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The year 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Eastern and Central European Revolution in general. Even on a short look backward, 1989 appears to have been the year that was nothing short of a miracle.

(1) What was the “Autumn of the Nations” in 1989 about and how should the events of that time be understood?

There is something beautifully ambivalent in the concept of the autumn – a Spengleresque motive of the waning merges here with the metaphor of fertility and harvest. Something straight out of the world of Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler and Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen by Johan Huizinga.

The year 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Eastern and Central European Revolution in general. Even on a short look backward, 1989 appears to have been the year that was nothing short of a miracle. The World War II with its sinister and seemingly insurmountable divisions within Europe was over nearly overnight leaving no trace of disbelief, despair and hopelessness that devastated Eastern and Central Europe for more than forty years. Instead, Europe was filled with joy and the sense of solidarity. As Adam Michnik, a hero of the Solidarity movement and a towering figure among public intellectuals and dissenters of Central Europe, recently noticed, it is quite tempting nowadays to assume the role of having been the then leading force and the major inspiration behind the historic fall of totalitarianism in Europe. Therefore, it was with sounds reason that Michnik called the year 1989 the annus mirabilis, the miraculous year.

In the United States, it is taken for granted that it was nothing other than the economic power of America that stripped the former Soviet Union of its potential inflicting on it a humiliating defeat in the Cold War. German politicians would proudly assert that their wise and patient Ostpolitik was a decisive factor in this historic struggle, rather than direct force and bellicose stance of America.

In the United States, it is taken for granted that it was nothing other than the economic power of America that stripped the former Soviet Union of its potential inflicting on it a humiliating defeat in the Cold War. German politicians would proudly assert that their wise and patient Ostpolitik was a decisive factor in this historic struggle, rather than direct force and bellicose stance of America.

In Poland, nobody doubts that Pope John Paul II has come to delegitimize Communism both as a world system and a major rival ideology, whereas the Solidarity movement dealt a fatal blow to the mortally wounded Soviet system showing that the working class people can revolt against the Working Class State and deprive it of the remains of its legitimacy. In the Baltic states, it is widely assumed, and not without reason, that the living chain of the joined hands of Baltic people in 1989 that was followed by the exceptional role of Lithuania as the first rebellious and breakaway republic, also played a role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism in Europe, the role that was much too obvious to need emphasis. All these kinds of reasoning and arguments are more or less correct. If a unique combination of forces and inspirations had not been possible, 1989 would never have become the decisive year that changed history beyond recognition.

What looked for a Western European intellectual like the Grand March of History stretching from the Latin Quarter of Paris to the rest of the globe, as the character Franz from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has it, was a tragedy and the jackboot trampling on the face of the human being, in the way another character of the novel, Franz’s mistress Sabina, a Czech artist in exile, describes it. Socialism and a promise of freedom as a theory in the West proved a horrible practice in the East in that same year 1968. Memory politics, as well as opposing memory regimes, still divides Europe. The short century of 1914–1989 and the autumn of the nations were tragically logical in its overture, all movements, and finale. Each time the world was changing beyond recognition, it was a strong feeling of fatalism – a revolution, a war, a downfall, a criminal regime accompanied by complacency and impotence of the so-called civilized politics and institutions.

Words, words, words, and no explanations of what and why was lost or what kind of human and institutional weakness was fatal.

(3) Are there any analogies between past and present situation?

Yes and no. Yes, as I can clearly see the analogies between 1917 and 1989, because in both cases the world witnessed the collapse of the Russian Empire, whether in its classical-monarchist incarnation as ancien régime or in its even more devilish hypostasis as the Soviet Union. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States have all become facts of world politics and international relations, and their names have been engraved in the political map of the world.

And no, since we live in the time of obsession with a different sort of power. As Zygmunt Bauman wittily noticed, the old formula of politics as a carrots-and-sticks strategy still holds, yet we, having seen in the twentieth century, the worst nightmares of sticks, are likely to experience the domination of carrots nowadays. Power manifests itself as the financial and economic might and potential, rather than military force and the language of militarism. Yet the logic remains the same. This is the old good wille-zur-macht, or the will-to-power, whether it assumes the guise of Friedrich Nietzsche or Karl Marx. The point is not if you have an identifiable Weltanschauung, a resilient identity or a major ideology; instead, the point is about how much power you have. I buy, therefore, I am.

We got accustomed to regarding a human being merely as a statistical unit. It does not come as a shock to us to view human individuals as workforce. The purchasing power of society or the ability to consume became crucial criteria to evaluate the degree of suitability of a country for the club of power to which we apply various sonorous titles of international organizations. The question whether you are a democracy becomes relevant only when you have no power and therefore have to be controlled through the means of rhetorical or political sticks. If you are oil-rich or if you can consume or invest really much, it absolves you from your failure to respect modern political and moral sensibilities or to stay committed to civil liberties and human rights. The crisis of the EU is quite different from all previous crises in the 20th century. Before and after WWII, Europeans were afraid to name things that existed already; for now, we are actively using words for things that have yet to come into existence. In fact, we live in a time of fundamental interregnum.

(4) Do events of 25 years ago can be an inspiration for contemporary Europeans?

I have a feeling that what is happening in present Europe is a silent technocratic revolution, rather than the rise of e-democracy and global civil society, as some of us choose to believe. A decade or two ago it was crucial to have proof that you are a democracy to qualify for the club. What mattered was a set of values and commitments. For now, we are likely to enter the new stage in world politics: what really matters is your financial discipline, the ability to be suitable for a fiscal union, and your economic conduct. There was a time when Eastern European nations sincerely believed that the rule of law, a strong commitment to democracy, and a decent human rights record served as a passport to the heaven of Western attention, respect, and even security.

I am afraid we are loosing this now, and the Eastern Partnership countries are getting awfully discouraging and disenchanting news from the West that nobody will fight their fights, or nobody is willing to risk their gas and oil relations with Russia out of sheer European solidarity or something like that. This may be the kiss of death to the Idea of Europe in Eastern Europe, especially keeping in mind that the Maidan in Kiev was not only an anti-criminal revolution against a mafia state but also a truly European revolution of people who were far less Euroskeptical and cynical about the EU than their Western European counterparts put together…

Recalling Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (the title of this anti-utopian novel is an anagram of Nowhere – hence, a clear allusion to Thomas More’s Utopia), here we have the political and moral logic of Europe turned upside down. In Erewhon, Butler pokes fun of a utopian community where illness becomes a liability and where a failure to remain healthy and fit is prosecuted. Something of this kind can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where a failure to be happy is seen as a symptom of backwardness. A caricature of the pursuit of happiness in a distant technocratic and technological society should not console us as something beyond our reality, though.

What we have in Europe now is an emerging concept of the liability of economic impotence. No kind of political and economic impotence shall remain unpunished. This is to say that we no longer have a right to fail, which had long been an inescapable aspect of freedom. The right to be open to the possibility of bankruptcy or any other possibility of failure was part of the European saga of freedom as a fundamental choice we make every day facing its consequences.

Those days are gone. Now you are at risk of becoming a gravedigger of Europe or even of the entire world if you send a wrong message to the global market. You may cause a global domino effect, thus letting down your foes and allies who equally depend of that same single world power structure. This is a new language of power, hitherto unseen and unidentified by anybody in world history. Behave yourself, otherwise you will spoil the game and will let us down. In doing so, you will jeopardize the viability of a moral and social order within which no country or nation remains responsible for itself. Everything has its global repercussions and implications. And how about the nations? Up to now we were certain that the European nations embodied the Calvinist principle of predestination implying a possibility to be happy in this earthly life and in this-worldly reality; the Kantian principle of self-determination became more relevant in the 19th century. There was a world where the pursuit of happiness, like the possibility of salvation and self-fulfillment spoke the language of the republic and its values: hence, the emergence of postcolonial nations after two world wars and after the breakup of empires.

What we have today in our second modernity bears little, if any, resemblance to this logic of the first modernity, as Ulrich Beck would have it; we can no longer experience the passions and longings of the 20th century, not to mention the dramas of the 19th century, no matter how hard we try to relegitimize our historical and political narrative. To use the terms of Zygmunt Bauman, the liquid modernity transformed us into a global community of consumers. What was a nation in the era of solid modernity as a community of memory, collective sentiment and moral choice, now is a community of consumers who are obliged and expected to behave in order to qualify for the club.

In the epoch of facebook, the nations are becoming extraterritorial units of a shared language and culture. We knew in the era of solid modernity that the nation was made up by several factors, first and foremost by a common territory, language and culture as well as by the modern division of labor, social mobility and literacy. Nowadays, the picture is rather different: a nation appears as an ensemble of mobile individuals with their logic of life deeply embedded in withdrawal-and-return. It is a question of whether you are online or offline with regard to your country’s problems and the debates around them, instead of deciding once and for all whether you are going to stay in that same place or vote for those same political actors for the rest of your days. Either you are on or you are off. This is a daily plebiscite of a liquid-modern society.

(5) Was 1989 the end of geopolitics in this part of the world?

In fact, 1989 was the end of geopolitics in Eastern and Central Europe. Yet on a closer look now it appears to have been just a geopolitical interregnum caused by Russia’s political impotence and humiliation by the West, as they claim now under Vladimir Putin – instead, it seems to have been a failure to bring the worst legacy of the USSR and Stalinism to the end. What we have now is a comeback of history and geopolitics all in one and all at once.

By the time this opinion piece is published, we will know whether Russian ambitions in Ukraine went beyond Crimea, but here in Kaunas, Lithuania, there is a strong sense of how history repeats itself. A feeling of being back in time with such code names as Munich, the Sudetenland, Hitler, Daladier, and Chamberlain is much stronger than it would have been any time earlier after the fall of the Berlin wall. We bid farewell to the holy naïveté of Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history, as if to say: “Welcome back to the twentieth century!” We are parting with Fukuyama just to be on the way to Putiyama, as Andrei Piontkovsky, a brilliant Russian political analyst and essayist, once put it with his wit and elegance.

It must have been five years ago when I came up, in a seminar with high-ranking EU and American officials, diplomats, politicians, and academics, with a comparison of Putin’s Russia and post-Weimar Germany. I insisted on the rise of a revisionist state in Russia with a strong sense of injustice seemingly done by the West to the USSR and with the resulting wave of chauvinism, neo-imperialism, and fascism. Some colleagues took this remark quite seriously, yet others (especially Germans) thought that it was overstretched and overblown. I leave it to my gracious readership to decide who was right and who was wrong at that time.

Arnold J. Toynbee, echoing a great many historians, once asked: Does history repeat itself? Karl Marx wittily and caustically answered this question in the nineteenth century reminding us that it does, and even twice: once as a tragedy and then as a farce. There are quite a few indications that what proved a Shakespearean tragedy in the twentieth century tends to repeat itself as a farce now. The Soviet Union and its new industrial faith, as Ernest Gellner described it, was nothing short of a civilizational alternative and rivalry to Europe or to the West, if you will. A deep disappointment with the supposed Jerusalem of the Left, along with the real collapse of modern belief (or disbelief) in a hidden alternative to capitalism and liberalism had a component of a universal tragedy.

Yet what appears as real present civilizational rival to Europe is Russia’s crony capitalism coupled with a gangster state, instead of a resistance ideology or a utopian dream. What was a tragic cul-de-sac of humanity turned into a grotesque of a rogue state with semi-criminal elite. Ideology without any ideology, or capitalism without liberty – no theory or ideological doctrine of the twentieth century can explain this phenomenon. Living in post-ideological and, in all likelihood, post-political era, creates quite a few predicaments when trying to apply mainstream views or conventional wisdom of the past.

History does repeat itself – we will know soon as to whether it is doing so this time as a tragedy or as a farce. We will learn whether the new Iron Curtain and the Old New Cold War is about impotence and forthcoming final disintegration of Russia or whether it is all about our own impotence along with the crushing of our hopes to achieve the final breakthrough. Up to now I was tempted to believe that Russia will fail inexorably due to its own fallacies and also due to a radically different situation in which Poland, the Baltic States, and other democracies find themselves.

Yet I do not have the answer about the fate of Ukraine, the nation that has already become the litmus test case of all of our strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. Leonidas Donskis is a Member of the European Parliament (2009–2014). He has written and edited over thirty books, fifteen of them in English. Donskis combines political theory, history of ideas, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, and essayistic style. Among other books, he is co-author (together with Zygmunt Bauman) of Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (2013), and the author of Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World: A Philosophical-Political Diary, 2009–2012 (2013), Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (2011), Troubled Identity and the Modern World (2009), Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature (2008), and Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (2003). Donskis acts as a visiting professor of politics at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He holds an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bradford, Great Britain.

Article written as 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.

A quarter-century after recovering freedom the Poles have to confront again the notion of their civilisation belonging to the periphery.

When the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of freedom started, I wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza[1] about the Polish cultural leap after 1989, and a member of the public reacted bitterly to my text. He asked: if “everybody” believes that Poland made it, that we achieved a collective cultural advance, why is it so bad? The reader cited a survey from March 2014 (conducted by the well-known polling institute Millward Brown), according to which only 17% of Poles “did not consider” emigration.

He went on: Why is health care such a shambles, and why education (including, or perhaps especially, university education) is so poor? Why do we have such a high unemployment rate, despite the fact that several millions of our compatriots have already left Poland in order to search for a job and professional fulfilment abroad? Why do so many people find it so hard to make ends meet? Why is our economy so lacking in innovation? Why we are still a peripheral country?

He also asked why book readership in our country was declining, why quality press was unable to stay on the market – in Poland we have no counterparts of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. The problem is not wealth: the problem is culture. “In the foreseeable future Poland will have motorways and express roads in abundance. What strikes every driver coming from Germany to Poland is a completely different driving culture. My worry is that in the foreseeable future this difference will be the same.”

This anecdote illustrates a fundamental discussion now going on in Poland today. You can find its echo in debates concerning various spheres of life - the economy, education, public administration, labour market. A quarter-century after recovering freedom the Poles have to confront again the notion of their civilisation belonging to the periphery. The history of the Polish struggle with the awareness that we are not the navel of the world, is very long. In the eighteenth century aristocratic ideologues wrote that Poland was antemurale christianitatis, the rampart of Christianity, the easternmost bastion of Western civilization, the historical mission of which was to protect the rich and well-fed Europe against the barbarian hordes flooding in from the south and the east. In this ideology the Polish sabres were the main bulwark separating the lazy and helpless Western bourgeois from Oriental despotisms, in its Orthodox or Muslim versions.

But it was not accidental that the “rampart of Christianity” concept gained momentum in Poland only when the nobility of The Republic was already in decline and later, at the time of the Partitions, when the Poles lost their own state. The message was clear: our Polish moral merits not only entitled us to Western help in the fight against the invaders (to whom we had finally succumbed after centuries of heroic struggle). In the play Kordian by Słowacki the Pope greets the main protagonist with the words “welcome to a descendant of the Sobieskis” – that is those Poles who saved Christianity at Vienna in 1683. The Pope, of course, did not help Poland, leaving Kordian – a classic Polish romantic hero - a prey to depression and gloomy reflections on the nature of the world. The West, of course, did not read Polish lamentations, because they were mostly written in Polish, so it was not even aware of their existence.

The costs of the titanic effort in defending the Western civilisation incurred by the Republic and its citizens also explained Polish cultural backwardness. The roads in Poland had always been bad, the inns dirty, poverty widespread, and the peasants – constituting as much as 90% of contemporary society – lived in conditions decrying even the contemporary notions of a decent standard of life. At the same time the gentry and nobility lived in luxury.

There is no space here to cite the numerous reports of Western travellers who believed that Poland did belong to a different civilisation than the West (they experienced another cultural shock when entering the territory of Russia).[2] I will confine myself to one description, by an Englishman named William Jacob, who in 1825 was commissioned by the British government to cross the length and breadth of the then Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and the Baltic provinces of Russia. Jacob was asked to examine how much grain and at what prices could be provided by the lands of the “former Poland”. After returning to England he published a comprehensive report, where he also described - in the fashion of contemporary travelogues - the inhabitants of the Polish lands.[3] He noted the reluctance of the nobility to take up any occupations outside the military service and the dominant position of the Jews in trade and the Germans in crafts. (Germans, he observed, felt uncomfortable in Poland and longed to return home after they have made enough money.) The author devoted much attention to Polish peasants.

They are no longer slaves, or adscripti glebae. [...] Though no longer slaves, the condition of the peasants is but little practically improved by the change that has been made in their condition. When a transfer is made, either by testament or conveyance, the persons of the peasantry are not indeed expressly conveyed, but they services are, and in many instances are the most valuable part of the property. [...] These people live in Wooden Huts, covered with thatch or shingles, consisting of one room with a stove, around which the inhabitants and their cattle crowd together, and where the most disgusting kinds of filthiness are to be seen. Their common Food is cabbage, potatoes sometimes, but not generally, pease, black bread, and soup, or rather gruel, without the addition of butter or meat. Their chief Drink is water, or the cheap whiskey of the country, which is the only luxury of the peasants; ad is drunk, whenever they can obtain it, in enormous quantities. [...] In their houses they have little that merits the name of furniture; and their clothing is coarse, ragged and filthy, even to disgust. Very little attention has been paid to their Education, and they are generally ignorant, superstitious, and fanatical. [...] This Representation of the condition and character of the Peasantry, though general, cannot be considered so universal as to admit of no exceptions; some rare instances of perseverance in economy, industry, and temperance, are to be found.[4]

Economic historians confirm this grim picture. Estimating the Polish GDP per capita over the centuries is of course a very bold exercise: the data are haphazard, the price structure in past centuries is different than today. The information that in 1820 the GDP per capita in the Polish lands was $686 per year, more than in China ($600) but less than in England or the U.S. (respectively 1200 and 1250 dollars) tells us little, although it is cited by economists in dead earnest5. The figures given by various authors are divergent, but generally it is assumed that never in history Polish GDP per capita has exceeded 60% of the average GDP in the West. It came close to this ratio several times: for the first time probably in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Jagiellonian “golden age”; the second time was around 1648, before the rise of the Cossacks and the invasion of the Swedes, who ruined the First Republic; the third time was in 1914, before World War I, during which the frontlines swept across the Polish lands three times (and which in Poland ended in 1921, three years later than in the West); the next time was in 1939, when the restored Poland recovered from the Great Depression and began to implement a large-scale programme of industrialisation; and the last time was around 1978, at the end of Gierek’s “economic miracle” financed by loans from the West.[5]

As I write these words, Poland is again nearing this magic mark.

The relatively lower level of Polish wealth shows only one - although perhaps the most visible to the naked eye – dimension of Polish cultural “junior status”. Of more importance are such factors as the direction of import and export of technology, the patterns of the organisational structure of the state, the military and industry, capital, literary and intellectual fashions. And the direction of this exchange has always been the same - from the West to the East. Prominent historian Jerzy Jedlicki wrote:

It is hard not to see that inventiveness of the kind discussed here was born only in some areas, and that the patterns spread in various directions, and the extent of these impacts marked the expansion of the current boundaries of civilised Europeans. I mean here multiple types of patterns, such as articles of faith, rites and religious practices, secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy, government structures, sets of laws, the secrets of calligraphy, artistic conventions, canons of philosophy, ideas of a just social order, as well as new crops, rules of trade, specie, handicrafts, principles of engineering and religious architecture, and many, many more discoveries producing an almost constant evolution of forms of life and ideas about the world, about its physical and moral order[6].

Since baptism of Poland in 966 we were - writes Jedlicki - a border country, a recipient country. In the monumental work of Immanuel Wallerstein about the history of the world system it is Poland - and Eastern Europe, but most of all the huge Republic of the nobility – that plays the role of the first “periphery” of the West, drawn into its orbit at the very beginning of the development of the system, that is in the fifteenth century, before the era of great explorers and colonization[7].

There is nothing surprising in this situation: a large part of the continent shares this fate. The question is to what extent the Poles were willing to accept it.

For centuries it was easy to think that history always threw obstacles on the Polish path. We would be wealthy and prosperous were it not for the Tatars, Swedes, Muscovites, Germans; were it not for the Cossack uprising, the Great Northern War, the Partitions, the failed uprisings and the ensuing repression; were it not for the war and occupation, and, finally, communism. The list of Polish woes is long and invoking it was handy. In a well-known short story by Sławomir Mrożek entitled Moniza Clavier the main protagonist, a Pole suffering for the nation and humanity, shows his wounds to the indifferent Western world:

I stepped into the midst of an amused company. `O, here!,’ I shouted, widely opening my mouth and pointing my finger on the molars. `O, here, they knocked them out, sir, for freedom they knocked them out!’ Confusion ensued. They went quiet, looked at me, unable to understand what I meant[8].

Only a quarter of a century after the 1989 watershed it is becoming clear how important role was played by this historical justification of our peripheral status (once the word “backwardness” would be used at this point but because of its emotional load it came out of fashion) in the Polish collective unconscious.

This change took place gradually. In the early 1990s the memory of communism, its dreariness, misery and isolation from the world it imposed on the Poles, was too vivid to seriously reflect on the structural sources of the Polish “junior status”. In the early 1990s everything seemed clear: the words „we are going to Europe” were omnipresent. It ended, as we know, in success. In 1999 Poland joined NATO and in 2004 it joined the European Union. In parallel with these political developments, there was an unprecedented wave of cultural imports: of values, ideas, norms, patterns, corporate culture and organisation of non-governmental institutions. In the period before the accession the Polish parliament was incorporating European law in a wholesale fashion; some people quite seriously asked the question if European directives really must be translated into Polish prior to their passing. After joining the European Union the import only gathered momentum, but changed its character. It is not enforced by politicians, and if it is, then only to a small extent. Over two million Poles emigrated to look for work in the West - which is one of the largest waves of migration in Polish history, comparable only with the wave of migration in the late nineteenth century, the first era of globalisation. Just like then, immigrants have not lost contact with their home country: they brought back from the West new notions about what to wear, what to eat, how to live, how the state and government administration should be organised. I was recently at a New Year’s Eve party in a village near Wroclaw. I met there a Polish woman living in Paris, the host’s sister, who in France is the head nurse in a hospital. She brought with her French wines that she likes, different ideas about food and a lot of experiences from the world of Western institutions, which a person born ten years earlier would not have a chance to encounter.

The gigantic cultural import only brought out the paradox of a breakthrough which occurred in the “Polish civilisation” in 1989. On the one hand, of course, we are getting closer to the West, adopting its norms and customs. Poland still is a much poorer country, but no longer separated from France and Germany by such a deep chasm as in the days of Polish People’s Republic. Polish wages are two-three times lower than Western ones, which means that the gap is roughly the same size as in 1914 or 1939.

The paradox of the breakthrough lies in the fact that bringing the Poles closer to the West, at the same time it reminded them of their peripheral status. The Polish cultural backwardness can no longer be explained away by history. The main debate now raging among Polish commentators concerns the new path of Polish modernisation Polish - how to make Poland became a country competing in the world through innovation rather than cheap labour; how to make the money generously given to us by the Union produce sustained growth rather than be spent on one-off pleasures - such as stadiums and swimming pools (also needed for that matter). We ask why Poland spends just 0.7% of its GDP on research and development - which makes us one of the least innovative countries in Europe. This problem, as many observers seem to notice, is more profound. It is not just a result of a political decision about how to share the money in the government budget. In Poland not only the government spends little on research - even less is spent by private companies, which prefer to buy technology and equipment from the West. Polish economists discuss a “trap of an average income country” – a country with an educated workforce and improving infrastructure, and where Western companies are increasingly willing to locate their factories, but also a country which does not have its own global brands, its own research centres of world class quality and which seems doomed to the role of an eternal subcontractor of Western corporations.

Jan Szomburg, president of the Institute for Market Economy, in the 1970s and 1980s one of the leading figures in the community of the Gdańsk liberals (from which many important politicians originated, including Janusz Lewandowski, today European Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budget), asks:

We are looking for answers to the question: what is the glass ceiling of our development and how to break through? As a whole society we are working a lot (few nations in the world work longer hours), and generally we are working well - we are good subcontractors. In the structures of global corporations Polish factories are recognised as the best in terms of efficiency and quality of work. The level of our savings - as a source of investment financing - is not high, but there is not much to save on - we have low wages because this is the area we base our competitiveness on. As for the rational level of foreign debt, we have already achieved, and perhaps even exceeded it. Although we have a lot of foreign investments, they do not produce high wages and do not fully allow for the development of our skills and talents (we practice our manufacturing competence - even if it is an engineering and highly specialised competence)[9].

This is the whole paradox: after 1989 Poland has come a long way and has been successful, but it was a road from one periphery - the Communist world was a peripheral world, importing technology and other solutions from the West – to another, within the global capitalist economy. At the same time it also deprived the Poles of the mental comfort provided by a sense of historical injustice. Now we are solely responsible for our destiny - for our poverty and backwardness.

[1] “Polaku, jesteś moim bohaterem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, April 5-6, 2014.

