist constitution, albeit modified. On 29 December, 1989 the Sejm of the People’s Republic of Poland passed amendments to the constitution, changing the official name of the country to the Republic of Poland [Rzeczpospolita Polska]. February 1990 saw the restoration of the prewar coat of arms, a crowned white eagle. In the first months of 1990 the remnants of the previous system swiftly disappeared. The institution of local governments was restored, and the Security Service [Służba Bezpieczeństwa] disbanded. Even if the Round Table agreement seemed to function directly after General Jaruzelski was elected President, after a few months Poland’s thorough transformation was an undeniable fact.

The pro-independence émigré community welcomed the changes with deep satisfaction, and, it is worth emphasizing, with genuine realism, given that the changes did not always match their expectations. The non-violent transformation and smooth transition from the communist era to democratic reality precluded proclamations of non-continuity between the PRL and the Third RP, which meant that the emigrants’ legalism could only be recognized in symbolic way. This also meant resigning from territorial claims in the East, rejecting the April Constitution (though in April President-in-Exile Ryszard Kaczorowski was still calling for its restitution), and abandoning the idea of a one-time act, albeit symbolic, that would signify breaking with the tradition of the People’s Republic of Poland. Changes in the name of the country and modifying its coat of arms could not be recognized as acts of this nature, since the office of President was held by the General, who had stood behind Martial Law.

Nevertheless, the émigré community accepted this reality. Although the idea of restitutio ad integrum (i.e. declaring the entire legal heritage of PRL void) was still alive in late 1989 and early 1990, given the political environment of the time, this solution was pure fiction. Jerzy Jan Zalewski, a minister in several governments in exile, admitted that demanding restitutio ad integrum, which he himself advocated, was wishful thinking on the part of the epigones of the Second Republic of Poland. It seems that most pro-independence emigration leaders were aware that this extreme understanding of legalism could only come about if the communist rule was overthrown, but not when a non-violent transformation was underway (Zaleski 1995, 195).

migré society, there was little controversy in assessing the events in Poland. The only reasonable conclusion could be to end the fifty-year mission. It was irrelevant to continue the activities of the authorities in exile with the process of democratization underway in Poland, and the Brezhnev doctrine, which had restrained Polish independence, practically invalid. To continue the mission when Poland was regaining the attributes of an independent state would pose the risk of being completely incomprehensible to Polish citizens both in Poland and abroad. The only question was how to choose an appropriate moment to close the mission and make a symbolic return.

In March 1990, Prime-Minister-in-Exile Edward Szczepanik presented two possible scenarios for concluding the political mission in exile. The first, mentioned mainly pro forma to appeal to the émigré community, assumed the restitutio ad integrum option, reinstating the Constitution of 1935 and organizing parliamentary elections based on its provisions (incidentally, the April Constitution contained clauses which were far from democratic). The other scenario was free parliamentary elections, based on the existing election statute and other regulations, a new constitution passed by both chambers, electing a President, and the President in Exile handing over the insignia of office. The second scenario basically coincided with the general statements of the émigré community from the preceding months, and seemed more probable. In early 1990, however, the path to its implementation seemed rather long. General Jaruzelski was still in office, hopes for dissolving the “Contractual Sejm” appeared faint, and changing the constitution rather unlikely (Przekazanie insygniów 2000, 37–39).

One more important issue had to be addressed: official contacts with Polish authorities. Although the legalist circles maintained close contacts with various opposition communities (especially close with those who recognized the authority of the émigré political structures) in “Polish London” in the latter half of the 1980s, there was a forty-five-year tradition of disregarding and boycotting official representatives of the PRL. After the government led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki was established, the situation became equivocal. On the one hand, Mazowiecki enjoyed popularity among the émigré leaders; on the other, they could not help treating him as a representative of the communist state. This reserve in contacts with “Polish London” was visible on both ends. As such, during the first visit of the Polish Prime Minister to London from 26–27 February, 1990, an official meeting between the authorities in exile and Tadeusz Mazowiecki was not held. But the political situation in the first half of 1990 presented no formal obstacles to strengthening relations. All the more so, that the émigré community did not want to be a passive bystander to the events in Poland. On 11 May, 1990 Aleksander Hall, a member of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government paid a visit to President Kaczorowski. This marked the beginning of formal relations between the Polish officials and the pro-independence émigré community (Friszke 1999, 479–480).

In the summer of 1990 it turned out that the scenario to conclude the émigré mission, developed a few months earlier, failed to match up to reality. Under pressure from the right wing, General Jaruzelski decided to resign from office; this was confirmed by a resolution in the Sejm. Thus, the expected order of elections was reversed: instead of parliamentary elections and a change of the constitution, a free presidential election was to be held first. Moreover, the presidential election was to be universal for the first time in Polish history. This fact was important for the emigration legalists, as the National Assembly still consisted of the deputies and senators who, some twelve months earlier, had taken an oath of allegiance to the People’s Republic of Poland.

The Polish authorities in exile faced a historic decision about handing over the office of the President in Exile to the President of Poland to be elected in free, democratic elections, before they were held. The pivotal question was, as President Ryszard Kaczorowski rightly pointed out, whether a newly elected president would take the office from the successor to the prewar tradition of free Poland, or from the communist apparatchik, the man behind Martial Law of 1981. In spite of complaints from some émigré politicians, who lamented the fact that the government in exile would conclude its mission while Poland was still waiting for democratic parliamentary elections, hopes for the former option prevailed. On 12 October, 1990 President Kaczorowski announced his intention to hand over his office to the President of Poland, chosen in a universal and democratic election (Turkowski 2002, 91–93).

On 9 December, 1990, in the run-off, Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity leader, was elected President of Poland. Having arranged the details for the transfer of the insignia of presidential power, Ryszard Kaczorowski arrived in Warsaw on 22 December, 1990, on board a government plane, received with all the honors due to a head of state. On the same day, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, there was a ceremony where the presidential insignia were handed over to Lech Wałęsa (Górecki 2002, 250–254).

The day before, in a special address, Ryszard Kaczorowski explained:

Giving over the office of the President of the Republic of Poland to Lech Wałęsa tomorrow at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, and passing the insignia of this office, I entrust him with the whole, independent, free, democratic and just Poland, for which the soldiers of September 1939, soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and the brave Home Army, fought in the past. To them, above all, I pay my tribute today. I shall entrust President Lech Wałęsa with care over the pro-independence émigré community, which completed its mission by prudently preserving the idea of an Independent Poland. It did not manage to reach all of its political goals. The political parties created in the free country shall take over its mission. (Suchcitz 1997, 678).

In the Realm of Symbols

The ceremony held on 22 December, 1990 can be summarized in one sentence: the pro-independence émigré community completed its mission with its head held high. With his decision to accept the insignia of the office from Ryszard Kaczorowski, the President-elect confirmed that the Third Republic of Poland was the successor to prewar Poland. I believe, however, that his general statement should be supplemented by a deeper reflection on the actual meaning of the symbolic transfer of the office from the head of the state-in-exile to the President of the nation. I can say without hesitation that on that day, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, two Polands met. One, for fifty years on foreign soil, took pride in their tattered flags, and the other one, whose founding myth originated in recent events, in the rebellion of young Polish workers. Two Polands, two generations, two historical experiences, far apart.

The celebration at the Royal Castle had no legal or constitutional significance. During the political transformation in Poland, no one had seriously questioned the legal continuity between the People’s Republic of Poland and the Third Republic of Poland. Regardless of the wishes of the émigrés, who would have been more than happy to erase the PRL period from the nation’s history textbooks, undermining this continuity was inconceivable. Obviously, this did not preclude the existence of another succession: between the Polish state-in-exile and the Third Republic. In this case, however, we are talking about two fundamentally different entities, out of which only one – the successor – met the criteria of statehood. According to international legal regulations, the Polish state-in-exile failed to meet these criteria. Its organs and institutions, anchored in prewar traditions, exclusively served the pro-independent émigré community. So the émigrés’ Poland with its President, parliament and government constituted a kind of alternative statehood for the reality in postwar Poland. Its statehood, however, was more of a symbolic nature, recognized only by those who consented to it.

Therefore, the transfer of the insignia of office was largely symbolic as well. At the same time, it should be mentioned that it was the émigré society who needed the symbolism of 1989 more than the citizens in Poland. The émigrés expected recognition for their fifty-year mission in an extremely hostile environment, with dim chances for success, but with the deep conviction that their path was morally and historically right. The victorious Solidarity less needed legitimization from the pro-independence émigré community. Some leaders of the political elites did not entirely treat them seriously.

This state of affairs should not, however, be attributed to the ill will of local politicians. It was more because of Poland’s unusual path from communism, which determined the place of the pro-independence diaspora in this process. In the atmosphere of “national reconciliation,” it was pushed into the background.

For the same reason, the Round Table became the symbol of the transformation (including the informal meetings of the communist dignitaries and Solidarity leaders in Magdalenka, whose celebratory pictures were later revealed), rather than the ceremony with Wałęsa and Kaczorowski. The émigrés could not ignore this fact, and it is unsurprising that they felt disappointment, which only became more profound in light of the two consecutive victories of the post-communist left: the parliamentary elections in 1993 and the presidential elections won by Aleksander Kwaśniewski in 1995.

On the whole, however, historical justice had been served to the pro-independence émigré community. It could be said that both the Round Table (accepted by at least some of the post-communist camp and the Solidarity elites as a model of “wise agreement over political differences”) and the heritage of Solidarity have become the founding myths of the Third Republic of Poland. This was still insufficient. The collective identity of Poles and the sense of historical continuity called for other references, legends, myths, and paradigms. The prewar period, the time of the Second World War, and early post-war years were explored in seeking them. The figure of Marshal Józef Pisudski, the martyrdom of the Polish officers in Katyń, the heroic story of the Warsaw Uprising, and the tragic fate of anticommunist “cursed soldiers” were all evoked.

The Institute of National Remembrance was established from this attitude and to promote national heritage; research on little-known aspects of Polish history (such as the anticommunist armed resistance) was also intiated. There were also attempts to consciously shape the politics of memory. Opened in 2004, the Warsaw Uprising Museum might serve as a good example of this tendency.

Mythologizing the Second Republic of Poland made the society start to notice the heritage of the pro-independence émigré community. The last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, became widely known; moreover, he was recognized as a symbol of the link between contemporary and historical Poland. His tragic death in the plane crash in 2010 near the Smolensk airport had all the hallmarks of a symbol: the last leader of the Polish diaspora flew together with the President Lech Kaczyński to Katyń to pay homage to officers of the Second RP, murdered on Stalin’s order in 1940. To some extent, it can be said that Kaczorowski’s death was the closing episode of the Polish pro-independence diaspora’s mission.

It seems that only now, twenty-five years after the political transformation, we can grasp the meaning of the pro-independence émigré community at that time. Handing over the insignia of the office to the President Lech Wałęsa built a historical continuity between the second and the third republics of Poland. Even if in the late 1980s and the early 1990s the need for this continuity was not clear to all, it is now considered to be a substantial contribution to the Polish historical identity.

Handing over the office to Lech Wałęsa, Ryszard Kaczorowski legitimized not only the Third Republic of Poland, but also the “Polish road to freedom.” This road, in the eyes of the stolid Polish émigrés, was far from perfect, marked with half measures and compromises. Yet, as the process of democratic transformation progressed, both sides symbolically recognized that it led to establishing a free, independent Poland – a country which draws upon both the history and achievements of Solidarity and of “the indomitable Poles of London,” filled with sacrifice and self-denial.

Paweł Gotowiecki. Born 1983, is a PhD, historian, journalist, and social activist. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University (2007) and received his Ph. D. from the Jan Kochanowski University (2012). He specializes in Polish history of the twentieth century, in particular the history of Polish independence emigration in the West after World War II. His books include For Poland with Vilnius and Lviv: The Association of the Polish North-Eastern Provinces 1942–1955 (Warsaw, 2012). He lectures at the University of Business and Enterprise in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, and serves as Chairman of the Ostrowiec Solidarity and Remembrance Historical Society.

List of References

Cichocka, Anna Zofia (2012) “‘Stara’ emigracja polityczna wobec przełomowych wydarzeń w historii ‘Solidarności’,” in Łukasz Kamiński and Grzegorz Waligóra (eds.) NSZZ”Solidarność” 1980–1989 6 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), p. 76.

Dziennik Ustaw RP (1989), No. 1, 2, 4, 6

Friszke, Andrzej (1999) Życie polityczne emigracji (Warsaw: Biblioteka “Więzi”), pp. 435, 458–459, 465–467, 475–476, 479–480.

Gawenda, Jerzy August (1959) Legalizm polski w świetle Prawa Publicznego (London: White Eagle Press Ltd.), p. 120.

Górecki, Dariusz (2002) Polskie naczelne władze państwowe na uchodźstwie w latach 1939–1990 (Warsaw: wydawnictwo Sejmowe), pp. 238, 250–254.

Gűnther, Władysław (1946) “O czystość doktryny,” Wiadomości, June 16.

Habielski, Rafał (1999, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji (Warsaw: Biblioteka “Więzi”), pp. 475–476.

Lencznarowicz, Jan (2009) Jałta. W kręgu mitów założycielskich polskiej emigracji politycznej 1944–1956 (Krakow: Księgarnia Akademicka), p. 400.

Machcewicz, Paweł (1999) Emigracja w polityce międzynarodowej (Warsaw: Biblioteka Więzi), p. 235.

Maciejewski, Jan and Krzysztof Mazur (2013) “Tamiza Wpada do Wisły,”Pressje XXX–XXXI, pp. 16–27.

Michnik, Adam (1988) Polskie pytania (Wszechnica społeczno-polityczna), p. 78.

Orzeł Biały (1956), August 18.

“Przekazanie insygniów prezydenckich do kraju” (2000), in Zbigniew Błażyński and Ryszard Zakrzewski (eds.) Zakończenie działalności władz RP na uchodźstwie 1990 (London: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe na Obczyźnie), pp. 37–39.

Rynkiewicz, Artur (1996) “Światowe Zjazdy Wolnych Polaków” in Aleksander Szkuta (ed.) Kierownictwo obozu niepodległościowego na obczyźnie 1945–1990 (London: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe na Obczyźnie), pp. 589–591.

Suchcitz, Andrzej, Ludwik Maik and Wojciech Rojek (eds) (1997) Wybór dokumentów do dziejów polskiego uchodźstwa niepodległościowego 1939–1991 (London: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe na Obczyźnie), p. 678.

Szczepanik, Edward (1995) “Władze RP na uchodźstwie i kraj,” in Roman Lewicki (ed.) Pomoc krajowi przez niepodległościowe uchodźstwo 1945–1990 (London: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe na Obczyźnie), pp. 8–10.

Tarka, Krzysztof (2003) Emigracyjna dyplomacja. Polityka zagraniczna Rządu RP na uchodźstwie 1945–1990 (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm), pp. 269–260, 265.

Terlecki, Tymon (1946) “Emigracja walki,” Wiadomości, 12 April.

Turkowski, Romuald (2002) Parlamentaryzm polski na uchodźstwie 1973–1991 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe), pp. 83, 91–93.

Zaleski, Jerzy Jan (1996) “W piątą rocznicę,” in Zbigniew Błażyński (ed.) Materiały do dziejów uchodźstwa niepodległościowego 1939–1990. Uzupełnienia do tomów I, II, V, VI (London: Polskie Towarzystwo Naukowe na Obczyźnie), p. 195.

This article has been published in the third issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the consequences and commemorations of 1989 in Central Europe .

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ABSTRACT

In contrast to the Czechs, the Slovakian resistance towards communist dictatorship grew out of other motives, springing to life from different ideological premises and – not least – historical experiences quite different from those faced by the Czechs. These assumed a much more religious and national character and found expression in myriad ways, ranging from pilgrimages and petitions to the efflorescent Samizdat press and written declamations against the infringements of the communist church secretary. The spate of protests in Bratislava on 25 March, 1988 initiated by Slovaks abroad and organied by the laiety of the Catholic Church was the first public demonstration for the observance of citizen and human rights in the entire Eastern Bloc before 1989. The various attitudes of Slovaks towards their Czech counterparts was no doubt one of the reasons why the best known oppotition movement – Charter 77 – was not able to maintain itself in Slovakia. Alongside religiously motivated aspects of the resistance, the political energies of Slovaks likely drove environmental activities. Environmental protectionists expressed their main criticism against the pollution of the Slovak capital by means of a leaflet campaign which caused a great stir under the name Bratislava/nahlas, and was rightly characterized as a kind of “Slovak Charta.” The following study analyzes the concrete activities of the Slovak opposition movement which became stronger in the second half of the 1970’s and had a hand in the downfall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The analysis proposes the study of the different forms of resistance that took place in each parts of the country merits individual attention in order to see how the political and social motivations of Czechs and Slovaks differed from one another.

The resistance against the dictatorial rule of the two communist parties: the statewide Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ)¹ and the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS)² – a unit responsible for the Slovak territory – was driven in Slovakia by completely different motives. The underlying incentives included different attitudes towards ideological premises and, last but not least, a historical experience that was different from that of the Czechs. Despite many transformations that took place in the last decade exposing Slovaks to the oppressive and strange Bolshevik ideology with its impact on all areas of life, Slovak mentality, as opposed to Czech, proved to be rather conservative, based on traditional values and committed to the Roman Catholic or Lutheran faith. Therefore, the opposition movement in the 1970s and, above all, in the 1980s developed strong religious-driven grounds expressed in mass demonstrations during pilgrimages claiming the restoration of religious freedom. The revival of religion was confronted with harshly enforced atheist campaigns.

Apart from the religious aspects of Slovak resistance broadly described in a separate chapter, the struggle for the retrieval of political and civil freedom was equated with national liberation. Consequently, it was meant to solve the Slovak issue. The then centralized state was transformed into a federation in accordance with the Constitutional Act No. 143 of 27 October 1968. However, it brought no fulfilment of Slovak citizens’ national aspirations. Not only the ban on the Communist Party federalisation, which in view of specific political power relations would have constituted a necessary condition for state federalisation, but also a gradual return to party centralism as well as an unchanging centralistic economy structure were preventing the practical enforcement of the Act to a considerable extent. The power monopoly of the Party was then contradictory to national sovereignty. The political centre of Czechoslovakia remained at the same time the centre of the Czech Republic. As a result, Czechs identified the republic with the Czech state. On the contrary, Slovaks perceived the federation as a bizarre and hostile creation.³ Supreme power was still exercised by a more or less ten-member steering committee of the centrally ruled KSČ. Therefore, the newly established republic governments possessed a partly decentralised function since such areas as cultural policy were pursued only at republican level. Consequently, the federal Ministry of Culture no longer existed after 1968.⁴ On the other hand, the relevance of national councils diminished significantly after the adoption of the Constitutional Act No. 117/1969. Moreover, the federation lost its decentralising function also from an economic perspective due to the implementation of a binding five-year plan for the national economy.⁵

Charter 77 and Slovaks

The lack of two components in the civil rights movement – national and religious – may well have been one of the most important reasons that Charter 77 gained no significant support among Slovaks. The Italian publicist Leo Magnino, who advocated the sovereignty of Slovakia, wrote about the citizens’ initiative in the same year the document was published: “Charter 77, being an open revolt against the dictatorship, generated a wide response in the Western world. Not surprisingly, this act aroused a feeling of moral and civil solidarity among all free people. However, we do not find included in Charter 77 – apart from a fair intercession for freedom and respect for the human rights of individuals – any of the demands made by the Slovak nation, of which we know was likewise longing for freedom and state independence. Only little by little have we learned that the absolute majority of the Charter 77 signatories were Czechs, and what is more, communists who were once in power.”⁶

Slovak citizens naturally associated the guarantee of human rights with the principle of national self-determination. With this in mind, one of the most relevant expatriate Slovaks, a supporter of politically active exile organisations and, for many years, the editor at Radio Free Europe in Munich, Imrich Kružliak, wrote in the exile monthly magazine Horizon published in the Slovak language (and which he himself edited): “As far as the Slovak people are concerned, the fight for human rights has been always been connected with the fight for the rights of a nation. It also corresponds to the sense of our national philosophy, according to which not only does an individual deserve to benefit fully from the dimension of humanity, but also that a nation has to be provided with a human face. Today as well it is our task to combine the struggle for human rights with the struggle for a dignified self-realisation of the nation.”⁷

It appears that the chartist civil rights movement developed within the Czech community and was orientated only towards the needs of the Czech part of the republic until the very end. The initiative underlying its creation was conceived within Czech intellectual circles and without consulting Slovakian. Miroslav Kusý and Dominik Tatarka were the only Slovak representatives involved in its preparation. Others learned about the initiative either from state television or from foreign broadcasting stations such as the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.⁸ Nevertheless, those Slovaks who signed it had to suffer a great deal. For the liberally oriented writer Dominik Tatarka, the author of Farská republika (The Parish Republic), a novel much acclaimed by the local communist founding fathers, it meant being banned from publication and isolated for the rest of his life, which had an enormously negative effect on him. Two Catholic priests, Marián Zajíček and Róbert Gombík, were granted government permission to exercise their priestly ministry while others were forced into exile. Accordingly, the number of those who dared to express their sympathies by signing the document possibly exposing themselves to persecution remained small, which definitely corresponded with the calculations of the state authorities.⁹