[2] Many such impressions can be found, for example, in a two-thousand-pages long collection edited by Wacław Zawadzki and called Polska stanislawowska w oczach cudzoziemców, v. 1-2, Warszawa 1963.

[3] W. Jacob, Report on the Trade in Foreign Corn: And on the Agriculture of the North of Europe, London 1826. descriptions of Polish backwardness and misery were a constant element of travel reports at least since the seventeenth century: see J. Kochanowicz, “Polska w epoce nowoczesnego wzrostu gospodarczego,” [in:] Modernizacja Polski. Struktury, agencje, reżimy instytucjonalne, edited by W. Morawski, Warszawa 2010.

[4] W. Jacob, Report…, op.cit., 63–67.

[5] A. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macroeconomic History, Oxford 2007, p. 382.

[6] J. Jedlicki, „Nasz kraj na poboczu Europy”, Przegląd Polityczny no 91/92 (2008).

[7] See I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II. Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750, New York-London 1980.

[8] S. Mrożek, „Moniza Clavier,” [in:] Wybór opowiadań, Kraków 1987, p. 150.

[9] J. Szomburg, „Polska jak Pendolino,” Rzeczpospolita, March 21, 2014.

Dr. Adam Leszczynski - historian, journalist, reporter. Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, journalist of Gazeta Wyborcza. Author of several books, including a documentary Naznaczeni: Afryka i AIDS (2003) and a collection of African reports Zbawcy mórz oraz inne afrykańskie historie (2013). He has recently published the book Skok w nowoczesność. Polityka wzrostu w krajach peryferyjnych 1943-1980 (2013), devoted to the problems of modernisation in poor countries - including Poland - in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to a grant from the Polish Ministry of Science an English edition of Skok w nowoczesność will be published by Peter Lang Publishing in 2015.

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.

In 2009, an exhibition on the Iron Curtain was held at the Kunsthalle Wien, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall; 35 well-known artists from both East and West took part, including Chantal Akerman, Johan Grimonprez, Anna Jermolaewa, Marcel Odenbach, Ewa Partum and Neo Rauch. The exhibition, curated by Cathérine Hug and Gerald Matt, not only tried to depict an event through art, it also tried to detect pictorial worlds that could subconsciously and critically reflect and capture these intense, hopeful atmospheres.

It was a completely interdisciplinary exhibition, with a number of lectures and discussions taking place simultaneously, for example with the artists Erik Bulatov and Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, as well as Barbara Kruger, with the psychologist Hans-Joachim Maaz, the writer Bora Ćosić, the priest Helmut Schüller, the philosopher Boris Buden, the Slavist Svetlana Boym, the politicians Alexander van der Bellen and Ursula Pasterk, and the economist Rainer Münz, to name but a few. The following conversation with Robert Menasse in Vienna and Zurich at the end of March 2014 took place in this context and against the backdrop of the topicality of European issues. Menasse is a poet and novelist living in Vienna, whose work deals intensely and recurrently with European topics and their complex genealogy. He has been awarded the Heinrich Mann Award (Berlin 2013) and the Max Frisch Award (Zurich 2014) for his work.

Catherine Hug (CH): 25 years ago, on 27th July 1989, the former Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, together with his Hungarian college Gyula Horn, cut a hole into the border fence between Austria and Hungary. How do you remember this?

Robert Menasse (RM): History was faked at the Austrian-Hungarian border on 27th July 1989; it was done for a good reason, namely the hope that this falsification would develop its own momentum and actually become steeped in history. The dismantling of the monitoring systems and borders had actually begun much earlier, at the end of February and the beginning of March, if I remember rightly, so almost three months earlier.

Obviously, this did not yet represent the true fall of the Iron Curtain, it was just a symbolical act by the Hungarian government, in accordance with Gorbachev’s policy of détente. The border systems were indeed reduced, but the borders were still guarded by soldiers. On 27th June, the image that turned this symbol into a historical fact was deliberately produced. This was a combination of Pop Art and political voodoo. The political stakeholders involved were aware that this had to be included in future history books and that it had to become history. They succeeded in this. It became an iconic photo in the history of 20th century press-photography. However, if you look at it carefully, you can see that it is a fake: the border systems no longer existed, so it was arranged to make it look real, but it looks more like a wire mesh fence on an allotment. And look here: Horn is cutting something that looks like a white ribbon. Well, the Iron Curtain was certainly not secured with white ribbons. A journalist later told me that the picture was taken many times and repeated until the counselors, press and politicians were satisfied with it, so it really was an artistic shot. In fact, it is surprising that they didn’t do it in a studio. I later processed this journalist’s stories in my book Schubumkehr (Reverse Thrust).

If I remember rightly, the immediate impact of the picture was not huge, either. As far as I know, it was not published on the front page of any newspaper, which it certainly would have been if what the picture meant to portray had been true. But the picture had a gradual effect, especially on the minds of the people of the GDR. And so the photo was subsequently overtaken by its message, firstly, on 19th August 1989, during the mass exodus of GDR citizens over the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron. That truly was a historic day! I have a much clearer memory of that. Nothing was staged or acted, the cameras were just pointing at what was happening and I was sitting in front of the TV, stunned, I was totally fascinated. In reality, the border had not been opened, it was only open symbolically. But hundreds of GDR citizens just crossed it, as if it had actually fallen. The officer on duty on the border that day, Arpad Bella, had received orders to open fire, however he gave orders not to shoot and to simply ignore the refugees. This soldier could have caused a bloodbath, in fact he had been required to do so! And he could later have used the excuse of “orders from above”. But he did not do it. He was a hero. But nobody could have known that at the time, nobody could have anticipated that, completely by chance, a hero of humanity was on duty that day. And here you see what an important role the human factor plays in this story! I later visited and interviewed Arpad Bella. He told me that he returned home late in the evening and his wife slapped him, screaming and crying. She had seen the scenes on TV and had heard that he was guilty of insubordination. She was beside herself with fear; afraid that he would go to jail and she would be left alone with the kids.

Anyhow, the hole in the fence really began to exist at that moment, the hole that Alois Mock and Gyula Horn had created for a photo. As I said, it was fascinating, it was touching, but… how can I describe it?

CH: But…?

RM: It might sound strange, but it was still unreal. In terms of the meaning that this event should have had, and indeed gained later. This was still not the fall of the Iron Curtain; even then, nobody could imagine that it would actually fall. There was a hole in the Iron Curtain, yes, but a hole can be fixed, and even if it was not closed, it was still unimaginable that the power and might of the Eastern Bloc could leak out of this little hole in the Hungarian border, the Berlin Wall could fall and the Soviet Union could collapse. The excitement, this unbelievably emotive feeling that I was witnessing a major event in world history, an epochal change, did not hit me until 9th November 1989, when the Berlin Wall opened. Then I consciously and comprehendingly experienced something that I had not expected to happen in my lifetime, as up to that moment, everything had seemed to be carved in stone for eternity; this was the great upheaval of history that turned everything upside-down.

CH: The shock waves even reached my school in Switzerland; on 10th November, our history teacher came into our class and gave us the day off, after announcing that it had been a historical night. The general euphoria was so great that during the 25th and 26th November 1989 referendum about the abolition of the army, 35.6% voted in favor. In the Canton of Jura, where I lived at that time, the initiative was actually accepted. This was interpreted as a clear sign that the policy of deterrence could no longer be effective and that it was gradually making way for other ideological viewpoints.

RM: Yes, gradually – but at the same time suddenly. At that time, everything happened simultaneously in slow-motion and ‘fast-motion’. It was no longer a process being steered pragmatically by the political elite; it was now a political meltdown, in which reality and possibility merged. There was no tracking of time, because a sense of time became a sense of history, and every second was equally historic. This has never really been looked back on and reappraised. Firstly, why did nobody see it coming, despite many indications and signals? On 8th November, anybody claiming that the Berlin Wall would fall, the Iron Curtain would disappear and the Soviet Union would implode would have been called a dreamer, a utopian or even a lunatic. Secondly, why did nobody back then even vaguely think it was possible to anticipate the impact that 9th November would have beyond the first moments, even though all of a sudden, everything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed to simultaneously become reality. The atmosphere suggested that this was the end of the era of crises and hostilities. Every citizen of the GDR, who suddenly could now go through the Brandenburg Gate, actually took these steps before the eyes of the global public, with the pathos of the astronaut Neil Armstrong, “…one giant leap for mankind!” But isn’t it strange that nobody anticipated where these steps would actually lead, i.e. to entirely new conflicts, world-policy crises and new wars with new stereotypical enemies and the dramatic growth of misery and poverty amongst the “winners”, i.e. Western societies? The prevailing sentiment was that everything would now be possible, but nobody really thought in terms of possibilities! And thirdly, why until today did nobody understand the most obvious, simplest and clearest message of this historical momentum?

CH: Which message do you mean?

RM: Let me take a trip down memory lane. I can remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday – that’s why it bewilders me so much -, that today there is a generation of grown-ups who were born after these events, and for whom the world has always been as it is today. However, I can remember sitting in front of the TV crying. I sobbed – out of affection, happiness and literally FELLOW feeling with this euphoria of liberation felt by all these people stumbling across the Berlin Wall, climbing over it, singing and dancing. Apart from the day my daughter was born, there is no day in my life I can remember that clearly. I instantly thought, this is the decisive, the defining experience of my lifetime, from today my life has a new system of bearings, from today everything will rearrange itself around this new point of reference and stand in relation to it. But today, we have to admit that this has not happened. Before November 1989, the political elites, the opinion leaders and the media had always been of the opinion that the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain were unalterable political realities, entities that could not be eliminated, one could only try to ease the situation and improve life for the people “over there”. From the Western point of view, the so-called arms race was merely a lever for easing the situation and, at the same time, a multi-billion dollar business. But nobody seriously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse. Maybe it had been said in political speeches, with that frivolous audacity that does not expect consequences, that the Berlin Wall had to fall. But from Monday to Friday, the division of the world was a self-evident and acknowledged precondition of all global political affairs, accepted as a political law of nature, one it was in no way possible to abolish. Just as we do business today with China, the Tiananmen Square murderers, while at home we gripe with rhetorical disgust about their human rights situation.

That’s a definition of political pragmatism: take the world the way it is, and call anyone who does not a dreamer! Then silence the dreamers by telling them that their dreams are lovely and we have the same dreams. But then make it plain that anyone who now believes they could make these dreams come true is a lunatic! That’s why everyone was so surprised; the pragmatists, because they had never believed that what they had sometimes claimed, for ideological reasons, would really happen; and the dreamers, too, because they had long ago stopped building their illusions on political pragmatists. This is a historical fact and it also explains the enormous emotional euphoria of that time. We could have drawn a permanent lesson from this! Namely, that what is understood and acknowledged as political pragmatism is petty-minded and blind and will someday be overrun by history. What then enthralled me so much was exactly that: I was experiencing the death of petty-minded, unimaginative pragmatism!

Now we can more boldly and freely ask how we want to organize our life politically and socially, how we can construct a humane and free world. But even though this was the end of the pragmatists, today they once again sit in control of the levers and switches, sweep through governments and institutions and produce a political zombie-world in which people become aggressive but have no perspective beyond what the weather forecast is. I cannot understand how people who experienced 1989 and created a situation in which the Iron Curtain could be torn down, now believe that it is pragmatically unthinkable to regulate the financial markets… For the generation which experienced 1989, the persistent lesson should be that history is feasible, more is possible than you think, so think more boldly from the beginning, don’t think anything is forever, tomorrow it could already be history, because everything that has a beginning in history also has to have an end! It is a strange punchline that after 1989, the ideology of the “end of history” became fashionable, with what however the exact opposite of the experience of 1989 was meant. The experience was, in fact, that everything has an end, even those things we once thought would last forever. However, out of this experience emerged the philosophical idea that now, nothing would come to an end.

CH: How do you understand that?

RM: I don’t know. Maybe because, in the final analysis, the experience of 1989 touches on a taboo; anyone who thinks this experience through to the end must, in the final analysis, be able to imagine that capitalism will also collapse, that the national democracies to which we are accustomed will reach their end, that the ideology of everlasting growth in a confined world will be buried in rubble, and so on. We cannot and must not think like this. The fall of the Iron Curtain was admittedly not foreseeable in this way, but it did not touch on a taboo. On the contrary, it confirmed an ideology. And ideologies are philosophically regarded, necessarily wrong awareness.

However, the consequences of that do indeed touch on a taboo. It is complicated. And at the same time it is ridiculous in the light of history; on the precondition that we consider ourselves to be thinking beings, pursue historical science, fetishize memories, raise monuments, celebrate historical anniversaries and so on, it is almost preposterously ridiculous. Isn’t it ridiculous to believe that from now on, only technologies and medicine will further develop, but not our political and social systems? Isn’t it ridiculous to believe, in all seriousness, that revolutions will only take place in the virtual world of informatics or genetic engineering, but not in political reality? And don’t the agitations of Taksim Square, the Tahrir or the Maidan prove that history is still moving forward, anything but turned to stone – even if the people who start the revolutions are still betrayed…

CH: What visible and sustainably positive consequences did the political turnaround of 1989 have on art production and especially on your work as a writer? Let’s take, for example, your novel Schubumkehr (1995): terms like drawing of a border, shifts of borders and dissolution of borders, of hope, of encounters with strangers as well as the fear of the strange play an important role. Do you see yourself more as a commentator or an analyst? Or is it also or primarily about other things?

RM: As a writer, I have, from the outset, aspired to reflect upon my contemporaneity. I was shaped by theories of art and literature, which understand art as a reflection of an era and literature as a story about how it is lived and thought, so that contemporaries can recognize themselves and those who come after us can understand us. My trilogy of novels, Die Trilogie der Entgeisterung, which I had conceptualized in the first half of the ‘80s, was meant to be a mirror on our times; it was an irrelevantly disgusting time, the so-called postmodern era. The notion of postmodern era basically means that enlightenment had come to an end, to be replaced by unelightenment. What was disgusting was that the end of enlightenment was celebrated, that creativity was achievable solely in some form of eclecticism and that the ideologists of unlightenment preposterously celebrated themselves as “critical philosophers”. At the same time, it was of course a happy time. There was no big crisis, no anxiety about the future, principally because there was no future, just as there was no history. History was a trunk from which you could take what you fancied. Superficially, this time was esthetically nicer than the ‘70s, that’s why this was basically a time of extraordinary good luck for some people, namely a sensation of weightless floating on a slightly rippling surface. There are, of course, many objections to this point of view, but that’s how I experienced this time. That was how it was and that was the material that I had to hand. That’s what I wanted to reflect like a mirror, inverted. And while writing, I have methodically and technically reverted to reflection theory. But 1989 happened before I had finished the trilogy. That’s why I abandoned this theory in the end and created the third volume completely afresh. I then gave it the title “Schubumkehr” (“Reverse Thrust”) instead of “Endzeit (“Eschaton”), and instead of a story about the trickling away of history, I wrote a text in which the narrator disappears. History is simply bigger than a single spokesman! But at that time, the novel was not yet really analytical, something that probably benefited the book in the end. But since then, literature has interested me in a completely different way, no longer as a mirror-image, or reflection of the static, the status quo, but rather as some kind of laboratory, where experiments are performed with the liquids of history and where the changes in the condition of aggregation can be described. 1989 completely changed me. But when I observe how politics are pursued today, and also how they are written about today, I lose it. On the other hand, the feeling of losing it is omnipresent lately, so maybe I’m just a little symptom in a specific way, at least not unworldly!

CH: Bold and very inspiring trains of thought; you are throwing new, rather self-critical light on my hitherto rather positive perception of eclecticism. Eclecticism is commonly perceived as a formula for success, at least in fine arts, architecture and design, as well as in philosophy, as you mentioned. If we think outside the box, we will come to the conclusion that not every cultural sphere deals with topics such as perceptions of history and crisis in the same way – a blessing of our kaleidoscopically multi-faceted world! 2014 also marks the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, or the Internet, in short. Where do you see comparisons with 1989 and its consequences in this context? How did the WWW shape artistic practice?

RM: I don’t believe that 1989 and the WWW have a causal relationship beyond their random concurrency. In an emotional sense, the only thing which might be important for world history is the fact that even though the Internet emerged concurrently, it came too late for the GDR. If the possibilities arising from the Internet had existed sooner, if what the NSA is able to do today had been available to the Stasi, then the GDR might still exist. CH: Maybe yes, I completely agree! On the other hand, I also want to protect the achievements of the Internet. Positively seen, it is after all about the provision of more extensive information, where, for example, readers can follow this conversation in every corner of the world. Which brings me to my next question: what is the relationship between the free movement of people and homeland (Heimat: in German: region or place where you come from and where you feel at home and at ease, place where you belong)? The writer Max Frisch once pointed out the fact that there is no plural for the word homeland (Heimat), even though the definition of this notion is so heterogeneous. Artists embody a nomadic understanding of homeland (Heimat). They are unstoppable travelers within their trains of thought, but at the same time part of real life. What role does longing play in connection with that? Can it become a problem? Or is it first and foremost the instigator for finding a solution?

RM: That is an interesting question. It points to another, extremely dramatic symptom of the change of era following 1989, namely the fact that development since then, especially through the so-called Eastern enlargement of the EU, has extended the area described as homeland (Heimat) and at the same time given the notion of homeland (Heimat) a plural after all. Yes, homeland (Heimat) now has a plural, too! Due to the free movement of people, the freedom to travel and the freedom of establishment, the notion of homeland (Heimat) has radically changed, at least for us in Europe. It no longer refers to a nation, something that has always been fiction anyhow. I, as an Austrian, have for example never felt at home in Tyrol. What do I have in common with mountain-dwellers, just because they have the same passport? In Vienna, there are no mountains and therefore there is a completely different mentality! The Tyrolese can be nice and friendly, but people from Alentejo or the Peloponnese can also be nice and interesting… So why should I feel at home in Tyrol, just because it belongs to Austria? Homeland (Heimat) is therefore not a nation but, in a libertine and mobile Europe, increasingly a place to live, which I can, at least inside the Schengen-area, choose freely and without problems. Mobility, which has always been an aspiration, has nowadays become almost a compulsion. Many do not want to, but have to be mobile.

However, it still remains an opportunity, and this opportunity has increased, even though many still regard it as a threat to their homeland (Heimat). In 2012, there was a Eurobarometer survey about the concept of mobility, which showed that personal freedom of movement had the highest approval rates in Poland and the highest rejection rates in Austria. In Poland, mobility apparently means, “I can go somewhere else!”, whereas in Austria mobility means, “someone could come here”! That alone shows that there are at least two concepts of homeland (Heimat): the concept that my homeland is where I live and work, where I have dignity and a legal situation and the concept that this is all divisible, homeland (Heimat) is somewhere I can exclude everybody else from. One is an urban, enlightened concept, the other a village concept of homeland (Heimat), a concept of a narrow valley, of contractedness. What is interesting is the fact that conservative, narrow concepts of homeland (Heimat) are historically more recent. Visas, for example, were not introduced until 1914; before that, one could travel from Coimbra to Riga without a visa or passport and settle there.

Stefan Zweig wrote about this in 1914, “Nationalism has destroyed European culture!” It is insane that today there are once again so many people demanding the devastation and ruin caused by nationalism, literally as a human right, establishing these situations through referenda and celebrating this devastation of intelligence as democratic reason, just so they can defiantly feel better. I have always had the desire to live and work in different cities; I have spent the greater part of my adult life in the so-called outlands, in São Paulo, Lisbon, Berlin and Amsterdam. Nowadays, I live in Brussels part-time. Political borders are one thing, they can be abolished, as we have seen, however it is crucial to break open the narrow borders of mentalities. When we do, we will also feel better in our homes and only then will homeland (Heimat) be a part of the world and not a castle built to withstand the world.

CH: In the meantime, a whole post-1989 generation has grown up, a generation that knows about the time of the Cold War and a bipolar world-order only through stories. These narratives and depictions are generally ideologically biased. Nostalgia, frustration and fatalism, as well as hope, can be found in the implementation of new perspectives. Do you agree with me that young people today think more freely? And that they might have learnt to cope better with what is foreign to them? At the same time, I have the impression – but maybe I am wrong - that we, especially young people, are more apolitical. Where does this come from? However, I want to hold against this assertion the visionary power of initiatives such as the Occupy movement on Wall Street and the demonstrations on Taksim Square or, more recently, in Ukraine. As different as they might be, what is their common denominator, what do they reveal about our understanding of democracy?

RM: First of all, I have to clear up a misunderstanding that appears repeatedly. One can no longer split a society into generations with regard to social awareness, social discourse, way of thinking, political behavior, et cetera. If we take a transient picture of how a society works as a collective, what unites it and what kind of contradictions prevail within it, then at this moment, all living people are contemporaries, no matter how old the individual is. Contemporaneity establishes itself in living beings as a whole, and not in dates of birth. If I, as a sixty-year-old, encounter a thirty-year-old, he might belong to another generation, but basically we are both equally characterized by what is impressed upon us by contemporary conditions, much more than by the erstwhile experiences that I might have had due to my greater age and that the other person has not had. Expressed very primitively, I am influenced by the smartphone culture to the very same degree as someone who has never experienced telephone booths. This is also the reason why age no longer necessarily commands respect, as it did in the olden days, when age meant many years of experience with respect to problems which young people also faced, as nothing really changed except for the seasons, and even they don’t change, they just alternate. This means that when I meet a thirty year-old, I as an adult encounter an adult, and we could both be dead tomorrow, even him, though he would not have lived as long. We are both inherently the same: contemporaries. That’s also why we cannot say that young today think more freely, or that they are more apolitical, or whatever. There are older people thinking more freely, and older people who are completely apolitical; this does not even depend on class consciousness any more. There are younger people from privileged families who are solidary, and working-class children who know no solidarity when it comes to fighting for their workplace. There are all kinds of things, but if it can be integrated into a description of contemporary zeitgeist, it has to do with today and not with age. Admittedly, it is true that the Erasmus-generation has opportunities and experiences that the older generation could barely dream of, but that is unfortunately a minority, and no politicians who check their slogans via opinion-polls would let themselves be guided by that. So if we want to understand ourselves in our contemporaneity, then the question of why younger people today are in part apolitical and whether that has something to do with the fact that they did not experience ’89, is completely nonsensical. There are younger people who are not apolitical and there are older people who experienced ’89 who are apolitical.

The truth is that the applicable parameters have changed again since 1989, and these new parameters are the pegs between which everyone today, both young and old, has to move and find their bearings. Younger people did not experience ’89, well yes, but for older people, the experience of ’89 vanished just as quickly as the time when they did not yet have cellphones. My daughter, for example, speaks five languages and has studied and lived in three different European cities. That is representative of today’s possibilities, but definitely not of her generation. That’s what I mean. The question of what might be typical for a generation is relatively insignificant to me; I have the impression that what is typical for our contemporaneity is typical for all generations, roughly speaking. And, bearing in mind all individual exceptions, that is the backlash of renationalization, the curse of the lucky year of 1989.

CH: Okay, then please forgive me my slightly naïve interjection concerning the generation question. Anyhow, one also speaks of youth mania nowadays. In cultural production, for example, everything has an extremely short half-life – partly artificially created, but partly because it has not historically evolved. Careers are short, memories fade… That is, of course, not the fault of the producers per se, but of an overheated art market, so maybe something similar is happening on the book market. A friend of mine, who is an author, recently told me how frustrating it can be to spend two or more years writing a novel, which is quickly out of date, if significant commercial success does not follow or no acknowledging prices are recorded. Something comparative is happening in fine art: young artists today concentrate far more on being well placed in the art market early on; unfortunately this mainly happens at the expense of creative ideas, as they are too keen to satisfy the market. That’s why free art spaces are so important as a counterbalance! In my previous remark, I might have wanted to create an analogy between this cultural phenomenon and the superordinate society. Obviously, it is not that easy to do this.

RM: Yes, for a simple reason: the “youth mania” which exists today is without a doubt a societal phenomenon. It is not a generational phenomenon. Your examples show that young people today have no advantages, even though youth has become a fetish. This fetish is not recognition of the self-evident beauty and strength of youth, but a lever forcing older people to somehow stay young in order to function and be needed. The sweat in fitness centers and the blood on the operating tables of plastic surgeons are the sweat and blood of the war of markets. Turbo-capitalism demands the faster reproduction of the capital invested, the product has to be fresh, the profits easily disposable. Man himself enters the market as a product, the art market too… But I was originally driving at something else.

CH: Yes, you mentioned the curse of the lucky year of 1989. What do you mean by that?

RM: 1989 was not only the opening of the Berlin Wall. 1989 also represented the beginning of the developments which quickly led to German reunification. At that time, as I have already said, everything was possible; however, the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if on an inclined plain, led unstoppably and almost unopposed to reunification and the national rebirth of Germany, as if there were no alternative. National rebirth! And that took place in the midst of the post-national development of Europe via the EU and the internal market. The train of history had, after all, been driving in a completely different direction for four decades. Now, the redemption of German trauma could take place and the liberation of all the misfortunes and crimes connected with the history of the German nation-building process. All of a sudden, the German nation stood there great and proud. And this fact, that there had actually been a misunderstanding, became completely lost in the initial euphoria: the world was celebrating the liberation of the people; Germany, however, was celebrating the liberation of a nation. And today, Germany is what the EU was founded to oppose, namely a leading power in Europe. This is rooted deep in the heart of Europe, knowingly or unknowingly, but in any case as an enduring political rage. The Germans have demonstrated that re-nationalization is a concept which can lead to success. And even if Germany honestly and sensibly seeks European policy solutions in some key issues, the reactionary and national forces in Europe are becoming stronger, as is the impetus for German nationalism. CH: And in Hungary, of all countries, where 25 years ago there was significant hope for the future of Europe, the most reactionary forces in Europe are in power today! And recently in Switzerland, the question arose of whether the free movement of people should be regulated within nation states –contrary to all the fundamental principles of the EU and the law of nations; this was unfortunately (although admittedly narrowly) accepted by the people. As a citizen of that country, this is a decision I deeply regret. Although democracy in this specific case openly displays its shortfalls, what would be the alternative? How responsible are neighboring states and what measures and initiatives could particularly creative artists use to participate actively in the process of redefining democracy?

RM: Yes, those are the misunderstood consequences of 1989 and also the pragmatic preconditions we have to deal with today. What should be done now and what artists can do, are two different questions. Artists accompany the process, knowingly or unknowingly, no matter how history develops. But it obviously matters how history develops further. What is necessary now, in my opinion, in the light of recent experiences in Switzerland, Hungary, the Crimean, etc., is in fact a new definition of democracy, the liberation of the perception that democracy has to express and defend national sovereignty, and that personal happiness thus depends on national pride and the enforcement of national stubbornness.

The world long ago became a transnational entity, as nothing of any importance can still be regulated within or stopped at national borders. We have transnational economic processes and financial currents, markets, investments and repayments of profits, everything functions transnationally, there is no such thing as a national economy anymore, ecological problems don’t stop at borders, streams of information, including their downsides such as surveillance, cultural exchanges, everything is completely without boundaries; all this can be handled and configured for the purposes of public welfare only through the development of a transnational democracy. 1989 was, and remains, the year that stood for an epoch change. But 2014/15 will be an even more important date, as it will have to result in a decision. Do you know what is strange? Centuries take a further one and a half decades to really die. In 1814/15, the 18th century died with the Congress of Vienna. In 1914, the 19th century died.

And in 2014/15, the 20th century, the century shaped by the criminal energy of nationalism and its consequences, will have to die. And if it does not die now, it will be the fault of world-history.

CH: Thank you for this conversation, Robert Menasse!

ABSTRACT

The question as to whether war was inevitable is tantamount to asking what must have happened for the order established by the Treaty of Vienna to finally collapse in 1914. An extensive search through libraries and archives has allowed us to venture a response to this question. As it turns out, the treaty protecting Europe from war was either a spent force or was being consumed by the virus of national chauvinism to such an extent that it was unable to play its role any longer. As it happened, Europeans were longing for war, the politicians and the military yearned for it, and this war-mongering mood was growing in intensity. The artistic avant-garde did their best to meet this demand in society, providing an ideal reflection of the atmosphere of the time.

During the war and following its conclusion, it was often heard that: “things could have worked out very differently,” or “war was entirely avoidable.” It has been said that we must not be drawn into taking a deterministic view of history, claiming that if war broke out, it must have been necessary. Was peace therefore truly within our grasp, and could the war have been avoided? It soon turned out that the hope of salvaging peace was based on a few fallacious premises. The first of these was the conviction that monarchs were bound by a sense of solidarity and were therefore reluctant to go to war. Indeed, the monarchs had close blood-ties and considered themselves a single family. Emperor Wilhelm II and the Tsarina were maternal cousins, as were Nicholas and Britain’s George V, who looked like mirror images of each other. Edward VII was the uncle of the Kaiser of the Reich and the Tsarina, while Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, the cousin and sister-in-law of the Kaiser, was her sister. Almost all the monarchs ruling in both the larger and smaller countries of Europe were either distantly related to the Sachsen- Coburg-Gotha Dynasty, or sprung from it directly. Bismarck disdainfully called them the “fertile studs of Europe.” In the letters they exchanged, they called each other beloved and dear brothers, cousins, and friends. One sign of the solidarity of these “cousins,” these emperors, kings, and princes, was their joint decision to attend the funeral of Victoria, the British Queen, in 1901; for some she was an aunt, for others a grandmother. In 1914 seven of her descendants sat on European thrones. In 1910, during the funeral ceremonies for King Edward VII, the “uncle of kings,” there was a parade of monarchs, an unparalleled demonstration of royal solidarity. Ties between monarchs were based not only on family bonds, but also on shared traditions, similar values, and court etiquette. Nonetheless, quarrels, discord, and wars can even occur within a family, which is why, time and again, tension emerged in the royal family, in spite of its veneer of fraternity. As such, there was no guarantee that a Europe of related monarchs was immune to a great war. But even if the monarchs had made a joint stand against war, there still would have been no certainty that it would not have broken out, as none of the reigning European monarchs enjoyed absolute power or were able to impose their will. They were all compelled to hear out their advisers, ministers, generals, and, in this era of European constitutions, the voices of the people or the nation as well, however much the monarchs were the symbols of the state, the image of sovereign statehood, and however much their portraits adorned public spaces. Meanwhile, even if they had cared to, they would not have been able to halt the impending armed conflict. But did they want to? To this question it is difficult to find a definitive answer.

When the war had already broken out, the monarchs were forced to make a dramatic choice between the solidarity of the royal families and solidarity with their own nations. This choice was in fact made for them, as they could not oppose their subjects. This is why King George V – under pressure from his British subjects – changed his German name to the British Windsor, which British monarchs still use to this day. He deprived the Emperor of the Reich of his honorary command of the British army, and struck German and Austro-Hungarian names from the registry listing members of the officer corps. Knights of the Garter who belonged to enemy camps were also stripped of this honor. The other monarchs representing the warring parties behaved in like fashion.

Another source of faith that war could be avoided was the trust placed in diplomats who, even when the pressure had reached its boiling point, found ways to resolve disagreements without resorting to war. The diplomats traditionally sought paths to reconciliation between the restless sides, ever pursuing the difficult art of striking a compromise. Most often they merely called a conference of the states which formed the “concert of powers,” and this sufficed. “In the impending war, which shall be spurred on for no compelling reason, what is at stake is not only the Hohenzollern Crown, but the very future of Germany [...] the provocation of war is not merely foolhardy, it is downright reprehensible,” warned the German Chancellor in 1913. It turned out in 1914, however, that neither the solidarity of the monarchs, nor that of the diplomats would suffice.

The third source of optimism that war was impossible was the stance adopted by the socialist parties with delegates at the Second International. They expressed the conviction that armed conflict was advantageous for international capital, imperialist states, and nationalist governments, but not for the proletariat. This is why the socialist-led proletariat had to struggle for peace. The socialists threatened to organize a general strike if war were to be declared. They believed that this threat would stop the war-mongers in their tracks. This hope for peace also proved illusory, and the anti-war demonstrations organized on the eve of the conflict were unable to prevent the war. Anti-war sentiment was particularly strong in Great Britain. The prospect of dying for – as the British press worded it – “the stinking Serbs” and the “drunken Russians” was less than alluring. When the war did break out, however, the pacifist socialists, including the British, vanished from sight, declaring solidarity with their own nations. The idea of national solidarity triumphed over the idea of class solidarity, which for many came as a considerable surprise.

Fourthly, military alliances – in particular, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente – were meant to safeguard against war, serving as insurance policies of sorts. These too failed, however. Nor were the political and economic ties between the states in the antagonistic blocs of any aid. These ties, sometimes bolstered by political treaties, could have raised hope for salvaging a state of peace. Nonetheless, the desire for war turned out to be stronger than the desire for peace.

Fifthly: Pacifists gave people hope for peace. Their writing had its readership, whose numbers were not negligible. Norman Angell’s treatise entitled The Great Illusion was a publishing success; its argument was that the European integration process was already so far advanced that a war that ruptured these ties would be a disaster for one and all. No less a publishing success was a multi-volume work by one of the world’s best-known authors, Jan Bloch, a Pole of Jewish extraction, and one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the Kingdom of Poland. His work, published in 1898 and entitled Przyszła wojna pod względem technicznym, ekonomicznym i politycznym [The Future of War from a Technical, Economic, and Political Perspective] was translated into many of the world’s languages. In Austria and Germany it was Karl Kraus who was most frequently read. Nevertheless, neither he nor Angell, nor any of the other pacifists, were able to create mechanisms protecting against war or pacifist movements. On the whole, they were isolated and politically insignificant. The German Emperor, for example, nursed deep contempt for the pacifists, whom he called eunuchs. At any rate, it soon turned out that pacifists could most easily laud peace in times of peace.

Sixthly, a chance to salvage peace was seen in the pressure being exerted by international concerns. Indeed, they were afraid of war, as it threatened to rupture all their economic and financial ties. They preferred to negotiate for their share of the markets – such as the businessmen from Britain and Germany who, two weeks before Sarajevo, negotiated a deal to build a railway from Baghdad to Basra. Two Englishmen were due to sit on the board of the German-controlled Baghdad Railway Association. Earlier, in mid-February 1914, entrepreneurs from France and the Reich signed a similar contract. Yet the influence of big business circles interested in a peaceful resolution to the conflicts was ultimately too weak to prevent war. The arms industry, on the other hand, generally declared itself in favor of the war.

The political tension between the states and, in particular, the powerhouses, was growing from one year to the next; the issues of dominance in Europe, the recovery of lost lands or the acquisition of new ones, influence in the Balkans or the Middle East, a new division of colonies, and rule over the seas and oceans led to rearmament on an unprecedented scale, and to an arms race. Did this rearmament inevitably bring war to Europe? It might have, though it is difficult to definitively declare that it led to the war. Such opinions do abound, however. The scale of the rearmament was unprecedented. All of Europe’s large and small states, including Montenegro, increased their military budgets, which went to prove the popularity of the idea of war in parliaments, and was, at the same time, a way of making people accustomed to the real prospect of war. The inflated war budgets testified to the fact that most parliamentarians accepted the governments’ proposal to fuel the fire. In the years 1909–1914 alone the European states’ expenditure for arms rose, on average, by about 50%. In 1909 it was 3.5% of the GDP, while in 1913 it rose to 5%. Rearmament caused a serious fiscal burden for society. For the Reich the burden was so severe that several warned that the state could go bankrupt. The only chance of avoiding this glum prospect was “pressing forward,” i.e. declaring war, during which time the state could suspend the debts it had incurred from its own citizens. Budgets assigned for naval weaponry rose particularly swiftly. The construction of warships was supported by dozens, and later hundreds of associations and organizations, which created effective pressure groups.

The new carving up of the world and the colonial lands was of most interest to Germany, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was comparatively indifferent. The Germans believed that they had received less of the colonial pie than they deserved. True, they possessed around three million square meters of colonies spread over two continents, inhabited by thirteen million people, officially known as “protected territories,” but these were not generating enough profit or prestige. In his 1900 work entitled The Great Powers, Max Letz said that a war to divvy the ailing British Empire was inevitable, and in its place would come a German Empire. He argued that, in accordance with social Darwinism, the colonies should trade owners. The weak, such as the French, the Portuguese, and the British, would withdraw, while the stronger ones – the Germans – would step in. “Our future will be ensured when we conquer not only all of Europe, but also wherever we can across the ocean. Expanding our possessions is, after all, the basis of our nation,” said Heinrich Class, head of the Pan-German League, in 1913. The idea of war can certainly be traced to this mode of thinking, but thought alone was not enough to actually set it off.

Nor were the Germans satisfied with their place in Europe. Located in the center of Europe, they were constantly obsessed with the idea of being encircled by France and Russia, caught between the proverbial firing lines. In fact, these countries did not pose much of a threat, at least for the time being. This was more of an artificially generated psychosis than a real threat, but it did reinforce the pro-war mood.

The armament policy was fueled by the imperialist propaganda and pro-war rhetoric. Nationalism, which was growing into a national chauvinism, held pride of place in the nations’ preparations for the looming struggle. Apart from love of one’s country and nation and a national pride, it was composed of contempt and hostility for other nations and a national pride that sanctioned rule over others. The nationalists claimed that the path to achieving a high level of national solidarity and unity led through war. War, they argued further, cleanses a nation of its weaknesses and shortcomings, and would work like a salubrious catharsis. The Italian nationalists stressed that war was the swiftest and most heroic means of attaining willpower and wealth. “To the nationalist circles war seems akin to salvation, a hope for change,” concluded Viktor Adler, a leader of the anti-war social democrats on 29 July 1914. Nationalism did not dominate the general mindset, and the nationalist parties did not dominate the political stage. The power remained, on the one hand, with the liberal and conservative parties, and on the other, with the socialist ones, though both the former and the latter did show evidence of being influenced by nationalist ideas and ways of thinking. In particular, the liberal parties succumbed to the pressure of nationalism. The nationalists’ advantage and strength was in the comparatively few in number, yet outspoken, punitive, hierarchically structured, and well-financed organizations and associations, such as the German Eastern Marches Society, the German Army League, the Navy League, the Pan-German League, and the Pan-German Union in Germany; England’s Imperial Naval League and the National Service League; France’s Patriotic League and Action française; Russia’s Black Hundreds; and the Nationalist Association of Italy. These organizations were capable of mobilizing public opinion around their aims, for rearmament and war preparations. They influenced governments, parliaments, and rulers.

Nationalism was nourished by a confused social Darwinism, which urged the need for a decisive armed confrontation in the name of national values and glory. Social Darwinism was popularized in England by Benjamin Kidd, author of Social Evolution, which was first published in 1893. Another Briton who made his name in Europe writing on the subject was Harold Watt, a founder of the Imperial Naval League; he claimed that “war is God’s test for the soul of a nation,” and that in history “the higher and more noble nations have triumphed in war, routing the lower races.”

The cultural climate also favored the war. In the late 1890s Positivism and Scientism were on the decline and Neo-Romanticism was on the rise. In the early twentieth century millions of people had already been convinced by artists and intellectuals that they were leading a bland, prosaic life, a life of consumer boredom, bereft of greatness, sublimity, and spirituality. They claimed that such a bourgeois existence was senseless. Thomas Mann wrote that “war should be a cleansing, a liberation, and a vast hope,” a manifestation of the “fitness of the nation.” War, it was said, ennobled people, and taught the virtues of discipline and obedience. The hopeless life of the wage earner could only be changed by something sublime and revivifying – and this “something” was war. Wartime accomplishments and the life of the hero were important. Neo-Romantics and avant-gardists saw war as a manifestation of the strength of the spirit, as a sign of vitality and creativity. “War is a life-giving principle,” “it is an expression of the highest culture,” Friedrich von Bernhardt wrote in 1911 in a work which went through six editions in Germany in the space of two years. “When a man throws himself into the whirlwind of war it is not instincts, but virtues he rediscovers... In war everything is renewed,” stressed French painter Pierre Bonnard in 1912. In 1891 the French writer Emil Zola pointed out that “only fighting nations develop: a nation immediately perishes when it disarms. War is a school of discipline, devotion, and courage.” The Italian Futurists, headed by Filippo Marinetti, were enthusiastic about war, joyfully exclaiming that “war is the only hygiene of the world.” Generally speaking, the rebellious people of the avant-garde who roused others to rebel against the old world in order to build a new, better, and more noble one in its place, and who called for liberation from the suffocating girdle of custom, could, to a considerable degree, feel that they shared responsibility for the war.

Historian D. S. Landes has pointed out that many a war was believed to be a sort of spring break; he wrote that the tragedy of war lay “in the gullible vanity of people who thought war was a party – a kaleidoscope of handsome uniforms, masculine courage, feminine admiration, dress parades, and the lightheartedness of immortal youth. The war broke out for a lack of imagination.”¹ US President Theodore Roosevelt saw the eventuality of the outbreak of war in only a slightly different light: “Europe has not fought for a very long time, and has decided to rouse in itself the spirit of action. War broke out when Europeans had subconsciously grown tired of peace. Then war became acceptable, even desirable.”

Fashionable philosophers and historiosophers added more arguments in favor of the war: “The propriety of war is simply based on the consciousness of its moral necessity. Because [...] history must be in a state of eternal movement, war is waged; it must be regarded as an order established by God,” wrote Heinrich von Treitschke in 1887. People chose to heed his words, but also those of Joseph Maistre, an early-nineteenth-century conservative thinker who maintained that “war is the normal state of the human species.” Henri Bergson’s perception of thought also aided intellectual preparation for the war, stating that Europe urgently needed a spiritual rebirth through a powerful clash of elements. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was popular in Europe, also contributed here. Nietzsche’s call to action and violence, to do battle with idleness, bourgeois narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, spoke to many, and his statements were printed on leaflets for soldiers; his idea that “war and courage have done more good than love for those dear to you” was found in the rucksacks of soldiers from various armies. Nietzsche called on people to take risks in life and promoted the value of a revolt against liberalism, tradition, and the status quo. Ideas directly or indirectly glorifying war were distributed to millions, and to young people in particular – and it was they, after all, who had to march off to battle.

The literature of the time made a clear contribution to psychologically and emotionally preparing people for war; it often portrayed armed conflict as a joyful and fascinating adventure. Spy novels and tales of the future enjoyed popularity. Novels published in installments that depicted Germans landing on British shores or Britons organizing landing operations on the German coast also proved exciting. Boys’ adventure literature and new weeklies for young people prepared readers to slay their enemies, filled as they were with resourceful and courageous warriors ready to die for their homeland.

State history policies also contributed to preparing people for war, mainly through schools. School curriculae reminded pupils that there was nothing more valuable than a nation’s victories on the battlefield, but also reminded them of the defeats, to inspire an urge for revenge. Anniversaries of wars that were important to the nation were celebrated, along with the deaths or births of heroes who had fought for the national cause. The French commemorated the victories of Napoleon, and the Germans the Battle of the Nations, which ended in Napoleon’s defeat. In 1913, at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, the authorities organized a great fete – a holiday of national unity – under the pretext of ringing in twenty-five years of Emperor Wilhelm II’s rule. The Russians commemorated Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and the French the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bouvines (June 1914).

Solemn celebrations and shows of patriotism were organized in schools, and negative images of enemies were widely promoted. Hate propaganda was spread by newspaper and school bulletins. Army camps were organized for children and young people, there was drill practice during physical education classes, and military preparation courses were run. All this had a major impact on mental preparation for the conflict. School textbooks taught “good patriotism,” indicating the significance of sacrifice, if the motherland should so desire it. “War is not likely, but it is possible. That is why France remains armed and always ready to defend herself. In defending France we defend the land in which we were born, the most beautiful and abundant land in the world,” we read in a French schoolbook of 1912. One way of mobilizing and educating school-age pupils was mass events, such as the Navy Days in Great Britain, or the German youth festivals.

The priming of nations for war was also crucially affected by a series of crises, beginning with the one caused by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was followed shortly afterward by the Moroccan Crisis in 1911 (the “Panthersprung” in Agadir). When this concluded, anti-French and pro-war hysteria erupted in Germany. The mob called for the Emperor to abdicate, calling him a coward, and demanded that the Chancellor resign from his position. Tensions were further stoked by Belgrade’s “Pig War” with Vienna, Italy’s war with Turkey over Libya in the years 1911–1912, and finally the Balkan War, which infringed upon the existing power structures. The fact that every war brought a new crisis meant that the atmosphere grew increasingly electric and ways of thinking feverish. Biases and mutual grudges intensified, along with mistrust and nationalist phobias. The constant tension was akin to a tightrope walk over an abyss. Each new crisis overlapped with the one before, building the tension until it all reached a climax. At any moment an armed conflict on a greater scale was expected to erupt. This led to a “dry” (today we would say: “cold”) war. The consecutive crises inclined nations to arm themselves on an even greater scale, to “try out” the militarization of their economies and to forge more “defensive alliances.” The disquieted populaces began asking questions about the coming war. “I always thought about the looming war. If it could be avoided,” wrote Daisy Hochberg von Pless in 1911. “In the early winter of 1912/1913 there was increasing talk of the possibility of war between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia... There was quiet turmoil hidden in our country. The wheels of independence were turning feverishly,” recalled the Polish Princess Matylda Sapieżyna. Due to the tension, volunteers swiftly arrived for the Polish and Ukrainian rifle units in 1912–13 in Galicia. When the immediate threat of war seemed to subside, recruitment diminished.

And yet, even all of the above factors need not have sealed the outbreak of a world conflict. Further crises could have come and gone, resolved through established procedures, and the world could have kept on arming itself, continuing to train and parade its armies while war plans reposed in carefully guarded safes. Even with all this going on, it would have been possible to live in peace, though a life of constant tension, from crisis to crisis, from conflagration to conflagration, was certainly not a source of comfort. How many years can one live on a powder keg? Not very long. This is why it should come as no surprise that it was often concluded that, in spite of the risk of war and the lack of certainty as to how things would turn out, an attempt needed to be made. “War [...] was inevitable and unstoppable, as a result of motives that drive states and peoples, like a storm which nature itself must release,” wrote Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski. Thus, if war is unavoidable, there is no point in delaying it. A surgeon would make a similar argument: an operation is the only chance to salvage the health of a patient, and the chance of its success depends on the speed with which it is conducted. “A just and necessary war is no more brutal than a surgical operation. It is better to give the patient pain and get blood on your fingers than to let the illness spread to such an extent that it becomes a threat to you and the world,” wrote British journalist Sidney Low on the eve of the war. War is, after all, simply another means of gaining political aims. Meanwhile, there is what might be called the compulsion of war. All that remained was to choose the date. The bloody attack in Sarajevo of 28 June 1914 appeared to fulfill these expectations, setting off a chain reaction.

Andrzej Chwalba. Born on 11 Dec. 1949; he specializes in the social and religious history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has been a professor since 1995. He has 380 publications to his name, including twenty-two books. He once served as Vice-rector of Teaching Affairs of the Jagiellonian University. He has received many awards for his books, including The History of Poland, The History of Krakow 1939–1945; The History of the World in the Nineteenth Century; The History of the World 1989–2011. He has also published six books in foreign languages: Polen und der Osten, Suhrkamp, 2005; Kurze Geschichte der Dritten Republik Polen 1989 bis 2005, Harrassowitz, 2010; Collegium Maius. A History, 2010; Polsko 1989–2008. Dejiny soucasnosti, Brno 2009; Poljska Nakon Komunizma (1989–2011), Zagreb 2011; Istorija na Trietaja Polska Republika, Sofia 2013.

ENDNOTES

1. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), p. 465.

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

After being subsumed by the Soviet Union during World War II, Estonia suffered greatly during occupation. But one area that the Soviet authorities could not completely control was Estonia’s tradition of “Song Festivals”. Sung primarily in the Estonian language, these choral festivals lasted through Soviet rule, and became the bedrock for preserving Estonian culture. Moreover, this singing tradition spilled over into Estonia’s fight for freedom, as Estonians used song as a peaceful, non-violent means of protest. Estonia’s “Singing Revolution” lasted roughly from 1987–1991 and resulted in independence for Estonians. This paper will assess this period of Estonian history by using survey data and over 30 participant interviews gathered by the authors. These structured, in-depth interviews assess the meaningfulness of the Song Festival tradition and crystallize the role of these festivals in post-independence Estonia. More specifically, the authors also will connect discussion of these song festivals to the social capital literature made famous by Robert Putnam. The authors argue that song festivals and choruses were a significant component of fostering social cohesiveness and civic engagement among Estonians – both native and abroad – and thus served as a bulwark against the intrusion of Soviet ideology.

Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the monumental episodes of the 20th century, resetting the world politically, economically and ideologically. Perhaps the most fascinating turn of events in the build-up to this collapse lies in the myriad of avenues through which revolutionary activity was fomented and spurred throughout the Eastern bloc. From Romania’s very violent turn of events over Christmas in 1989, to Czechoslovakia’s relatively peaceful “Velvet Revolution,” change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union proceeded in very different ways. One of the more remarkable stories of revolutionary activity was that of Estonia’s so-called “Singing Revolution,” an effort by native Estonians to protest Soviet occupation through song. Though Estonia is not the first (nor will it be the last) country to use song as a form of political and social protest, the Estonian experience is germane for what it says about the position of music within Estonian culture and language. In addition, as the authors argue in this essay, music – particularly choral music – was a central organizing tool for Estonian protest. Borrowing from the voluminous work on civic engagement and social capital in the political science discipline, the authors will contend that the Estonian “Singing Revolution” was a combination of cultural re-awakening and political strategy that fostered community activism. Estonian choral music and singing during the Soviet collapse not only rekindled a notion of “Estonian-ness,” but also provided a platform for many individuals who were otherwise not politically active to engage in social and governmental protest.