The example of two Catholic clergymen, young chaplains Marián Zajíček and Róbert Gombík, illustrates that the individual biographies of Charter signatories did not necessarily run along anti-communist lines. Gombík – a priest with government permission – had been a registered secret agent of the State Security Service since 1973. Even if the absolute credibility of the security service records cannot be assumed, a file registered in his name was maintained under the code name “Clergyman.”¹⁰ However, his loyalty to the communist regime began to waver with the implementation of Charter 77. According to the entries in his file, from that moment he was no longer willing to collaborate with the State Security.¹¹ Eventually, together with his friend Zajíček, also a Catholic priest, he was denounced as”a threat to the national order“, and both were subject to a criminal prosecution that, however, was never concluded. After imprisonment, they were released again, which occurred most probably due to the tremendous reaction of Western media and the exile press. The most drastic measures resulting from the signing of Charter 77 involved revoking the permission to exercise the priestly ministry and the introduction of remuneration payments which resulted in existential hardship. As far as it was possible to follow the life of Gombík, he exhausted his spirit of resistance in the mid-1980s regaining government permission as he revived his contacts with dissidents.¹²

Also, the introduction of the official Catholic hierarchy to Charter 77 on the one hand, and the secret actions of individual church structures on the other hand, were not fully explained and still need to be thoroughly analysed. Doubtlessly, the declaration of Slovak bishops and ordinaries enforced by the regime and signed by the regime-dependent Association of Catholic Clergy Pacem in Terris and the St. Adalbert Association on 17 January 1977 can be deemed a shameful document.¹³

The rather cautious behaviour of some hierarchs as, for example, that of the bishop of Tyrnau Július Gábriš, who took an increasingly critical stand on the regime’s policy, mostly in the 1980s¹⁴, was not necessarily unjustified. For instance, Gábriš criticized the presence of former high rank party functionaries, such as Pavel Kohout among the signatories of the Charter since it could change the perception of the initiative to being a platform for the return of former prominent party officials.¹⁵ Certainly, it was a novelty in the civil rights movement in the Eastern Bloc countries that a group consisting mostly of non-Christian members demanded exactly the introduction of religious freedom. Nevertheless, the Church was entrusted by the foreign Catholic press with the task of supporting the Charter, as this long-lasting solidarity wave would bring unambiguous profits to the oppressed Church.¹⁶ Obviously, this kind of support on the part of Slovak bishops, who at that time found themselves under constant persecution, was impossible and the risk of embarrassment in front of their own congregation had to be accepted.¹⁷

The most famous Slovak signatory of Charter 77 active abroad, Miroslav Kusý, former professor of Marxism-Leninism and, for some time, the head of ideology department in the Central Committee of the KSS, whose polemical contributions on the internal situation of the country were broadcasted by the Radio Free Europe, tried to find an answer to the problem of minor support and admiration among Slovaks towards the so-called Czech parallel culture. The main reason for this could be two different paths of development that the Czech and Slovak nations had taken before 1968 and in the following years. Slovaks, who started to consider themselves as a modern nation for the first time (!) as a result of the industrialisation and urbanisation of the country in the 1960s, reflected the suppression by Novotný’s regime primarily as a nation and defended themselves against it. This overemphasis on the nationally-perceived obligation appeared also as far as the violation of civil and human rights was concerned. The effects achieved by Slovaks due to the establishment of a federation sated national demands for only a limited period of time. Therefore, the development in the post-invasion era was no longer as intense as in the Bohemian part of the country. No remarkable change of course took place. There were even some areas that brought a considerable profit (better professional advancement). “Based on this statement on the development after August 1968, another view emerges among Slovaks regarding the Czech parallel culture in general and with reference to Charter 77 in particular. They consider it to be a typically Czech matter and reaction to the typically Czech reality that we [Slovaks] are not characteristic of.”¹⁸ According to Kusý, at the beginning, Slovak ambitions to obtain their own statehood did not exist, because the problem of the constitutional position of Slovakia in relation to the Czech state was solved by the implementation of federal structure. In his opinion, it was only about economic, cultural and social equality. Consequently, the national issue was no longer in the foreground since Slovak people (even without their own country!) would feel equal to other European nations: “The Slovak citizen will consciously become more and more a citizen of Europe and of the world.”¹⁹ (However, Kusý with his wishful perception had to be wrong because the national element once again became an essential part of the political development after 1989 upon which a sketch of the establishment of an independent state emerged.)

Both the openness of Charter signatories to dialogue with the regime that had already violated human dignity with its materialistic footing, and the lack of distance to communism as an ideology were strongly criticized and mostly by Slovak émigrés in the West. Emil Vidra, the founder of an organization protecting human rights in Slovakia²⁰, was extremely critical of Charter 77. The organization had been founded in 1968 during the Prague Spring. Paradoxically, none of the later Charter signatories – and reform communists at that time – attended the inaugural meeting, although each of them received a personal invitation.²¹ Vidra’s response to the accusations of Gustáv Husák was also refused by the editorial staff of the Literární listy magazine as many of its members at that time later became signatories of Charter 77. Vidra accused Charter 77 of not rejecting communism unequivocally. In his view, the Charter might have done harm to some representatives of communist power, but not to communism as a whole.²²

The directions of Slovak exile policy, even if different from the evaluation of Charter 77 by Czech emigrants, were not entirely disapproving despite of the fact that, due to a considerable Czech influence, a large part of the global community considered precisely this dissident group to be representative of a nationwide Czechoslovak anti-communist opposition. Each center of Slovak political exile was aware that the objective to bring the communist system to a collapse should be reached jointly and together with the Czech people. In this respect, public defamatory statements on Charter 77 were rather avoided.²³

Opposition based on faith: Ecclesia silientii

Secret churches in Czechoslovakia that were brought into being upon the initiative of both Pope Pius XII and Msgr. Gennaro Verolino, ²⁴ the Vatican Chargé d´Affaires in Czechoslovakia after the WWII were gradually gaining in strength from 1949 as the first secret bishops were consecrated. The first secret consecrations had taken place in 1949. Kajetán Matoušek was ordained Suffragan Bishop of Prague on 17 September 1949 and František Tomášek was ordained Suffragan Bishop of Olmütz on 14 October 1949. Ecclesia silentii became reality in Slovakia with the secret consecration of Štefan Barnáš as the Auxiliary Bishop of Spiš on 5 November 1949.²⁵ The subsequent consecrations involved Pavol Hnilica on 2 January 1951, Ján Chryzostom Korec on 24 August 1951, Dominik Kaľata on 9 September 1955 and Peter Dubovský on 18 May 1961. The principal duty of secret bishops was to ordain secret priests in order to secure the survival of the Church oppressed by the regime.²⁶ Bishop Korec alone ordained 120 secret priests by 1989, the majority of whom belonged to a secret male order. In this way, the Church was strictly covered by a (secret) religious community²⁷ and the secret Church was protected from the risk of being infiltrated by the State Security.²⁸ However, as the State Security exposed secret consecrations, secret bishops had to emigrate (Hnilica, Kaľata, Dubovský) and others were sentenced to long-term imprisonment (Korec). After the great wave of rehabilitation in the 1970s, which was a short period of liberalisation during the Prague Spring, and after its suppression, underground activity started again in the 1970s.

In 1968, a mathematician and secret priest, Vladimír Jukl, together with a physician, Silvester Krčméry, started to organise small groups of university students in Bratislava. Both of them had gained sufficient experience in the youth apostolate, being former members of the Catholic lay organisation “Rodina” (The Family), which was established by Stjepan Tomislav-Podglajen (in Slovakia known as Stjepan Kolaković-Podglajen) – a Croatian missionary and lay apostolate promoter in the 1940s. Students were getting together with the aim of deepening their religious life. Their representatives summoned all higher education institutions in Bratislava several times a year to attend large meetings where future activities were coordinated. By 1989, a total of one hundred meetings of this kind had taken place with ten to fifteen participants gathering on a regular basis. After graduation most of them returned to their hometowns and helped with the establishment of a nationally widespread network of Catholic activists.²⁹

An organisation of Christian families was founded in a similar way. On this basis, the activities of underground missionary work could be disseminated throughout the whole country.

In 1974, four laymen³⁰ established the Fatima community. Being a lay community under the jurisdiction of the secret bishop Korec, its main duty was to “create, lead, expand and coordinate small Catholic communities of workers, young people and children”.³¹ It was given its Statutes, according to which the community was ready to give assistance to the Church whenever it required urgent help and whether it was related to the apostolate, or to the fulfilment of such duties for which the responsible organs had not yet been appointed by the Church.³² From 1975, their members³³ organised meetings with local activists four times a year in many Slovak cities in order to exchange information, to plan joint activities and to distribute religious foreign literature and the latest publications by samizdat. The network that was built due to these activities included 150 towns and villages with a total number of 400 activists. The activities of the secret apostolate, whose members stayed in regular contact with the “official” Church, not least in order to discuss their plans with them, mostly with the Bishop of Tyrnau, Július Gábriš, and the Diocesan Administrators, Štefan Garaj and Ján Hirka, remained unnoticed by the public until 1983; however, to their own surprise, they benefitted enormously from it in the following years.³⁴

A new self-awareness provided by the election of a Slavic Pope and, simultaneously, a feeling of no longer being isolated from the Church behind the “Iron Curtain” were conditions for a greater independence of the opposition after the Catholic Church was again subject to even more severe oppression in the 1970s and 1980s. Cardinal König stated in an interview that the community of believers began to fight stronger than before when they felt the violation of their citizen rights.³⁵ They used to cite the Declaration of Human Rights signed by the Czechoslovak government in Helsinki in 1975, which from that moment on was included in the legal system. Employment bans for clergy used as a frequent anticlerical measure and targeted at priests characterized by taking successful pastoral care of their congregations.³⁶ were no longer accepted with resignation. An increased number of cases was observed when the affected communities submitted a complaint about the actions of district and regional Church secretaries and wrote on their own to the head of state and parliament providing a complete number of complainants’ signatures. A letter of complaint from 1979 by a Catholic community from the Budweis Diocese addressed to President Husák asking for the abolishment of the employment ban for their priests was signed by 190 persons.³⁷

Letters of complaint, after protests, represented a particularly widespread form of opposition, being a valuable historical source providing information about the state of the Church as well. Most famous are the letters written by Msgr. Viktor Trstenský,³⁸ in which he protests against the suppression, persecution and abuse of the Church and the injustice against his own person. Only in the years 1975–1989, he wrote 65 letters. Twelve of them were addressed to President Husák, to the Chairman of Government, Peter Colotka, to the Minister of Culture, Miroslav Válek, to the television, press, and the Church hierarchy, etc.³⁹ Moreover, cases were multiplying in which individuals were no longer afraid of submitting complaints to the official institutions. In this manner, parents protested when their children were refused to be enrolled in religious class, young priests – when they were forced to join the priestly movement “Pacem in Terris” that was loyal to the regime, and priests without posts – after being deprived of their permission to perform their priestly ministry.⁴⁰

One of the most remarkable protests,⁴¹ almost without precedence in the whole Eastern Bloc, was organised in October 1980 in the seminary of Bratislava where 120 out of 147 seminarians united in a two-day hunger strike (20–21 October 1980) against the influence of the regime-dependent Association of Catholic Clergy “Pacem in Terris” (in the seminary). In a letter to Cardinal Tomášek and Slovak ordinaries theology students protested against the interference of the Association in the seminary’s issues. In addition, they called on all of the clergymen in the country to boycott the organisation.⁴² As eleven students were suspended for one year at the beginning of the summer semester 1981, 100 students decided to leave the seminary as well, sympathizing with their colleagues who had been punished. Although all but seven seminarists withdrew their claims upon the seminary management’s request and continued their studies, they kept protesting against the actions taken by the authorities. The wave of solidarity coming from abroad, for instance, from the seminaries of all Austrian dioceses, from 600 students and professors of the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Munich and from the Jesuit University of Philosophy, with the famous theologian Karl Rahner, not only undermined the position of the Pacem in Terris Association, but also submitted various requests to the Czechoslovak president, Gustáv Husák, to cancel the suspension of the eleven students.⁴³

The increased activity of Catholics in the 1980s could be noticed through the dissemination of samizdat periodicals, i.e. those magazines and information leaflets that were printed underground without the participation of the National Printing Office and without a special permission and being distributed via secret networks of students, Christian families and laymen. In 1973, a group of Catholic clergymen from Spiš decided to publish a philosophical‑theological underground magazine Orientácia (The Orientation), which, in 135 issues during its eleven-year existence, printed original texts written by renown Catholic intellectualists from Slovakia and translations of important works written by foreign theologians as well as other information related to the current situation of the Church.⁴⁴ Since an issue consisted of barely 20 copies – they were reproduced on a typewriter – its reach within the Spiš region was limited. Nevertheless, it became a platform for artistic creation for Catholic intellectuals otherwise condemned to silence during the period of normalisation.⁴⁵ This tradition was followed later in June 1982 by another Catholic samizdat magazine Náboženstvo a súčasnosť (The Religion and Modern Times). The magazine created by a group consisting of a mathematician, František Mikloško, a lawyer, Ján Čarnogurský and a mathematician and priest, Vladimír Jukl, could reach the whole of Slovakia with an issue of up to one thousand copies, thereby satisfying the needs of the already well developed “secret” underground Church for religious literature.⁴⁶ From 1982, a great number of new titles appeared so that by the end of 1989 there were fourteen Christian samizdat magazines with a total circulation of 7,760 copies.⁴⁷ Various magazines were printed illegally in the Czech Republic between 1988 and 1986. Some nine of them belonged to the Christian underground.⁴⁸

The meaning of samizdat literature for the opposition and for the survival and continuous existence of an uncensored and free culture of writing cannot be underestimated. While the regime was issuing tons of atheistic literature – only the Church Secretariat of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture published a hundred copies of so-called reference books propagating atheistic ideology between 1975 and 1986⁴⁹ – the editing, publishing and distribution of each samizdat edition involved a high risk. Jozef Oprala, a Jesuit, priest and theologian responsible for the publication of the illegal magazine Una Sancta Catholica recalled: “Today we perceive those deeds as a kind of heroism that was necessary and, at the same time, provoked suffering. The existence of those courageous men [the publishers of samizdat magazines] was related to a great deal of patience and caution. One cannot describe exactly what was happening in the families where samizdat was developed. Small flats in panel buildings, tiny rooms or prudently furnished weekend cottages or cellars gave shelter to the publication process of samizdat. An unbelievable fairy tale and, at the same time, a testimony to the strength and courage of the Christian soul... It united us as the atheistic oppression enslaved our spirit and human beings were racked by the wheel of moral deformation [...] The Catholic samizdat in Slovakia is a noteworthy cultural, religious and deeply human phenomenon consisting of what should be admired by the world in the Slovak soul.”⁵⁰

The pilgrimage to Velehrad that took place on 6–7 July 1985 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, who had been pronounced patron saint of Europe alongside St. Cyril four years earlier, was a significant turning point in the relations of the Church with the totalitarian regime. One month before, on 2 June 1985, Pope John Paul II published the Encyclical Slavorum Apostoli, in which he emphasized the meaning of the two brothers’ achievements in the evangelisation in the Slavic countries.⁵¹ The years of self-sacrificing work of small religious communities in Velehrad were visible in the underground. A Slovak activist, Vladimír Jukl, recalled: “With the help of communities, we invited young people to come to Velehrad on Saturday, 6 July. We used all underground structures to spread this information. We mobilized everyone upon whom we had some influence: young people, families, priests, movements, orders... The information was also broadcasted by Anton Hlinka on Voice of America radio station. Slovakia began to move towards Velehrad.”⁵²

Almost 150 000 people participated in the pilgrimage to Velehrad. The majority of them came from Moravia and Slovakia. Considering that a pilgrimage to Levoča took place on the same day, the number of pilgrims was exceptional. The leadership of the Party wanted to convert this unique event into a “Peace Festival”; however, without much success. As the Czech Minister of Culture, Milan Klusák, who could not bring himself to pronounce the word “saint”, preceding the names of the two patrons, turned to the believers with a call for peace. He was booed – possibly the first time that the “normalised” regime lost in an open confrontation with its own citizens.⁵³ The pilgrimage was a manifestation of loyalty to the Pope, Cardinal Tomášek and the Church; a manifestation of the restored strength of Ecclesia Silentii and the members of its congregation who were no longer afraid.⁵⁴ The pilgrimage came as a shock to the regime, from which it never recovered. The leadership of the Party had to admit that the Church had at its disposal an extremely effective information network, since the unparalleled mobilisation of the community of believers took place without the participation of the state media. It became clear to them again that they were universally hated and each anonymous gathering posed a risk to the regime.⁵⁵ The Church opposed the regime as the true and only challenger, whom they had already buried and now had to be afraid of again. Consequently, one of the most important objectives of the communist church policy failed, i.e. to eliminate the Church as a real opponent together with its ambition to be a mass organisation.

The regime was put on trial by the religious population once more with a petition entitled: “The recommendations of Catholics on the resolution of the situation of believers in the ČSSR“.⁵⁶ The petition’s text was prepared by a group of Moravian Catholics under the leadership of Augustín Navrátil. A one-time signature collection campaign began on 29 November 1987. An incredibly large increase in the number of signatures could not have been possible, had it not been for a personal letter from Cardinal Tomášek addressed to the congregation on 4 January 1988, in which he appealed to Christians to get rid of “their fears and lack of courage being unworthy of a Christian” and to sign the petition.⁵⁷ It was an important decision because without the patronage of the Czech Primate in the initiative, it would not have achieved such an outstanding success and would have been labelled by the regime (as) a kind of “provocation by illegal and hostile structures”. The demands presented in the 31-paragraph petition included the separation of the Church and the state, the abolition of regulations discriminating against the Church, especially the Act No. 217/1949 on the economic hedging of the Church and the amendment to the Constitution concerning the claims included into the petition.⁵⁸ During the first months, the petition was signed by around 300,000 members of the congregation. By the end of 1988, the number of signatures amounted to 501,590, including 291,284 Slovaks and 210,306 citizens from Bohemia and Moravia.⁵⁹ In response to this, the regime imprisoned Navrátil, the initiator of the petition, in the psychiatric department of a military hospital. Nonetheless, the petition largely united believers with non-believers and Catholics with Protestants, so that it was perceived by Catholic activists as a kind of referendum against the existing system.⁶⁰

In the second half of the 1980s, traditional pilgrimages in Slovakia reached as yet unknown proportions as to the number of pilgrims. From 1983, as the pilgrimage to Levoča alone attracted 150,000 participants, high numbers of pilgrims became visible. In the summer of 1987, their number increased, amounting to 250,000 people, probably on the occasion of the Marian Year, previously declared by the Pope. Considering that only during the Marian Year the total number of pilgrims reached an incredible 600,000, consisting mostly of young people, compared to the Communist Party of Slovakia with its 450,000 members at that time, it was an important sign of the invincible religiousness of Slovaks, as well as of their rejection of the atheistic ideology propagated by the state and became clear evidence of the disproportion between those in power and the oppressed.⁶¹

Candle Demonstration on 25 March 1988

The Candle Demonstration on 25 March, 1988, which was the first open protest carried out by Slovaks against the communist regime62, is a well known and recorded event in their historiography. 25 March was proclaimed the Remembrance Day of the Slovak Republic, thereby making it the focus of public attention. Interest among historians was aroused also by a wide range of historical sources. On 30 November, 1989, a commission was established by the Slovak National Council intended to investigate an excessively violent attack by the police on a peaceful gathering of believers in Bratislava.⁶³ The commission was active until 20 March, 1990 and collected extensive documentation from the governmental institutions involved: the police, security service, prosecutor’s office, high ranking KSS officials as well as the participants concerned.⁶⁴ The demonstration was widely reported abroad; about three months after the event, a collection of authentic documents appeared in Austria.They were smuggled across the border by Bishop Korec and his helpers, and then published abroad.⁶⁵ By 1998, elaborate work, based on a variety of archival sources and oral history was published by Ján Šimulčík.⁶⁶ Finally, we should mention that twenty years after these memorable events, an academic conference dedicated to the Candle Demonstration was organised. The results of the conference will be published in an anthology in the spring of 2014.