For this article, over thirty Estonian song festival performers were interviewed, many of whom participated in the political struggle of the mid to- late 1980s. These interviews provide an enriching narrative of Estonian views on song and its relation to social and political change. Moreover, these interviews offer further insight into the differences between Estonian choral protest and other countries’ use of song protest. This matter is particularly relevant given recent musical protests, such as Russia’s feminist-inspired Pussy Riot, and the musically-charged protests lodged by Syrian youth against the Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad (MacFarquhar 2011). In all of these instances, although music was the medium by which grievances were transmitted, the songs were varied in audience, content, arrangement and perhaps most importantly, participants.

This essay is organized into three parts. First, an overview of the Estonian political situation in the 1980s is examined, with special attention paid to the effect of Soviet occupation on Estonian politics and society. Second, the history of the song festival tradition will be analyzed, including interviews with participants. Lastly, the third section links both the political history of Estonia and its history of song festivals to the literature on social capital. Though it is truthful to argue that “singing” was a major catalyst in ending Soviet occupation, the manner in which this unfolded requires further distillation. Thus the third section explores how song choirs became important networks for political and social change within a closed-off environment like the Soviet Union. The authors also will touch briefly on how singing allowed social networks to be fostered across Estonian expatriate and émigré communities in the USA and Europe, and what this meant for the preservation of Estonian culture as a whole.

Occupation and Revolution in Estonia

Estonia’s tortured relationship with outsiders dates back centuries, as it was settled and occupied by countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Russia for roughly 700 years, in what Kyllike Sillaste entitled Estonia’s unfortunate history of “conquest and survival” (1995, 119). However, by 1919, Estonians declared their independence, wrote a constitution, and enacted a democratically-elected parliament. This first “independence period” brought the flourishing of Estonian schools, business and culture, an era that lifted Estonian society to a level comparable with “Western” neighbors such as Finland. Even so, twenty years following independence, in 1939, the dream of freedom was halted. German and Soviet forces used Estonia as one of their theaters of war during World War II, with both militaries taking turns ruling parts of the country. By the culmination of the war, Soviet forces dominated Estonian territory and incorporated Estonia into the Soviet Union. For Estonians, the period from 1945–1953 was especially traumatic, termed by Estonian political scientist and politician Rein Taagepera as the “years of genocide” (Mertelsmann and Rahi-Tamm 2009, 308). “Approximately 8,000 were arrested for political reasons during the first year of Soviet rule” noted Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-Tamm. “Of these, only a few hundred survived” (2009, 310). Anatol Lieven, in his book The Baltic Revolution, argued that the Estonian population had declined by 25-percent in the 1940s, and further speculated that “it is difficult to exaggerate the amount of damage done to the Baltic States by Soviet rule” (1994, 82).

The penetration of Soviet influence into Estonian political and cultural life was particularly galling and unsettling for Estonians. Not only were they unable to control their political fortunes or to possess autonomy over political decisions, but Estonian language and customs were struggling to maintain a foothold. “As early as 1959,” wrote political scientist David Smith, “over 50 per cent of the school-age urban population of Estonia were native speakers of Russian, receiving their education in Russian language schools, where little or no Estonian was taught” (1999, 296). Other scholars estimated that by the 1980s, less than 70 per cent of the population were actually “Estonians,” as years of industrial plans and collectivization campaigns brought growing numbers of outsiders to the region (Sillaste 1995, 122).

As in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe, and throughout the Soviet Union, things began to rapidly change for the people of Estonia in the 1980s. While it is true that economic and political softening brought by glasnost and perestroika augmented changes in Estonia, the tipping point occurred in 1987, over environmental problems related to open-pit phosphate mining in north-eastern Estonia. As political scientist Andres Kasekamp points out, environmental concerns were a catalyst for revolutionary spirit in all three of the Baltic States, and especially in Estonia (2010, 161). However, environmental harm related to phosphate mining was not the only issue, as the mine also sought to employ over 100,000 workers who were not from Estonia (Smith 1999, 297). From 1987 onward, Estonians proceeded down a political path that would radically alter the prospects for future generations. This path included large-scale social activism that rallied native Estonians against what they saw as Soviet and Russian occupation.

From 1987–1990, Estonia formed several new political and civic movements, including the Estonian Popular Front – an organization led by Edgar Savisaar and composed of many reformist communists – the Estonian National Independence Party, a group that argued that Estonians never relinquished their independence to the Soviet Union to begin with, and the National Heritage Society, a “proto-political force” that, among other things, challenged Soviet authority by restoring Estonian monuments and the Estonian tri-color national flag (Lieven 1994, 217–220). Additionally, Estonians took to the street to protest, when, in 1989, they locked arms with Latvians and Lithuanians in a 400-mile long human chain connecting Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, an action known as the “Baltic Chain.” This protest commemorated the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had given the Soviet Union control over the Baltics (Sillaste 1995, 123). By 1990, many communist governments throughout Eastern Europe – in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania among others – had collapsed or were on the brink of collapse. Soviet-occupied spaces such as Estonia and the rest of the Baltics followed suit. In April 1990, Estonia “simply cancelled the Soviet annexation, and declared that Estonia was in a period of transition to full independence” (Lieven 1994, 242). A provisional government was formed around members of the Popular Front and headed by Savisaar.

Not all shared in the independence struggle in 1990, however. Thousands of Russians who feared their own political and cultural extinction formed the group Interfront, and staged a sort of insurgency against the new government, attacking the Estonian parliament building (the Riigikogu) located on Toompea Hill in Tallinn. Savisaar went to the radio broadcast tower in an attempt to alert the public, declaring: “Interfront gangs have surrounded Toompea Castle and are attacking. I repeat – Toompea is under attack!” (Vesilind 2008, 146). Estonians flooded up the hill, chanting for freedom, and surrounded the Interfront group. Remarkably, no one was injured or hurt in the protests and counter-protests. The Russians filed out peaceably, and Estonians returned to their homes.

This episode marked a turning point in the Estonian independence narrative. Estonians remained united behind this cause and let little stand in their way. The following year, in August 1991, the Soviet Union was collapsing upon itself – Gorbachev was removed from power, a coup was being staged in his place, and Boris Yeltsin was moving Russia towards independence. Clumsily, Soviet tanks were still moving in the Baltics, having killed 14 Lithuanians in an effort to take television communications away by knocking out and scrambling their TV tower (Vesilind 2008, 148). The tanks then rolled on into Latvia, and later, Estonia. But, Estonians staged physical and human blockades to protect the tower, and two young, Estonian border policemen stood guard until the Soviets retreated, never to return. Estonia was a free country again.

Methodology

A key component missing from the previous narrative (and existing literature generally), is a substantive discussion of the contribution made by Estonian singing, especially the long-standing tradition of choral music within Estonian society. Ultimately, one cannot fully understand the Estonian independence movement without referencing singing. In 2008, this notion was made famous by James and Maureen Tusty’s documentary The Singing Revolution and Priit Vesilind’s accompanying book of the same name. Though research into Estonia’s choral traditions and song festivals has been advanced by a number of scholars (Thomson 1992, Puderbaugh 2006, Brokaw and Brokaw 2008), The Singing Revolution documentary broadcast the Estonian independence saga to wide and far-reaching audiences beyond academic communities. Not only was there limited distribution of the film in theaters, and thousands of copies of the film sold and distributed to libraries, but PBS (Public Broadcasting System) picked up the documentary as well, airing the story to millions of Americans through their televisions.

Drawing on the inspiration of Tusty’s film, the work done by many scholars on this topic, and the courage demonstrated by the Estonian people in the face of cultural and linguistic annihilation, the authors continued to delve further into Estonia’s singing revolution. In particular, the authors were not only interested in the history behind the singing, but also the effect of this singing in the lead-up to independence. In the following section, Estonian singing traditions are examined, both through secondary research and through 34 semi-structured interviews conducted by the authors via surveys, emails, and face-to-face contact. The interviews were conducted in English, over the course of four months in the Spring and Summer of 2013. All face-to-face interviews were conducted at the LEP-ESTO festival – a convention that brings together native and ethnic Estonians – in San Francisco, California. The interviewees were a diverse lot – from teenage to senior citizens, from Estonian-natives to first- and second-generation people of Estonian heritage residing outside of Estonia, and from veteran choral performers to prideful on-lookers. This diverse selection was culled intentionally, to achieve a variety of perspectives on Estonian singing, and to demonstrate its meaningfulness to the Estonian people.

Before proceeding, the authors must clarify the general use of the words “song festival” in the Estonian culture. In short, there are many different types of Estonian song festivals. The most notable of those forms is the Laulupidu – literally meaning “song festival.” Laulupidu occurs every five years – the last being in 2009 and the next one in 2014. The festivals are the largest gathering of Estonian choirs in the country and typically are the festivals to which our respondents refer. However, there are many other song festivals in Estonia, including the Estonian Night Song Festival (Öölaulupidu), the Estonian Youth Song and Dance Festival, the Viljande Folk Festival, and more recently, the Punk Laulupidu, among others. These festivals occur in the intervening years between the larger, more prominent Laulupidu, though they are no less important to some Estonians.

Singing and Song Festivals in Estonia

Estonia has a rich folklore and storytelling tradition that dates back centuries. The most famous of these stories was that of the mythological giant Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s son), a tale that tells the national story of the Estonian people. But other, less famous, stories began to be collected in the early 19th century. Jakob Hurt, a German pastor dubbed the “King of Folkfore,” persuaded Estonians to begin collecting and writing down the literally hundreds of thousands of stories and tales passed through the generations (Thomson 1992, 15). This ongoing project created a repertoire of Estonian narratives that became crucial to preserving Estonian culture, but also served as a natural springboard to the composition of Estonia-specific songs. During what is known as the “National Awakening” period of Estonian history, poets such as Lydia Koidula constructed a narrative from which future generations of composers would borrow. Koidula’s place in Estonian history is so significant that following independence her picture was placed on the former 100-kroon bank note (Thomson 1992, 76).

Coupling the growth of folklore literature with an already rich tradition in music and choir singing, Estonia began hosting a Song Festival (Laulupidu) in the nineteenth century. The first festival began in 1869 and was organized in part by Johann Voldermar Jannsen, a newspaper publisher who created the Estonian-language newspaper (Postimees) and was also the father of Koidula (Vesilind 2008, 32; Thomson 1992, 75). In the university city of Tartu, and in conjunction with the national awakening, the festival was held in an effort to raise the national consciousness of the Estonian people and to encourage them to embrace Estonian as the official language of the state. “I think that in general the first song festivals were not so much about politics,” said Estonian song festival participant Merit Künnapuu, “than cultural awakening and identity” (Künnapuu, Merit. Survey Interview. 22 February, 2013). Tartu saw 51 male choirs consisting of 845 musicians, with 10,000–15,000 in the audience during the first year of the Song Festival (Raun 2001, 75). Singing came naturally to the people of this small Baltic country; “you get three together and they start singing” said Mari Truumaa, an Estonian-American (Truumaa, Mari. Personal Interview by Authors. 29 June, 2013). The festivals then played out uninterrupted for three decades before Estonia was rattled with revolution and war. The singing resumed during Estonia’s first period of independence from 1923–1938, but was halted due to Soviet occupation and the introduction of communism. The 1938 festival was in fact the last festival that was entirely an Estonian project, “rife with Estonian nationalism” (Puderbaugh 2008, 33)

Thought of as “one of the darkest sides of Stalinism,” the decrease in cultural output and expression is what weakened Estonia the most in the early years of occupation. In typical communist fashion the Soviets fought for “ideological purity” and banned many aspects of Estonian culture including literature and the arts (Raun 2001, 186). What they did not ban at first, however, was soon molded into something that was no longer Estonian in nature, but Soviet-inspired and then Estonian-produced. In this way, literature could be published only if the author was an Estonian Communist Party member (ECP), theatres could produce only Soviet Russian or Soviet Estonian works, and composers were encouraged to create music that reached the masses of people. This same concept was used to neatly package the Estonian song festival tradition into something that was Stalinist in spirit, and as this event encouraged a mass participation it offered the perfect opportunity to establish the new principle of “national in form, socialist in content” (Raun 2001, 188).

Kai Põld, an Estonian born before the Soviet era of occupation and attended every song festival since his childhood, expressed a sentiment that many of his fellow countrymen felt when their twenty-year bout for independence was contested with the onset of WWII: “What can one do when there are one million Estonians and 150 million Russians? What more than wait. So we worked and sang and waited” (Põld, Kai. Email Interview, May 22, 2013). While Hitler began his invasion of Central Europe, the small Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were disregarded by the rest of Europe and left “for 50 years to the barbarian Soviet Union,” as Leonardo Meigas, a veteran of all song festivals dating from 1965, acrimoniously recalled (Meigas, Leonardo. Email interview, 4 July, 2013). Communism had settled effortlessly into Estonia, and with a population of only 1.3 million it infiltrated all aspects of everyday life, making it impossible for the Estonian people to embrace their own cultural heritage and long-enduring traditions.

Many families fled the country during the 1940s, narrowly escaping the desolation the Soviets would reap upon their homeland and its people. Truumaa’s family – for example – lived in the city of Tartu in Estonia, but left for the United States in 1952 after being displaced persons in Germany for six years. Upon her marriage in 1965 she claimed that “at the time there really was no hope of Estonia, at least in my lifetime, to become free” (Truumaa, Mari. Personal Interview by authors. June 29, 2013).

The Soviet Union, however, underestimated the strength and perseverance of Estonians. While their plight was not unique in the grand scheme of war and occupation, their sentiment toward the situation was. Estonians collectively refused to acknowledge their perceived hopelessness with the same pessimism that potentially could have become their downfall, but instead came together as a nation. Instead of feeling guilt that their sons and daughters could grow up knowing nothing beyond foreign oppression, they channeled their energies into fighting using their one strength: singing. While defeating 150 million Russians was unrealistic, so was silencing one million Estonians. Estonia was ready to raise its voice.

“Singing is the best therapy in everything. You can sing about your joy, pain, longing, grief, dreams... and express yourself through music,” said Estonian native Kertu Vallerind, who has performed in every song festival since 1976. “And to do that together with thousands of other singers, it’s such a powerful feeling. It makes you feel that you can move mountains, and you can in your soul!” (Vallerind, Kertu. Email Interview. 7 June, 2013). In late June 1947, following a conscious collaboration with the Soviet government, Estonia was allowed to resume their century long tradition and continue the beloved Song Festival, but with very strict guidelines. This was the first song festival since the 1938 festival, which was a wholly Estonian performance. However, in 1947, Soviet influence on the musical program was apparent to all Estonians.

The repertoire started with God Save the Tsar “A lot was forbidden,” said Vallerind, referring to absence of many Estonian choral classics. But Estonians eluded the Russians by hiding messages in verse. “The censor couldn’t stop you as the message was hidden carefully into the text and melody – through ‘flowers.’ The censor didn’t notice it or they just couldn’t find a proper reason to decline” (Vallerind, Kertu. Email Interview. 4 June, 2013). For many people, it was not the words they were singing or the communist propaganda that united the country, but the feeling of togetherness through choral music. Estonians were able to experience a sense of cultural identity that was not present during the majority of their occupation. “It was a tool that we used to show to the Soviets that they did not manage to kill our culture and spirits and that if we wanted to restore our freedom then there was nothing that would stop us,” said Künnapuu (Künnapuu, Merit. Survey Interview. 22 February, 2013).

Eva Türk, an Estonian born during the end of Soviet occupation, recalled: “My grandmother used to say some decades ago when we were a part of USSR: ‘Attending the festival makes me feel Estonian again...’ I think that this says a lot” (Türk, Eva. Survey Interview. 22 February, 2013). Even so, the 1947 Soviet-influenced festival was not the same as the pre-war performances. First generation Estonian-American Aavo Reinfeldt said that if he had to describe those first festivals “the words I would use would be gray, somber, unified sadness” (Reinfeldt, Aavo. Personal Interview by Authors. 29 June, 2013). As David Puderbaugh argued, the purpose of the festival from the Soviet perspective was to attain three main objectives. The Soviets wanted to create a sense of comfort in the wake of war and devastation, to celebrate the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany, and to show off the Soviet economic and societal advancements made in Estonia (Puderbaugh 2008, 35).

Though the 1947 festival was still shrouded in communist ideology, 28,000 people came to sing and another 100,000 filled the audience, the largest turnout in Estonian history. With the Soviets keeping a close watch on the repertoire, Estonians spent two days singing compulsory songs centered around socialist themes, such as the nobility of hard work and the glorifying of the deeds of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. “It was better to continue our national events than not do it,” said Põld (Põld, Kai. Email Interview. 22 May, 2013). Accordingly, it was when Gustav Ernesaks took the stage that Estonia was exalted for the first time in years. Ernesaks led the choir in “Mu isamaa on minu arm,” a poem written by Koidula during the national awakening movement and a song that is considered the unofficial national anthem of Estonia. Put to a new arrangement, thousands of Estonians sang this song in their native tongue, expressing hope for the future of their homeland through the lyrics. The Estonians sang: Mu isamaa on minu arm // kell’ südant annud ma // sull’ laulan ma // mu ülem õnn // mu õitsev Eestimaa. This translates in English as: Land of my fathers, land that I love // I’ve given my heart to her // I sing to you // my supreme happiness // my flourishing Estonia! The song slipped past the Russian censors and the true message it conveyed was lost in translation.

Ernesaks is arguably the most famous conductor in song festival history, and an enormous statue of him graces the song festival grounds in Tallinn today. Perhaps not surprisingly, during the 1940s and 1950s, some Estonians looked upon Ernesaks with great suspicion, as a sort of Soviet traitor. Someone like Ernesaks would have been among the handful of Estonians permitted to travel throughout the Soviet Union, and his attempt at conducting Sovietthemed material proved problematic for his reputation at the time. “[He] was considered a collaborator,” Põld said, “But nobody told him that he was treated like a national hero, for he started [sic] continuing our song festival tradition” (Põld, Kai. Email Interview, May 22nd, 2013).¹ The following year three conductors were declared “enemies of the people” and arrested. Ernesaks was able to escape arrest and possible deportation because of his high public profile in society, both among the Estonian people and Soviet dignitaries. Still, during the 1950s, the song was banned from the song festival and did not reemerge for a decade (Puderbough 2008, 41).

In 1960, as the Fifteenth Estonian song festival was winding to an end and people were filing out of the song festival grounds, following a repertoire that contained the customary Soviet songs, the opening lyrics of Mu isamaa on minu arm were heard quietly trickling through the audience. A tune that had not been heard publicly in over 10 years quickly picked up with vigor until thousands of Estonians were singing the song that had first struck a cord with the Estonian people in 1869 at the first song festival. The people knew what they wanted and were rebelling in the only way they knew how. One participant recalled: “Why people are still crying, singing ‘Mu isamaa on minu arm?’ Because having homeland is more important than having home. Losing it you can’t buy a new one” (Meigas, Leonardo. Email Interview. July 4, 2013). Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the song festivals continued, each with a mixture of Soviet and Estonian songs. But following the backlash over phosphate mining in 1987, Estonians began to organize more and more public protests centered around their singing culture. A prominent example is the June 4th, 1988 rally, where close to 100,000 people marched and sang songs, working their way from Old Town Tallinn, and weaving down the street toward the Song Festival grounds, about a four kilometer walk (Puderbaugh 2008, 41). Noted Meigas: “In 1988, spontaneous night festivals of young people singing old forbidden songs [fed] our belief and hope to live in our free homeland someday again” (Meigas, Leonardo. Survey Interview. February, 20, 2013). The song protest participants were a diverse lot, ranging from formal conductors, to noted Estonian rock stars like the late Alo Mattiisen. Without sacrificing one life or shedding an ounce of blood Estonia had managed to restore its independence peacefully. Though it would be an overstatement to suggest that song alone brought forth revolution, it is not hyperbole to remark that choral music in some ways saved Estonia. Most Estonians do not deny the importance of the song festival tradition during the Soviet period, nor the challenges it presented to communist authority. “In the Soviet period, under the Russification pressure it was the only legal public way to demonstrate mental and cultural togetherness of a small nation,” said Meigas (Meigas, Leonardo. Survey Interview. February 20, 2013). After the Soviets left and the Republic of Estonia was once again independent, some Estonians worried that the tradition would diminish in its breadth and significance, since there was no longer a direct cause to precipitate the act of engaging in song. “The one in 1990 [song festival], it was like everyone was convinced they would become free...it was a tremendous nationalistic movement,” said Truumaa. “And I thought, well now that everyone is free maybe not everybody is going to participate, oh no! It was raining on the parade, everybody was doing it anyway. We were sitting in the rain. Whenever it started raining everybody put their ponchos on... They said there were over 20,000 singers...” (Truumaa, Mari. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013).

Liina Steinberg, an Estonian veteran of six song festivals, believes the song festival tradition is “the most visible part of Estonian culture.” As she states: “...Estonian music can be enjoyed without knowing the Estonian language – so the song festivals provide everybody with a more tangible example of Estonian culture” (Steinberg, Liina. Survey Interview. February 22, 2013). Türk furthers the sentiment by saying that the song festivals give her “a feeling of being one of many – it is part of my cultural consciousness” (Türk, Eva. Survey Interview. February 22, 2013). This is important as even Estonians – admittedly so – are typically regarded as being a very reserved group of people. In this regard, Künnapuu said: “I think we don’t really appreciate each other that much and we rarely refer to those cultural ties in our everyday life. It seems to me we mostly come together and feel united when in trouble” (Künnapuu, Merit. Survey Interview. February 22, 2013).

Stories like Liina’s, Eva’s and Merit’s were told to the authors in numerous ways by numerous interviewees. One of the key themes that emerges from the authors’ interviews with these diverse individuals of Estonian heritage is the notion of music as a source of collective action, or more broadly, as a vehicle for bringing people together in common pursuits that transcend the songs themselves. It is important, though, to distill what is unique about the role that song played in fostering these larger pursuits in Estonia and for Estonians living outside of their native land. Such an understanding, it follows, will permit a thorough recognition of the sources underlying – and the after-effects of – forms of civic engagement across other cultures. To directly address these matters, the authors turn to a discussion that links the unique traits of Estonian song with existing literature that addresses the notion of “social capital.”

Singing, Engagement and Social Capital

What separates much of Estonian protest music from music in the rest of the world is the use of choruses as the primary framework for musical expression. While it is true that Estonian song festivals occasionally feature solo performances – Tõnis Mägi’s version of Koit is an excellent example – most of the music is structured around the choral traditions of the country. The most rudimentary (and perhaps most important) quality of a chorus is the amount of participation that it engenders. When respondents noted that 20,000 singers would sing all at once this was not an exaggeration. Including the audience, which would frequently join in, over 100,000 Estonians could sing in unison at a song festival. The group-dynamic of choral singing in the Estonian case also helps to make sense of the success and peacefulness of the revolution in the country.

To understand this idea, Robert Putnam’s books Making Democracy Work (1993) and Bowling Alone (2000) provide some insight. Putnam’s work on the concept of social capital was developed in these books, the first about civic engagement in Italy, and the second about declining civic engagement in the United States. Social capital – as he defines it – is “features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (1993, 167). Putnam’s work set off a firestorm of debate in the political science community about the extent to which these social networks impacted politics, and whether increased social capital was, on balance, a healthy component of political communities. While the authors do not wish to delve too far into those debates, we do think the social capital literature has relevancy to this particular project on Estonian choral singing.

In this regard, Matthew Baggetta at the University of Indiana examined in detail the use of choirs as important social networks. In his study of Boston-area (USA) choirs, he argued that choral groups offered “opportunities to interact with others, experience [in] governance, and [connection] with community institutions” (Baggetta 2009, 194). Baggetta also touched upon two other important components of choir groups in his research. First, he noted that choirs create great opportunities for individuals to assert “organizational management,” as member-volunteers often are tasked with organizing and planning choral practices and events (2009, 187). “Choruses are relatively complex managerial undertakings,” Baggetta stated, “with substantial budgets, limited staff presence and significant amounts of volunteer labor” (2009, 189). Second, Baggetta highlighted the collaborative nature of the choral experience. Choirs frequently interact with other musicians (vocalists need instrumentalists, for example) and people of various ages and skillsets. Choirs also frequently perform in the community, connecting not only with other artists but also with people who hold only a passing interest in music (Baggetta 2009, 189).

Choirs in Estonia certainly provide the kind of networking and organizational components Baggetta observed in Boston-area choirs. Survey respondent Viivi Verrev stated that being part of choirs in preparation for a song festival “are great practice in organizing a major event on a tight budget” (Verrev, Viivi. Survey Response. February 25, 2013). Another interesting example of the organizational power of choral groups was relayed by Leonardo Meigas, an aforementioned singer: “Edgar Savisaar, the newly elected Prime Minister, managed to get a message on the radio saying ‘Toompea is under attack. I repeat, Toompea is under attack!’ I left my frightened and crying nine-month pregnant wife waiting at home and I rushed to Toompea, being really ready to meet a conflict. But when I got there, I saw a crowd of perplexed and downcast Russians already descending with their red flags...” Meigas explained that this event happened on a Tuesday, which has been a traditional rehearsal day for amateur choirs who practice in schools, theatres, and other venues with large recital halls. “That’s why many angry Estonian choirs quickly reacted,” Meigas clarified. “Nearly a thousand men got through in 15 minutes to Toompea to protect our newborn independence!” (Meigas, Leonardo. Email interview. July 31, 2013).

Singer Hanna-Liina Vosa, arguably one of the most popular performers in Estonia, got her start singing traditional songs in a song festival choir. While she has had a successful career in theatre, starring in many big name musicals such as Grease, My Fair Lady, and Les Miserables, and even having an audience with and performing for Queen Elizabeth II, she has not forgotten her roots, and performs in many Estonian festivals, most recently singing at the 2003 song festival and the 2009 Tallinn Days in Moscow. “It means a lot to people who are from smaller places in Estonia because they practice, they rehearse the songs all year and then they come together and it kind of expands, but they feel like they really give it their all,” said Vosa. “Because they feel like their voice counts even though there are 20,000 people singing” (Vosa, Hanna-Liina. Personal Interview with Authors. June 29, 2013). Respondent Kerstti Kittus agreed. She noted: “...Choir singing is an important part of social life outside of the big cities like Tallinn and Tartu” (Kittus, Kerstti. Survey Response. February 23, 2013).

As Künnapuu stated, the song festival is an event that has the power to bring everyone together, “[...] no matter the age, gender, economic background; it’s all about the love for the country and to feel that connection and sense of belonging” (Künnapuu, Merit. Email interview by authors. June 5, 2013). In the same breath, Eva-Tiina Põlluste, an Estonian veteran of nine song festivals, noted: “In my opinion Estonians are quite individualists, but sometimes you would like to feel that people around you are similar and thinks and likes the same. So that is what unites us on the song grounds and we can feel that we are the same nation and we breathe in same rhythm” (Põlluste, Eva-Tiina. Survey Interview. February 22, 2013).

Especially following the fall of the Soviet Union when Estonia was free to sing as she pleased, the people needed an event that was going to unite them again as a country and make them forget the evils they had faced to reach that point. As Reinfeldt stated:

Estonians’ spirit does come alive during song festivals because everything aside there is nothing to be afraid of. When you’re afraid you don’t want anyone to overhear what you’re saying. When you’re afraid you don’t want anyone to read your letters. But everyone knows how to sing. Everyone knows how to hold hands. Everybody knows what it means when your emotions sort of take over. And imagine the power of thousands not thinking of negative things, but positive (Reinfeldt, Aavo. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013).

Even those Estonians that moved abroad following independence have not lost their cultural roots, with many returning year after year for the song festival. Besides coming home every five years to sing for their country, those Estonians that have moved abroad often join choirs in other countries, like the European Choir of Estonians that was founded in 2007. One member, Mairis Minka, grew up during Soviet-era Estonia but currently lives in Luxembourg, where she was a part of a few different choirs before going back to her roots and joining an Estonian-based group. “I have been living in Luxembourg ten years and there was a period of my life where I was searching for some choirs but I didn’t match with these Luxembourg choirs,” said Minka. “I was singing there but I didn’t feel well there, it’s not at all the same singing Vivaldi, it doesn’t touch you” (Minka, Mairis. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013). “SILLER” is another choir that seeks to unite Estonians living abroad, translating in English to “a group of Estonians living in Finland.” Co-founder Maria Lume helped start this choir in 2006, because much like Minka in Luxembourg, no matter where they are, “singing is in the blood of all Estonians.” While this group is based in Helsinki, their objective has always been participation at the song festival in Estonia, which they “do not consider an obligation, but rather a privilege” (Lume, Maria. Email Interview. May 27, 2013).

What makes this Estonian tradition all the more unique is the staying power it had with the people. “In Estonia the folk dance and singing is not dying out, it’s getting more and more popular, while in other countries it’s not popular,” stated Tuuli Solom, a member of the Choir of European Estonians who grew up during Soviet-era Estonia, but now lives in Germany. “That’s the phenomenon in Estonia. Even though we do these traditional things we try to modernize it also, it will not stay in the old fashioned way” (Solom, Tuuli. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013). Upon gaining independence, some feared that the song festival would lose popularity, especially with the younger Estonians being a generation removed from the devastation of war and foreign occupation. As Trummaa said of the post-independence festivals: “And I thought, well now that everyone is free maybe not everybody is going to participate” (Truumaa, Mari. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013).

Once again, Estonians impressed their adversaries by capitalizing on their newfound independence. The song festivals were considered vital, and a way for the people to sustain their optimism for the future and to promote much needed nationalism among the smallest of the Baltic countries. As Solom emphasized, by modernizing the festival and composing new melodies and songs, such as Rahu (a pop song performed by the famous contemporary group Ruja) and Isamaa ilu hoieldes, (an upbeat rock song written by the late Mattiisen), the tradition has not been left stuck in the nineteenth century. “I think it’s delightful to see how eager the young generation is to perform and wear national costumes,” said Steinberg. “Some smaller cultures face the problem that the younger ones don’t want to carry on the cultural traditions of the nation.” This does not seem to be true, however, in the Estonian case.

Proof of this assertion lies in the story of Estonian orchestra conductor Jaan Ots, who was born in 1988, and is currently a rising star within the Estonia orchestral community. Too young to remember the major strife between Soviet Russia and Estonia, Ots feels the passion of the song festival every time he attends. “Music-making together, and so many people together, and good music and good emotions that unite people and this feeling that you get... It’s such an international feeling, it’s not only about Estonians. If you can create a good energy with singing and making music, that’s the most important thing I think” (Ots, Jaan. Personal Interview with Authors. June 29, 2013). “I am not worried about the younger generation,” added Künnapuu. “Maybe 100 years from now [the] song festival will be just another social event but right now it is so much more” (Künnapuu, Merit. Email Interview. June 5, 2013).

For now, the song festival is not diminishing in value or representation. “Knowing the historical, political and cultural meaning of these festivals to Estonians and taking into account that during such a festival about ten per cent of our nation is present,” said Steinberg, “you feel and see history in making.” (Steinberg, Liina. Email Interview. June 5, 2013). An Estonian respondent named Maria, who asked for her last name to be withheld, is a veteran of six festivals. She believes the song festival still helps the people unite in a very special way, and said: “There is a hint of nostalgia in song festivals when singing songs had a political impact, but there’s also a lot of joy and it seems that song festivals help people believe in a better tomorrow (Maria. Survey Interview. March 12, 2013). Added Ots: “There is a kind of atmosphere that you cannot find anywhere else. Maybe you can but it isn’t in any way special (Ots, Jaan. Personal Interview by Authors. June 29, 2013).

Künnapuu best summarized the significance of the song festival and choral singing for Estonians both near and far:

These days a lot of people go abroad to work, study or just have an adventure. And many stay abroad. But our song festival is something that always brings people back. No matter the age, gender, economic background; it’s all about the love for the country and to feel that connection and sense of belonging. There are always a lot of expatriate Estonians going to song festivals who emigrated during the cold war. Their life is not in Estonia anymore but I think every Estonian is at least a little bit of a nationalist at heart. And with a population of 1.3 million we need that something that will always bring us together. (Künnapuu, Merit. Email Interview. June 5, 2013).

Conclusion

Estonia is not the first country to use song as a form of political and social protest.² For example, in her study of the French Revolution, Laura Mason uncovered how a revolutionary song culture was a critical piece of understanding that period of French history. As she noted about Paris at that time: “It was a city that encompassed a cacophony of voices as revolutionaries and royalists filled streets... giving speeches, rioting and throughout all, singing” (1996, 2). The same was true in Cuba in the 1950s, as Fulgencio Batista’s army clashed with the bourgeoning communist movement led by Fidel Castro. All the while, however, Cuban music exploded in popularity both at home and abroad. “Batista’s final years in power are thus associated simultaneously with pleasure and political repression, hedonism and terror” (Moore 2006, 27). Cuba is a particularly interesting case as artists both hailed the coming revolution with songs such as “En eso llego Fidel” (That’s When Fidel Arrived), but also grew to be critical of the restrictions placed upon them, opting for exile rather than for censorship (Moore 2006, 60–67).

Dozens of other examples also could be mentioned, including the folk and rock protests of American music in the 1960s or the recent punk protests of a band like Russia’s Pussy Riot. Music is a wonderful medium for rallying people to engage in activities in which they might not otherwise partake. Valerie Samson’s study of music during the Tiananmen Square protest represents a case in point. “[...] Music was a significant factor in politically arousing protestors to such a degree that they increasingly engaged in risky behavior,” Samson wrote. She also noted that music “enhanced [...] audience participation. [T]hese performances were auditory realization of the abstract concept of democracy” (Samson 2012, 518, 527).

Of course, not all politically-charged protest music is necessarily uplifting or constitutive to healthy communities or democratic practices. This is certainly true of the plethora of neo-Nazi bands in places like the United States, Germany and England. Consider the Croatian band called Thompson. While their music and lead singer Marko Percović Thompson are widely popular on Croatian radio, he has been accused of glorifying the Ustaše, Croatian soldiers that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II (Muršič 2012, 191). The popularity of his music coupled with on-going political and religious tensions in that area, demonstrates how song also can rally communities in very divergent directions.

The Estonian case is special because the music was, as one might infer from the interviews discussed herein, almost exclusively uplifting. It was also inclusive of many participants from different walks of life, a hallmark of what Putnam defines as “bridging” social capital (Putnam 2000, 22–24). More specifically, the songs united people around themes that were universal, like nature, or even the honey bee. For example, the classic song festival tune Ta lendab mesipuu poole roughly translates to “He flies toward the beehive,” and is a song about the return of bees to the hive. Some bees are lost along the way, but others have returned home. The subtext is obvious to an Estonian, but the theme of returning home is a universal one.

To draw a quick illustration in closing: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song Fortunate Son is an appropriate example of 1960s protest music that emerged in the United States around the time of the Vietnam War. The song details how many fortunate sons were able to avoid serving in Vietnam by being well-connected, or having wealthy fathers, while thousands of lower – and middle-class people were sent overseas. The song was direct, blunt, and for many, divisive and scandalous. While it would be a mistake to assume that everyone in Estonia unites around the themes of the song festival – ethnic Russians living in Estonia have their antipathies, for example – the content and melodies of the songs are designed to bring everyone together, and during the independence period from 1987–1991, this was true for many. After countless emails, conversations, interviews and surveys conducted by the authors, the primary realization of this research is not only that Estonians love to sing, but also that, for many, the act of singing represented a central organizing force in their lives. And thus, singing is a critical part of understanding the evolution of Estonian independence.

Joseph M. Ellis. An Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wingate University in Wingate, NC (USA). His research interests are in comparative politics and post-communist transitions, specifically in the former Soviet Union. He has written extensively on the Baltic States and flat taxes, and more recently, on counter-intuitive forms of social capital, such as pick-up soccer and choral groups. He received his BA from Winthrop University (USA) and his MA and Ph.D from Temple University (USA). He would like to thank the Wingate Summer Research Grant fund for supporting this work and Hemant Sharma, Ph.D at the University of Tennessee, for his editorial advice.

Keeley Wood. An undergraduate student at Wingate University majoring in Communications. A native of Sanford, NC (USA), she was awarded a Summer Research Grant from Wingate to conduct research on Estonian song festivals. In addition to her academic prowess, Wood is a three-time All-Conference and a two-time All-Region performer in cross-country. She is also a Capital One Academic All-District athlete.

ENDNOTES

1. This has some parallels to the story of the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the preeminent composers of 20th century and someone who played on both sides of the ideological divide. On the one hand, Shostakovich was a favorite composer and propagandist of Stalin and the Soviet government; on the other hand, his music had a sub-text that went deeper than the surface level, and even was critical of Soviet form. “To Shostakovich, music was the true language of multiplicity, which always expressed the truth, never lied, yet was always subject to interpretation,” wrote Jennifer Gertsel. “With music he felt he was able to say everything and admit nothing” (Gertsel 2012, 156).

2. Estonia’s neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania, have very proud and storied singing festivals and choral traditions also. Though the focus of this paper was only on Estonia, a number of works have addressed the importance of song in the lives of Latvians and Lithuanians. See Janis Chakars (2010) “Work Life in the ‘Singing Revolution’”, John Ginkel’s “Identity Construction in Latvia’s ‘Singing Revolution’”, and Guntis Šmidchens (2013) The Power of Song, which compares Estonia’s, Latvia’s and Lithuania’s singing cultures.

List of References

Books and articles

Brokaw, Alan J. and Marianna Brokaw (2008) “Identity Marketing and the Case of the Singing Revolution,” Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing 8(4), pp. 17–29.

Gertsel, Jennifer (2012) “Irony, Deception and Political Culture in the Works of Dmitri Shostakovich,” in Ian Peddie (ed.) Music and Protest (London, UK: Ashgate Publishing), pp. 154–156

Kasekamp, Andres (2010) The History of the Baltic States (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan), pp. 160–167.

Lieven, Anatol (1994) The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence. (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 82–220

MacFarquhar, Neil (2011) “In Protests, Syrians Find the Spark of Creativity,” The New York Times, December 19, p. A10.

Mason, Laura (1996) Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 2–17.

Mertelsmann, Olaf and Aigi Rahi-Tamm (2009) “Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisted,” Journal of Genocide Research 11(2–3), pp. 307–322.

Moore, Robin D (2006) Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 27–67.

Muršič, Rajko (2012) “Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Encounters with Popular Music and Human Rights,” in Ian Peddie (ed.) Music and Protest (London, UK: Ashgate Publishing), pp.191–212

Puderbaugh, John (2008) “How Choral Music Saved a Nation: The 1947 Estonian National Song Festival and the Song Festivals of Estonia’s Soviet Occupation,” Choral Journal October edition, pp. 29–43.

Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster), pp. 22–24

Putnam, Robert (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 167

Raun, Toivo (2001) Estonia and the Estonians. (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institute Press).

Samson, Valerie (2012) “Music as Protest Strategy: The Example of Tiananmen Square, 1989,” in Ian Peddie (ed.) Music and Protest (London, UK: Ashgate Publishing), pp. 518–527.

Sillaste, Kyllike (1995) “Conquest and Survival: An Outline of Estonian History,” World Affairs 157(3), pp. 119–123.

Smith, David (1999) “The Restorationist Principle in Post Communist Estonia,” in Christopher Williams and Thanasis Sfikas (eds) Ethnicity and Nationalism in Russia, the CIS and the Baltic States (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press), pp. 287–321.

Thompson, Clare (1992) The Singing Revolution: A Political Journey Through the Baltic States (London, UK: Michael Joseph), pp. 7–15.

Vesilind, Priit (2008) The Singing Revolution: How Culture Saved a Nation. (Tallinn, Estonia: Varrak Publishers), pp. 32, 148

Interviews:

• Anonymous, “Maria,” Survey response to Authors, 12 March, 2013.
• Kittus, Kerstii , Survey response to Authors, 23 Feburary, 2013.
• Künnapuu, Merit , Email message to Authors, 5 June, 2013.
• Künnapuu, Merit , Survey response to Authors, 22 February, 2013.
• Lume, Maria , Email message to Authors, 27 May, 2013.
• Meigas, Leonardo , Email message to Authors, 4 July, 2013.
• Meigas, Leonardo , Email message to Authors, 31 July, 2013.
• Meigas, Leonardo , Survey response to Authors, 20 February, 2013.
• Minka, Mairis , Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.
• Ots, Jaan , Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.
• Pold, Kai , Email message to Authors, 22 May, 2013.
• Polluste , Eva-Tiina, Survey response to Authors, 22 February, 2013.
• Reinfeldt , Aavo. Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.
• Solom, Tuuli . Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.
• Steinberg, Liina , Email message to Authors, 5 June, 2013.
• Steinberg, Liina , Survey response to Authors, 22 February, 2013.
• Truumaa, Mari , Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.
• Turk, Eva , Survey response to Authors, 22 February, 2013.
• Vallerind, Kertu , Email message to Authors, 7 June, 2013.
• Verrev, Viivi , Survey response to Authors, 25 February, 2013.
• Vosa, Hanna-Liina , Personal interview with Authors, 29 June, 2013.

 


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.

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

Ewa Piłat: You came to Poland right after completing law studies in Rome in 1958 as a correspondent of Il Giorno. As a correspondent for RAI Television you reported on such things as the birth of Solidarity. For years in the European Parliament you had been a spokesman for Polish affairs and interests. Fifty-five years in and around Poland must have given you unique insight into assessing whether we have achieved as much as we could have after toppling communism?

Jas Gawronski: That all depends on the perspective through which we evaluate the changes that took place in Poland. Despite all its horrors, communism had its good sides as well: it toughened the nation up and brought out the best and the worst character traits in people. It verified a person's value. Pope John Paul II highlighted that fact in a conversation I had with him. As we were musing over which part of Europe had benefited the most from the unification, he said it was the West. Thanks to communism, people in the East were stronger, he maintained. They added a breath of fresh air, energy and morality to Europe. Following that digression I can answer your question. Poland has made superb use of its historic opportunity thanks to the quality of its people. It has also taken advantage of its geographic opportunity by virtue of being situated in this part of the world.

On 11 October 1982 the European Parliament adopted a resolution you had proposed on nominating Lech Wałęsa for the Nobel Peace Prize. A year later, almost to the day, on 5 October 1983, the Nobel Committee announced it was awarding the world's most prestigious prize to the leader of Solidarity. When preparing that resolution, did you foresee the great historic consequences that act would have for Poland and Europe?

No, I did not. Back in 1982 I did not foresee what the consequences of that effort might be. First of all, I wasn't sure I could get the resolution adopted. If it were only a question of voting, it would have been simpler. But preparing the resolution required collecting a set number of signatures. Deputies had to want to make the effort and be convinced about a given issue. I myself was surprised that 223 MEPs signed the resolution. At that point, I wasn't sure what the Nobel Committee's decision would be as there were many candidates in the running.

Without the Nobel Prize could Lech Wałęsa have brought about the collapse of communism?

I think he could have. It has been said that the Nobel Prize had been a kind of protective umbrella for Wałęsa, because the communists couldn't treat a Nobel laureate the way they normally dealt with opponents. However, I believe an even bigger security umbrella was provided to the Solidarity leader by John Paul II. The Nobel Peace Prize in turn gave him, Solidarity and the changes taking place in Poland world-wide publicity.

Had you known Mr Lech Wałęsa before preparing that resolution?

Yes, quite well. We met in 1980 in Gdańsk. Later we conversed in Warsaw. One time he came to collect me at Gdańsk airport. We got in the vehicle and there were cars of secret police in front of and behind us. We couldn't shake them off. It was then that I realised how easy it was being a foreign correspondent in Poland and how difficult the life of an opposition activist could be.

You were the first journalist who succeeded in conducting an interview with John Paul II. Many times you have emphasised the Polish Pontiff's contribution to the toppling of communist rule. Was it greater than that of Lech Wałęsa?

Both were indispensable to the overthrow of the communist system. One could not have achieved anything without the other. Not long ago I took part in a conference which raised the question: which of those two 20th-century heroes will be better remembered 50 years from now? Most of those in attendance pointed to the pope. I however would vote for Wałęsa. There have been many popes and no-one knows when some new one might eclipse ‘our’ John Paul II. But there was only one leader of the many-million-strong trade union movement which overthrew the criminal system.

In the 1990s, when the first effects of the transformation and Poland's European aspirations became visible, you said that for Poland, membership of the European Union was more important than NATO. Why was that?

I continue to hold that view. In a situation where there is no real threat to the state, NATO does not mean a whole lot. But being in Europe means a great deal: for the Polish economy, culture, science and the mentality of Poles – one could go on enumerating.

Four years ago, after five terms in the European Parliament, you took leave of that institution, but to Jan Gawroński the question of a common Europe remains close at heart. From the sidelines it is often easier to see the virtues and vices of EU organs. What tasks in your view should today's MEPs be dealing with?

The most urgent matter is to tackle the economic crisis and resolve financial problems. In the long run, MEPs will have to work on people’s mentality and convince them to want to regard themselves as Europeans. Today there is no sense of community, only a sense of belonging to an institution that ensures specific economic benefits. That's not enough to predict a good future for the European Union.

Jas Gawronski – Italian politician of Polish ancestry; up till 2009 an MEP belonging to the European People's Party which affiliates politicians with moderate conservative, Christian Democratic and democratic views. His father, Jan Gawroński, was the last pre-war Polish ambassador to Austria, his mother, Luciana Frassati-Gawrońska, – a social and conspiratorial activist (she escorted the wife of General Władysław Sikorski from occupied Warsaw to the West). His grandfather, Alfredo Frassati, founded the daily La Stampa, and his mother's brother, Pier Giorgio Frassati, was elevated to the rank of blessed, the penultimate step to Catholic sainthood.

Interviewed by: Ewa Piłat, Dziennik Polski, 24 May 2013

Interview is published courtesy of the May 77 Society

In 2013 we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Volhynian massacre - anti-Polish genocidal ethnic cleansings conducted by Ukrainian nationalists. The Volhynian massacre was one of the topics of a seminar Common Memory - fragments of presentations by Grzegorz Motyka, Piotr Tyma and Andriy Portnov below.

The massacres took place within Poland's borders as of the outbreak of WWII, and not only in Volhynia, but also in other areas with a mixed Polish-Ukrainian population, especially the Lvov, Tarnopol, and Stanisławów voivodeships (that is, in Eastern Galicia), as well as in some voivodeships bordering on Volhynia.

The time frame of these massacres was 1943−1945. The perpetrators were the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists−Bandera faction (OUN-B) and its military wing, called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their documents show that the planned extermination of the Polish population was called an “anti-Polish operation.” (http://www.volhyniamassacre.eu/). The 11 July, 1943, is regarded as the bloodiest day of the massacres,with many reports of UPA units marching from village to village, killing Polish civilians.

On 17 June 2013, the History Meeting House was the venue for the international seminar Common Memory dedicated to the Polish, Ukrainian and German perspective of dramatic events from the 20th century history of Central and Eastern Europe. The event was organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, the Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the History Meeting House. Presented below are fragments of the panel entitled SECOND WORLD WAR – HISTORICAL REMEMBRANCE OF GERMANS, POLES AND UKRAINIANS, which placed a spotlight on the memory of the Wołyń massacre.

Dr Grzegorz Motyka (Jagiellonian University)

I will try to explain what the Second World War meant for Poles and Ukrainians and highlight some elements of remembrance of the wartime period. In reference to the overview of the conference, I would also like to discuss the problem of the Wołyń massacre.

First of all, the Second World War is an essential fragment of the national collective memory for both Poles and Ukrainians, for its historical events have shaped the current borders of both countries. Both nations have a sense that their wartime history demonstrates special significance and that they have suffered extraordinary injustice. Moreover, both countries attach major weight to their contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany – as we know, Poles cultivate the memory of the operations of Polish intelligence units, while Ukraine stresses that Ukrainians were the largest nationality group after Russians in the Red Army.

Differences begin to surface when we discuss resistance movement operations and the public attitude to war. An important element of the Polish memory is the Polish fight against two totalitarian regimes – Poland’s enemies included both Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union, spawning the cult of the Accursed Soldiers, which has been growing in recent years. From the Ukrainian perspective, the problem seems to be even more complex. Eastern parts of Ukraine continue to cherish the vivid memory of Soviet guerrillas fighting against Germans, while Western Ukraine demonstrates a sometimes apologetic attitude to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which continued its ruthless campaign against the communists after the war. Ukraine is now witnessing a fierce discussion; its main talking points include: should the country grant veteran rights to former UIA troops and did they actually fight the  Germans? To be frank, most controversies are stirred by the post-war operations of the UIA and its attitude to the communist system.

I would like to take this opportunity to highlight another important issue, often confused in Poland and probably in Ukraine. Ukrainians who condemn UIA operations should not be confused with people who share the Polish view on the Wołyń massacre. Individuals who believe that the UIA was a group of fascist criminals may be also convinced that the Wołyń massacre is a chapter of history that should not be discussed.

The ethnic cleansing known as the Wołyń massacre continued from 9 February 1943 until 18 May 1945. The operation masterminded by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army took approximately 100,000 Polish lives. Polish historians agree that it was a methodical campaign demonstrating characteristic features of genocide. It was undoubtedly one of the biggest crimes against Polish people during the Second World War. Therefore, and this point has been raised by Dr Kazimierz Krajewski, it is the last crime not to be embraced by history textbooks. To identify the reasons for such omission, we should answer the following question: how can one factually and unemotionally describe the event as it unfolded? Contrary to Katyń, Auschwitz or the Warsaw Uprising, where it is easy to pinpoint the crime and the guilt of the aggressors, the Wołyń massacre saw citizens of the same country slaughtering each other. Another factor which makes penning a fair textbook description even more difficult is the fact that Ukrainians actually suffered major injustice in the Second Polish Republic.