A direct incentive for the demonstration came from part of the Slovak political emigrant community in the West, to be precise from its leaders – the editors of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, the priest Anton Hlinka and the chairman of the Slovak World Congress, Marián Šťastný. The idea was then picked up by the leaders of Catholic dissidents and transformed into a well-coordinated secret structure.⁶⁷ The Candle Demonstration in Hviezdoslav Square on Friday, 25 March 1988, was the first street demonstration demanding the free appointment of bishops, full religious freedom and respect for civil rights.⁶⁸ The announcement of such a demonstration was the logical result of the growing activity of the community of believers in the country, whose resistance gained not only a religious, but also a civic dimension. Through the third demand concerning observance of civil rights, the opposition movement decided to open itself to the non-believer part of the population on the one hand, thereby showing their solidarity, but on the other hand, Catholics showed that they were struggling not only for religious, but also for political freedom.⁶⁹

The reaction of the regime constitutes an example of a government apparatus that, being deep in crisis, acting defensively and wanting to save face, reached for violent and repressive measures. The minister of Culture, Miroslav Válek, described this situation a few days after a brutal police action targeted at a few thousand peaceful demonstrators,⁷⁰ who wanted to ask for freedom by singing, prayer and lighted candles in their hands. Válek watched the course of the demonstration and its bloody denouement from the window of the Carlton Hotel which was transformed into the operational headquarters of the security forces. He commented on what he saw on 20 April 1988 during the anniversary meeting of the Pacem in Terris Association: “During the last few days, the public was thrilled by a demonstration that took place in Bratislava. I openly admit that it was my duty to see the truth with my own eyes. And so I observed the whole demonstration. Unfortunately, the majority of you in this room trust foreign media than more our own. The demonstration was dispersed because it was illegal. But there were neither dogs nor rubber truncheons and tear gas. There was only water and cars [...]. However, there was also another option: to let the demonstration pass with the security forces successfully selling candles. But we know that the demonstration was only a part of a carefully planned campaign. Nothing has been written about the dogs, but about the impotence of the state, the disintegration of power structures and the victory of the believers over the state...”⁷¹

The Party leadership considered the Candle Demonstration a priori as an attempt to activate the opposition in a political direction. Therefore, the KSS politburo, that held a meeting on 15 March, was eminently interested in: 1) hindering the demonstration in general, 2) requesting the participants to leave the square, if, however, the demonstration takes place, and 3) dispersing them, if the two previous measures failed.⁷² During the meeting, a political commission was formed consisting of the Slovak Minister of Culture, Válek, Minister of the Interior, Lazar, other high rank party officials, the representatives of the security forces and the police. The commission worked out specific counter-measures against the demonstration. A day before, Oberst Mikula, Chief of Police of the city of Bratislava, asked the Federal Minister of the Interior, Vajnar, to “grant him authorisation to enforce extraordinary security measures from 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 p.m. on 25 March 1988”⁷³ in order to prevent the demonstration. Large-scale and very extensive preparations illustrated that the regime wanted to make every effort in order to avoid potential confrontation with opponents at all costs. Preparations ranged from the mobilization of all available means of political power, through the introduction of certain measures in higher education institutions and student residences, where no lectures were held on 25 March, thereby forcing the students to leave on Thursday evening, as well as other measures concerning traffic and hospitals that were preparing to admit a large number of injured, to the detention of leading Catholic activists.

The demonstrators were violently dispersed, by 1,061 policemen, 20 cleaning vehicles, 17 police cars, 8 convoy vehicles, 2 water cannons, 2 buses, and 3 tanks.⁷⁴ In the aftermath of the brutal course of action, 14 people were injured, and 99 were arrested and interrogated, including foreign journalists.⁷⁵ The images from Bratislava evoked a wave of indignation and protests across the entire world. All prominent newspapers reported on the events for several days. Among other things, the media pointed out the lack of potential to reform the system under the rule of the new Secretary General, Miloš Jakeš,⁷⁶ as well as the scale of religious repression and its relation to the ongoing Czechoslovak-Vatican negotiations concerning the appointment of bishops.⁷⁷ The names of the main activists, Ján Čarnogurský and František Mikloško, became known to the world’s public. Media coverage and the resulting political protests additionally strengthened the critical attitude of the West towards the Czechoslovak state leadership, increasingly mired in international isolation.

The Candle Demonstration of 25 March 1988 was the culmination of underground Church activity and the activity of Slovak Catholic emigrés. It was simply a public peace demonstration that electrified the global political scene and attracted the gaze of the media, although it was violently suppressed by the regime. It was an incentive for further demonstrations of Czechs and Slovaks against the regime and gradually developed into an open confrontation between the street and authority. The demonstrations took place throughout 1989 and eventually put an end to the persecution of the Church. As the Velvet Revolution began, the 17 November 1989 became a special occasion of great joy for the Church as its members could finally catch a glimpse of freedom.

Bratislava/nahlas

An important role in the increased activity of the civil opposition movement in Slovakia was assigned to the environmentalists whose critical views on the disastrous situation of the environment in the capital of Slovakia attracted public attention and caused disruption politically. The most relevant points of their criticism were summarized in the samizdat magazine Bratislava/nahlas (Bratislava Aloud) that was published in October 1987 with an issue of two thousand copies and announced to the general public on 25 October, 1987 on Voice of America. There, a group of around 80 persons, mostly members of the Slovak Association of Environmentalists,⁷⁸ highlighted the air pollution in the city of Bratisalva, which proved to have the highest level of contamination in the whole of Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, attention was drawn to the enormous waste of water resources caused by damaged water piping, to the contamination of water, resulting primarily from the activity of the oil-processing industry, as well as to noise pollution. Another point concerned the catastrophic condition of Bratislava’s Old Town monuments that, in large part and probably deliberately, were destined to fall into decay, since the timely renovation either did not take place at all or was delayed.⁷⁹

The publication aroused a wave of indignation among people spanning the major part of the Republic. A circulation of another 30,000 copies of Bratislava/nahlas was prepared. Even the state security forces were not able to confiscate them. The initiative of young environmentalists, who became the most active participants of the Velvet Revolution later on, was rightly hailed as the Slovak Charter 77⁸⁰ since it gained the wider support of society and addressed the main needs of the capital’s inhabitants. The process of gradual rapprochement of the ever-growing opposition movement was present both in the Czech and Slovak parts of the country in the last two years before the collapse of the communist monopoly on power. However, by August 1989, when judicial proceedings were brought against the so-called Bratislavská päťka (Bratislava Five) – a group of the five most famous dissidents in Slovakia,⁸¹ and the trial was a catalyst for further bonding both within the opposition and between dissidents and the rest of the population. This criminal trial evoked a wave of indignation reflected by numerous protest resolutions. A letter to the president written by Slovak intellectuals, in which they pleaded for the suspension of the trial, was signed by historians, writers, journalists, still active or banned from their profession, alongside the representatives of the civil-liberal dissident groupings with Milan Šimečka Sr. as their leader, as well as by the secret Catholic clergy, including prominent names, such as Alexander Dubček and the secret bishop, Ján Korec.⁸² A similar protest letter to the president was sent by Slovak sociologists whose signatures provided an exemplary list of the future political and social, pro-western and pro-American, prominence of Slovakia, with Magda Vašáryová and Martin Bútora as the future Slovak Ambassador to the US and one of the founding fathers of foreign policy in the independent Slovak Republic of the 1990s, to mention but a few.⁸³ “Therefore, we turn to you, dear Mr. President, so that you contribute to the recovery and moral restoration of our society and support further development of the idea of national reconciliation based on a political dialogue. This idea has become a hopeful starting point for overcoming the crisis also in other countries in the world. Some of them barely know anything about our democratic traditions. Therefore, we shall prove that these are precisely our national traditions, and not the legacy of Stalinism that will determine the future of our nation.“⁸⁴

Conclusions

The real revolution, which began with the violent suppression of a student demonstration on 17 November 1989 at Národní Třída Avenue in Prague, originated from people’s (unsatisfied) expectations and was a thoroughly idealistic, social, political and, last but not least, religious phenomenon.⁸⁵ Slovaks and Czechs detested the communist regime not because it was socialist, but because of its inhumane, bureaucratic and oppressive policies.⁸⁶ Equally, no one wanted to return to the thieving capitalism implemented in the early 1990s. The fundamental concepts of humanity, religious freedom, social peace and even love and mutual respect were the core elements of the long-lasting ideology of the opposition. Lastly, if it had not been for the support of the Slovak political diaspora, not only the wide media coverage of every injustice committed by the governance apparatus on its own citizens, but also the successful outcome of the revolution and the establishment of an independent Slovak state three years later would not have been possible.

Beata Katrebova –Blehova. Born in Nitra, Slovakia in 1973 and has studied English and German studies at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, as well as political science, history, Russian language and law at the Univeristy of Vienna. She completed her dissertation titled The Fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia while working as a university tutor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Vienna and from 2000–2005 as a lecturer for the Austrian East and Southern Europe Institute on the satellite campus Niederösterreich in St. Pölten. From 2004–2009 she served as university assistant for the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include: twentiethcentury Slovak and Czech history, the history of the Cold War and the history of Czechoslovak-Soviet relations. Since 2007 she has been a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Pamäť národa.

ENDNOTES

1 KSČ – the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Paradoxically, the Party was responsible exclusively for the Czech state territory – after the transformation into a federative state in 1968, the existence of a separate Communist Party of the Czech Socialist Republic was not allowed.

2 KSS – the Communist Party of Slovakia.

3 Jan Rychlík, Češi a Slováci ve 20. Století. Česko-slovenské vztahy, 1945–1992 (Bratislava: VEGA, 1998), p. 276.

4 Cf. Beata Blehova, “Die Kulturpolitik in der Slowakei und der Beginn der Normalisierung,” in Peter Bachmaier, Beata Blehova, Der kulturelle Umbruch in Ostmitteleuropa (St. Pölten: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 171–189.

5 Rychlik (1998), pp. 282–287.

6 Quotation after Leo Magnino, “Slowaken sind reif für Eigenstaatlichkeit,” in Slowakei 16 (Munich, 1977–1978), p. 97.

7 Imrich Kružliak, “Za ľudské práva,” nn Imrich Kružliak, V čakárni dejín. Obrazy slovenských osudov, (Bratislava, 1999), p. 272. Originally printed in Horizont, July/August 1978.

8 Peter Balun, “Akcia ‘Kniha’. Charta 77 na Slovensku,” In Pamäť národa 1 (2007), p. 84.

9 Until 1989, Charter 77 was signed by 37 Slovaks. See Vilém Prečan, Charta 77. 1977–1989. Od morální k demokratické revoluci. Dokumentace (Scheinfield-Schwarzenberg: Čs. Středisko nezávislé literatury/ Bratislava: Archa, 1990), pp. 487–514 (List of signataries.).

10 Balun (2007), p. 87.

11 Ibidem.

12 Ibidem, p. 94.

13 Pavol Čarnogurský writes that by creating the declaration and signing this shameful document the Slovak Church hit rock bottom. See Paľo Čarnogurský, Súboj s komunizmom (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2013), pp. 186–188.

14 Gábriš, to the great dissatisfaction of the party leadership, was becoming more and more critical and hostile towards the regime and advocated for the Association of Catholic Clergy Pacem in Terris after its activity was officially prohibited by Vatican in a papal decree Quidam episcopi. See Jozef Haľko, “Biskup Július Gábriš a Združenie katolíckych duchovných Pacem in Terris,” in Pamäť národa 3, vol. 3 (2007), pp. 30–45.

15 According to the personal testimony of the priest Zajíček. See Balun (2007), p. 86.

16 See “Die ‘Charta 77’: ein politisch-kirchliches Dilemma,” in Herder-Korrespondenz, vol. 31, no. 3, (Munich, 1977), pp. 116–119. This outstanding analysis was published under the initials R. S.

17 The declaration of Czech bishops of 14 January 1977 with František Tomášek on the top of the list had a substantially different wording; therefore, it appeared that they managed to oppose to the pre-fabricated statement of the ecclesiastical office. A dissociation from Charter 77 cannot be concluded on the basis of this document. See “Die ‘Charta 77’: ein politisch-kirchliches Dilemma,” reference as above, p. 119.

18 Miroslav Kusý, “Slovenský fenomén,” in Listy vol. 15, no. 5 (Rím, 1985), p. 35.

19 Kusý (1985), p. 36.

20 Slovenská organizácia na ochranu ľudských práv (SONOP). Emil Vidra belonged to the anti-communist resistance fighters whose services were not recognized by the Slovak society, although a commemorative plaque can be found in his historical house in Bratislava. After the 2nd World War, he became a member of the Labour Party (Strana práce). Following the invasion of 1968, he emigrated to Vienna, where he established contacts with Slovak exile organisations. (Personal report of Ján Bobák to the author.)

21 František Braxátor, Slovenský exil 1968, (Bratislava: Lúč, 1992), pp. 113–114.

22 Ibidem.

23 Ibidem, p. 114.

24 Gennaro Verolino travelled around the country before his deportation from Czechoslovakia on 24 March 1949 in order to authorize bishops to create a secret hierarchy. Hansjakob Stehle, Eastern politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979 (Athens, 1981), p. 273.

25 See Václav Vaško, Neumlčená. Kronika katolické církve v Československu po druhé světové válce, vol. 2 (Prague, 1990), p. 111.

26 For more information on secret consecrations see František Vnuk, “Tajné vysviacky pred 50. Rokmi,” in Kultúra 21 (2000), p. 10–11.

27 All 56 monasteries with six Catholic male oreder communities were violently attacked in the night of 13 to 14 April 1950 during the so called Akcia K (sk. Akcia kláštory, lit. Action Monasteries). The monks were concentrated in special centres and, consequently, forced into the civil life or pastorate. See, among others, František Vnuk, Popustené putá. Katolícka cirkev na Slovensku v období liberalizácie a nástupu normalizácie (1967–1971), (Martin: Matica Slovenská, 2001), pp. 134–135.

28 See Ján Chryzostom Korec, “Tajne vysvätení kňazi za komunizmu,” in Ján Šimulčík, Zápas o nádej. Z kroniky tajných kňazov 1969–1989 (Prešov: Michal Vaško, 2000), p. 9.

29 Cf. Šimulčík (2000), p. 43.

30 Jukl, Krčméry, Rudolf Fiby and Eugen Valovič.

31 It was described in the report of Fatima community concerning the conference of Slovak bishops in 1990. Here, quotation after Šimulčík (2000), p. 13.

32 Šimulčík (2000), p. 12.

33 By 1989, the community increased in number up to 24 members and 40 employees.

34 Šimulčík (2000), p. 82.

35 “‘Der Widerstand ist selbstverständlicher geworden.’ Ein Gespräch mit Franz Kardinal König,” in Herder Korrespondenz 37/7 (Freiburg, 1983), p. 307.

36 In the eyes of Church secretaries, priests were guilty of “illegal activity” when they dared to condemn in their preaching the anti-Christian smear campaigns spread in the mass media, to give their opinion about atheism, and to defend themselves against the distortion of Christian truths and moral principles. They were suspected by the state organs whenever they maintained contacts with their congregation members, especially young people while preparing them for sacraments, providing pre-marriage catechesis, and organising groups of ministrants and boy choirs or any kind of charity activities among the old and sick people. See “Die Lage der katholischen Kirche in der Slowakei,” in Slowakei 16, 1977/78 (Munich), p.81. In accordance with paragraph 178 of the Penal Code, for those “crimes” they could be convicted of”thwarting the state control over the Church“and given a prison sentence. Those elements of the offence were not explicitly named by the Penal Code, thus their identification was incumbent upon a free judgement of Church secretaries. Otto Luchterhand made a reference to this speaking about a”blurred lawlessness of the religious community“in Czechoslovakia. See Otto Luchterhand, “Organe des Staates zur Kontrolle der Kirchen. Die Religionsbehörden in kommunistischen Staaten,” in Herder Korrespondenz, 38/6 (Freiburg, 1984), p. 265.

37 Jozef Nechluwyl, “Zwischen Druck und Widerstand. Zur Lage der Kirche und der Christen in der ČSSR,” in Herder Korrespondenz vol. 33, no. 3 (Freiburg, 1979), p. 158.

38 Viktor Trstenský was born in 1908 in Trstená, ordained as a priest in 1931, arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in 1949, in 1951 convicted again for five years, released from prison in 1954, in 1958 convicted again for a fifteen-year imprisonment, granted an amnesty in 1960, in 1969 priest in Stará Ľubovňa. In 1974, after only five years, he was deprived of his permission to perform priestly ministry again and returned to be active as a priest no sooner than in 1989. For his merits, Pope John Paul II appointed him a papal Prelate in 1994. See Július Paštéka et al., Lexikón katolíckych kňazských osobností Slovenska (Bratislava: Lúč, 2000), p. 1412f.

39 Cf. Viktor Trstenský, Nemôžem mlčať, Contents (Bratislava, 1995), pp. 681–686.

40 Nechluwyl (1979), p. 158.

41 The Austrian radio station ORF described it as one of the most spectacular actions that ever occurred in a communist country. See Anton Hlinka, Sila slabých a slabosť silných (Bratislava, 1990), p. 134.

42 See “Skandal um Studentenausschluss in Bratislava,” in Slowakei. Kulturhistorische Revue, 17, 1979/80 (Munich), pp. 100–102. The article printed here was used by the Catholic News Agency (KNA).

43 Ibidem, p. 101f.

44 Rudolf Lesňák, Listy z podzemia. Súborná dokumentácia kresťanskej samizdatovej publicistiky na Slovensku v rokoch 1945–1989 (Bratislava: Lúč, 1998), p. 31.

45 Works by a poet, Janko Silan, a theologian, Pavol Strauss and an art historian, Ladislav Hanus, among others, were published for the first time in the Orientácia magazine. See Lesňák (1998), pp. 31–52.

46 Ján Šimulčík, Svetlo z podzemia. Z Kroniky katolíckeho samizdatu, 1969–1989 (Prešov: Michal Vaško, 1997), p.18.

47 Between 1969 and 1989, a total number of 23 Christian and 4 liberal periodicals were printed illegally in Slovakia. Šimulčík (1997), p. 24.

48 See Johanna Posset, Česká samizdatová periodika, 1968–1989 (Brno: Paseka, 1990), p. 180.

49 “Sekretariát pre šírenie ateizmu?,” in Svedectvo (samizdat), 2/1, 1988.

50 Lesňák (1998), p. 17.

51 See the Circular Letter Slavorum Apostoli by the Pope John Paul II addressed to bishops, priests, order communities and all the faithful in remembrance of the evangelising work of the Saints Cyril and Methodius 1100 years ago, 2nd June 1985, in Verlautbarungen des Apostolischen Stuhls, p. 65.

52 Vladimír Jukl, in Ján Šimulčík, Zápas o nádej. Z kroniky tajných kňazov 1969–1989 (Prešov: Michal Vaško, 2000), p. 60.

53 Kardinál Tomášek. Svědectví o dobrém katechetovi, bojácném biskupovi a statečném kardinálovi (Praha 1994), p. 110, ff.

54 For an elaborate description of the Velehrad pilgrimage see Václav Benda, “Jak dál po Velehrade?,” in Rozmluvy. Literární a filozofická revue, Nr. 6 (England: Purley, 1986), pp. 7–37.

55 Ibidem, p. 14.

56 Podnety katolíkov na riešenie situácie veriacich občanov v ČSSR. Also known as 31-Paragraph Petition (31 bodová petícia). The Slovak text printed in Jozef Žatkuliak ed., November 1989 a Slovensko. Chronológia a dokumenty 1985–1990 (Bratislava: Nadácia Milana Šimečku a Historický ústav SAV, 1999), pp. 185–187.

57 Cardinal’s letter printed in Ján Šimulčík, Čas svitania. Sviečková manifestácia – 25. Marec 1988 (Prešov: Michal Vaško, 1998), p. 25.

58 For the text of the Petition (in English) see George Weigel, The final Revolution. The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York/Oxford, 1992), p. 239f.

59 This number was mentioned in a telegram of the Prague Archbishopric to the Commission of the Slovak National Council regarding the investigation of police attack on the congregation on 25 March 1988, Šimulčík (1998), p. 237.

60 In paragraph 29, a demand was made to modify several articles of the Constitution in the sense of the claims included into the petition. See Weigel (1992), p. 181.

61 Cf. Hlinka (1990), p. 184. See also Ján Šimulčík, Katolícka cirkev a nežná revolúcia (Prešov: Michal Vaško, 1999), p. 12.

62 Cf. Padraic Kenney, Karneval revoluce. Střední Evropa 1989 (Prague: BB/art, 2005), p. 54.

63 Komisia SNR na dohľad prešetrenia zásahu ZNB proti zhromaždeniu veriacich 25. marca 1988 v Bratislave.

64 A total number of 97 witnesses were interrogated. The documentation is archived in the Slovak National Archives. For more information about the commission’s work see Patrik Dubovský, “Sviečková manifestácia,” in Pamäť národa (Ústav pamäti národa), vol. 4, no. 1 (Bratislava, 2008), pp. 46–51.

65 The collection was published under a pseudonym that was used by Korec as a camouflage: R. V. Tatran, Bratislavský veľký piatok: Zbierka autentických dokumentov o zhromaždení veriacich 25. marca 1988, (no indication of place: no indication of publisher, 1988), p. 222. After November 1989, the book was two times reedited, firstly in 1994 and secondly in 2008 – on the 20th anniversary of the demonstration.

66 Šimulčík (1998), p. 275.

67 See Ako sa pripravoval 25. marec. In: Ján Čarnogurský, Videné od Dunaja. Výber z prejavov článkov a rozhovorov. (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1997), pp. 370–374.

68 The demonstration was announced by František Mikloško in a letter to the National Committee of the City of Bratislava on 10 March 1988. Printed in: Šimulčík (1999), p. 35.

69 Cf. Šimulčík (1999), p. 33.

70 The figures concerning the number of participants of the demonstration differ. Most probably, 3000–4000 people came to the Hviezdoslav Square by 5.15 p.m. Then, the square was cordoned off, forcing the other 8000–10 000 people to wait in the nearby streets and under the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising. See Šimulčík (1999), p. 138.

71 The speech of the Minister of Culture was published in a Catholic informative leaflet by Samizdat. Here quoted after Šimulčík (1999), p. 158.

72 According to the statement of Ladislav Sádovský, the Head of the Department of Public Administration in the Central Committee of the KSS. See Šimulčík (1999), p. 49.

73 The letter was published in Šimulčík (1999), p. 46.

74 Šimulčík (1999), p. 139.

75 According to the report of the General Prosecutor’s Office of 31 January 1990. Šimulčík (1999), p. 137.

76 Der Kurier, 27.3.1988.

77 Die Presse, 28.3.1988.

78 Slovenský zväz ochrancov prírody a krajiny (SZOPK). See Mikuláš Huba, “Bratislava/ nahlas po dvadsiatich rokoch,” in Pamäť národa 4 (2007), p. 104.

79 Výňatky z publikácie Bratislava/nahlas In Jozef Žatkuliak ed., (1999), pp. 173–179.

80 Huba (2007), p. 106.

81 A lawyer, Ján Čarnogurský, a sociologist, Miroslav Kusý, a writer, Hana Ponická and a Catholic dissident, Anton Selecký.

82 A letter of Slovak opposition activists and intellectuals to the President on the suspension of the criminal trial against the members of the so-called “Bratislava’s Five” (30.8.1989). In Jozef Žatkuliak ed., (1999), p. 300, ff.

83 A letter of Slovak sociologists to the President (7.9.1989). In Jozef Žatkuliak ed., (1999), p. 302, ff.

84 Ibidem.

85 Cf. James Krapfl, Revolúcia s ľudskou tvárou. Politika, kultúra a spoločenstvo v Československu po 17. novembri 1989 (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009), p. 23.

86 Ibidem.

This article has been published in the third issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the consequences and commemorations of 1989 in Central Europe .

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The Murder of Armenians – Armenocide – Genocide – Genocide Prevention: Aspects of Political and Historical Comparative Genocide Studies

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the genocide of Christian Armenians in the late Ottoman times in World War I: the first historical “worldwide festival of death” (Thomas Mann), which has been denied in Turkey, the perpetrating country (Türkiye Cumhuriyetiz), until today. In his analysis of this first state-run “organized and planned genocide of the twentieth century” (Edgar Hilsenrath), the author, who is a social scientist, points out both the historical and conceptual context. Furthermore, he brings up the fundamental issues of remembrance, memory work, genocide, eliminationist racism, genocide policy, and genocide theory in the twentieth century.

Musa Dagh

In 1919, the Prague writer Franz Werfel (1890–1945) wrote the novella Not the Murderer (Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig), released in 1920 by a publishing house specializing in Expressionist literature.² The catchphrase the murdered is the guilty one from the title of the original German edition became almost a proverb in the Germany of 1920s. Even today, several generations later, it might appear as if Franz Werfel had developed his artistic vision to anticipate the “trial of Talaat Pascha”³ which took place a while later. A dozen years later it was again Franz Werfel who, in an artistic visionary overview, recognized and stressed the relationship between racism and genocide. After the handover, the takeover, and the exercise of power by National Socialists in Germany, starting on 30 January 1933, the author emphasized the necessity to “rescue the incomprehensible fate of the Armenian people from the depths of history” in the postscript to his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933).⁴

In his statement the author draws our attention both to the central vanishing point of our memory (to “rescue” something, instead of leaving it in “the depths of history”) and to the specific “case” of “the Armenian people” and their “incomprehensible fate” during World War I, “far away in Turkey.”

Armenocide

Like “genocide” and “Holocaust,” the English word “Armenocide”⁵ is a coinage, made up from “Armenius cidere” and translated into German as Armenozid. It refers to the genocide of the Armenian religious, ethnic, and political minority in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. This was the first state-run genocide of the twentieth century. The word itself includes a reference both to the victims (Armenians) and to the murder (cidere). Unlike the much more well-known coinage “Holocaust” (holokaustos, lit.: “burned completely”), it does not indicate the form of the murder, even though it was more the Armenians who were burned alive during World War I, for instance in their churches, than the Jews, who were murdered on a massive scale in extermination camps, “factories of death,” in the occupied East during World War II.

Rudolph Rummel, a genocide scholar who applies quantitative analysis of victim statistics in “the Dismal Science of Authorized Terror” (Irving Louis Horowitz),⁶ gives a total victim count for the Armenian genocide in Turkey, “the first complete ethnic cleansing of this century.” He estimates it at around 1.883 million, i.e. almost 1.9 million people.⁷

Memory work

The historically-oriented social scientist, involved in theoretical reflection on political and sociological aspects of comparative genocide studies, empirical research, and scientific publications, is less interested in the (certainly relevant) ethical dimension of memory, which may stand for reconciliation, which includes the Christian sense of the word, or dealing with the essential consequences arising from the culture of impunity, which favors genocide and genocide denial. Instead, the focus here is on another memory-related dimension, the possible genocide prevention with regard to the lasting generational and biopolitical consequences of a real genoce event. Public memory here is an essential duty of art in general and narrative art in particular, in the form of novels and novellas, stories and poems, as shown by the example of Werfel’s novel Musa Dagh.

Aryans on paper

The relation between racism and the “genocide which Young Turks have on their conscience,”⁸ recognized by Franz Werfel, did not escape the notice of German “friends of Armenians” either. As Christians, they tried to draw a lesson from their subjectively perceived co-responsibility for Armenocide: the genocide of the Armenian religious, ethnic, and political minority in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. By a letter of 31 May 1933, the board of the German-Armenian Society, represented by Paul Rohrbach and Ewald Stier, led to the issuing of the decree of 3 July 1933 by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. According to the decree, Armenians in the Third Reich should not be considered, in the light of fascist ideology and its racist implementation, as “Semites,” but as “Aryans.” In an official letter of 31 August 1933 addressed to Stier, the “expert on racial matters in the Reich Ministry of the Interior” wrote: “In accordance with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Armenians are to be considered Aryans.”⁹

Jews of the Orient

The German(-language) literature presented both an ambivalent image of Armenians as well as a stereotypical perception of them as “the Jews of the Orient” (long before the National Socialist eliminationist racism).¹⁰

The negative stereotype of Armenians was promoted by a German mass entertainer who remains popular to this day. In 1897 Karl May published his short story Der Kys-Kaptschiji, in which he presented the anti-Armenian stereotype as follows:

“One Jew outwits ten Christians; one Yankee outwits fifteen Jews; one Armenian is, however, worth one hundred Yankees; that is what some say, and I have found out that, even though this is an exaggeration, it is based on the truth. Those who travel to the Orient with their eyes open will agree with me. Wherever malice or treachery is planned, a hooked Armenian nose must be involved. Where even the unscrupulous Greek refuses to commit a villainy, there will certainly be an Armenian ready to earn the ignoble payment.”¹¹

Anti-Armenian stereotypes were promoted in the 1920s in the form of the violent Armenophobia, with reference to the economic dominance in the Orient, by Halíde Edíb Adivar (1884–1964), a Young Turk ideologist and a popular author, known also in Germany for her 1916 novella Yeni Turan (translated into German as Das neue Turan – ein Frauenschicksal) and her 1924 novel Ateşten Gömlek (translated into German as Das Flammenhemd, and into English as The Daughter of Smyrna or The Shirt of Flame). What seems to be just a manifestation of the early Kemal¹² was – and still is – nothing but an anti-human and life-threatening fascism-related ideology.

Eliminationist racism

Hitler’s conception of the world, shaped by the bitter hostility towards Jews, the panic fear of Bolsheviks, as well as his contemporary pseudo-scientific and pseudo-Darwinian racism, was neither original nor intellectually developed. It was essentially a convenient recapitulation of the right and far-right zeitgeist in the spirit of German power.

After the decision had been made about “who should live in this world and access its resources” and “which peoples should be annihilated because they were considered inferior or a hindrance to the winners”¹³ (Gerhard Weinberg 1995), Hitler, as a representative of the supposed master race, rehashed the eugenic racist stereotype of Armenians and Armenia in his so-called “Weltanschauung.”¹⁴ This has also been reflected in a few recorded anti-Armenian remarks made by Hitler in his table talks and conversations, according to which he talked several times about the “non-Aryan blood” of Armenians and the resulting distrust of them in the military policy.¹⁵

No elaborate, in-depth hermeneutical interpretation is needed to recognize that the last Reich Chancellor (and, at the same time, the first one “with a migration background”) had also internalized the stereotype of a sly and unreliable Armenian, “Jews of the Orient,” which was so widespread in Germany.

In the two volumes of Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf,¹⁶ first published in 1925/26, no references to “the Armenian question,” “Armenians,” or Armenia can be found. Nevertheless, there are records of Hitler’s anti‑Armenian prejudice more than twenty years apart. Without a “solution to the Jewish question” the German people would be “a people like the Armenians”, remarked Hitler, a German völkisch racist, in 1922.¹⁷ As a fascist eliminationist racist in 1943, he is said to have emphasized in his “paranoid insanity”¹⁸ that peoples, if they “did not deliver themselves from the Jews,” would hit the bottom just “like the Persians, once a proud people, who now lived their miserable lives as Armenians.”¹⁹

The anti-human contempt of Armenians and the murderous hatred towards Jews, on the one hand, paired with an admiration for historical authority figures like Genghis Khan and the cruelty of his Mongolian army, and the approval of the twentieth-century Turkish proponents of power politics such as Enver and Kemal, on the other hand, constitute Hitler’s racist power-political ideology and the resulting powerful ideological policy of the National Socialist eliminationist racism.

The Terrible truth

Foreign observers of those times were aware of the “terrible truth” (furchtbare Wahrheit, Georg Glaser) of the relation between the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey in World War I and the persecution of the Jews, which started as early as in the spring of 1933 and was formalized and legalized in 1935 by the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, one of the steps leading to the genocide of European Jews in World War II. The German racial laws of 1935 reminded Eric Mills, the British Commissioner for Migration and Statistics in Palestine, of “the elimination of the Armenians from the Turkish Empire,”²⁰ as he wrote in a letter to his superior.

On the eve of World War II, in February 1939, the exile executive committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SoPaDe) referred to the historical events while expressing their opinion about the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich:

“In Germany, a minority is being inexorably exterminated, by the brutal means of murder, torturing to insanity, plundering, aggression, and starvation. What happened to Armenians in Turkey during the war is being exercised on the Jews in the Third Reich, more slowly and more systematically.”²¹

Genocide

In 1944, Polish-American international law expert Raphael Lemkin (1900– 1959) defined a new word, genocide, referring to what for decades had been described as a “murder of a nation” (Völkermord):

“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group [...]. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation [...]. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”²²

In this context, not only the short-term goal of mass murders (“annihilating the groups themselves”) and the respective destruction plan are of relevance. It is the long-term strategic, biopolitical and intergenerational effects which are characteristic of genocide. This opinion, concerned with present actions which determine future developments, was phrased by Lemkin (1944) in the form of a definition:

“[...] genocide is a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.”²³

This means that whoever loses a war may also be the winner, at a biopolitical level, of the postwar time (or, as Lemkin puts it, “peace”) for many generations. This is one of the dimensions of genocide, the relevance of which for the international law (ius gentium) was recognized by Lemkin as early as the 1930s. After World War II, in December 1948, Lemkin’s observations were also incorporated into the definition of the criminal act of international law, included in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Convention pour la prévention et la répression du crime de genocide; Konvention zur Verhinderung und Bestrafung des Verbrechens Völkermord).

The Holocaust before the Holocaust

In the preface to the French edition of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1986) by Franz Werfel, Elie Wiesel – a Jewish intellectual, an American author and a Nobel Peace Prize winner – wrote of the “Holocaust before the Holocaust.”²⁴ This, however, was recognized in America much earlier, right after the end of World War II, when the publicist Joseph Guttmann wrote an article (1948, first published in Yiddish in 1946) that not only sought to recall the Young Turk genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but also compared both genocides with regard to their main methods. He came to the main analytical conclusion that – prototypically – “the Armenian genocide” showed traditional features of a primitive mass slaughter, whereas “the Jewish genocide” was rather an implementation of a highly-organized industrial “scientifically”-founded mass murder plan in which gas chambers were used.²⁵

Furthermore, as early as in 1946, Joseph Guttmann pointed out the destructive ways of developing forces of production. He considered the mass murders in genocidal factories in the militarily occupied East during World War II as a qualitatively new aspect of Nazi extermination camps. The massive destruction was in no way unorganized. On the contrary, it was a process, a series of carefully planned state-run murder actions against “Gypsies” (nowadays called Sinti and Roma) and other supposedly “antisocial” people, “burdensome, unproductive eaters” (1939–41). The extermination of millions of people, which started in the fall of 1941 and focused on the social group of European Jews, defined as “objective opponents,” went beyond the imagination of contemporaries, including many Germans. Today as well, there are many German contemporary historians who have considerable difficulty in the scientific understanding of the real genocidal event known as the Holocaust.

Uniqueness

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), whose German-language version Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft was published in multiple copies and editions,²⁶ made a pertinent point about the nature of genocide. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963, German-language edition in 1964), Arendt considered genocide as a crimen magnum which leads to further massive genocidal crimes:

“[...] once a specific crime has first appeared, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”²⁷

This observation, so important to genocide prevention, was made by a political philosopher and intellectual of great importance and argumentative effectiveness. Despite these qualities, Hanna Arendt showed long-lasting ignorance as to the first planned and state-run genocide of the twentieth century. The “genocide of Armenians” was recognized and judged by contemporaries as the “Murder of a Nation”²⁸ and the “destruction of the Armenian nation.”²⁹ To this day, the Armenocide, also referred to as “Turkish Genocide”³⁰ and “türkischer Völkermord”³¹ of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, has been condemned by countries all over the world (but not by the present Republic of Turkey, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, and its insular appendix Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti). Uruguay was the first country to recognize the events as “genocide” (by decision of the Senate and the House of Representatives, 20.04.1965), followed by the United States (the House of Representatives, 09.04.1975), Argentina (the Senate, 05.05.1993), Canada (the House of Commons, 23.04.1996), and other countries. In the Federal Republic of Germany a unanimous decision was made by the Bundestag on 16.06.2005.³²

In her report on Eichmann’s trial (1964), Hannah Arendt reminded of the “Armenian Tindelian” [in the (online) English book edition I used it is “the Armenian Tehlirian” – trans] in the context of a political assassination. She must have meant Սողոմոն Թեհլիրյան (1897–1960; Soghomon Tehlirian, also: Soromon Tehlerjan), “who, in 1921, in the middle of Berlin, shot to death Talaat Bey, the great killer in the Armenian pogroms of 1915, in which it is estimated that one third (six hundred thousand people) of the Armenian population in Turkey was massacred”³³ The author also pointed out that the assassin was acquitted only a few weeks later, during a highlypublicized public trial. The total victim count for “the first complete ethnic cleansing of this century” (around 1.883 million Armenians murdered in the “genocidal cleansing of Turkey”³⁴) was reduced in Arendt’s book by approximately two-thirds, which – along with the references to the assassin – is an example of a shocking lack of knowledge and ignorance. What is more, these indications emphasize the underlying fact which is relevant regardless of the specific situation with all the respective details: if there is no historical confirmation, we always face the risk of selective remembrance in the form of an “ideological memory” (una memoria ideológica), as opposed to the memory of witnesses to history (una memoria histórica, testimonial) as defined by Jorgé Semprun (1977).³⁵ In his post-doctoral speech on 1 February 1989, the author of this article discussed the intergenerational and biopolitical effects of genocide policy:

“Contrary to the popular singularity claim for the genocide of European Jews in World War II, it is only the industrial form of the mass murder with the use of gas which that be considered unique. What is comparable, on the other hand, are the effects of genocide policy for generations of victims, as observed by Raphael Lemkin, and the fact that the genocide policy along with the irrevocable consequences of mass murders made it possible for the inferior firepower of the party of perpetrators to ensure a biopolitical victory, both in the First and the Second World War. [This biopolitical victory] being decisive for the destructive efficiency of genocide policy, the effects of which can still be seen several generations later.”³⁶

Criticism of unique uniqueness

In the light of the uniqueness thesis, the Holocaust was a historical event with unique characteristics. For years, the thesis of its “unique uniqueness” or singularity had an impact also on the relationship between the genocide of the Armenians and that of the Jews, Armenocide and Holocaust, as the two historical genocides in the first half of the past century. In 1977, the historian, political advisor and publicist Klaus Hildebrand recapitulated this theory in a concise way. Not only did he focus more on the form of the genocidal murder than on its content, but he also revealed an ideological variety of the thesis: Theoriefeindlichkeit (the antipathy to theorizing), which builds on anti-Marxist ressentiments and is remarkably widespread in Germany, both among economists and contemporary historians:

“The far-reaching ‘measures’ – if we stick to the language of the regime – of genocide, ‘breeding trials’ and euthanasia programs which go beyond all functionality – that is the essential, singular feature of the Nazi racial policy. No general theory of ‘fascism’ can be expected to provide an accurate description of these measures or to allow us to understand them, if that is at all possible.”³⁷

In Germany, the Holocaust-uniqueness theory was influential to such an extent that it resulted in the temporary tabooization of analytical comparisons and, consequently, impeded comparative (genocide) research. Furthermore, it led to the creation of victim classifications where Holocaust victims would belong to the first category, whereas Armenocide victims would be considered part of the second category.

The theory of the uniqueness of Holocaust is nonsensical on a linguistic level and unacceptable in historical research. Like its English equivalent, the German word Genozid is not a singulare tantum (the term for a noun which appears only in the singular form). On the contrary, it is a central category, a generic term for various “modern” historical genocides in the twentieth century. Hence, it cannot be considered as the unique characteristic of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the ideology of singularity is non-scientific and impedes research progress. Those who focus on the dialectics of the general and the particular, in the spirit of the principle of definitio per genus proximum et differentiam specificam, who do not shrink from arduous work and want to contribute to scientific knowledge, need to introduce preconditions and prerequisites for the purpose of scientific understanding, in order to make it possible to compare state crimes as forms of historical reality. The genocide of the European Jews, known as the Holocaust or Shoah (more rarely: Judeocide), which took place in the occupied East during World War II, was neither deprived of preconditions and unorganized, nor unique. On the contrary, the massive destruction of “lives not worth living” was a process, a series of carefully planned state-run murder actions:

“Forced sterilization, killing (genuinely or allegedly) sick children in hospitals, killing adult inmates of institutions with gas in medical killing centers (euthanasia), killing (genuinely or allegedly) sick inmates of concentration camps, and finally, the mass murders of Jews.”³⁸

The “state-organized genocide”³⁹ of 1941–1945 was not unique as such. It was rather the destructive forms of actual working forces’ development and the bureaucratic organization of the large-scale industrial mass murders in the “factories of death” in the occupied East during World War II that could be considered singular – as qualitatively new moments of the Nazi mass murder and genocide policy.

Genocide theory

In 2004, Micha Brumlik, the director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main, tried to define the place of “the Young Turk mass murder of Armenians” in history more precisely in the light of the theory of genocide. According to Brumlik, what

“at first was only considered to be one of the many massacres of Armenian subjects, committed by Ottoman rulers, is seen until today as the paradigm of a ‘genocide’. That is why it is so crucial for both the European and the global development of a historically-aware culture of remembrance that the Kemalist Turkey [...] has not recognized the events as a genocide until today and, above all, sanctions all those who dare to think differently, at home or abroad. In the debate about the Young Turk genocide of Armenians, we can identify a number of problems and conflict areas relating to the notion [of genocide]. We could ask whether a planned crime of this kind is demonstrable in its full extent and its genocidal intentionality.”⁴⁰

Furthermore, Brumlik observed that the war plays “a causal role in regard to the genocides of all kind” but, on the other hand, the term “genocide” denotes a specific form of a mass murder which is different from mass slaughter and wartime atrocities in general. Brumlik also noted that underlying each genocide is a racist ideology which provides a new “inclusion/ exclusion model” and is supposed to exonerate the perpetrators. He made the observation that each sociological theory of genocide also contributed to the “systematics of genocide prevention”. At the same time the author recognized that the events described as “the genocide of the Jews” (the Holocaust), which belonged to the historical German Sonderweg in the form of “totalitarian anti-Semitism,”⁴¹ had been presented as unique and singular for decades in German writing on postwar history.