And this is the essence of the current discussions being held by Polish historians. It is true that studies on the Wołyń massacre have only been conducted for twenty years, yet there is a consensus that a fundamental set of facts has been sufficiently defined to address the narrative of this event. The situation is different in Ukraine – the evaluation of the Wołyń massacre in  public debate is ambiguous. Some Ukrainian historians fail to negate the organised character of the campaign and merely discuss the legal qualification of acts committed by the UIA. A more common notion of the Wołyń massacre depicts it as a people’s rebellion which evolved into a Polish-Ukrainian war, with both sides of the conflict committing similar crimes. A historical Ukrainian website defines the Wołyń tragedy as ‘mutual ethnic cleansing.’ At the same time, many recent publications argue, often in a very ahistorical way, that the crime was not a methodical operation.

Undoubtedly, attempts at describing the Wołyń massacre as a certain type of social revolution in Ukraine reflect the struggle to maintain the ethos of the UIA as a heroic guerrilla movement. Obviously, this phenomenon casts a shadow on Polish-Ukrainian relations as it leaves little room for history and fully embraces mythology. Having collected key data, Poland is now witnessing the beginning of the ‘textbook process’, while in Ukraine, with minor exceptions, we are seeing attempts to expand the accountability for the Wołyń massacre, an act of desperation considering the records we have accumulated which dispel all doubts.

Piotr Tyma (the Association of Ukrainians in Poland)

I would like to present a perspective slightly different from the dominant ‘Poles-Ukrainians’ perspective which focuses on the historical remembrance of Polish citizens of Ukrainian nationality, or Ukrainians who live in the borderland between Poland and Ukraine. I will try to describe the perception of the image mentioned by Dr Grzegorz Motyka as seen by this community.

Long before the anniversary of the Wołyń massacre, our community initiated a discussion whose leitmotif was how to address the artificial periodisation, which was, by the way, introduced by the title of Dr Motyka’s book From the Wołyń Massacre to Operation Vistula (Od rzezi wołyńskiej do akcji „Wisła”), and to what extent those two events brought together reflect Polish-Ukrainian issues, especially in the context of the borderland population. In my presentation, I will capitalise not only on my own experiences but also studies published in Ukraine to prove that they fail to embrace the memory of Ukrainians from Polish borderlands despite its immense impact on the remembrance of citizens of modern Ukraine.

Recently, a novel about the life of a resident of Carpathian Ruthenia has been published in Zakarpattia. There is one scene in the book when Carpathian Sich POWs are being marched by Hungarians who have just seized the region. One of the soldiers asks his commander, a former Ukrainian Galician Army soldier: ‘What is going to happen to us? Will the Hungarians put us in front of a firing squad?’ The Commander calmly responds: ‘Not Hungarians … but they are handing us over to Poles.’ Published in the 1990s, records of the 2nd Division of the General Staff prove that these were not isolated cases or events steeped in literary confabulation. The documents I have mentioned describe the sabotage operation Crowbar whose objective was two-fold: on one hand, to destabilise Czechoslovakia and on the other, to undermine the Ukrainian influence in Zakarpattia and stifle attempts to establish the Ukrainian state. In my view, operations of Polish sabotage units in Zakarpattia and Zaolzie were no different from German sabotage operations on the eve of the Second World War (the Gleiwizt incident).

The second aspect which is present in both Ukrainian narratives and Polish remembrance, but is never analysed in the context of the root causes of the conflict, is the fact that after the collapse of the Ukrainian state in Zakarpattia, troops of the Border Protection Corps executed Galician volunteers joining the ranks of the Carpathian Sich on the newly established Polish-Hungarian border. Recent exhumations in the Verecke Pass have revealed the bodies of five hundred people shot in a single site. I have mentioned it because these developments give rise to a whole new narrative, which has also been stressed by Prof. Wolfgang Templin; a narrative which sees the source of the conflict in the events of 1928 and early 1939, and not in those of 1 September 1939.

Dr Grzegorz Motyka mentioned the mythologisation of the Ukrainian underground movement. I have an impression that a similar approach has been recently adopted in Poland in relation to the interwar period. In an article recently published on an Internet portal, Dr Lucyna Kulińska declares that the Polish state actually introduced a policy towards Ukrainians as late as in 1938. Everyone who studies the history of this period realises what sort of acts were committed by Polish troops as part of efforts to reinforce Polishness in the eastern territories of the pre-war state. It also seems to me that these elements should be objectively and factually analysed as part of reflections on the Second World War, not in the context of the Ukrainian quest for justification, but in reference to all drivers of the conflict.

I would also like to address the Ukrainian discussion about Wołyń. I have the impression that the Polish perception of its discourse is simplified. Representatives of the current government coalition are determined to put the spotlight on Polish victims – a vital element of the discussion among other numerous issues related to the complicated historical remembrance of the Ukrainians. Giving in to a certain mindset, Poles project their notions into the Ukrainian discussion which is far more diversified.

For the sake of a common discussion, we should agree that the Second World War brought suffering to a number of different communities, not only in terms of the number of victims, but also losses in material culture and the extinction of traditions. Our dialogue will always be imperfect if we fail to adopt this assumption – not only because the Ukrainian party is evading responsibility for the Wołyń massacre, but also because its Polish counterpart continues to see certain issues as taboo.

Dr Andriy Portnov (Humboldt University / Historians.in.ua)

My presentation is intentionally provocative, as I believe that contrary to diplomatic language, the language of provocation gives everyone a better insight into the essence of the problem.

There is no fundamental consensus in Ukraine on the interpretation of the Second World War, which is often overlooked in Poland. What we are dealing with is an enormous fragmentation of the memory about it, whereas the dominant discourse does not focus on the Bandera-led Ukrainian Insurgent Army, but the Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Shards of this memory form two-way relations, which sometimes compete or reinforce each other. There is the memory of the UIA, the memory of the Red Army, the memory of occupation (not only the German one). Narratives which are neglected in this context include the distinctive memory of the Crimean Tatars, with additional problems posed by the memory of Jews. Finally, we have the Polish theme, subordinated to other elements in the current debate, often mentioned in the wider context of the UIA and the anti-Soviet resistance movement.

Nevertheless, the two dominant narratives include the post-Soviet (or neo-Soviet) and the nationalistic one. In this context, both parties claim their rights to interpretation of the Wołyń massacre. The nationalists see it as a roadblock hindering the development of the national narrative and thwarting the prospects for dissociation from the Soviet tradition. In the neo-Soviet discourse, the theme of the UIA and the Ukrainian underground movement boils down to Wołyń and certain anti-Jewish campaigns, which distorts the social context of the theme. I am also convinced that there is no understanding in Poland for this aspect of the Ukrainian debate.

It also seems to me that the discussion about the Wołyń massacre is now only a Polish-Ukrainian dialogue. Everyone in Poland has heard about it, while few people in Ukraine are aware of the Wołyń massacre. This topic has never been discussed in countries such as Germany, France or Israel. I am convinced that it would be beneficial to have our discussion expanded and publicised on the international scene. We ought to set the Wołyń massacre in the broader context of the war in Europe, pre-war developments and erstwhile ideologies.

To describe the contemporary Polish-Ukrainian debate, I will use the metaphor of the discussion of Ivan Vyshenskyi with Piotr Skarga. Both of them may have apt remarks, yet they are using a different language. We can clearly see it on our website where the text written by the Polish historian, who apparently uses the same terms, is set in a wholy different context that the reply of the Ukrainian historian. It is not a way to conduct a bona fide dialogue as it only reinforces certain stereotypes and political threads.

Finally, I would like to present several ideas concerning the discussion dedicated to the Wołyń massacre – they may appear to be trifling and obvious, yet they are often not articulated directly in various publications and debates. First of all, the criminal nature of the anti-Polish campaign in Wołyń does not mean that the Second Polish Republic had no problems with its nationality policy. Secondly, the contextualisation of the Wołyń massacre is not a denial of this crime, although, obviously individuals who negate the slaughter try to guise their efforts as contextualisation. Thirdly, analysing the discussion itself, we should ask ourselves: are we seeking adequate analytical tools or political gains? Fourthly, the history of the UIA should not be reduced to the Wołyń massacre – just like this chapter of history should never be excluded from the annals.

Interview with Professor Lavinia Stan: The Romanian example has shown that demands for radical accountability can lead to a situation in which hardly any account settling occurs.

Andrzej Stankiewicz: What is transitional justice, especially in our part of Europe?

Lavinia Stan: This is an attempt to settle accounts with the legacy of a dark and gloomy past. The countries of our part of Europe have had a difficult Nazi and communist past. In Romania, this included crimes committed during the revolution, and in former Yugoslavia – during the civil war.

But this is an entirely different fate, a different kind of gloom. Does any common denominator, therefore, exist when it comes to settling accounts with the past?

There are practices and processes that have been common to nearly all the region's countries. It is another matter whether this has resulted from a mutual flow of ideas or taken shape independently. Those common areas pertain to politics, public debate and the legal situation. In most cases account settling has involved judicial proceedings. Access to secret police files was provided. The issue of restitution of illegally taken-over property emerged, although at times little has come of it, as in Poland's case.

Our region's specific feature has been vetting – one of the most controversial instruments of justice in the transformation period. Another important phenomenon has been memorialisation – the destruction of some monuments and their replacement with others, as well as a change of symbols and street names.

You are studying the influence of civil society on account settling with totalitarian systems, and focus on the perspectives of three different groups: victims, the intellectual elite and the totalitarian elite (‘nomenklatura’).

Nearly everyone wants to regard themselves as victims of the former system. But not all of us were victims. Most people supported the dictatorship through their passivity. But how many people of my generation will admit it?

Each of these groups – true victims, the system's dignitaries and intellectuals – perceive justice of the transformation period differently. Let's take Romania. Victims demanded radical vetting, putting secret informers of the Securitate on trial and sacking them from their jobs. To people wronged by the regime, vetting regulations were never sufficiently severe. They wanted to entirely eliminate people of the ancien régime from public life. Punishing collaborators became a symbol of justice to them. Such demands emerged soon after the collapse of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu in the Timişoara Proclamation of 1990. These, of course, were never fulfilled by the political class, which in Romania was in a large part rooted in the former Communist Party.

In Poland the former democratic opposition was divided to a greater extent. A portion of the right-wing politicians demanded vetting, whilst centre-left politicians were opposed.

In Romania such harsh rhetoric by the regime's victims resulted from the way the dictatorship was overthrown – in bloody revolution. We lacked ‘round-table’ talks. Because of the bloodshed, the regime's victims did not want dialogue with their former oppressors, and it boiled down to a case of ‘we or they’. At the same time, the Romanian example has shown that demands for radical accountability can lead to a situation in which hardly any account settling occurs.

You ascribe none too flattering a role to intellectuals, accusing them of agreeing to some measure of account settling while blocking attempts to bring the dictatorship to account.

In Romania intellectuals played a significant role because some of them were dissidents, whereas in our country there were few such people. We do not have a civil society; hence nothing like Solidarity ever arose in Romania. After the revolution, intellectuals became very influential. It was they who made public opinion aware of the demands on which accountability was based. But mindful of the victims, intellectuals always softened the demands.

Subsequently, it turned out that some of the intellectuals had a disreputable past by virtue of having collaborated with the regime. Intellectuals politicised account settling and diminished public support for transformation solidarity.

The third group comprised Communist Party dignitaries, people attached to special services and other beneficiaries of the former system. In most of the region's countries they retained significant influence on public and political life for years.

When I initially became involved with transitional justice, my research focused on groups advocating account settling. But in Romania, I saw a different situation with my own eyes.

One of the most vociferous groups were tenants residing in property that had been illegally taken from its former owners. To make things clear, these were not poor workers or rank-and-file hirelings of socialism, but representatives of the former regime's elite. Very quickly they organised themselves, acted very effectively and blocked the restitution of property to the heirs of their former owners.

They convinced politicians to legally safeguard their interests including the right to continued residence in flats confiscated during the communist era and their purchase in the event that their former owners had no heirs.

Perhaps there are countries in our region where transitional justice is only a pretence?

Even in Romania, which has done less in many areas than other Central European countries, there has been clear progress in the realm of transitional justice. In spite of everything, some real estate is being returned, and this process is far more advanced than in Poland. Restitution of the property of the biggest religious denomination, the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the Greek Catholic Church is moving forward.

Which country is the most advanced in terms of account settling?

The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states have done the most to settle accounts with the past. In Romania and Bulgaria there are regulations on the books enabling account settling, but life is what it is, and a great deal still needs to be changed. Albania and the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia have achieved the least.

What about Russia?

Russia is regressing compared to the Gorbachev era.

When will the administration of transitional justice be completed in our part of Europe?

It will not end as long as a significant portion of society continues to lodge claims that the authorities are unable to fulfil. In Poland, the question of property restitution must be resolved. This issue has far-reaching legal and financial consequences, and thus account settling with communism cannot be completed without resolving it. In Romania, authentic vetting continues to be a problem, Up until 2006, secret files were controlled by the new security services that were largely comprised of former Securitate officers, as there was no verification of special services in Romania. Access to these files continues to be limited. Please do not ask whether vetting makes sense this late in the game – this is an entirely different matter. However, the victims do need a symbol.

Do you support settling accounts with former Communist Party leaders by means of court proceedings?

I know that discussions are also under way in Poland as to whether a dictator who has peacefully handed over power should be absolved of his past transgressions. Personally, I believe dictators should be put on trial if there is evidence that they broke the law.

Interviewed by Andrzej Stankiewicz (Rzeczpospolita)

>>Professor LAVINIA STAN is a Romanian political scientist with books and articles to her credit. She is employed at the Centre for Post-Communist Studies at Canada's St Francis Xavier University. A year ago, together with Dr Nadya Nedelsky, she published the Encyclopaedia of Transitional Justice, the first comprehensive work devoted to the accountability of dictatorial regimes.

Settling accounts with Nazism and communism, even with apartheid and the dictatorships of South America has become a scholarly discipline in its own right. Its distinguished researchers met during a seminar in Warsaw.

By Andrzej Stankiewicz

Research on the mechanisms of what has come to be known as transitional justice got under way in earnest at the turn of the 1990s, when communism in Central-East Europe was headed for the dustbin of history.

Transitional justice is the broadly conceived settling of accounts with receding totalitarian systems, carried out by new democratic authorities. This goes beyond legal regulations alone such as bringing criminals to justice, and also involves social phenomena accompanying the collapse of regimes. At present, this field of study, touching on law, history and the social sciences, encompasses research on the consequences of the collapse of all the world's 20th-century dictatorships, including de-Nazification and de-communisation. It also involves vetting and access to regime files, rehabilitation of political prisoners and restitution of nationalised property.

Plaque with the word ‘murderer’

Researchers of transitional justice met in Warsaw at an international conference titled ‘Legal Frames of Memory. Transitional Justice in Central and Eastern Europe’ (27-29 November 2013). The conference was an element of the Genealogies of Memory project launched in 2011 and carried out by European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.

‘Genealogies of Memory is one of those important scholarly projects seeking to come to grips with the memory of Central-East European totalitarianism and the transformation period,’ said deputy culture minister Małgorzata Omilanowska while opening the conference. ‘The problem of justice and related legal issues are the key to understanding many processes taking part in the countries of our region.’

Does a single model of transitional justice for countries leaving dictatorships behind them exist? ‘The situation of each country is different, but there are similarities,’ said Professor Adam Czarnota, a legal expert who lectures at universities in Poland, Australia and Western Europe.

The professor has only just returned from Argentina, a country in the process of healing its wounds following the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. He shows a snapshot he took during a visit to Buenos Aires. It shows a yellow plaque with black lettering hanging on a roadside post, indicating that a ‘murderer’ lives in this house, a collaborator of the former military regime involved in crimes.

This is evidence of what can occur when transitional justice is lacking and victims take things into their own hands. From that perspective, how does he evaluate transitional justice in Poland? ‘Property restitution and penal accountability of representatives of the former regime is still needed,’ believes Professor Czarnota.

Symbols, not money

At the centre of transitional research, both victims and victimisers are studied following the collapse of a regime. According to researchers, there can be no talk of justice until the victims are rehabilitated and the state reimburses them for the losses they sustained at the hands of the dictatorship’s functionaries. Professor Christiane Wilke of Canada's Carleton University warned in Warsaw that justice not rooted in the rule of law can become distorted and deteriorate into revenge against victimisers.

Professor Mark Osiel of the University of Iowa called attention to the way of memorialising regime victims used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Based in Costa Rica, it was set up in 1979 to settle accounts with Latin American regimes. ‘The Court seeks to restore the memory of victims by means of proper court rulings. It orders the rehabilitation of victims' memory by publicly honouring them and through apologies made by the state. It also orders changes in school textbooks,’ Osiel explained. ‘Latin America is perhaps making the greatest effort to change collective memory.’

The American professor called attention to yet another matter: research on transitional justice has shown that former victims regard financial assistance as improper and at times downright suspect. In his view, it is far better to honour victims symbolically.

An unquestioned authority on transitional justice, Osiel is the author of several fundamental works on the subject. He advised prosecutors in the case against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and on the prosecution of genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Generals to the barracks?

Researchers disagree as to whether prosecuting dictators who have given up power such as Pinochet and Jaruzelski is proper. ‘I recall the worldwide reaction to Pinochet's detention in London upon a motion of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in connection with murder and torture charges. Even former Polish dissidents such as Adam Michnik were opposed. Because it becomes known what your future holds when you lose power,’ Jiří Přibáň, a Czech professor from Cardiff University, explained.

Professor Adam Czarnota recalled that in May the leader of the Burmese opposition and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi told him they did not want to sentence the junta generals but only send them back to the barracks.

But all the discussion participants agreed that settling accounts with a regime looks different in every region of the world. It depends whether a system collapsed amid violent revolution, through the peaceful hand-over of power or – as in the case of Germany and Japan – resulted from a lost war. The latter instance was referred to by Professor Czarnota as ‘victor's justice’, as the victorious powers imposed their order on the vanquished.

According to Professor Czarnota, with the exception of the Baltic states, there has been no transitional justice in the countries of the former USSR. It is no coincidence that the churches of Western Christianity essentially dominate in countries where transitional justice processes have taken place.

Ukrainian Yaroslav Pasko form Donetsk State University admitted: ‘In Ukraine such social will is lacking. This is the result of an underdeveloped civil society. In our country there is no structure that promotes a departure from post-Soviet experiences and sentiments.’

Polish model in Tunisia

Conference participants set the countries of our region up as examples for states making the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Deputy justice minister Wojciech Węgrzyn emphasised that account settling in the countries of the former Eastern bloc has incurred smaller social and economic costs compared to states in, for example, Latin America.

Recently, Poland has even become something of an exporter of knowledge on ‘justice of the transformation period’. Last year, Polish NGOs, backed by the Foreign Ministry, organised training sessions devoted to justice in the transition period for Tunisians who have been trying to build democracy following the Jasmine Revolution at the turn of 2011.

While other Central European countries initiated lustration before Poland did, none consider it an entirely successful process.

Although more than two decades have passed since the collapse of communism, settling accounts with the old system is anything but complete. This is true regardless of the nature of the revolution: a ‘velvet’ one as in Czechoslovakia, negotiated as in Poland and Hungary or brutal and bloody as in Romania. The lack of complete and credible documentation is the most obvious reason almost everywhere. While the burning of the Polish secret police’s files in Pasikowski’s Pigs is only a movie scene, it is quite close to what actually happened. Developments in the other Soviet bloc countries were no different; just think of the piles of scattered documents filmed by Western journalists in the back yard of the demonstrator-occupied Stasi office in Leipzig.

Dossier game

There was a temptation to use more or less credible documentation against political opponents during the fight for power in post-communist countries, especially in the 1990s. As a consequence, lustration was deprived of its role in dealing with the past and instead created the impression of being a ‘dossier game’ serving the purposes of the powers that be. While in Poland these clashes are symbolised by the ongoing dispute regarding Lech Wałęsa’s past, almost all former Soviet bloc countries have had their share of alleged informers, including the Czechs, who were the first to initiate lustration, and the Germans with their apparently model lustration legislation and the so-called Gauck Office.

Countries, various groups and different institutions have all failed in conducting a complete and consistent lustration process. This includes churches, which the previous system attempted to fight (and infiltrate). Poland’s Catholic Church symbolically completed its lustration at the end of the previous decade but there were no major consequences. Elsewhere, for example in post-Soviet states, no attempts were made to conduct a credible lustration of the local Orthodox Churches. In Bulgaria, it was not until 2011 that the church hierarchy reluctantly agreed to lustration (not surprisingly since, as it soon turned out, the majority of synod members during communism had collaborated with the secret police).

Conducted soon after reunification, lustration in the former GDR was for a long time considered relatively complete. Germany, however, was different because the democratic legislation of West Germany was extended to the former German Democratic Republic, with all the consequences. Established in 1990, the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives, with a staff of 1,600 (referred to as the Gauck Office after the first commissioner) is still very much in demand. Since 1992, two million people have requested access to the files. Initially the office was to continue until 2011, but the German parliament has extended this period by another eight years.

While the office has been relatively successful and has blocked the careers of former Stasi collaborators and agents at federal level, it has failed at state level in the east of the country. As an example, in Brandenburg’s Landtag every fourth left-wing (Die Linke party) MP has had a spell of what could be qualified as collaboration with the Stasi. Past informers have been found in the police and among Western politicians. In addition, some fifty people with a record of working for the secret services are employed at the Office for Stasi Archives and more than 500 work for various federal agencies. More than two decades into the process, some say that complete lustration in a country where every fiftieth citizen has had some contact with the secret political police is in fact impossible. What was Germany’s universally praised lustration process has turned out to be quite superficial, a claim made by Uwe Müller and Grit Hartmann, the authors of the book Vorwärts und Vergessen!.

Agents and confidants

The Czechs were the first among the former Soviet bloc countries to take lustration seriously, screening as early as 1989for StB (Security Service) agents and collaborators. Prior to the first free elections in June 1990, political parties could run checks on their candidates, thus blocking the political careers of many. Czechoslovakia’s new parliament adopted formal lustration laws in October 1991. One applied to all citizens and the other to those serving in uniformed services. If a person was proved to have collaborated with the communist secret police, they were excluded from posts in public administration, public offices, the army, police and state-owned enterprises.

Early on there were legal and interpretational problems. The Constitutional Court ordered a change in some of the clauses. It was found that some people described as ‘candidate’ or ‘confidant’ in secret service documents may not even have known that agents were using them as a source of information. Following their formal adoption, the lustration laws were to stay in effect for five years. However, just as in all the other postcommunist states, this was much too soon and it was clear that more time was needed. The lustration law in the Czech Republic has indefinite duration.

There were scandals involving people from the front pages. Many were prosecuted following the 1992 publication by journalist Petr Cibulka of a list of 220,000 people from the StB archives. Just as with the Polish Wildstein’s list, the problem was that it included former spies and those of interest to the secret police. With no equivalent of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, the mistakes were difficult to correct. It was not until 2007 that the Czech Republic established the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTRCzR).

The Slovaks took a different approach when they established their own state. From early on, Slovak politicians, especially on the left of the political spectrum, were wary of lustration. The joint Czechoslovakian lustration law expired in 1996 and was not followed up by Vladimir Meciar’s HZDS government. The Nation’s Memory Institute (UPN) was not established until 2002 under a right-wing government. Eventually, it was decided that lustration statements were not mandatory, and even if someone is proved to have had a secret police past, moral stigma aside there will be no legal consequences (e.g. exclusion from public office). Gaining access to UPN archives is relatively easy.

Neither were the Hungarians very enthusiastic about dealing with the past. Despite the militant mood among right-wing groups during the collapse of communism in 1989, Hungarians took a long time to adopt lustration laws. The Alliance of Free Democrats had its proposals, as did the first non-communist government of József Antall. Adopted in 1994, the first act offered a relatively mild treatment of former agents. Not only were secret police collaborators kept safe from any serious sanctions, but also legislators wanted to keep communist security service files secret for as long as 30 years. Due to objections raised by the Constitutional Court, the final version of the law was not ready for another two years, to have finally expired in 2004.

Astonishingly, the governing radically anti-communist Fidesz party is reluctant to address the topic of lustration. Some analysts believe that this is due to the fear of possible blackmail due to intense infiltration of the opposition during the 1970s and 1980s. In a recent bid to revisit the ‘agent’s act’ in June this year, the Hungarian Parliament again failed to pass the bill. This time government coalition MPs abstained.

Secret Collaborator politician

Romania was equally slow with its lustration legislation. With strong post-communist influences, the first governments were in no hurry to deal with the past. It was not until 1996 that the right-wing government of Emil Constantinescu started work on Act 187, a law dealing with Securitate (Ceausescu-era security service) agents and collaborators. Passed three years later, the law turned out to be ineffectual. While data about confidants’ pasts were to be disclosed, there would be no consequences. It was up to voters to decide whether people discredited in the past could hold elected offices. As a result, many a former secret police collaborator is pursuing a political career in Romania. While the agent exposure process gained some impetus after 2006 with pressure from president Traian Basescu, the screening of several hundred people a year compared to several hundred thousand former secret police collaborators does not seem like an effective way of dealing with the past.

As we can see, lustration involving painful consequences for former communist secret service collaborators is merely a demand voiced by former opposition groups. Despite the common belief that the new political elites of Germany and the Czech Republic were most consistent in their lustration policies, the process failed even there. What may come as consolation is that while Polish lustration is criticised for being weak and inconsistent, the majority of the countries in our region have achieved even less in dealing with the shameful past of the communist era.

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

For a quarter of a century we have sought to memorialise the victims of communism by erecting monuments and opening museums. But at times it seems that the most important things continue to be left unsaid.

Despite the Institute of National Remembrance operating at full capacity, it cannot win against nature. Defendants usually avoid justice, through death or for reasons of old age. Had the Institute of National Remembrance been formed ten years before, and had judges party to the lawlessness of the Polish People’s Republic been duly charged, justice would probably have had a better chance.

Institute of National Remembrance Prosecutions

As of October 2013, Institute of National Remembrance judges closed proceedings in 12,457 cases. Over a period of ten years, a total of 305 cases were filed against 469 individuals. 131 were convicted, with as many as 129 for communist crimes. Proceedings against 13,562 defendants were discontinued because of the statute of limitations. Nonetheless, prosecution is not over. Last year, as many as 1,252 new proceedings were initiated, 704 of which were in cases relating to communist crimes. During the same period, Institute of National Remembrance prosecutors filed as few (or perhaps as many) as 10 cases against 12 defendants.

Prosecuting crimes, communist crimes in particular, is but one of the aspects of coming to terms with the Polish People’s Republic’s past (and of the Institute’s work). A list of examples of the work performed during recent weeks follows, as reported by the Polish Press Agency.

• (18/11) Following a preliminary examination, the Institute of National Remembrance defined the area to be searched in the hope of identifying the graves of Home Army soldiers Danuta ‘Inka’ Siedziko wna and Feliks ‘Zagon czyk’ Selmanowicz at the Gdan sk Garrison Cemetery, in the vicinity of a prison where both had been sentenced to death after prolonged and cruel interrogation.
• (15/11) In the case of Stalinist military prosecutor General Marian R., aged 94, charged with having unlawfully deprived 17 detainees of freedom in the years 1951–1954, the Regional Military Court in Warsaw withdrew the majority of charges by virtue of the 1989 amnesty, and a number of other charges due to the statute of limitations. The Institute of National Remembrance is set to file an appeal. Following the so-called Gomułka period of political thaw, R. was chief military prosecutor of the Polish People’s Republic, then chairman of the Polish Football Association, and director general of the Office of the Council of Ministers in the 1980s.
• (21/10) The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg concluded that it cannot assess the 1990–2004 Russian investigation into the Katyn massacre, as Russia ratified the European Convention of Human Rights only in 1998, i.e. eight years after the investigation had begun. The judgment received heavy criticism, including from Professor Witold Kulesza, former head of prosecution at the Institute of National Remembrance, who said that ‘the court had an opportunity to add something of a postscript to the judgment of the Nuremberg Trials by confirming that the Katyn massacre had been committed by Russia, which today is charged with the duty of classifying the crime in international law as genocide. Let me add that the Institute of National Remembrance is conducting its own investigation into the Katyn massacre, the outcome of which largely depends on the files held by Russia. To date, the authorities there have failed to provide Poland with a complete set of documents.’

Live Fire Fight

I cite the Strasbourg judgment in the Katyn case to prove that seeing justice done is an uphill struggle, even outside of Poland.

This is shown in the ruling of the Regional Court in Warsaw in the December 1970 case. Over eighteen years of trial, the number of defendants has shrunk from twelve to three. That in itself is cause for a major charge to be brought against today’s Polish judiciary. The court acquitted former deputy prime minister of the Polish People’s Republic Stanisław Kociołek, while sentencing two commanding officers of troops responsible for crushing the December 1970 worker protests to two years of suspended imprisonment sentences. Concurrently, the legal classification of charges was commuted from issuing a command resulting in the manslaughter of several individuals at the Gdan sk and Gdynia Shipyards to participation in an assault resulting in death with the use of ‘dangerous objects’, the dangerous objects in question being rifles loaded with live ammunition. In her justification for commuting the charges the judge, Agnieszka Wysokin ska-Walczak, declared as follows: ‘Responsibility for participation in battery resulting in death does not require blame to be individualised; the relevant article of the Polish Criminal Code extends to fights and well as assault threatening human life and health.’

The legal structure resulting in Polish People’s Army officers having been convicted for participation in battery resulting in death (Article 158 § 1–2 of the Polish Criminal Code), while probably easier for evidence-related reasons, dilutes the perpetrators’ accountability.

Maciej Bednarkiewicz, the lawyer representing the victims in the December 1970 trial, who announced his intention to file an appeal, told the Rzeczpospolita daily that he expects the Appeals Court to offer an appropriate assessment of the Polish People’s Republic under criminal law, as this is the last moment to do so. The President of the Institute of National Remembrance shares this opinion. In March 2012, he called on the individuals with access to knowledge of events qualifying as communist or Nazi crimes to come forward and testify before a commission (the Ostatni Świadek – Last Witness campaign). The campaign yielded the initiation of investigation proceedings in 38 cases.

The Lost Decade

You might well ask why so late? And why has Poland been so slow to prosecute communist crimes? Maciej Bednarkiewicz, a lawyer with ample experience in political trials, believes that three factors have contributed to deficiencies in justice against officials of the Polish People’s Republic: that in the wake of 1989, they only handed selected files over to the new authorities; that the current Polish Republic and its authorities have not been sufficiently persistent in bringing criminals to trial, and have suffered a shortage in support; and that the 1981 imposition of martial law or the Polish People’s Republic have never been judged in political categories, as was the case in Germany.

‘The primary obstacles encountered by Institute of National Remembrance prosecutors are legal in nature: doubts as to the statute of limitations for communist crimes,’ adds Dariusz Gabrel, director of the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.

The fundamental issue is that, in the resolution of May 25, 2010 (Reference No. I KZP 5/10), the Supreme Court interpreted provisions of the Institute of National Remembrance Act with regard to the statute of limitations for communist crimes, concluding that the Institute of National Remembrance does not have the capacity to prosecute crimes carrying a penalty of up to three years of imprisonment.

‘There are factual problems as well,’ highlights Gabrel, ‘such as the passage of time: the memory of witnesses dims, after many years it becomes impossible to identify the victims, and there are difficulties with collecting evidence. In the 1990s, it would have been easier to prosecute the perpetrators of communist crimes, but parliament only began dealing with the issue in late 1998 by establishing the Institute of National Remembrance.’

‘Officials from the Office of Public Security and Security Service have used the occasional argument that they felt unjustly treated; the Institute of National Remembrance is prosecuting them, they are facing charges of torturing an innocent human being, and yet, they say, this human being had been tried and sentenced by a court of law. Why, then, should they be treated any differently to judges in facing criminal responsibility for alleged lawlessness,’ says Professor Witold Kulesza.

This brings me to the role of the prosecutors and judges of the Polish People’s Republic.

Judges with Immunity

Poland has not seen the sentencing of any prosecutor or judge for judicial crimes comprising the trying and sentencing of innocent individuals recognised as opponents of communist authorities, despite the fact that more than 100 officials who tortured these innocent individuals in person have actually been tried and convicted.

It is thus difficult to claim pure coincidence. What usually happens resembles the Katowice case: the local branch of the Institute of National Remembrance was investigating communist crimes consisting of the abuse of power by prosecutors and judges who under martial law in 1981/82 had tried Solidarity Trade Union members, sentencing them to imprisonment. These Solidarity members were convicted for acts which were not illegal under the law, making it obvious that the issue was one of political repression. The Institute of National Remembrance applied to the respective courts (including the Supreme Court, as one of the judges had been a Supreme Court judge, currently retired) to remove the respective prosecutors’ and judges’ immunity, allowing them to be tried under criminal law. Not only did the Supreme Court refuse the institute’s motion, on December 20, 2007 it resolved that criminal courts had been forced to apply the Martial Law Order in retrospect. As the 2007 resolution was entered into the Register of Legal Statute, lower-instance courts are currently treating it as binding interpretation.

‘When as a co-author of the Institute of National Remembrance Act I was consulting it with German prosecutors appointed to prosecute cases of lawlessness in the German Democratic Republic, they envied the institute’s investigation authority,’ recalls Professor Witold Kulesza. ‘But they also pointed out that commencing any investigation in the late 1990s, ten years after the collapse of communism, is too late for the democratic state to judge the crimes in question. They told me that we were just beginning a process they were about to complete. I must admit the bitter truth that my German colleagues were correct.’

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

For a quarter of a century we have sought to memorialise the victims of communism by erecting monuments and opening museums. But at times it seems that the most important things continue to be left unsaid.

The concept of the ‘museum’ has a long and convoluted heritage. It is generally held – and no-one has described it better than Krzysztof Pomian – that it all began with the collections of oddities in the Renaissance. There, in fascinating disorder, lying side by side, were minerals, seashells, ancient coins and drawings. In time, collectors of paintings and coins concluded that it would be better to tidy things up to better exhibit their collections. Collectors of drums and masks from the Southern Seas, entomologists, hunters, lovers of maps, copper engravings, book-plates and side arms followed suit.

But there also exists one of the oldest trails of human remembrance: the preservation of famous battlefields and massacre sites, places where kings duelled and gathered. There are separate trails leading across specific mountains and through olive gardens to places where mortals met deities and where all of Europe's once common historia sacra unfolded.

Much closer to our contemporary thinking is the notion of memorialising elements of daily life to show to the posterity the entire civilisation of their ancestors rather than just their most outstanding achievements. This idea arose in Scandinavia, with the development of skansens (open-air museums and collections of historical structures). Exotic villages and temples, reconstructed for World Fairs by colonial powers proud of their subjects, competed with (and certainly came out victorious against) windowless Laplander huts.

But they provided as much knowledge about the world as the old German-born merchant Mincel did when lecturing a shop assistant in his broken Polish in a scene from the 19th-century Bolesław Prus novel The Doll.(‘See vas ist in dis drawer. Es ist Zimmt or cinnamon. And ven do ve need cinnamon? In soups and desserts ve need cinnamon. And vas ist cinnamon? Er ist de bark from dis one tree. And ver do dis one tree live? In India lives dis tree. Look on de globus – here lies India. So gif me cinnamon for a tenner...’). It wasn't until the mid-20th century that museum curators and managers began giving thought to ways of conveying other cultures in a consolidated manner within a limited time and space.

Cast-iron corpses

Those for whom memorialising everyday life under communism for posterity is close at heart have tried all these means and formulae. Small towns attempt to lure tourists with ‘collections of oddities’ such as amusing signs saying ‘Attention farmers! Wash your eggs at the procurement stations’ or the humorous labels on cheap fruit wines. The cast-iron corpses of former monuments lie in the grass in parks on the outskirts of big cities (Memento Park in Budapest) or even behind royal residences such as Mogoşoaia Palace, which once belonged to the rulers of Romania. Great art museums have separate rooms for grim propaganda paintings, and collectors of A2-sized posters greatly fancy communist-era appeals for vigilance and productivity. To show the ugliness of daily life under communism, here and there between the Elbe and Danube yet another flat in a tower block is adapted and fitted out with a wall unit, PVC flooring and a yearbook of the magazine Woman and Life on the table. (In Warsaw a similar skansen can be found on Grochowska Street.) But it isn't easy to complete the furnishing: the vintage artefacts now cost a fortune on auction sites.

Time and again a titanic notion arises to bring it all together and create a kind of ‘total museum’ of the epoch. This should not only show the annals of the system and highlight its victimisers and victims, but also explain the mechanics and conditions of totalitarianism while offering the visitor a wealth of details. Probably the boldest project of this type has been SocLand, created over the past decade or so by enthusiasts led by Czesław Bielecki.

The scope and fantasy of this project are truly impressive. It was to have been situated beneath Warsaw's Parade Square and, thanks to an ingenious trick, would have ‘subordinated’ the huge Stalin-era Palace of Culture, symbolically reducing it to the size of one of the other period exhibits. This was also a judgement-of-Solomon-style solution to the insoluble dispute between the advocates and opponents of demolishing the Palace of Culture. But the reasons behind its failure included the scope of the project, as shown by the visualisations, combined with the pettiness of Warsaw's city-hall officials. But dreams of a museum of communism have not disappeared. Evidence of this was provided in mid-November by the authorities of the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, who have come up with the idea of turning a large part of their city covering an area of more than 120 hectares into a museum of the Soviet Union. However, the internet is probably the best-suited medium for a project of this type. A certain American foundation, whose co-founders were Zbigniew Brzezin ski and Vaclav Havel, has been working for fifteen years or so to create a similar ‘virtual museum of communism’.

The snap of the bolt-lock

But what of those who seek the truth about the past and need tangible evidence, even if they are not allowed to touch it? Such people will sooner or later make it to several Central European museums ranging from the Teror Haza (House of Terror) in Budapest to the KGB Dungeon Museum in the Estonian city of Tartu. They share one thing: both are housed in old, converted security service buildings where prisoners were incarcerated, interrogated and sometimes killed.

The originators of the KGB Dungeon Museum, the Museum of Genocide in Vilnius, Romania's Museum of Remembrance in Sighet, and even the more modest Leistikowstraße Memorial in Potsdam have followed in the footsteps of the victims of Nazi totalitarianism. Warsaw's former Gestapo headquarters in Aleja Szucha as well the infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz have been turned into museums of Nazi terror. The reason is partly because no ‘socially beneficial’ use could be imagined for these places other than bearing witness to past atrocities, but above all because this role was deemed the most meaningful.

A question remains as to the devices curators can use to recreate the atmosphere of horror and violence. Some elements such as a prison's very look and feel are always effective. Whether climbing the rattling metal stairs of Sighet or crouching low in the 1.5-metre-high dungeon in Andrassy Avenue in Budapest, everywhere it is equally stuffy, cramped and threatening amid the snap of bolt-locks being closed, eye-wearying bare light bulbs and beds of boards. The interrogation rooms are the same in Budapest and Vilnius, with massive oak-veneer desks confiscated from some ‘enemy of the people’, pink-rimmed NKVD hats near their edge and interrogation lamps shined in the prisoner's face. In such a setting, the question asked by Polish writer Marek Hłasko inevitably returns: ‘Are the scoundrels shown in films imitating the real ones, or is it the other way round?’ When we sit on a chair meant for an interrogated prisoner, we can easily imagine being on the set of Ryszard Bugalski's film Interrogation.

The creators of the memorial in Tuol Seng, recalling the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, seem to have taken things the furthest. Only a few years ago were they persuaded to abandon a map of Cambodia made of victims' skulls. But, all in all, doesn't the silence and mounds of hair at Auschwitz cry out the loudest?

Killing fields

This aspect of communism – not violence against the individual but genocide, whose victims were entire social or ethnic groups – is easiest to evoke by means of a museum exhibition in Russia. On the islands of the Gulag Archipelago, prisoners' hair was not shorn with a view to stuffing mattresses. But maybe a stretch of a railway embankment, to which the corpses of forced-labour-camp victims were added to improve its stability in permafrost conditions, would suffice. And next to it a barracks with narrow beds of boards, a tin bowl, and a torn quilted jacket. Such crude reminders suffice if we look at the faces of visitors leaving the former Nazi German extermination camp at Majdanek in Poland or Washington's Holocaust Museum.

But no such collection has been created and it is doubtful whether one ever will be. This in itself is very meaningful. Beginning in the late 1980s, several monuments have been erected in Russia, mainly through the efforts of the Memorial association. Usually they have taken the simplest (albeit most eloquent) form of a commemorative boulder, the most famous of these standing outside Moscow's Lubianka prison and former KGB headquarters. Among the best-known exceptions are the sculptures of Ernst Nezvestny. One of them titled ‘Mask of pain’ was erected in Magadan in Asiatic Russia; and one in Elista in Russia's Kalmyk Republic is dedicated to the victims of forced exile.

And what about museums? Even the most modest ones? These can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. Usually on a wave of pro-perestroika enthusiasm, local museums would set aside a room containing a few photos, photocopied documents and rusty pick-axes. But the museum in Vorkuta tells more about Russian historical memory than volumes of research ever could. There, side by side, is an exhibition devoted to a labour camp theatre (it looks like things weren't that bad after all!) and a display case proudly highlighting heroes of the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia).

But efforts continue. In her book Gulag Remembrance, Zuzanna Bogumił compiled a list of probably all known attempts to create makeshift semblances of museums dedicated to communism. In the village of Kuchino, several barracks of the Perm-36 labour camp have been preserved and exhibitions have been set up in them. A small museum has been opened in Yagodnoye, and several display cases have been set up in Solovki. Young people from the Perm section of the Memorial association have for years been trying to safeguard the ruins of the Stvor labour camp on the River Chusovoy. And that's about it! That's about it in a country covering one-sixth of the earth's surface. Nearly two decades ago, Tomasz Kizny photographed the ‘road of death’, or what was left of the Salekhard-Igarka railway line, built by Gulag prisoners, and remarked that woodworm and permafrost would finish it off. But the terror was hardly limited to the Arctic Circle. It is estimated that the ‘Ukrainian killing fields’ in Bykovnia contain the remains of over 100,000 people, the victims of the 1937 Soviet wave of terror as well as murdered Polish officers. This very site was alluded to in a poem by Janusz Kotański:

the way to the kyїv road
is shown by a sign
with the word ‘memorial’
behind it are wooden stakes
adorned with red stars
after a few kilometres
one passes amid
rectangular hills
overgrown with young woodlands
(...)
a woman standing there
of middle age
begins to silently
weep in despair
the hilly terrain
overgrown with pines
stretches over an area
of a dozen hectares

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

Interview with Dr Stanisław Tyszka

Adam Tycner: Does the fact that the Czech Republic managed to carry out reprivatisation result from the Czech political class having a different attitude to communism than Poland?

Stanisław Tyszka: Property restitution was similar to lustration (vetting and decommunisation) in that it was one of the ways to reconcile the communist past and restore justice. This was successfully carried out in the Czech Republic, because the anticommunist current was victorious there, whereas in our country it has failed utterly. In Poland, the political changes were the earliest to take place in the region. When the Czechs voted on the first reprivatisation bill, we still had an interim parliament (the Contract Sejm) dominated by the Communist Party. There was a widespread conviction among our influential politicians that in exchange for a share of power it was necessary to let the communists retain control over the economy.

At the end of 1991 there was no Contract Sejm. The opposition had come to power.

Yes, but if we look at the other countries in the region, we see that the most important period was just after 1989. On a wave of public enthusiasm, it was then possible to reconcile communism and implement reprivatisation (the restitution of nationalised property). In Poland, these first moments of freedom were lost, and instead of focusing on the restitution of property, the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki began privatisation. The Bielecki and Suchocka governments didn’t rush to adopt legislation, while Jan Olszewski was prime minister for such a short period that he didn’t have time to draft a relevant legislation. Meanwhile, privatisation progressed.

In Czechoslovakia, the order was reversed.

Yes. The Czechs felt that first you have to make restitution to those who were illegally deprived of their property. Starting privatisation before restitution was the original sin of the Polish Third Republic. It limited the opportunity to return property. In 1993, Prime Minister Pawlak removed the ban introduced by Hanna Suchocka on the sale of agricultural land to which claims had been filed. Within four years of post-communist government, a huge portion of what was to be given back to former owners was sold off.

How far did nationalisation reach in communist Czechoslovakia? Were the Czechs and Slovaks in a better position than the Poles in 1989?

On the contrary. Expropriation took place to a much greater extent there than here. In our country, like in Yugoslavia, collectivisation failed and a large part of the agricultural land belonged to the peasants. Houses also largely remained in private hands. Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia in 1989, everything was in the hands of the state.

What principles guided the Czechs and Slovaks in their reprivatisation?

The Czech Parliament passed the main bills in 1990 and 1991. Firstly, property that was taken between 1955 and 1961 was given back, i.e. service buildings. Later, a comprehensive restitution law was passed. Owners or their descendants could apply for restitution in kind. If this was not possible, they received compensation.

Could anyone apply for the return of their property?

In 1990 yes, but a year later legislation was passed under which only Czechoslovak citizens who lived permanently in the country could apply for restitution. This ruled out hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their descendants from the entire process. It was the subject of a lot of dispute and finally the Constitutional Court ordered the deletion of this provision. There was no restitution of property expropriated in the years before 1948, before the communists took over power completely. Of course the idea was to not have to return property to the Sudeten Germans. But after the war the state also took over large industrial plants. Thanks to these regulations, they did not have to be returned.

Does that mean that Jews whose property had been appropriated during the war were not able to apply for restitution?

Initially this was the case, but the Czechs quickly rectified this error. They made an exception for people whose property had been expropriated for reasons of race.

Why did Czech churches have such a big problem with the recovery of property?

Whenever the Czechs regained their independence, anticlerical sentiments increased. This was one of those times. Property taken from churches was not subject to privatisation, but a law on its return has not been passed yet. The struggle is ongoing. Of great symbolism is the fate of the most important church in the Czech Republic, the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague, located next to the presidential palace, which has changed owners several times. It was only three years ago that a compromise solution was worked out.

How has reprivatisation affected the Czech economy?

Very positively, but social relations have also changed. It helped to restore the middle class, cemented respect for private property and has had a big impact on politics. The conservative party TOP 09 was created by former owners who regained their property.

Can we still use the Czech model?

Yes, because although most of nationalised property has already been sold, it is still possible to receive compensation in the form of substitute land, even that belonging to the Agricultural Property Agency. Today, a reference point for us could be the resolution applied to property east of the Bug River, namely compensation at a level of 20 percent of the value of assets.

Interview by Adam Tycner

Stanisław Tyszka is a lawyer and historian, a graduate of the European University Institute in Florence, where he defended his doctoral thesis on the restitution of property in Poland and the Czech Republic after 1989.

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

Nazis are still being prosecuted in Germany; however, many have never been tried due to political considerations and society’s reluctance to come to terms with the past.

It is difficult to imagine a greater turning point in the life of a nation than that experienced by Germany after the end of the Second World War. Unconditional surrender, occupation and the rule of foreign powers went hand in hand with the breakdown of German notions of their superiority and power. However, society could not dissociate itself from a closed historical chapter, since it faced the colossal problem of coming to terms with the ideology and crimes of National Socialism. 7.5 million members of the Nazi Party, 850,000 members of the SS, newsreels across the world showing heaps of corpses in liberated concentration camps, perpetrators of crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust, blending into the crowd and keeping a low profile, doctors killing en masse the disabled and the terminally ill, a corrupt judiciary, youth brainwashed by Nazism – this was only a fraction of the burden under which German society began to build its future. At the same time relatively few people in Germany were aware of the scale of the problem and for certain no-one had any idea of how to solve it.

Nuremberg Known and Unknown

Aware of the immense support that Hitler’s regime had enjoyed in German society, the Allies doubted the Germans’ ability to cleanse themselves. Therefore, as early as in 1942 they took on the responsibility of punishing those charged with war crimes, and ordered the relevant documentation to be drafted. In November 1943, it was decided that those charged with war crimes were to be extradited to the countries where they had committed their atrocities, and those whose deeds concerned multiple countries – belonging to the category of main perpetrators – were to be brought before an international court. Thus in August 1945, the Allies signed a treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal. It operated during the Nuremberg Trials, where from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, twenty-two principal war criminals from the highest levels of the Third Reich were tried. They were selected in a manner assuring a representation of the Nazi system’s main areas of activity (including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann – Nazi Party leaders; Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg –ideologists of Nazism; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Konstantin von Neurath – foreign policy; Ernst Kaltenbrunner – the SS and police; Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, Erich Raeder, Karl Dönitz – armed forces; Hans Fritzsche – propaganda; Baldur von Schirach – Hitler Youth; Albert Speer and Hjalmar Schacht – the economy, Hans Frank and Artur Seyss-Inquart – the occupation policy). During the trial, 19 convictions were handed down, including 12 death sentences.

However, an often overshadowed fact is that from 1946 to 1949 twelve other large trials were held in Nuremberg, such as the Ministries Trial (management of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs); the trial of concentration camps doctors (the Doctors’ Trial); Einsatzgruppen; the management of the Kruppa and I. G. Farben companies; the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, and the SS Main Economic and Administrative Department. Oswald Pohl, the head of this key unit tasked with operations including organisation of the concentration camps, was sentenced to death and executed on 8 June 1951 at the American military prison in Landsberg, Bavaria. This was the last execution carried out in the Federal Republic of Germany, since the death penalty had been abolished with the founding of the country in 1949.