From this perspective, Brumlik seems to offer a late recognition of the 1980 thesis developed by Irving Horowitz which considered totalitarian anti-Semitism as state-run eliminationist racism.

“Genocide is a national policy with adherents throughout the world, whereas the Holocaust was a specific practice of the Nazis which entailed the total murder of an entire population.”⁴²

Future perspectives

The large-scale industrial extermination of millions of people, which started in 1941–42 and focused on the major social group of European Jews, defined as “objective opponents,” might have gone beyond the imagination of contemporaries, including many Germans. Today as well, there might still be many German contemporary historians who have considerable moral and intellectual difficulty in the scientific understanding of the real genocidal event known as the Holocaust.

The ideology of singularity or uniqueness was, and still is, not good – quite the contrary. Moreover, it rejects the tentative results of a relatively new research perspective: comparative genocidal research (internationale vergleichende Völkermordforschung).⁴³ The proponents of such an approach want, in part, to overcome the problem of the miserable status of competing groups of genocide victims. This is possible, and the problem is being overcome increasingly, which is definitely a positive development. Following Hannah Arendt, past experiences may be perceived as a task for the future – one of genocide prevention, or as a “saving-lives” policy⁴⁴ which applies to universal and indivisible human rights, as argued by the American genocide researcher Irving Louis Horowitz (1976). If that is the case, then there is only “one human right” in the end: Hannah Arendt’s (1949) inalienable “right to have rights,”⁴⁵ or the Right to Life and the Physical Integrity (Grundrecht auf Leben und körperliche Unversehrtheit),⁴⁶ accepted in the Federal Republic of Germany. According to Hannah Arendt, the right to life is the core of the human right to have rights. Or, as Heinrich Heine wrote while discussing diverse conceptions of history (1832/34), life as such is a right,⁴⁷ also a right to revolutionary processes: “Life is neither means nor end. Life is a right.”

Richard Albrecht. Social scientist (graduated in 1971, PhD. in 1976, post-doctoral in 1988). First an outside lecturer (until 1989), now he works as an independent research journalist, editor and author in Bad Münstereifel, where he lives. In 1991 he published THE UTOPIAN PARADIGM. 2002/07; editor of the online magazine rechtskultur. de. 2011. His latest book is HELDENTOD. Kurze Texte aus Langen Jahren. Bio-bibliography: http://wissenschaftsakademie.net

 ENDNOTES

1 The first publication of a speech delivered by the author on the “Remembrance Day for the Victims of the Armenian Genocide,” 24 April 2009, Armenian Community in Cologne. The printed version was slightly expanded and supplemented with footnotes.

2 Franz Werfel (1920), Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig. Eine Novelle (Munich: Kurt Wolff, p. 269).

3 Der Prozess Talaat Pascha (1921). Stenographischer Bericht [...], m.e.Vorwort von Armin T. Wegner und einem Anhang (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 136 p.); new edition, m.e.Vorwort von Tessa Hofmann (1985), Göttingen: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, XI/136 p. (= progrom [typo? – trans.] series); Rolf Hosfeld (2005), Operation Nemesis. Die Türkei, Deutschland und der Völkermord an den Armeniern (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 351), pp. 13–31.

4 Franz Werfel ([1933]; 21959; 31985), Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh. Roman (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 808 p. [= Gesammelte Werke]); regarding the novel and ist impact: George Schulz-Berend, Sources and Background of Werfel’s Novel [...]; in: Germanic Review, 26 [1951] 2: pp. 111–123; Artem Ohandjanian, ‘Diese Sucht, zu erniedrigen...’ Über Franz Werfel und seinen Roman [...]; in: die horen, 35 (1990) 160: pp. 158–163.

5 Richard Albrecht, “Murder(ing) People. Genocidal Policy Within the 20th Century – Description, Analysis, and Prevention: Armenocide, Serbocide, Holocaust As Basic Genocidal Events During the World Wars,” in Brukenthalia, 2 (2012): 168–185; idem, «nous voulons une Arménie sans Arméniens» Drei Jahrzehnte Armenierbilder in kolonial-imperialistischen und totalitär-faschistischen Diskursen in Deutschland, 1913–1943; in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions – und Kulturgeschichte, 106 (2012): pp. 625–661.

6 Irving Louis Horowitz, “Counting Bodies: the Dismal Science of Authorized Terror,” in Patterns of Prejudice, 23 (1989) 2: pp. 4–15.

7 Rudolph J. Rummel (2003), “DEMOZID” der befohlene Tod. Massenmorde im 20. Jahrhundert. Prefaces by Yehuda Bauer [and] Irving Louis Horowitz (Münster-Hamburg- London: LIT, xxiii/p. 383 [= Macht und Gesellschaft 1]), pp. 177–202; ibid. (1998), Statistics of Genocide. Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 (Münster: LIT, ix/527 [= Macht und Gesellschaft 2]), pp. 78–101.

8 Johannes Lepsius, “Mein Besuch in Konstantinopel Juli/Aug. 1915,” in Johannes Lepsius (ed.) Orient. Monatsschrift für die Wiedergeburt des Ostens, 1 (1919) 1–3: 21–33.

9 Quoted after the bulletin of the German-Armenian Association e.V. (Berlin), 2.1938: 32; similar observations in subsequent issues; in his articles “Der Orient in Bewegung” (10.1940: 129–132) and “Armenier und Armenien” (15/16.1943: 193–197) Rohrbach later recalled the “radical elimination of Armenians” which started in 1915 in Constantinople and caused “one and a half million” casualties in World War I.

10 Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Die Juden des Orients. Die Armenier waren Träger von Fortschritt und Bürgerlichkeit. Die jungtürkischen Nationalisten verfolgten und töteten sie in blindem Haß”, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (24.04.2005: p. 15); also earlier idem (2000), “Der verpasste Friede. Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Türkei 1839–1938” (Zurich: Chronos): pp. 504–508; online: http://www.hist.net/kieser/pu/a&j. html; cf. also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Armenianism [and] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiarmenismo.

11 Quoted after Dominik J. Schaller (2002), “Genozid, Historisierung & Rezeption. Was kann die Analyse der Rezeption des Völkermordes an den Armeniern 1915 in Deutschland während der Jahre 1915–1945 zum Verständnis der Shoah beitragen?,” in Hans-Lukas Kieser/Dominik J. Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah (Zurich: Chronos); online version: http://www.hist.net/kieser/aghet/Essays/EssaySchaller.html.

12 Halidé Edíb, Memoirs (1926); (reprint 1972: New York: Arno Press, vii/472 p. [= World Affairs]); eadem (1928), The Turkish Ordeal(London: John Murray, ix/407).

13 Gerhard L. Weinberg (1995), Eine Welt in Waffen. Die globale Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1174 p.), quoted from page 16; for the information about the author, born in 1928 in Hannover, cf. the researcher‘s portrait of Hans-Heinrich Nolte, “Weltkrieg als Weltgeschichte: Gerhard Weinberg,” in Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, 2 (2001) 2: pp. 137–144.

14 Christian Geulen (2007), Geschichte des Rassismus (München: C. H. Beck [= wissen/ sr 2424], 128), 97/98; briefly about Hitler’s “Weltanschauung“: Marlis Steinert (1991), Hitler (Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard, 710), pp. 166–211.

15 Henry Picker (1976), Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier: mit bisher unbekannten Selbstzeugnissen Adolf Hitlers, Abbildungen, Augenzeugenberichten und Erläuterungen des Autors [...] (Stuttgart: Seewald [new edition], 548 [5.7.1942]); Werner Jochmann (1980, ed.), Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen von Heinrich Heims (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 496), 136/137 [12.11.1941] and 370 [28.8.1942]; Helmut Heiber (ed. 1962), Hitlers Lagebesprechungen. Die Protokollfragmente seiner militärischen Konferenzen 1942–1945 (Stuttgart: DVA, p. 971 [= Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 10]): 12.12.1942.

16 Adolf Hitler (1939), Mein Kampf. Jubilee edition (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP Fr. Eher Nachf., 705/XXIX p.); idem (1941), Mein Kampf. One-volume edition (München: Eher, 641.-645. edition, p. 782).

17 Eberhard Jäckel; Axel Kuhn (1980, eds.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1315 [= Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 21]), 557 [December 1922].

18 Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler ([1978] 1993) (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 158), 94; for further details about Hitler’s “career” see also Richard Albrecht (2007), ‘Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier? Adolf Hitlers Geheimrede am 22. August 1939’ (Aachen: Shaker, 104 p. [= Genozidpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert 3], p. 104), pp. 5–8; 93–94 [preface and postface].

19 Der Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nuremberg, 14. November 1945 bis 1. Oktober 1946; Volume 2: p. 428.

20 Martin Gilbert (1986), The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Holt, Reinehart & Winston, 959), pp. 48/49.

21 Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, 6. Jg. 1939, No. 2 [February 1939], A 78: Die Judenverfolgungen; zum historischen Gesamtzusammenhang Mark Levene, “Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?,” in Journal of World History, 11 (2000) 2: 305–336; German-language version in: Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, 11 (2004) 2: pp. 9–37.

22 Raphael Lemkin (1944), Axis Rule in Occupied Europe; foreword George A. Finch (Washington [D. C.]: Carnegy Endowment for International Peace Division of International Law, xxxviii/674 p.), ix: Genocide, 79–95, p. 79.

23 Ibid., p. 81.

24 Franz Werfel (1986), Les Quarante jours de Musa Dagh; traduit de l’allemand par Paul Hofer-Bury; préface de Pierre Benoît et Elie Wiesel (Paris: Ed. Albin Michel [=Collection Les Grandes Traductions], p. 701).

25 Joseph Guttmann (1948), “The Beginning of Genocide. A Brief Account on the Armenian Massacres in the World War I” (New York, 19); first published in: Yivobleter [New York], 28 (1946) 2: 239–253; later a similar remark was made by Dr. Helmut Kohl (1987) when he was the federal chancellor: “This crime of genocide, with its cold inhuman planning and fatal efficiency is unique in the human history” (Tischrede [zu Ehren des Präsidenten des Staates Israel, 7.4.1987]; in: Presse – und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, press report 111/97, 7.4.1987).

26 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism [1951]; the latest revised Germanlanguage new edition (1986): Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Munich/Zurich: Piper, p. 758).

27 Hannah Arendt (1986), Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen. Aus dem Amerikanischen von Brigitte Gransow [...] (Munich/Zurich: Piper, new edition, 358), p. 322.

28 Arnold J. Toynbee (1917), Armenian Atrocities. The Murder of a Nation [...]; revised reprint edition, New York: Tankian, 1975, p. 127.

29 Johannes Lepsius “Mein Besuch in Konstantinopel Juli/Aug. 1915,” in Johannes Lepsius (ed.) Orient. Monatsschrift für die Wiedergeburt des Ostens, 1 (1919) 1–3: pp. 21–33.

30 Irving Louis Horowitz “Government Responsibilities to Jews and Armenians: Nazi Holocaust and Turkish Genocide Reconsidered,” in Armenian Review, 39 (1986) 1: pp. 1–9.

31 Martin Sabrow “Der Kampf der Erinnerungskulturen – Völkermorde als historiografische Herausforderung,” in: ibid. et al. (2005), Völkermorde und staatliche Gewaltverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert als Thema schulischen Unterrichts (Ludwigsfelder-Struveshof: LISUM Bbg, 103), pp. 81–88.

32 A regularly updated list of the countries which have formally recognized the Armenian genocide is available on Wikipedia: Wikipedia DE.

33 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 314/315 [the quote in the translated article is taken directly from the English edition of the book: http://reflexionesdeunaerreita.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/arendt-eichmann-in-jerusalem-a-report-on-the-banality-of-evil.pdf; no pagination available – trans.].

34 Rummel, “DEMOZID”: 177–202; Statistics of Genocide: pp. 78–101.

35 Jorgé Semprún (1977) Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez. Novela (Barcelona: Ed.Planeta, 347), pp. 240–241.

36 Richard Albrecht, “Die politische Ideologie des objektiven Gegners und die ideologische Politik des Völkermords im 20. Jahrhundert. Prolegomena zu einer politischen Soziologie des Genozid nach Hannah Arendt,” in Sociologia Internationalis, 27 (1989) I: pp. 57–88.

37 Klaus Hildebrand (1977), in Manfred Bosch (ed.), Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte. Historische Bestandsaufnahme und didaktische Implikationen (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 175 p. [= Geschichtsdidaktik 1]): pp. 55–61.

38 Bernd Jürgen Wendt (2006), “Moderner Machbarkeitswahn. Zum Menschenbild des Nationalsozialismus, seinen Wurzeln und Konsequenzen,” in Burghart Schmidt (ed.), Menschenrechte und Menschenbilder von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Dokumentation & Buch [= Geistes – und Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien 1]): pp. 157–176.

39 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 321/322.

40 Micha Brumlik “Zu einer Theorie des Völkermords,” in Zu einer Theorie des Völkermords, in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 49 (2004) 8: pp. 923–932; henceforth quoted after this.

41 Max Horkheimer; Theodor W. Adorno (1959), Preface, in Paul W. Massing, Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus [...] (Frankfurt/Main: EVA [= Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie 8]): V–VIII.

42 Irving L. Horowitz (1980), Taking Lives. Genocide and State Power (New Brunswick [N. J.]-London: Transaction Books, xvi/199), p. 16.

43 For further reflections on the topic, see Richard Albrecht “Lebenskultur und Frühwarnsystem: Theoretische Aspekte des Völkermord(en)s,” in Sozialwissenschaftliche Literatur Rundschau, 28 (2005) 51: pp. 63–73; idem, ‘Völkermord. Zur Begriffsbestimmung eines Schlagworts’, in Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, 13 (2012) 1: pp. 73–76.

44 Irving Louis Horowitz (1976), Taking Lives. Genocide. State Power & Mass Murder (Transaction Books, 80 p.); Genocide and State Power (2002; Transaction Books, 5th, revised ed., foreword Anselm L. Strauss, ivx/447 p.); “Genocide and the Reconstruction of Social Theory: Observations on the Exclusivity of Collective Death,” in Armenian Review, p. 37 (1984) 1: pp. 1–21; “Government Responsibilities to Jews and Armenians: Nazi Holocaust and Turkish Genocide Reconsidered,” in: Armenian Review, 39 (1986) 1: pp. 1–9; ‘Counting Bodies: the Dismal Science of Authorized Terror’, in: Patterns of Prejudice, 23 (1989) 2: pp. 4–15; cf. the researcher’s portrait of Richard Albrecht, “‘Leben retten’: Irving Louis Horowitz’ Politische Soziologie des Genozid. Bio-bibliographisches Porträt eines Sozialwissenschaftlers,” in: Aufklärung und Kritik, 14 (2007) 1: pp. 139–141.

45 Hannah Arendt ‘Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht’, in Die Wandlung, 4 (1949): 754–770, 761; eadem, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 462.

46 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany [List of fundamental rights], Article 2 (p. 2).

47 Heinrich Heine (1832/34), Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung [Textfragment]; quoted after: Werke, Digitale Bibliothek 7, Berlin 2004 (CD-Rom) [translated by Frederic Ewen, Heinrich Heine The Romantic School and other essays, eds. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub 1985, p. 260 – translator’s remark].

This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

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The Military Cemetery as a Form of the Cult of the Fallen Soldier: The History of the Idea and Its Destruction on the Example of Austro-Hungarian Cemeteries in “Russian Poland”

Fundamental changes occurred in the ways in which fallen soldiers were dealt with in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Europe and the USA. This evolution ran from their original apprehension as the “muck of history,” buried anywhere, in whatever fashion was available, to the cult of the fallen soldier, which reached its apogee in the era of the Great War. The culminating point was “the ideology of the military graveyard.” Since World War One, we have witnessed the gradual disintegration of this idea. The development of nationalism led to a decline in the equable treatment of war casualties, regardless of their nationality. The great cemetery-monuments (at Redipuglia and Tannenberg) are products of a different ideology. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe different processes took place, linked to the cult of a nation’s own soldiers, felled in the struggle for the freedom of their homelands. This process was particularly strong in Poland, and was tied to the cult of Marshal Piłsudski and the Legionnaires. As a result, the cemeteries from the Great War were physically destroyed, and where they survived, they became – to borrow a metaphor from Paweł Pencakowski – “the forgotten graves of no one’s heroes.” This process, which continues to this day, will be described using the example of Austro-Hungarian cemeteries on the former territory of the Kingdom of Poland.

In his work concerning death in Western civilization, Michel Vovelle poses a fundamental question: How does a nation state perceive its soldiers slain on the battlefield? Does it merely ensure them glory, or does it use them for other aims? (Vovelle 2008, 610).

In 1914–1918 the governments of the warring nations, terrified by the massive number of casualties, created the idea of the military cemeteries as the highest (though not exclusive) form of the cult of the fallen soldier. The key principles of this idea were: the right of every soldier to his own grave, and – insofar as this was possible – that it be marked with his first and last name, with equal treatment for the bodies of the opposing army, their burial in shared cemeteries, though generally in separate areas, and the recognition of the battlefield – the place of the soldier’s death – as the most worthy place to lay him to rest. The fallen soldier (der Gefallen) had become a hero (der Held). This went for the enemy as well. The Germans marked a boulder in the section containing fallen Russian soldiers in Piotrków Trybunalski (in the Lódź voivodeship, Poland) with the inscription: “In praise of a brave opponent” (Ehre dem tapferen Feinden). In all the surviving grave inscriptions in “Russian Poland” the opponent is always “brave.” This form of the cult of the fallen soldier had surely transpired for the first (and, unfortunately, the last) time in the modern history of Europe. What happened to it after the war’s conclusion, particularly in Eastern Europe, where nation states had replaced the great powers? I will use my own research to try to illustrate the processes that occurred, based on the examples of military cemeteries in part of what was once the Kingdom of Poland, that is, the region that Germans and Austro-Hungarians called rusische Polen.

The Austro-Hungarian “Russian Poland” – the MGG

After the summer campaign of 1915, the Russian armies were pushed back from the lands of the former Kingdom of Poland. This region was subdivided into two occupied zones: a larger one to the north, administrated by the Germans, and one half the size, administrated by the General Military Governorship in Poland (Militärgeneralgouvernement in Polen – MGG), with its headquarters first in Kielce, and, after 1 October 1915, in Lublin. The Austro-Hungarians also administrated the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa. This town was located in the German administrative zone, but because of its special religious importance for the Poles it was handed over to the Catholic Habsburg Monarchy. The governor appointed by the Emperor was directly answerable to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army (AOK).

In this area, measuring nearly 45,000 square kilometers and divided into twenty-four regional commands (Kreiskommandos), 729 cemeteries and mass graves have been located, in which 148,129 casualties were laid to rest before 1917 (AGAD, MGGL, cat. 1166, unpaginated). By October 1918 another 11,000 bodies had been located, making for a combined total of 159,633 casualties buried here. There were surely more of them; the remains of soldiers were found in the interwar period, and are still being found to this day. Thus, to the question: How many soldiers fell and were buried in this area?, our only honest reply is: We do not know. We might well mention another number established by the Austro-Hungarian administration – 491 Polish legionnaires were among the fallen. In August 1916 the Tenth Division of Military Graves was created by the MGG. It answered to the Ninth Division of Military Graves in the Ministry of War. Military Grave Divisions with various Kreiskommandos were also active in the area.

The Genesis of the Ideology of the Military Cemetery

To begin, we ought to cite R. Koselleck’s reflection which, though it may concern monuments, is equally applicable to other forms of the cult of the fallen soldier: the paradox of the cult of the fallen, politically speaking, is that its symbolism and function are identical, or can be interpreted in an analogous manner. Their messages, however, are always tied to the time and the place. The message can be ritually repeated, or the monument’s function can change; it can be destroyed or forgotten (Koselleck 1994,10).

It is generally accepted that the roots of this ideology reach back to the Enlightenment, and specifically, to the French Revolution and the First Empire. There is much truth to this, but as an overgeneralization, it is risky. The more or less insane concepts for commemorating the slain and those who served the revolution include Jacques Cambry’s project (1799) – a pyramid into which their ashes were to be poured – and Napoleon’s idea to engrave the names of fallen soldiers of the Great Army into a church, thus turning it into a great war monument. These were unrealistic, but they did stir the imagination. Jacques Cambry’s project made the simple soldier equal to the head of a revolution, while Napoleon’s equated him with generals and marshals and made him the object of a cult which had theretofore surrounded only leaders and rulers (Mosse 1990, 38). This period ultimately left behind the Pantheon, where the most deserving were buried, and the Arc de Triomphe, which contains the names of the marshals and generals. Nonetheless – excepting the section for the National Guard in Pere Lachaise – the problem of a dignified burial for fallen soldiers was not resolved. In this respect things remained as they were – ordinary soldiers were buried in any old place and manner, if they were buried at all.

The French managed to “infect” their opponents (in particular, the Prussians) with some of their ideas. In 1792 the Prussian King funded a monument in Frankfurt for the residents of Hesse, where the names of all fifty-five soldiers who fell in liberating the city were inscribed (Mosse 1990, 39). Gerhard von Scharnhorst’s reform of the Prussian army had the motto: “We will take victory when, like the Jacobins, we learn to speak to the spirit of the people” (Lynn 2008, 230).

In 1814 general conscription was introduced. In May 1813 King Frederick Wilhelm III had ordered all the districts, at their own expense, to hang a memorial plaque in every church with a list of those who “fell for their king and their fatherland.”

The time of the revolution and the Napoleonic Wars thus brought about the beginning of the cult of the fallen soldier. Nonetheless, a German doctor visiting the field of the Battle of Leipzig wrote of the naked bodies of the fallen, devoured by dogs and crows. Walter Scott recalled that – although the battle of Waterloo was mostly cleared – there were places of mass burial marked by an unbearable odor (Mosse 1990, 44). In 1814 the Prussians burned the bodies of four thousand casualties at Montfaucon (Thomas 1991, 175). This occurred once again in 1871 at Sedan, where the Belgians, bothered by the odor from the shallow graves, decided to exhume them, fill them with tar, and burn them (Aries 1989, 537).

The Austrian fortress of Alba Iulia (presently part of Romania, a town that has also been called Weißenburg and Gyulafehérvár) holds an 1853 monument to the soldiers of the squadron stationed there, who died between 1848–1849. The names of four officers are listed, with a characteristic note: “Mannschaft 44.” This term described soldiers who were not officers. It is hard to believe that the officers did not know the names of their subordinates. We can see that it simply did not occur to them to commemorate their soldiers.

It took another twenty years for this state of affairs to change. First in the United States, during and after the Civil War, in which – let us recall – more American soldiers died than in both world wars put together. From 1860 to 1880 changes also began to occur in Europe, albeit slowly. The massacre at Solferino in 1859 evoked terror, but ossuaries for the remains of the deceased were created only ten years later. Respect was shown for those killed in the Battle of Oświęcim during the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, who were buried alongside one another in graves marked with their names, but we ought to recall that the cemetery as it appears today was created only in 1877–1882. Of course, military cemeteries do appear, first near field hospitals (e.g. in Legnica), or, most often, in special enclosures in parish cemeteries (keeping to territories within present-day Poland, we might mention Nowa Ruda, Świebodzice, Kowary, and Chełmsk Śląski). Many of these provide the names of the fallen soldiers, and not necessarily those belonging to officers alone. It did happen that military enclosures were walled off from civilian ones, but this is more to glorify the dead, and not to stigmatize, as was previously the case (Mosse, 1990, p. 45).

What happened, then? Sometimes one encounters the view that this was a result of American experiences. This hypothesis is less than convincing, given the Eurocentric view of the world that reigned at the time. It seems we are dealing with a few coinciding events, which do bear some resemblance to those which transpired earlier in the USA:

1. The introduction of general or voluntary conscription. In 1868 it became mandatory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1872 in France, and in 1874 in Russia. The soldier ceased to be the sole property of the state, and returned to his community after service.
2. The democratization of the European states, the development of the ideas of rule of law and civil rights, elective rights, and of local governments meant that the soldier – even when subject to harsh military discipline – remained a citizen. Where a civic society did not emerge, as in Russia, nor did respect for the fallen soldier, to say nothing of the living soldier.
3. The growth of literacy in societies, the development of the press and communications. Just a few decades earlier the average villager learned of a war when enemy soldiers (or their own, which amounted to the same thing) were standing at the outskirts of town. In the late nineteenth century news of war reached the smallest of villages, as did, sometimes, information on the deceased – often family members or neighbors.

The governments of the time could not remain indifferent to these changes. The soldier had the right to his own name on his own grave (insofar as this was possible). This was first made law by the Americans during their war with Mexico (1846–48), and a similar inscription was found in the Treaty of Frankfurt that concluded the Franco-Prussian War – though the degree to which it was respected is another matter entirely (Koselleck 1994, 14).

In this way the basic cult of the fallen soldier was created, reaching its apogee during the World War I period.

The Military Cemetery: Ideology and Practice

“The most dignified place for the soldier’s grave is where he has died for his Fatherland. Thus it is only natural that we find military graves and cemeteries in battlefields. And we can be sure that the all-leveling force of death never so strikes the consciousness as when, after a mortal conflict, friends and enemies are buried alongside one another,” wrote a German ideologist of the new military cemeteries (Bestelmeyer 1917, 22). This is the crux of World War I military cemetery ideology. And, we might add, it is the ideology’s Achilles heel. After the war ended, exhumations of the corpses of fallen French and English soldiers took place on a mass scale. The same concerns the cemeteries in “Russian Poland.”

Today, it is difficult to unambiguously state if, and to what degree, ideological or pragmatic concerns were decisive in creating this standpoint – the armies had more than enough logistical problems as it was without dealing with the exhumation and transport of the soldiers’ bodies as well. All the more so in that their number exceeded all expectations. The latter was certainly of greater import, though it would be wrong to disregard the ideological, or at least the psychological factor. The societies of the day were unprepared for such a long-term conflict – the European wars had theretofore concluded within the course of a few months. Nor did anyone predict that the turnof- the-century technological revolutions in the art of killing would yield such a massacre of soldiers. Nor was anyone able to predict how much of this nightmare a general conscript was capable of enduring. It is hard to dispute Paweł Pencakowski’s view when he writes that the nightmare of war required the creation of an ideological counterweight: “The notion and task of building monumental cemeteries were a logical response to the madness of destruction; their creation and construction responded to the chaos of the battlefield; the general mayhem engendered the harmony of art and nature; the wartime clamor, poetic strophes; hatred, mercy; and animosity, unity” (Pencakowski 2002, 150).

The architecture of the military cemeteries in the East differs from that of the West. This results from the different nature of the wars: in the West it was trench warfare, while in the East it was trench/maneuver warfare. This explains the larger numbers of scattered graves and small graveyards in the latter.

There are also differences between the architecture of the graveyards found in the lands once belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Galicia) and Germany (Eastern Prussia), and those found in the former lands of “Russian Poland.” This is particularly visible in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where an archipelago of 400 Galician cemeteries, each of which is in fact a work of art, clearly differs from the more humble sites in the lands of “Russian Poland.” The Galician sites (like the Prussian ones) were to serve as patriotic education in the future. In “Russian Poland,” where the political future was less than evident, they did not need to serve this role. This does not alter the fact that the basic ideological components were the same. The difference applied less to the content than the form, which was made uniform. Directives of the Tenth Division precisely outlined, for example, the shape and dimensions of the grave crosses, which were produced by favored companies.

Basic differences between the German and Austro-Hungarian cemetery concepts are also visible. Their ideological messages were derived from the divergent recent histories of either state. For Prussia, the latter half of the nineteenth century was a run of political and military successes, while the successes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the same period were disputable, to put it lightly. Prussia’s greatest accomplishment was the building of a powerful state, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire merely succeeded in surviving. This is why the German monuments and cemeteries more often refer to glory, victory, and triumph, while their Austro-Hungarian equivalents are more likely to speak of the fallen soldier’s sense of duty and loyalty to the Emperor and the fatherland. The soldier’s devotion became an autonomous virtue whatever the outcome of the war or battle (Reichl 2007, 119–121). This is somewhat analogous to the situation in the USA after the Civil War, where the monuments erected in the north and the south differed in a similar fashion (Siedenhans 1994, p. 377).

In terms of symbolism the Germans had the upper hand over the Austro- Hungarians owing to the Iron Cross – a clear and legible mark of strength, a soldier’s valor, and eternal glory. Where circumstances allowed, grave monuments took the form of the Iron Cross, which found no opposition even among families of Jewish soldiers (Łopata 2007, 23). This was a secular symbol, not a religious one.

In practical terms, the difference between the German and the Austro- Hungarian cemeteries in “Russian Poland” were reduced to the construction materials of choice. The Germans preferred stone, in the form of cemetery walls, and the Austro-Hungarians earth and wood, which was more a result of economic concerns than ideological ones. The main component of the cemetery space was a Kurgan grave, which was essentially a mass grave for unknown soldiers, which could be seen as a response to the post-war cult of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Brüderkreuz, developed by Austro-Hungarian designers was a powerful symbol – it was a cross of brotherhood, a composition of several crosses with interwoven arms placed on mass graves.

Over its two years of work the Tenth Division of the MGG and its local units partly managed to consolidate the scattered graves and smaller cemeteries. As a result, the number of graveyards was reduced from 729 to 687. In spite of the centrally imposed models, many interesting designs were created. Unfortunately, most of these were not executed, owing to a lack of time and, above all, funds.

The Polish State and the World War One Cemeteries, 1919–1939

The Polish state was reborn at an exceptionally unfavorable time for the survival of military cemeteries. Of the three powers fighting for its territory, two had ceased to exist, and the third – Germany – had too many domestic problems of its own to tend to the graves of its fallen soldiers on Polish lands for at least a few years. The wars, particularly those with Soviet Russia, required the total commitment of the people and public funds, and moreover, it was necessary to take care of the soldiers that were killed in them.

New circumstances emerged after the end of war operations. Above all – galloping inflation, which practically ruled out the sensible planning of activities that looked more than a few months ahead. It also turned out that the scale of the problem, both with regards to the number of tasks and the magnitude of the required financial investments, greatly exceeded the most pessimistic prognoses. This was in spite of the fact that Poland had resigned from the idea of buying back cemeteries on private lands (formally speaking, Poland was not the legal heir to the partitioning powers, and was not obliged to cover the war damages they incurred).

As in France and England, the problem of exhuming bodies from military cemeteries arose in Poland. The available documents make it difficult to estimate the scale of the problem. In the report of the inter-ministerial hearing of November 1920 chiefly devoted to this issue, there is talk of “masses of requests submitted from the families of fallen or deceased soldiers” (Central Military Archive, cat. I.300.63.228, unpaginated). Judging by the numerous and frequent legal regulations concerning exhumation (27.11.1919, 15.01.1920, 20.05.1920) the problem was a pressing one. Ultimately, a solution was adopted that resembled the Austro-Hungarian one: exhumation was permitted in the period from 1 November to 15 April, but only in single graves; the opening of mass graves was forbidden, permission from the sanitation department of the relevant General District Command was required, and there were, of course, a whole range of sanitary regulations.

Was it simple to gain this kind of permission? The available documents do not give us a clear answer. Nonetheless, this was a time of searching for a compromise between the principles established during the war and the realities of life. Poland participated in the Red Cross conference in Prague (March 1920) devoted to graves and war cemeteries, where the following compromise was adopted: in principle it was forbidden to exhume a corpse from a military cemetery, where the soldier lies amid his company in a place of honor; in particular cases, however, consent ought not only to be granted, but families ought to be given all possible assistance. It therefore seems that, as in the West, the ideology of wartime had to give way to the natural law of civilian life – the right to bury one’s loved ones in a family environment.

As far as the treatment of the First World War cemeteries is concerned, the interwar period can be divided into two sub-periods, characterized by a clearly differentiated handling of cemeteries as the loftiest form of the cult of the fallen soldier.

In the first, which ran until approximately 1928/1929, the state authorities tried to enact the principles for handling fallen soldiers developed during the Great War. It was impossible to carry them out in full, of course, as the new state had new heroes of its own, who had fallen in the border war with Ukraine and in the Bolshevik War. It is no accident that Warsaw’s Grave of the Unknown Soldier holds those who died defending Lviv, and the choice of coffin was made by the mother of three sons who fell in combat with the Ukrainians. In our part of Europe this is nothing exceptional – in Latvia, for example, the Brothers’ Cemetery in Riga became a national cult symbol, though it commemorated not the Great War, but the war for independence (Aboltis 1995, 183).

The second period began with the tenth anniversary of the end of the Great War, which Poland commemorated as the anniversary of regaining independence. This period brought an end to the idea of the military cemetery as it had been understood during the Great War. From then on, the cult of the fallen soldier focused on the monuments and cemeteries of the Legionnaires, who had won Poland’s freedom. Separate cemeteries were created for Legionnaires. The bodies of soldiers of other nationalities were brought to different cemeteries (Jastków, Czarkowy) or, in some cases, located in separate, unmarked mass graves, which over time became forgotten (Bydlin).

Immediately after independence was regained, the cemeteries and military graves were tended to by military units, which was justified by the war that was being fought. The initially somewhat chaotic system run by the Military Graves Departments, the Military Constructions Council, and the various decanates was consolidated in December 1919 by the establishment of the Offices for the Care of Military Graves (UOnGW), which answered to the General District Commands (DOG), which in turn answered to the Ministry of Military Affairs. Beginning in early 1923, the upkeep of cemeteries was assigned to civil administration, the Ministry of Public Works, which was subordinate to the local UOnGW.

The first task was to register cemeteries and military graves. Although the relevant orders were released in December 1919, no wider inventory was carried out until 1921.

The results were horrifying. People had stolen all, or a significant portion of the cemeteries’ accoutrements. The first to disappear were the wooden items – fences, gates, and crosses (where the Austrians had placed wooden ones). Of the several dozen visitation reports from the Miechów district, not a single one fails to mention a lesser or greater degree of devastation. We can assume that the robberies occurred in the winter of 1918/1919, which was exceptionally harsh.

Iron crosses had also vanished. In Wierzbnik, in the Kielce Voivodeship, police found a major stockpile of them in an estate. The policeman astutely observed that it would be hard to find any use for them in a village farm, and that they were surely stolen to sell as scrap metal.

The main damage caused by these thefts was that the name plates of those laid to rest in certain graves vanished along with the crosses. Most often these were impossible to relocate on the basis of archival materials. As a result, one of the key rights of the fallen soldier was annihilated on a mass scale – the right to a grave marked with his name. The scale of the problem is demonstrated by the fact that, among all those buried in sixty-five cemeteries and military grave areas in the four regions in the north of the Małopolska Voivodeship, only in a single case has a concrete grave been assigned to a concrete soldier (Pałosz 2012, 238).

There are also recorded examples of the dismantling of walls surrounding a cemetery. Here the explanation is simple – someone needed some wellworked stone for the foundation of his house. Father Tomasz Jachimowicz thus described his visit to the cemetery of German soldiers in Mieczysławów, in the Kozienice district: “The horror I found [...] all the monuments and gravestones destroyed, the crosses broken, and even stolen, apparently for use on farms. There was a chapel on the site that was dismantled for the foundations of huts. The iron gate no longer exists. Although the Germans are our enemies, it doesn’t matter, what is of concern in the present case is the embarrassment to our state and degradation of our national culture” (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 15221 index 68).

It was not only the military cemeteries and individual scattered graves that were at risk, but also the sections and mounds for buried soldiers in the parish cemeteries. It is hard to estimate the scale of this phenomenon in the interwar period. Complaints to authorities were made only sporadically, and generally concerned individual graves. The liquidation of larger sites was generally revealed by accident. One example is Stopnica, in the Kielce Voivodeship, where, in liquidating the Orthodox area (which was unfortunately the rule), the priest also liquidated the Legionnaire section, of whose existence he was allegedly ignorant. It seems that it was more often the case that cemetery areas were pilfered gradually. They were also devastated, though to a lesser degree than military cemeteries proper.

The state authorities fairly quickly realized the extent of the problem. At the various meetings of the heads of the General Districts (7 July and 29 November 1920) the “mournful state” of the military cemeteries was raised. Responding to the Ministry of War on the subject of military graveyards, Sub-colonel Bronisław Pieracki emphasized “society’s lack of respect and devotion to graves and their lack of cooperation in conserving cemeteries and military graves,” but also the lack of activity on the part of the UOnGW. It was proposed that councils become more active and the community become more active, particularly through the Polish Association of the Mourning Cross, created in 1920, an organization based on the Austrian Black Cross (ŐSK), whose aim was to “provide care for the graves of fallen soldiers, both Polish, and those belonging to the armies of the partitioning states.” Ranks of workers were to be organized from prisoners of war and even Polish soldiers, and cemetery guards were to be employed, often recruited, from among war invalids (CAW, cat. I.300.63.228, unpaginated).

This failed to make much of a difference. The voivodes called for the devastation to end (in 1923 and 1927), threatening harsh penalties, but to little effect. The workers were disorganized, at least in the Lublin Province, because of the exchange of prisoners with Soviet Russia and the swift demobilization. The guards that were hired were laid off in 1921 and 1922, owing to lack of funds. Only those who agreed to work in exchange for the right to the grass clippings from the cemetery grounds were kept on.

Devastation and ordinary bureaucratic incompetence affected both the graves from the Great War and the Bolshevik ones. In undated instructions from the Voivodeship Office in Lublin, hailing no doubt from 1921 or 1922, it was noted that many scattered graves were lying about which had few crosses and “practically all of their identities are unknown” (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3190, index 96). On 15 November 1920 the MPs representing the Popular National Union tabled a motion in Parliament indicating that the graves of Polish soldiers were scattered across fields, plowed, and located in places that were utterly inappropriate (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 15181, index 27).

Judging by the lack of further appeals to the population and relevant decrees after 1927 we might hazard the opinion that, if plundering of military graveyards had not ceased altogether by the late 1920s, it was at least no longer a mass phenomenon.

The “Mourning Cross” turned out to be a misled notion. In the larger cities it had some degree of recognition, but in the counties and communes it scarcely existed. “Our society is so occupied with everyday life that it does not or cannot understand matters of such significance as caring for military graves,” wrote Lublin’s voivode in a letter to the Ministry of Public Works in April 1923 (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3190, index 170). More funding was brought in by public collections, generally organized by the mayors of the smallest rural administrative units on 1 November. The surviving letters from donors in 1922 in the Lublin area appear to suggest that these mayors simplified their work by imposing a kind of tax on estate dwellers, a sum of one hundred Polish marks per family. This was less than the price of one egg.

As previously mentioned, the first and basic task of the administration was to inventory and identify the cemetery sites. This was essential to begin adequate renovation work, but also to assess the situation on a nationwide scale. In February 1920 the Ministry of War wanted to present the government and Parliament with a breakdown of the costs needed to upkeep the cemeteries, in the hopes of acquiring necessary funds from the “occupying states.”

The official statistics were of fantastical proportions. In October 1922 the Ministry of Public Works estimated that, across Poland, 500,000 soldiers were buried in 6,000 cemeteries, 200,000 lay in scattered graves, and there was a need for around 300,000 crosses and grave markings (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3191, index 50). Meanwhile, in the early 1930s, and thus right after the partial consolidation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs declared that, in the territory of Poland as it stood, there were 1.3 million soldiers buried between 1914–1921 in 10,755 cemeteries (CAW, cat. I.300.63.228). The Ministry of Public Works thus underestimated the scale of the problem by about fifty per cent. In April 1923 the ministry caught an inconsistency in data concerning the graveyards of German soldiers: according to Lublin’s data there were eighty, and according to German data – 546.

The Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats were guilty of the same crime. As mentioned before, they counted 687 cemeteries in MGG territory. Meanwhile, the sum total of cemeteries in the early 1930s in the Lublin (425) and Kielce (653) voivodeships comes to 1,078. If we add the military areas in the parish graveyards to this sum (336), we arrive at a total of 1,414 (we should take into account that during the Bolshevik War new cemeteries were not established in the Lublin area; fallen soldiers were buried in military areas or in scattered graves). Even the border changes of the Lublin Voivodeship cannot account for such vast discrepancies.

As for the scattered graves, every number is only approximate. To this day, private grave hunters find a few new ones every year.

In spite of the war, the lack of documentation and the problems with grave robbery, the new Polish state did have a chance to cope with the problem of the vast quantities of cemeteries and military graves. The obstacles they faced were a public funding crisis and gigantic inflation. In September 1923 the Lublin voivodes applied for additional subsidies to close the third financial quarter, an amount of 60 million Polish marks. In October they were informed that the combined subsidy of 75 million marks earmarked for the third quarter had run out, and they applied for 150 million for the fourth quarter. The mad inflation annihilated any sensible plan of action. If a liter of milk cost 400–500 marks in September 1922, a year later it cost 3,000–5,000 Polish marks.

The situation stabilized after Władysław Grabski’s currency reforms (April 1924). This allowed for the gradual consolidation of military cemeteries. At any rate, such activities had been taking place – as far as funds and manpower allowed – since 1920. However, the Ministry of Public Works’ rescript of 13 January 1923 (APLublin, UWL, WKB cat. 3190, index 178) and a range of accompanying decisions created a legal basis for cautious consolidation, particularly the transfer of soldiers buried in smaller cemeteries and scattered graves to larger “collective” cemeteries. The bodies of identified fallen soldiers were to be buried in single graves, and the obligation to transfer the cross or the name plate together with the body was stressed, as was the duty to keep them in a decent state. Unknown bodies were to be buried in common graves. They maintained the principle that collective graves containing in excess of twenty bodies were not to be exhumed.

In sum: until more or less 1928–29 the Polish government tried – insofar as this was possible – to maintain the basic principles of the policies toward cemeteries that were developed in the Great War.

The Time of Nationalism: Our Fallen Soldiers and Theirs

The turn of the 1920s and 1930s sparked nationalist moods in Poland and all across Europe. This was quickly reflected in policies toward war cemeteries – fallen soldiers began to be divided into ours (superior) and theirs (inferior). Projects emerged to place “our” bodies in separate cemeteries, or sometimes to remove the “foreign elements” from “Polish” cemeteries.

This phenomenon was not unique to Poland. In December 1920, on the request of the Hungarian government, the Ministry of War asked the General District Commands if it was possible to clearly distinguish the graves of fallen Hungarian soldiers (APKielce, UWK I, 15196, 24). This request was reiterated in 1929, and further suggestions came a year later – that the cemeteries of fallen Hungarians be renovated first, that “Hungarian soldier” be written in Polish on their gravestones, and that Hungarian bodies should be, as far as possible, put in separate graves. Poland agreed to some of these requests, while stating that they would be possible only when the cemeteries were being reconstructed (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 15196, 166). Representatives of the Hungarian embassy occasionally visited the graveyards where their countrymen lay buried (in Lublin, for example, in 1928).

In Bielany, near Warsaw, an Italian cemetery was built in 1926; prisoners of war buried in Poland were exhumed here. Exhumation concluded in the territory of the latter-day MGG in 1929. In the fall of 1928 the Turks submitted a request for their deceased to be exhumed, establishing a cemetery near Lviv (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 15182, 53).

In Poland the changes in military cemetery policy were tied to Józef Piłsudski’s May coup d’etat (1926) and were a consequence of the burgeoning cult of the Marshal and the Legionnaires. The conviction formed (or was formed) that the Legion was the main reason why Poland had regained independence.

In late 1929 the Minister of Public Works, Jędrzej Moraczewski, suggested “creating, as far as possible, Polish military cemeteries which hold mainly Polish soldiers, transferring the grave mounds for foreign soldiers to other cemeteries, mixing the bodies of the soldiers of the occupying armies” (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3187, 122). The style of this document is significant. It indicates how far we had moved from the conception developed during the Great War.

The way in which the bodies were treated also changed. When, in 1932, the remains of Polish soldiers were exhumed in Okraja (Lublin Voivodeship), this was a ceremonial occasion. The bodies were laid in decorative coffins, and a special mass was held in a nearby church. The remains of the “soldiers of the occupying countries” were carried in paper sacks. In June 1929 the Lublin Voivodeship Council considered the complaints of three local mayors against a Voivodeship Council delegate leading the exhumation of scattered graves. They complained that the “remains of soldiers’ bodies were transported in a small paper bags” and that he had recommended they be buried, at the cost of the local governments, in the nearby cemeteries. One mayor claimed that the delegate had been drunk (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3191, 39–40).

In the early 1930s Legionnaire cemeteries began to be established, as in Jastków (1931, Lublin Voivodeship) and Czarkowy (1937, Kielce Voivodeship). A problem arose, however: What was to be done with the bodies of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian soldiers buried there?

During a visit to Jastków in 1929, a representative of the Legionnaires’ union suggested that the cemetery be completely rebuilt to hold exclusively Legionnaires. The twenty-three Russian soldiers and 108 Austro-Hungarian soldiers buried there in a mass grave (according to other data – 255 Russians and 117 Austro-Hungarians) were to be transferred to another cemetery (APLublin, UWL, WKB, cat. 3191, 10). This was, in fact, accomplished – in 1930 they were exhumed and transferred to nearby Garbów (Dąbrowski 2004, 105). It is a small irony of history that, two years earlier, on the tenth anniversary of the regaining of independence, in this very cemetery, the local people raised a chapel with the inscription: “To the knights who fell fighting for the freedom of the Homeland, on the tenth anniversary of independence, 1928.” Not a single Polish soldier is buried in this cemetery. This also anticipates a tendency that was to become almost universal after 1989.

Apparently, the same occurred in Czarkowy, though on a greater scale. A chance discovery of a Legionnaire grave by the road to the cemetery led to a monument to the “victory of the Legionnaires” being erected here in 1928 (Oettingen 1988, 107). This was followed by a decision to reshape the existing cemetery into a Legionnaire one. In total the ashes of over a dozen Legionnaires were placed here (Oettingen 1988, 106). To this end, the remains of 473 Austro-Hungarian and Russian soldiers were removed in 1937 and taken to a nearby cemetery in Opatowiec. This did not, however, cause the latter cemetery to be expanded. “The remains of the bodies will be buried in the area confined by the embankment surrounding the cemetery,” we read in the Voivodeship Council’s letter to the Regional Government Office in Pińczów (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 17483, 254–257). Because the cemetery in Opatowiec is relatively small (around twenty-eight by thirty-one meters), it is difficult to imagine a dignified burial for almost five hundred bodies.

We find an explanation of this phenomenon in correspondence concerning another exhumation. It was fairly common practice to carry bodies to the military enclosures of parish cemeteries. This did not require the consent of the priest, as the remains were buried between preexisting graves, thus not increasing the surface area of the section (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 17484, 189–90; cat. 17483, 221, 268).

Specialists from the Jurajski Forum, researching the cemetery in Kotowice, in the Myszków district, have come across human remains barely 30–40 cm below ground. There is evidence to suggest that the cemetery in Kluczy in the Olkusz district was only partly exhumed, and that bodies were certainly left in mass graves (research is still underway). The reason for this was the constantly reiterated appeals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (after the liquidation of the Ministry of Public Works in 1932, responsibility for military graves passed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs) to exercise maximum frugality in consolidating cemeteries.

Was even a symbolic religious ceremony organized in relocating bodies? It would seem not – though exceptions did occur. In 1937 the Voivodeship Council in Kielce applied to the head of the Tenth Corps Region for consent to transfer parts of a military cemetery to a new location. For financial reasons, there was a request to be free of the obligation to bless the new grave, arguing that during the time when the military cemeteries and enclosures were established they were, in the main, not blessed (which was not actually true). The council appealed to the Ministry of Public Works resolution of 5 January 1931, whereby soldiers’ bodies were to be transported “with all caution, gravity, and respect, but incurring no costs beyond reasonable necessity.” In response, the Catholic dean of the Tenth Corps District reminded the council that “in times of peace all transport of bodies should be accompanied by a brief service, out of concern for the piety and reputation of the local population,” and that, moreover, in this case, it would cost nothing, as the blessing was performed free of charge by the priest of the garrison in Sandomierz. His objection was supported by the head of the district (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 17483, 357–362). Judging by the other archival documents, however, this was more an exception than the rule.

Consolidation

The act of 28 March 1933 pertaining to military graves and cemeteries (Dziennik Ustaw No. 39/1933, art. 34) regulated the issue of military cemeteries in a complex fashion (it holds to this day, in an amended version). Cemeteries were, from then on, to be located on state lands (apart from religious cemeteries). If they were located on private lands, the state powers were given a choice: exhumation, purchase, or – inasmuch as this was possible – appropriation of the land where the cemetery lay. The state was responsible for the affairs tied to military cemeteries, while the communes took care of the local management. The regulations concerning exhumation were liberalized at the family’s behest – the decision was made by the voivode.

This act placed a great financial burden on the Polish state, and thus it was clear that the number of cemeteries had to be reduced to a reasonable figure. The general tendency was consolidation. Documents from the early 1930s show that the scope of the liquidation was enormous. In the Kielce district 290 cemeteries were to remain out of 653, and in the Lublin area, 180 out of 425. There were no plans to reduce the numbers of military enclosures in civilian cemeteries. However, the number of graves, both single and collective, was to be reduced.

Consolidation plans were modified as time went on. To judge by surviving correspondence between the Ministry of Internal Affairs, voivodeship councils, and local mayors, the basic criterion for keeping or liquidating a cemetery was the answer to a question: What comes out more affordable – exhumation or buying the land? (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 17483, 35–37, 173, 175, cat. 17484, 187, 205–208). Thus, unfortunately, it happened that cemeteries that had recently been renovated were liquidated in spite of being architecturally interesting, their only drawback being that they were located on private land.

The main objection toward consolidation – apart from the negligence in its enactment – is the fact that it brought no “added value” to the state of the surviving cemeteries. The reason for this was obvious: frugality. This is clearly expressed in a Ministry of Internal Affairs letter dated April 1939 to the Kozienice district authorities: in the remaining cemeteries only “provisional repairs” were to be conducted (APKielce, UWK I, cat. 17484, 187).

An act of 1933 broke with the World-War-I idea of the military cemetery once and for all. This ideology, however, had long since died. The cemeteries – to paraphrase the title of Paweł Pencakowski’s work – became “the forgotten graves of no one’s heroes” (Pencakowski, 1996, 3).

World War II and the Post-war Period: A Time of Destruction

The Germans restored a few cemeteries, including six in the Lublin district (Dąbrowski, 2004, 51). In destroying the majority of Jewish cemeteries, they liquidated many neighboring military grave enclosures at the same time (the rest were, unfortunately, destroyed immediately after the war).

The problem of secondary burials also cropped up – fallen Polish, German, and Soviet soldiers were buried in the First-World-War cemeteries and military enclosures. When Soviet (and later German) soldiers were exhumed in separate cemeteries, the remains of those killed in the First World War were also often collected.

World War II trauma caused the World War I cemeteries to vanish from the community’s memory. “Whereas military cemeteries were liquidated in the interwar period through the consolidation of graves [...] after 1945 these cemeteries disappeared through a lack of interest and upkeep” (Oettingen, 1988, 62).

The history of this “disappearance” of military cemeteries and enclosures is fairly well documented in the literature (Dąbrowski, 2004, 52–53, 123–124, Lis, 2001, 71, Oettingen, 1988, 62, 101, 173, 186, Ormanowie, 2008, 136–137, 152, 160, 183, Pałosz, 2012, 225–231), and thus we need not delve into the problem here. Firstly, those cemeteries on private lands that had not been exhumed or purchased in the interwar period disappeared. Many of these were plowed up, in some cases (Wierzchowisko near Wolbrom, Stogniowice near Proszowice, Kraśnik in the Lublin Voivodeship) they were joined to private properties, and one example is known of the construction of a residential home on a cemetery (Skrzeszowice IV near Krakow).

This does not mean that such a fate was shared by the majority of military cemeteries or enclosures during the time of World War I. Where there were no cemeteries of those killed in World War II they served the role of “tombs of the unknown soldier.” As the oppositional mood increased in the 1980s, some came to serve as local ara patriae – altars of the Homeland. Symbolic crosses appeared, honoring the memory of Polish officers murdered at Katyń (as in Biórków Wielki or Olkusz) or – in more contemporary times – sites for the cult of President Lech Kaczyński and other victims of the Smoleńsk catastrophe (Włodowice, the Zawiercie environs). This was not the first example of the “appropriation of fallen soldiers.” In 1953, during the preparations to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the January Uprising, some First World War graves of unknown origin (at the time) were renamed graves of the Insurgents of 1863 (e.g. Złotniki I and II near Krakow). However, as the Polish proverb says, every evil brings some good results – and surely it is for this reason that they have survived to this day.

The Appropriation of Fallen Soldiers

The year of 1989 saw crucial changes to how First World War cemeteries were treated. The role of the Austrian Black Cross (ŐSK) can not be overestimated here, as it first financed, and then inspired the renovation of the World War One cemeteries. This period also saw increased interest among local populations in the history of their “little homelands.” Happily, there are still people whose parents or grandparents told them stories about the First World War and the graves found on their land. It does, however, often happen that these “discoveries” are tainted by stereotypes shaped by the decades in between, above all the fairly widespread conviction that in 1918 Marshal Piłsudski’s Legionnaires fought for Polish freedom. Thus it frequently occurs that, in cemeteries or grave enclosures where not a single Legionnaire is buried, there are inscriptions claiming or suggesting that they contain the bodies of Polish soldiers who fell in the struggle for independence in the years 1914–1918. An extreme example is the military grave enclosure in Igołomia, just over a dozen kilometers east of Krakow, which holds the remains of 127 Austro-Hungarians (judging by the course of the battle in this region, they must be primarily Tyrolians) and twenty Russian casualties. The towering monument is dedicated to “the nameless Polish soldier” who fell in the fight for independence. The image of this “Polish soldier” on the facade of the monument is a curiosity of sorts: he wears a helmet resembling those worn today in China, a Russian overcoat, and holds something recalling a Kalashnikov in his hand.

Such cases, unfortunately, are abundant. Probably the largest cemetery appropriated for the Legionnaires is Opatów I, where 929 fallen soldiers are laid to rest, including one Legionnaire (who was certainly exhumed, at any rate). There are scarcely fewer (855) at the cemetery in Ogonów near Wolbrom, which is devoted to Legionnaires (in reality one lies there). Marek Lis has found at least seven cases of mislabeled cemeteries in the Sandomierz area (Lis 2001, 61), and Marian Dąbrowski has found the same number in the Lublin area. An initial attempt to sum up the number of bodies declared to be legionnaires finds that it exceeds their combined total in 1914. We have two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there is the development of associations and informal groups (e.g. the Jurajski Association and the Austro-Hungary Internet forum) with the relevant knowledge. On the other, we are dealing with the spontaneous acts of people who remain under the influence of Legionnaire ideology or who lack knowledge and competence (which cannot, after all, be expected of them).

Excessive generalizations, however, are risky. My research into the First World War cemeteries in the northern districts of the Małopolska Voivodeship indicates that, of the twenty-one marked cemeteries (not counting those which have been plowed over or otherwise destroyed), eleven are correctly marked, five are wrongly or ambiguously marked, and five are not marked at all. In terms of the military sections of cemeteries, twelve are correctly marked, one is unmarked, and thirteen are marked wrongly or ambiguously (Pałosz, 2012, 245–246). Here, too, the destroyed sections have been omitted.

Unfortunately, the members of The Jurajski Association continue to wage a battle, both fierce and hopeless, against scrap collectors; in Wronin in the Małopolska Voivodeship only one cross remains of the several dozen donated by the priest in the neighboring Biórków (which ought still to be regarded as progress, as for several decades after World War II there was only a local garbage dump on the site). It would seem that the lack of respect for military cemeteries found outside of parish or communal graveyards will be remarkably difficult to mend. This does not alter the fact that military enclosures are sometimes liquidated in parish cemeteries. In 2011 in Aleksandrowice (a district of Bielsko-Biała, Silesian Voivodeship), for example, there were visible traces of new burials in the grounds of a former military enclosure – between freshly-dug civilian graves one could find abandoned metal crosses, which generally signify soldiers’ graves.

The liquidation of small local schools and the decline in importance of the scouts means that cemeteries and mass graves once maintained by school children are gradually disappearing (in the Krakow region, this has meant the disappearance of the cemetery in Marszowice and the mass grave, Skrzeszowice III).

The most difficult issue, however, will be dismantling the mythology of the Legion and departing from the “us and the occupants” formula; showing the fallen soldier in this most senseless of wars in the history of Europe as an ordinary person whom politicians tore from his natural environment, gave a uniform and a weapon, and ordered to kill others like him, but in different uniforms. Only to fall dead in a country that was foreign and hostile.

Will such a transformation in the perception of the cemeteries that remain after World War I ever be possible? Not in the foreseeable future. The legend of the Legions is inscribed in Polish historical mythology, where historical truth has no role to play.

Jerzy Pałosz. A lawyer and a historian, a journalist for many years, presently an employee at the Faculty of Humanities, Cultural Studies Department of AGH University of Science and Technology (Krakow). He has written a range of publications on the subject of military cemeteries from the Great War and the history of the cult of the fallen soldier. In 2012 he published the book Śmiercią złączeni. O cmentarzach z I wojny światowej na terenach Królestwa Polskiego administrowanych przez Austro-Węgry [Death of the United: On World War One Cemeteries in the Kingdom of Poland administrated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire] (pub. Libron, Krakow 2012). He has spent years heading the inventory of the remains of cemeteries from the Great War in the former lands of the Kingdom of Poland. He has received the Black Cross for Service to Austria.

List of References

Archival Sources

Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. Militärgeneralgouvernement in Polen (MGGL). Dossier of the Tenth Division of Military Graves, cat. 1166 (unpaginated), quoted in: AGAD, MGG, State Archive in Kielce.

Kielce Voivodeship Council (UWK I), cat. 15181, index 27, 15182, index 53; 15221, index 68; 15196, indexes 24, 166; 17483, indexes 35–37, 173, 175, 221, 254–257, 268, 357–362; 17484 indexes 187, 189–190, 205–208, quoted in APKielce, UWK I. State Archive in Lublin.

Voivodeship Council in Lublin, Transport-Construction Department (UWL, WKB), cat. 3187, index 122; 3190, indexes 96, 170, 178; 3191, indexes 10, 39–40, 50; quoted in: APLublin, UWL,WKB.

Central Military Archive in Warsaw (CAW), Cat. I.300.63.228 (unpaginated), quoted in: CAW.

Secondary Sources:

Aboltis, Arnis (1995) “Narodowy Cmentarz Wojownika oraz inne cmentarze na Łotwie (report),” in Olgierd Czerner, Iwona Juszkiewicz (eds) Sztuka cmentarna – Art de cimentiere (Wrocław: Werk) p. 183.

Aries, Philippe (1989) Człowiek i śmierć (Warsaw: PIW), trans. by Eligia Bąkowska [orig. tit. L’Homme Devant la Mort (Editions de Seuil, 1977)] p. 537.

Bestelmayer, B. (1917) “Der Friedhof,” in Kriegergräber in Felde und daheim. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 1916/17 (München: F. Bruckmann AG), p. 22.

Dąbrowski, Marian (2004) Cmentarze wojenne z lat I wojny światowej w dawnym województwie Lubelskim (Lublin: Catholic University of Lublin Academic Society), pp. 51–53, 105, 123–124.

Koselleck, Reinhart (1994) “Einleitung” in Reinhard Koselleck, Michael Jeismann (Hrsg) Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag), pp. 10–17.

Lewandowski, Jan (1980) Królestwo Polskie pod okupacją austriacką 1914–1918 (Warszawa: PWN), p. 40.

Lis, Marek (2001) By nie zatarł ich czas... Śladami mogił i cmentarzy wojennych I wojny światowej w powiatach: sandomierskim, opatowskim i staszowskim (Sandomierz: PAiR), pp. 61, 71.

Lynn, John A. (2008) “Narody pod bronią 1763–1815” in Geoffrey Parker (ed.) Historia sztuki Wojennej (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza), trans. by Andrzej Czarnocki, [orig. tit. The Cambridge History of Warfare, (Cambridge University Press, 2005)] p. 230.

Łopata, Mirosław (2007) “Groby żydowskie żołnierzy Wielkiej Wojny w Galicji” in Mirosław Łopata (eds) Materiały z konferencji “Znaki Pamięci. Gorlice 27.10.2007” (Gorlice: Crux Galiciae), p.23.

Mosse, George (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 39, 44, 45.

Oettingen, Urszula (1988) Cmentarze I wojny światowej w województwie kieleckim (Warsaw: PWN), pp. 66, 101, 106, 175, 186.

Ormanowie, Krzysztof, Piotr (2008) Wielka Wojna na Jurze (Krakow: Libron), pp. 136–137, 152, 169, 180.

Pałosz, Jerzy (2012) Śmiercią złączeni. O cmentarzach z I wojny światowej na terenach Królestwa Polskiego administrowanych przez Austro-Węgry (Krakow: Libron) pp. 225–246.

Pencakowski, Paweł (1996) “Zapomniane pomniki niczyich bohaterów” in Wobec Thanatosa. Galicyjskie cmentarze wojenne z lat 1914 – 1918 (Krakow: MCK), p. 3.

Pencakowski, Paweł (2002) “Cmentarze I wojny światowej – geneza ideowa rzeczywistości historycznej i artystycznej” in Karolina Grodziska, Jacek Purchla (eds) Śmierć, przestrzeń, czas, tożsamość w Europie Środkowej około roku 1900 (Krakow: MCK), p. 150.

Reichl, Thomas (2007) “Das Kriegergräberwesen Ősterreich-Ungarn im Weltkrieg und die Obsorge in der Republik Ősterreich”, Universität Wien: Dissertations, pp. 119–121, available online at: http//othes.univie.ac.at/237/1/10–25–2007_8908935.35pdf, accessed 20.04.2011.

Siedenhans, Michael (1994) “Bürgerkriegsdenkmäler in der USA. Symbole einer gespalten Nation” in Reinhart Koselleck, Michael Jeismann (Hrsg) Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (München:Wilhelm Fink Verlag), p. 377.

Thomas, Louis V. (1991) Trup: od biologii do antropologii (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie), trans. by Krzysztof Kocjan, [orig. tit. Le cadavre: de la biologie a l’anthropologie], p. 175.

Vovelle, Michel (2008) Śmierć w cywilizacji Zachodu. Od roku 1300 po współczesność (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria) trans. by Tomasz Swoboda et al. [orig. tit. La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 a nos jours, (Paris: Gallimard)], p. 610.

This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

ABSTRACT

Swedish media reports of successive anniversaries of the end of the First World War usually provide general commentaries concerning the military struggles on the continent. The war is seen as having had a minor effect on the fate of Sweden itself. Several years ago, a historian from Lund University named Kim Salomon even hazarded the thesis that “World War I scarcely marks a significant moment in the history of Sweden,” given that the country remained neutral, and thus remained in the ‘viewers’ stand’.” The lack of a more wide-ranging discussion on the legacy of World War I in Sweden is somewhat alarming, particularly considering the fact that there is a wealth of Swedish historiography relating to the period of 1914–1918. Although Sweden remained neutral, the war was felt to a considerable degree. Shortages of supplies, numerous demonstrations, riots – all this laid the foundation for increased political activity in a society that wanted to democratize the system, improve civil rights, and socialize the economy. 1917 seemed to be the year when the radicalization reached its peak, but major changes arrived only with the end of the war in November 1918. There were the revolutionary events in Russia, which were later exploited in Germany in the ongoing political struggle to introduce democracy. The new order imposed in Europe by the Treaty of Versailles forced the Swedish government to come to terms with the situation that was produced and to engage with affairs on the continent to a greater degree.

The various anniversaries of the end of World War I are chiefly reported in the Swedish media with a general commentary on military struggles in the history of Europe. It could be that concentrating on these aspects of the war have caused it to be seen as an event that had little impact on Sweden as such. Several years ago a historian from Lund University, Kim Salomon, even ventured the opinion that “World War I scarcely marks a significant moment in the history of Sweden,” given that the country remained neutral, and thus remained in the “viewers’ stand” (Salomon 2008). Journalist and writer Niklas Ekdal, perhaps convinced that Swedes were poorly versed in the history of Europe, suggested that the issues of international policy of a century past could be viewed from a contemporary perspective. To help understand the genesis of the Great War, he compared the rivalry of the European powers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the threats facing us in the early twenty-first century. To his mind, the present economic crisis would lead to economic nationalism and the closure of borders, and thus to serious political clashes and conflicts between states. According to Ekdal’s concept, the contemporary world with its several growing powers (apart from the United States, he lists China first) recalls the camps competing for political influence and raw materials in the late nineteenth century (Lagerfors 2008). Once again, Sweden was peripheral to the author’s deliberations.

Alongside these recollections of the Great War as a conflict that had no bearing on Sweden we also find a publication by the popular historian Peter Englund (known for his numerous books concentrating primarily on the history of Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). His indepth work based on personal documents (journals, diaries, letters) entitled Stridens skönhet och sorg. Första världskriget i 212 korta kapitel [The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War] recreated the wartime reality from the point of view of ordinary soldiers from various countries and divisions, as well as a surgeon, a nurse, a bureaucrat, a German student, and an aristocrat. The author wove his own reflections on war into the narrative, which is punctuated more generously by the futility of armed conflicts than the “beauty and the sorrow” contained in the title. He attacks the blind nationalism in these conflicts and the obduracy of the politicians, who used propaganda to justify what could have been avoided. Englund states: “While there are undoubtedly conflicting interests involved, none of the problems is so insoluble as to make war necessary, and they are certainly not sufficiently acute as to make war unavoidable. This war became unavoidable at the point when people considered it unavoidable. When causes are vague and goals uncertain, however, it becomes necessary to fall back on the bloated and honeyed words of propaganda” (p. 14). He later adds that: “faced with the dark energies released by war they can only look on, dumbfounded and questioning; they stand apart from the nationalist rhetoric that has created the war and the wild hopes the war has created” (p. 29). Reviewers wrote that it was “a fascinating read about the real lives of real people at a moment when faith in the ongoing progress of civilization began to collapse” (Kälvemark 2008). The universal antiwar oratory is replicated by Lotta Lotass’ novel Red Sky (Den röda himlen, Albert Bonniers, 2008), which describes the daily lives of foot soldiers in the trenches (Bergqvist 2008).

Perhaps the only classic of academic work in recent years that broaches the subject of World War I (not counting the standard monographs on military history) is a book by Lina Sturfelt, a historian from Lund University, whose work entitled The Flash of a Flame: World War I in the Swedish Imagination (Eldens återsken. Första världskriget i svensk föreställningsvärld, Sekel Bokförlag/Isell Jinert, 2008) analyzed the image of World War I in the pages of Swedish weeklies published in 1914–1935. The articles from this epoch described the war as senseless carnage, but also as a kind of courtly saga, a holy sacrifice, a jolly picnic, or a necessary and elemental cataclysm. These images were paired with the opposing, almost unvarying depiction of Sweden’s role as a country that was perhaps somewhat indifferent, profithungry, cowardly, and effeminate, but above all, an isolated idyll and moral stronghold defending civilization from the chaos and barbarity of Europe (Första världskrigets återsken, 2008). This work was continued in the research by Sofi Qvanström on the presence of the I World War in the Swedish literature (Qvarnström 2009).

The lack of a wider discussion on the legacy of World War I from a Swedish perspective is somewhat alarming, particularly considering the fact that there is a wealth of Swedish historiography relating to 1914–1918 which proves that the period marked a watershed moment for the country (Zetterberg 1994). There is also no doubt that the events in Europe influenced development of the situation in Sweden (Andræ 1998).

As we know, during the First World War, Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries remained neutral. They took no part in the fighting, nor were they attacked by aggressors. Swedes became acquainted with the cruelties of the war only through correspondents from the battlefield and prisoners of war (mostly invalids or those seriously injured), whose exchange between the warring parties was organized by the Swedish authorities. Few Swedes volunteered to join the ranks of the various armies (Gyllenhaal & Westberg 2004). After one hundred years of peace, Swedes viewed war as unnatural. A philosopher from Lund, Hans Larsson, regarded militarism as a manifestation of man’s bestiality and barbarity. He rued the support for the war that came from Germany’s intellectual elite – to his mind it was a politically and culturally irrational phenomenon that disrupted the social order and testified to a crisis of the human personality. Larsson promoted the principle of compromise and negotiating positions at all costs, becoming a precursor of the Swedish policy of non-engagement and practicing activities of a humanitarian nature during times of armed conflict (Piotrowska 2006).

Although Sweden was not officially on either side, it did have to respond to changing conditions and the actions of the European powers. Swedish society, on the other hand, had its deeply rooted sympathies, which most certainly lay with the Central Powers, as a result of strong economic, cultural, and political ties with the Germans. Tage Erlander, who was the long-time premier of Sweden after World War II, was a secondary school student and then attended Lund University during World War I. He recalled that his father – the owner of a shop that sold blueberries – had traded with Germans during the war, and was fascinated by them. He saw them as the most efficient nation in the world, known for being industrious and frugal. He also admired the sense of community he saw as quite characteristically German (Erlander 1972, 47–48). On seeking the origins of this fascination, we might add that there was an equally deep-rooted aversion toward Russia. Any enemy of Russia was a friend. The Swedes were fascinated by the German military successes on the Eastern front in 1914. In general, the majority of Swedes, regardless of their origins and status, nursed a contempt for the states of the Triple Entente and an admiration for Germany. Recalling her childhood, family home and the attitudes of the Swedish peasants, the famous children’s writer Astrid Lindgren wrote succinctly: “Most supported the Germans and believed they would win” (Lindgren 1992, 57).

The social mood was in tune with government policy. Up until 1917 the government of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld favored the Germans: it used diplomatic methods to keep Great Britain, Italy, and Romania from joining the war, it did not recognize the Entente states’ naval blockade of Germany, and it supplied Germany with grain, animal fodder, and petroleum (Carlgren 1962). In fact, the Swedes reaped large profits by trading with both sides. They imported goods from Great Britain and France and then exported them to Germany at a high profit (Kersten 1973, 333–334; Norborg, 1993, 258–259). However, the blockade applied by Great Britain and the resultant supplies crisis of 1917 complicated the domestic situation and led to Hammarskjöld’s dismissal. Swedish policy changed, increasingly favoring the Entente, particularly after Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare, and after the “Luxburg Affair,” wherein it was revealed that a German MP had used the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs to pass on information concerning shipping maneuvers on the Atlantic. Hammarskjöld’s successor, the moderately conservative Karl Swartz, was incapable of dealing with the growing crisis. Hunger riots broke out, during which shops were plundered; there were clashes with the police. The February Revolution in Russia further radicalized the social mood. In 1917, when the socialists planned the First of May March, they hung posters that read “May 3rd in Blood.” Many passers-by decided it was better to stay at home on the third of May, fearing a revolution could break out, as had occurred in Russia. The message, however, was more of a general reflection on the events in Europe – and the fact that the May First demonstration was being held once again with the world war raging in the background (Erlander 1972, 50).

Shortages of supplies (there was insufficient milk, butter, and potatoes; coal shipments from Germany were cut back), numerous demonstrations, riots – all this made Swedish society take a new interest in politics. There was social pressure to democratize the system, to increase civil rights and to socialize the economy (Klockare 1981, 171–175). In early June 1917, 30,000 demonstrators were only kept from entering the seat of the Riksdag through the intervention of Social Democratic Party leader Hjalmar Branting, who pacified the incensed crowd. In October 1917 there were parliamentary elections in which the Conservatives were defeated. These resulted in the formation of a new government under history professor and liberal Nils Edén. The Social Democrats also entered the cabinet, having begun to grow into the country’s most important political force. The bulk of power now shifted from the headquarters of King Gustaf V to the parliament. The monarch now consulted with the government before making any political decisions and never went against the government, so thereafter very seldom had more than a symbolic function (Norborg 1993, 100). The triumph of the parliamentarycabinet system, however, was not the end of the internal political changes.

The new government strove to reach an agreement with the allies to receive much needed help for the economy. After long negotiations this was achieved in the spring of 1918, in part due to the strong contacts between Branting’s Social Democrats and their ideological partners in France, Belgium, and Great Britain. Supplies came in exchange for providing the allies with access to half of the Swedish merchant fleet. On balance, Sweden came out of the vicissitudes of wartime at an economic profit. One historian has even called the country a “neutral victor” (Koblik 1972). At any rate, the social mood had improved. Yet the postulate to democratize was everpresent in public debate and, as historian Ivar Andersson has claimed, this was not because of the successes of radical parties in the elections: “Views on the issue themselves had been radicalized.” This was sparked by trading scandals, which undermined those who treated money as a measure of man’s intellectual and moral values, and consequently, negated the effects of the property qualification in the parliamentary elections (Andersson 1967, 320–321). The decisive factor, however, was the general wave of European radicalism. This appeared to peak in 1917, but it was only with the end of the war in November 1918 that the “democratic breakthrough” occurred.

The revolution in Germany, the collapse of the imperial army and the downfall of Emperor Wilhelm II turned out to be of capital importance for Sweden’s future. These events caused conservative circles to worry a great deal about a local revolution. When the Germans requested a truce, the Bishop of Karlstad, Johan Alfred Eklund, declared that his political world was collapsing (Erlander 1972, 49). A capitulatory mood was tangible among right-wing politicians. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, sought to use these favorable circumstances to achieve their ends, starting with universal suffrage.

Ernst Wigforss, later the long-term Minister of Finance in the social-democratic governments of the inter-war period, recalled the last months of 1918 as “the most emotional period that his generation experienced.” He had in mind the legal changes to the constitution that compelled the privileged who held power to consent to introducing general elections. Wigforss stressed that this was not entirely of their free will, as it was done under the pressure of the revolutionary events in Europe, which echoed through Sweden itself (Wigforss 1951, 94). Nonetheless, Branting was committed to staying the legal course and bringing about change through the existing legal system. A social democratic expert in international policy named Östen Undén predicted on 11 November that the defeat of Germany would render the Swedish right wing “docile” (Wigforss 1951, 95). News from Russia only enhanced the danger of the situation and made the specter of Bolshevism loom large (Palmstierna 1953, 223). The leading extreme conservative Ernst Hederstierna spoke openly of his fear of a revolution, which could have provoked the right-wing’s obstinate refusal to change the constitution. Hugo Hamilton, one of the leading liberal parliamentarians, noted a meeting in the seat of the First Chamber with Hederstierna and another conservative, Otto Silfverschiöld, on 2 December 1918: “It is characteristic of the present situation that two such conservatives were utterly cognizant of the fact that any kind of compromise was impossible and that the right wing had no choice but to capitulate” (Hamilton 1956, 343). Social Democratic activist Torsten Nothin wrote in his memoirs of a “revolution of the fall of 1918,” stating that “although there was no open revolt, the mood was revolutionary,” adding that it was said at the time that “nobody prepares a revolution, it comes all on its own” (Nothin 1955, 14).

In effect, the political struggle ended in a compromise, though public opinion took the forecast constitution change as a loss for the right wing, who were succumbing to the fear of revolution (Klockare, 1981, 166). According to the above-cited Nothin, it was the resolutions of November 1918 that made the danger of a revolution subside. Apparently King Gustaf V was even prepared to flee abroad at a moment’s notice, were the situation to get out of hand. At any rate, he was shaken by the news from Germany, and he was frightened of the import of Bolshevism. It is known that he mediated conversations between the political parties in order to reach an agreement (Nothin 1955, 15–18; Klockare, 1981, 165; Franzén, 1985, 326). He was certainly concerned by the threat of a general strike (Franzén, 1985, 345). By the same token, there were Social Democrats who did not believe that things would come to a revolution. Gustav Möller, for example, confessed that the Social Democratic Party was merely using scare tactics when it threatened to stop at nothing, as the actions taken by Branting and his colleagues were aiming to reach a compromise (Leche-Löfgren 1941, 162). Historians agree, however, that a revolutionary mood reigned in Sweden in 1917, while by the fall of 1918 the threat of revolution did not truly exist (Franzén 1986, 362–366).

The reform of the new suffrage law drew on for three years. In May 1919 there were general elections for the lower chamber of parliament. In the upper house – the Landsting – an indirect election system was meant to be in effect. First, communal elections were held, then local government institutions were meant to send their representatives to parliament. Through this reform the Social Democratic Party became the most powerful, both in the lower chamber and in the upper Riksdag. The more radical social democrats pushed for a one-chamber parliament, a republic, and a workers’ council system, but the party leadership did not agree to any of these. The young social democrats – including Zeth Höglund and the later long-time premier of Sweden, Per Albin Hansson – even demanded a dictatorship of the proletariat (Cornell 1998, 116–117). Branting publicly declared that he wanted a democracy, not a dictatorship (Franzén, 1985, 325). The leading democrat, Erik Palmstierna, joyfully recorded the political events of the last weeks of 1918 in his journal: “The Swedish nation has a personality after all! Quiet and unceremonious, almost indifferent, but under great pressure it has accomplished a great thing and made a true achievement. Now no one speaks of constitutional reform, and yet this was a feat that will build a foundation for a new epoch in our inner lives. [...] We can feel a great, cultured sense of admiration in our nation when it so swiftly and calmly solves problems that lead to bloody conflicts in other nations!” (Palmstierna 1953, 267). The democratic breakthrough in Sweden did, in fact, take place without any serious socio-political shock waves.

Among the changes were social reforms, which included employer-paid accident insurance at work and the eight-hour work day. The first social democratic government was instituted in 1920, headed by Hjalmar Branting, who created the first Ministry of Social Aid, introduced a progressive income tax, increased the tax burden on large corporations, and decreased the period of military service. In 1926 the Social Democrats were voted out, only to regain power a few years later, and have dominated the Swedish political scene for decades. In 1921 women received the right to vote (we should recall that as late as 1918 a leader of the conservative party, Arvid Lindman, explained to the Riksdag that a woman’s place was in the home, and not in the state’s political life, and that this was to the advantage of both women and the country [Franzén 1986, 354]). The very same year saw the abolition of capital punishment (a prisoner was executed for the last time in 1910 with the swipe of an ax). In 1922 there was a prohibition referendum, but its supporters were overruled. Alcohol production and consumption remained legal, though some restrictions were introduced under the Dr. Ivan Bratt System, i.e. the rationing and control of alcohol consumption.

The results of the Great War and the changes in the political map of Europe left the Swedes with new economic and political challenges in the international arena. The end of the war brought Sweden a relief of sorts, as the German blockade of the country was lifted, and the allies ended the blockade of the Baltic. Historians point out that the economic problems in the blockade years encouraged Scandinavian countries to cooperate on a more regional basis (Piotrowski 2006, 121), but the key trading partners remained Germany and Great Britain. This is why Stockholm eagerly awaited a peace treaty. Only after its signing were trade restrictions with Germany to be annulled.

Above all, however, Sweden’s new strategic position after World War I is the major subject of study. Russia was practically pushed out of the Baltic Sea, while Germany was sufficiently weakened to abandon its vision of order for the region. In December 1918 the states of the Entente suggested that Sweden maintain stability in the Baltic region itself. The government in Stockholm was to stand at the forefront of a block of new, smaller states, notably Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and to prevent chaos in Northern Europe through integration. For Erik Palmstierna, such a special role for Sweden in the Baltic region initially seemed “unnatural” (Palmstierna 1953, 259). These first signals from the capitals of the victorious European powers indicated that Sweden was standing before dilemmas which demanded unprecedented decisions in foreign policy.

The restitution of the old countries of Central-Eastern Europe and the creation of new ones was observed with interest, but there seemed no reason to meddle in their affairs. The civil war in Finland, however, was the subject of keen attention. Many Swedish volunteers took the side of the “Whites” in this Finnish war for independence. The hope was that Finland would survive as an independent state, strengthening Sweden’s strategic position in the long run. Poland’s bid for independence was seen in a similar light. The creation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, on the other hand, were viewed with skepticism. Swedish politicians could be heard commenting that Russia would soon reclaim these territories (Larsson 1996, 42–44).

There was also resistance to the projects of the victorious states to carve up German territory and impose severe reparations on the Germans. Hjalmar Branting saw imperial Germany as a threat to European peace, but a democratic Germany, where power had been seized by the social democrats, was ideologically close to him. This is why he appealed to the allied powers not to obstruct “Germany’s first steps as a free nation” (Franzén 1985, 322). Small wonder, then, that he criticized the Treaty of Versailles. Stockholm was particularly critical of the final settlement of the German borders. The Swedes believed that giving Poland Pomerania and Silesia would only provoke conflict between the nations, aggravating any existing animosity between Poles and Germans. Poland’s excessive ambitions were seen as a festering evil. For the Swedes, this meant ending the war without a real peace settlement, as a new arena was created to continue old conflicts and start new ones. They were not only concerned about Germany, but also about the civil war in Ireland, the Italian/Croatian struggle for Fiume, and other border issues in Central Europe.

Ultimately Sweden recognized the new political order in Europe and entered the League of Nations (Gihl 1951, 393–404; Agrell 2000, 15–20). At the same time, it criticized the decision and actions of the League and the Western powers, which it saw as unwarranted or unjust. On the one hand, the ideas, associated with the League, of acting to avoid war and a general disarmament plan fitted the mandates of the social democrats. On the other, however, the League’s methods were often viewed with distrust. Swedes were most pained by the Council of the League of Nations’ 1921 resolution to award the Åland Islands to Finland. Their Swedish population wanted to join Sweden on the basis of national self-determination, but the Western states saw international policy concerns as more important. There was no desire to weaken this small neighbor of Russia, which was still in the process of bolstering its statehood (the shift in Swedish public opinion leading to the final acceptance of this decision was honored in the person of Branting, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922).

Moreover, membership of the League created further dilemmas, as it required active participation in organizational affairs, and participation in discussions on problems often more remote than those that Stockholm was used to. The question kept on arising: Does participation in the League of Nations mean abandoning neutrality, and even if it does not, what are the limits of neutrality in a system of collective security?

As such, the end of the Great War was an important historical moment for Sweden, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy. The battles between the European powers left their mark on this country. The revolutionary events in Russia, and then in Germany, were exploited in an ongoing political struggle to introduce democracy. The new post-Versailles order in Europe forced the Swedish government to come to terms with the new situation and join in with the Continent’s affairs to a larger degree. It is another matter that – as local observers confess – the years 1914–1918 have slowly vanished from the Swedish “cultural memory” and, if anything, it is World War Two that is most vividly remembered.

Paweł Jaworski. Researcher and instructor at the History Institute of the University of Wrocław. His research interests include the history of Poland and the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of Scandinavia and Polish-Scandinavian relations, the history of Central-Eastern Europe, and Czechoslovakia in particular, and the history of diplomacy and international relations. He has written Independent Poland and Scandinavia 1918–1939, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2001 and Dreamers and Opportunists: Polish-Swedish Relations from 1939–1945, Wydawnictwo IPN, Warsaw 2009.

List of References

Reviews:

Bergqvist, Erik Trovärdig version av krigets helvete, available online at: http://www.svd.se/kultur/litteratur/trovardig-version-av-krigets-helvete_2022959.svd (text of 11.11.2008; accessed 12.04.2013).
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Lagerfors, Johanna Likheterna börjar bli obehagligt manga available online at: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/likheterna-borjar-bli-obehagligt-manga. Text of 11.11.2008; accessed 12.04.2013.

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This article has been published in the second issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the European memory of the First World War.

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