Further trials between 1946 and 1951 were made possible due to Law No. 10 of the Allied Control Council, enacted as early as 1945, which expanded the powers of the military governors of individual occupation zones. This law was rescinded in 1951, when West Germany received many attributes of a sovereign state. Hence over several years, the Allied system of courts and prisons across Germany was eliminated. It should be noted that as early as 1950, the USSR had closed down its ‘special camps’ where Nazi prisoners were interned, and completed its prosecution of war criminals in East Germany. The last relict of the post-war period of Nazi war crimes trials was the joint military prison in Spandau, maintained and operated by the Allies, where prisoners sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials were detained. In existence as long as the last prisoner was alive, it was closed in 1987 after the suicide of Rudolf Hess.

In the initial post-war period, a great majority of Germans felt an aversion to the trials of war criminals. Even the Nuremberg Trials failed to exert the psychological effect expected by the occupying powers. It was generally viewed as a form of revenge on the defeated and the belief was that the verdicts of the victors could not be just. Besides, the nascent Cold War meant that friendly relations with the Germans were important to both sides. Thus the enthusiasm of the occupying powers to prosecute the Nazis quickly dampened. Extradition to East European countries was abandoned as early as 1947, and soon the practice of early release for convicts from Allied prisons spread.

In his first address to the opening of parliament in 1949, West Germany Chancellor Konrad Adenauer already spoke about a blank slate when coming to terms with the recent past. Most probably he was convinced that the rebuilding of West Germany would not be possible without the advocates of National Socialism. They were too numerous and too many belonged to the country’s professional elite. For this reason, in the West Germany of Adenauer’s era an unwritten agreement was reached between the new authorities and the advocates of Nazism, under which the authorities guaranteed them impunity (with the exception of a very small group of people charged with the most severe crimes) and freedom of professional development; while they, in turn, renounced their public anti-system and racist activity. The first amnesty act was passed as early as 1949, which freed from responsibility thousands of Nazis convicted for lesser crimes. In 1951, the West German Parliament passed another act, under which they regained public posts (including in the police) in a short period of time. It is therefore no surprise that in the 1950s the number of Nazi war criminals tried by West German courts dropped dramatically.

The Guilt of the Fathers

However, the situation in West Germany changed with the coming of age of the younger generation, who opposed concealing the guilt of their parents’ generation. Gradually, thanks to researchers, knowledge about Nazi Germany and the crimes committed during the period improved. Now and again, wishing to discredit West Germany, the East German security services revealed compromising facts about the Nazi past of West German politicians and high-ranking officials. In an atmosphere of gradually mounting interest in bringing Nazis to justice, the trial of ten members of Einsatzkommando Tilsit (Einsatzgruppe A), who were charged with murdering many thousands of Jews in Lithuania in 1941, gained wide publicity. Despite the fact that each defendant’s personal responsibility for executing at least several hundred Jews by firing squad had been proved, the sentences handed down during the trial, held in Ulm in 1958, ran contrary to the fundamental sense of justice (between 3 and 15 years’ imprisonment).

This scandal provided an impetus for the creation in November 1958 of a West German institution specialising in prosecuting Nazi crimes, i.e. the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, popularly called the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. Its operations were restricted in numerous ways, the most important of which was that the prosecutors only had the right to prepare indictments, without the possibility of independently filing these with a court. Despite this, the Central Office established a new quality in the German court system and greatly enhanced the prosecution of Nazi crimes in West Germany. To date it has drafted around 7,500 indictments.

Successive breaches in the wall of silence behind which the Germans were hiding came from the exhibition Ungesühnte Nazijustitz, shown for the first time in Karlsruhe in 1959. It proved that tens of highly-placed West German lawyers were guilty of severe judicial crimes perpetrated during the war. While the West German judiciary unshakeably stood and still stands for the principle of judicial immunity, after several years (1962), over 160 judges and prosecutors with Nazi pasts went into voluntary, albeit early, retirement. Regular TV broadcasts from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem had an even greater impact in Germany. On the rising tide of these West German transformations, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials commenced in December 1963, at which 20 members of camp staff were indicted. It is worthy of note that during the preparation for the trial, the files of around 800 people were studied, although only the best documented cases were selected. The fact that such a mass trial took place and that a huge body of evidence was gathered, enabling 17 out of 20 defendants to be convicted in December 1965, was by no doubt down to the success of the Central Office of Ludwigsburg and the Attorney General of Hessen, Fritz Bauer. He was the unofficial leader of a group of West German lawyers who understood the need to prosecute Nazi crimes.

Criminals Behind Desks

On the other hand, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial again exposed the courts’ weakness in bringing Nazism to justice. Contrary to the prosecution’s intentions, the prevailing practice was that of detailed investigation into the individual guilt of the defendants, while the fact that membership of the Auschwitz staff itself made the defendants accomplices to all crimes committed at the camp was ignored. Moreover, the court was very broad in applying the classification of accessory. Under this interpretation, the ‘true’ perpetrators of the crimes were only high-level commanders (e.g. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heidrich) and those who personally murdered the victims. Thus during the trial, the longest sentences (life imprisonment) were pronounced almost exclusively on lower-ranking personnel and prisoner functionaries (Kapos), while SS officers whose duties included carrying out the selection process on arrival of the transports, thereby sending thousands of victims to their deaths in the gas chambers, were sentenced to several years in prison. Moreover, the court in Frankfurt could not prevent the scandalous behaviour of lawyers, a great many of whom were former Nazis. While acting for the defence, they did not hesitate to mentally torture and insult the former Auschwitz prisoners who had decided to serve as witnesses for the prosecution.

As can be seen, progress in prosecuting Nazi crimes in West Germany after the establishment of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg did not mean at all that those opposed to bringing Nazi criminals to justice gave up. On the contrary, they still enjoyed the support of the majority of the population and also had some major successes. The most important of these was the West German Parliament’s effortless enactment in 1960 of a statute of limitations on all Nazi crimes except murder. From this point, no-one could be prosecuted for the use of torture, medical experiments, theft of fine art or, for example, the destruction of Warsaw. Besides, the acquittal of judge Hans-Joachim Rehse in 1968 emerged as an important precedent. Next to Roland Freisler, he was the most active member of the notorious People’s Court, which during the war sentenced many, including German opposition activists, to death. Thus in practice, the door had been closed to prosecuting former members of the Nazi justice system, even those guilty of the most drastic judicial crimes. In that same year, under circumstances that still remain unclear, ‘someone’ from the Federal Ministry of Justice, unnoticed by legislators, added an article that again broadened the interpretation of ‘accessory’ to the text of an act that had nothing to do with the prosecution of Nazi crimes. From then on, West German courts definitively lost the ability to convict a very important, although specific category of ‘criminals behind desks’.

No Statute of Limitations

Another battle over the prosecution of Nazi crimes centred on the statute of limitations for qualified murders committed during the Nazi era. This took place as early as in 1965, precisely on the 20th anniversary of the end of Second World War. Shortly before that date and following a heated debate, the West German Parliament decided to extend the statute of limitations until the end of 1969. In 1969, a decision to extent the statute further turned out to be easier than before, since a year earlier, following a proposal by Poland, the United Nations General Assembly had adopted the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. For this reason, the statute of limitations on crimes which led to a sentence of life imprisonment was extended from 20 to 30 years, i.e. until the end of 1979. Only then did the parliament pass an act on non-applicability of the statute of limitations for qualified murder. Importantly, during the debates held in 1965 and 1969, public opinion surveys showed that the majority of West German society opted for statutes of limitations. These proportions did not change until 1979.

According to observers, a change in Germans public attitudes was possible due to the last great trial of Nazi murderers, that of the staff of the Majdanek concentration camp, alongside the American TV series The Holocaust (January 1979). While there is no ambiguity as to the psychological impact of TV images, which for the first time clearly showed the persecution and extermination of Jews from the perspective of a particular family, the way in which the trial of Majdanek personnel influenced German public opinion requires an explanation. The trial of the 16 camp personnel in Düsseldorf in 1975 became a show of excesses to an even greater extent than the Frankfurt trial had been. The public gallery in the courtroom was dominated by neo- Nazis, who demonstrated their hostility towards the prosecutors and witnesses. The defence again exerted brutal psychological pressure on former prisoners. After the above series had been broadcast and had so moved public opinion, times had changed when in 1979 the court released four defendants due to the fact that the witnesses who were due to testify against them had died during the trial. The alleged helplessness of the court and the falsely perceived faithfulness to procedures were severely criticised. From then on, the trial was carried out peacefully and with all due solemnity; however, as far as justification and length are concerned, the sentences of 1981 were very similar to those handed down by the Frankfurt court 16 years earlier.

Although the Düsseldorf trial was the last of this magnitude, it was by no means the last of this type. Nazis are still being convicted in Germany. In 2009, a Munich court sentenced former Wehrmacht officer Josef Scheungraber (born 1918) to life in prison for commanding troops who murdered the villagers of Falzano di Cortona in Italy. In May 2011, also in Munich, the widely publicised trial of John Demjanjuk (born 1920), a former guard at Sobibor, resulted in a six-year prison sentence. On that occasion the media used the term ‘the last Nazi trial’. This year, however, the German prosecutor’s office unexpectedly announced that it was preparing to indict several dozen other perpetrators. A trial is being held in Hagen, North Rhine-Westphalia, of a certain Siert Bruins (born 1921 in the Netherlands), charged with participating in the execution by firing squad of Dutch resistance members. Despite the judiciary’s unexpected surge of activity, these actually will be the last trials of Nazi criminals, since in five years’ time none of them will be capable of standing in front of a court. Critics of the German justice system call attention to the advanced age of the defendants and the fact that during the war they were almost exclusively lower-ranking members of organisations involved in war crimes. At the same time, as a general rule their commanders, holding an immeasurably greater responsibility for the crimes, escaped punishment and are no longer alive. Despite these reservations, the fact that war crimes and crimes against humanity are prosecuted, so long as the suspects are physically able to stand in front of a court, is of great significance. It is a unique phenomenon in modern history.

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

The lack of reprivatisation legislation has made the restitution of property a chaotic procedure. The losers include not only the rightful owners and the state, but also thousands of tenants living in nationalised buildings.

There have been over a dozen draft proposals. Some were brought to a standstill in parliamentary committees, three were voted down and one was vetoed by the president. In a nutshell, this is the story of Poland's reprivatisation attempts. The present government had proposed paying for nationalised property in 2012, but in March 2011 the Treasury halted work on the draft. PLN 20 billion in compensation would increase the public debt and exceed the 60% precautionary threshold.

Although 13% of Poland's citizens sustained losses as a result of nationalisation carried out by the communist authorities, Poland is the only country among the new EU members and one of four in the region (the others being Belarus, Ukraine and Albania) that have not carried out reprivatisation following the transition to democracy. When in the early 1990s owners began reclaiming their property in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the Baltic States, and Hungary was issuing special bonds for them, Poland only managed to regulate the restitution of trade-union and church property.

Return or substitute

From that time, the chances for former owners to regain their property have dwindled year on year. Not only have successive governments over the past two decades refused or been unable to pass the relevant regulations, but a changing approach to property restitution can clearly be seen in successive drafts. The 2001 law vetoed by Aleksander Kwaśniewski envisaged the State Treasury returning confiscated property to its rightful owners. Where impossible, former owners were to receive reprivatisation vouchers equivalent to half the value of the nationalised property.

However, the draft abandoned two years ago made no mention of reprivatisation. Instead, it referred only to ‘alleviating the wrongs suffered as a result of nationalisation measures’ for which ‘monetary benefits’ were to be provided. The decrees of the postwar communist-controlled Polish National Liberation Committee and the measures adopted by the parliament of the People’s Republic of Poland were to remain in effect. Former owners were to receive compensation only if the communist authorities had nationalised property in violation of their own regulations. These regulations were often insulting to an elementary sense of justice. The government did not intend to return a set amount of the property's value to its rightful owners, but wanted to earmark PLN 20 billion for that purpose to be distributed among former owners. Compensation amount would depend on the number of claims filed and would be strictly symbolic.

‘Back in the 1990s, when the initial draft privatisation proposals were being worked on, it was obvious to everyone that the property should be returned in kind,’ explained Marcin Schirmer, vice-president of the Polish Landowners Society. ‘Since then, there has been a clearly visible tendency. The authors of successive drafts have moved away from restitution-in-kind in favour of monetary compensation, and each successive draft envisaged increasingly smaller damages.’

Why do successive governments want to return an increasingly diminished share of nationalised property to its former owners? ‘Unfortunately, that is the normal course of events,’ comments Professor Włodzimierz Pańkow, a sociologist at Koźminski University in Warsaw. At stake are the interests of hundreds of thousands of new owners, who after 1989 took possession of property previously nationalised by the communists. Often members of the former communist party authorities were enfranchised in this way. Today, in most cases privatisation no longer involves actual restitution of nationalised property, since beginning in the early 1990s the state has managed to sell off a large share of nationalised assets.

Most economists and sociologists agree that the abandonment of reprivatisation has adversely affected the Polish economy. A middle class has begun to emerge with great difficulty. The rural areas where nationalised property has going to ruin have lost out. And the lack of clear regulations is troublesome for tenants living in buildings being restored to their former owners. Do rightful owners still have any chance of regaining their property? Marcin Schirmer has not lost all hope. “At present, the Agricultural Property Agency has at its disposal nearly two million hectares of land, mainly in what are known as the recovered territories. Today, most of the land taken over by the communists can no longer be returned, but substitutional reprivatisation could be carried out if the political will existed.

Bierut lives on

The problems behind the lack of reprivatisation legislation can best be understood through the example of Warsaw. In 1945, communist leader Bolesław Bierut decreed that all pre-war property within Warsaw's city limits was to become city-owned. These regulations encompassed more than 90% of the capital’s real estate. Owing to Warsaw's exceptional situation in the country, there were repeated plans to regulate the question of property restitution in the capital by means of separate legislation. Last year, parliamentarians from the governing Civic Platform party pledged that applicable draft legislation would be ready by early 2013. But there is no guarantee that these promises will be kept. ‘Work on the new regulations is underway but proceeding are rather slow,’ daily Rzeczpospolita was told by Ligia Krajewska, the Civic Platform MP who heads the group working on the bill. ‘The matter is extremely complicated, and we are regularly consulting with legal experts. Perhaps work will move forward next year.’ When will the bill be ready? ‘That may take a year or two, maybe three,’ Krajewska adds. ‘It is difficult to predict at this stage, but we are not abandoning our work on the new regulations.’

The lack of legal regulations means that former owners can and are attempting to seek justice on their own. The value of property confiscated after the war is now estimated at some PLN 40 billion. Specialist firms involved in consolidating claims and recovering real estate have been established. There is also much to indicate that reprivatisation in Warsaw has taken on more ominous forms. Business magazine Puls Biznesu has established that there are at least several groups in Warsaw specialising in making money on privatisation. It reports that members of these groups are consolidating claims to a small fraction of the real estate's value and subsequently, thanks to ‘nonstandard good relations with officials’, quickly recover the property.

‘Extremely alarming things that have little to do with righting historical wrongs are taking place in Warsaw,’ Aleksander Grabiński, president of the Association of People Affected by the Warsaw Decree, told Rzeczpospolita. ‘Many owners who often have excellent lawyers are unable to recover their property for years on end. But the moment they sell their claims to private firms, it soon turns out that the real estate can be quickly recovered,’ Grabiński says. He cited the example of Warsaw's Blue Palace, which Jan Zamoyski had sought for years to reclaim. ‘Discouraged by endless procedures, he sold his claims and a private investor recovered the Palace within several weeks.’

Each year, dozens of Warsaw tenements experience a similar fate. Tenants' organisations are up in arms, because the housing being reclaimed by private firms is occupied by tenants who had been granted council flats after the war. ‘The firms reclaiming tenements want to transform them into luxury apartments or tear them down and build new structures in their place,’ said Anna Kutyńska of the Warsaw Tenants’ Defence Committee. They use every trick in the book to force tenants, often elderly people who are unaware of the legislation, to move,’ she explains. ‘In theory, these tenants are protected by the law. In practice, however, there are many ways of circumventing it. A standard practice is to begin prolonged, make-believe renovations involving numerous hardships such as disconnecting the electricity, water and gas. It is sufficient to sit back and wait until the tenants are unable to put up with such conditions and begin moving out on their own. “Unknown assailants” are brought in to deal with those who still refuse.’ Since Warsaw is short of housing, the displaced tenants often have nowhere to go.

Cashing in on other peoples’ misfortunes

How can the problems of Poland's capital be solved? Members of the Association of People Affected by the Warsaw Decree maintain that no new legislation is needed to restore most real estate to its rightful owners. ‘Existing measures regulating property issues clearly state that real estate taken over by city authorities should be returned to its former owner if it has not been put to the (city’s) intended use within seven years of the take-over,’ said Ryszard Grzesiula, a lawyer and the Association's vice-president. Its members have long been appealing the matter to the prime minister, president, MPs, senators and Warsaw city hall. The Decree Association has taken note of the problem of tenants evicted by private firms, and Grzesiula is proposing a solution: ‘The city council could be doing the same thing that private firms are. Many members of our association would forego their claims towards the council in exchange for a small proportion of the value of their real estate or a modest life annuity,’ he explains. Subsequently, real estate in good locations could be sold to developers for a fraction of its true value on condition that they build housing that includes council flats, so the displaced tenants would have a place to move. We have proposed that solution to the municipal authorities, but nobody even wanted to discuss it.

A lack of interest on the part of politicians is the most serious charge levelled by organisations of former property owners. The real estate taken over by the state after the war is sold on the free market or is falling into disrepair. It has been estimated that in 1939 there were some 20,000 manor houses and palaces in Poland. After nationalisation, many of these were deliberately destroyed as part of the communist regime's anti-landowner campaign. Others are now outside Poland's present borders. Ultimately, a mere 2,000 buildings have survived. In 2010, officials from the Supreme Audit Office verified the condition of the manor-houses and palaces now belonging to the Agricultural Property Agency or local councils. The results of the inspection were unequivocal. The report stated that ‘for the most part the current owners of the inspected historical property have done nothing to renovate destroyed or deteriorating real estate.’ The Supreme Audit Office has therefore recommended ‘regulating reprivatisation issues as soon as possible.’

It appears that the recommendations of Supreme Audit Office officials will remain on paper for quite some time. At present, reprivatisation demands are not included in the manifesto of any political party in parliament. In the meantime, the problems arising from the lack of reprivatisation regulations are growing and it appears that both in Warsaw and nationwide, politicians lack the desire and determination to resolve them. ‘The lack of reprivatisation at the start of the 1990s, in addition to the fact that it was simply unjust and adversely affected the economy, has produced yet another deplorable result,’ explains Professor Pańkow. ‘Among a sizeable portion of society, it entrenched a lack of respect for private property as well as the conviction that a passive state facilitates cashing in on the misfortunes of others.’

This article was originally published in a special appendix to Rzeczpospolita daily for the 'Genealogies of Memory' conference on 27 November 2013.

The task of a truth commission is an arduous one: it involves creating from a set of subjective memories, often blurred by time and marked by trauma, a common narrative that will no longer divide society.

Over the past three decades, in the course of media and scholarly discussions on settling accounts with the past, the institution most frequently invoked has been the truth commission. The origins of that concept should be sought in the bringing of the military dictatorship of Argentina to account in 1983. However, the truth commission owes its ‘international career’ to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which functioned in 1995-2000 under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Popularity

The ability for perpetrators to obtain amnesty in exchange for full disclosure of the truth about their crimes, public hearings evolving into religious ceremonies, and finally the charismatic chairman - all this meant that over the years South Africa and its truth commission were presented as a model solution to be used in other countries.

It is worth noting that many of its ideas had been used earlier in committees of inquiry in Great Britain and its former colonies. The popularity of the truth commission and continuing academic deliberation as to what exactly such a commission should be has led to the widespread creation of public and private institutions bearing that name.
Truth commissions have dealt with the causes of slavery in Mauritius (reaching back as far as 1638!), evaluated the issues of doping in cycling or paedophilia in the Irish Church.
The associated devaluation of the concept makes it difficult to determine the number of truth commissions involved in settling accounts with the past. However, 22 truth commissions can be identified, operating in 21 countries around the world. They share several characteristics: they are public institutions (appointed by the State or an international organisation), they are extraordinary, they operated for a defined period of time, they are set up during a time of transformation, also after a period of authoritarian rule, as in the case of post-conflict peace-building; they deal with human rights violations in the past and focus on the victims of these violations. As can be seen, not all of commissions identify the perpetrators of crimes (some even omit this issue), and only two (in South Africa and Kenya) had the right to grant conditional amnesty. The last truth commission was established in Brazil in November 2011.

Compromise

Historically, the greatest threat to settling accounts with the past is the emergence of the phenomenon known as victor's justice. After a former authoritarian regime has given up power, following the signing of a peace agreement, ‘after every war someone has to clean up’ (W. Szymborska).

The desire to obtain quick redress for grievances leads to self-appointed courts, show trials and witch hunts without guaranteeing the rights of offenders, without seeking to justify their circumstances, without regard for the future.
Revenge by some generates a sense of grievance in others; it creates a vicious circle which in the long term prevents reconciliation. Truth commissions are usually established on the basis of a worked-out compromise that in all appearances may seem unacceptable.

Acknowledging social peace and future reconciliation as the highest values, they try not to violate the agreements of transformation. The former opposition accounted for one-half of the members of Chile's truth commission and people involved in the Pinochet regime made up the other half. The representatives of various racial and religious groups sat next to each other in the commission in South Africa. These commissions were also careful about naming the perpetrators (making it possible to investigate the fate of the victims of the Chilean junta).
Truth commissions are sometimes accused of maintaining the impunity of perpetrators. However, in situations following internal conflict, when any criminal proceedings could threaten a return to violence (such danger existed for example in El Salvador), or if after the departure of authoritarian rule the armed or security forces continued to protect their interests (as in the countries of South America), the establishment of a truth commission becomes the optimum solution - as often pointed out by political journalists - second only to the courts.

The right to the truth

During a period of authoritarian rule, when judges cooperate with the authorities to cover up their transgressions and government officials deny that they ever took place, a truth commission, with the participation of recognised spiritual and secular authorities, seeks to bring this truth to light. Initially, commissions were limited to collecting data from police and military archives, carrying out interviews with the families of the victims and exhumations.

Since the establishment of the commission in South Africa, public hearings have become their most distinguishing characteristic. At such hearings, victims are able to present their truth about the crimes carried out, and the perpetrators are able to explain what guided them. From both of these monologues a truth commission is able to produce a new narrative: the truth about the past. This reference to subjective truths, to people’s memories, has allowed the past to be talked about in a language different from that of dry NGO reports or those found in secret-police files. Hearings held by truth commissions have become spectacles: they have revealed all the drama of what being a victim and a victimiser is all about. Addressing the motivations of individual people is perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of these commissions.

It is not difficult to note that the task of a truth commission is an arduous one: from a set of subjective memories, often blurry after many years and marked by trauma, to produce an intersubjective narrative that will no longer divide society. Although the role of the members of truth commissions has been entrusted to authority figures, this has not protected them from accusations that they lack impartiality in the creation of narratives about the past. Even the model commission of South Africa was seen by the white population, according to a 1999 study, as a tool of revenge.

The voice of victims

In a criminal case, typically the accused is th4e central figure, round whom the proceedings take place. But truth commissions were set up give a voice to the victims. The fact that they were not judicial bodies gave them the opportunity to function on a more flexible basis: they have often been compared to a treatment and healing process. However, giving a voice to the victims has led to two paradoxes which seem to have diminished the popularity of truth commissions as a means of reconciliation in the early twenty-first century.

The first paradox concerned the perpetrator-victim relationship. In Chile and Argentina, the division was clear: the victims were mostly left-wing opposition activists, whilst officers of the security forces and the army were the perpetrators. However, very soon it turned out that these categories were not mutually exclusive. In El Salvador, both parties to the conflict were guilty of crimes; in Sierra Leone it was not possible to even identify which of the warring factions was the government side; the truth commission of South Africa faced the problem of human rights violations carried out by activists as an expression of opposition to apartheid; in Ecuador there emerged the problem of extensive ranks of police informers.

It turned out that being the perpetrator and the victim is not as straightforward as it seemed at the beginning of transformation.

The second paradox is associated with the mechanics of a commission's operation. The more flexible and open the procedure is to the voice of the victims, the smaller the range of guarantees of a fair trial for the perpetrator. Can one then evaluate the past by violating human rights and making the past offender the present victim? Faced with that dilemma, successive truth commissions have developed a set of procedural guarantees, which have ultimately made commission procedures resemble criminal proceedings.

The functioning of a truth commission shows that human rights violations are not made in a vacuum. Its effects do not apply only to the perpetrator and the victim, but cover the whole of society. Therefore, a commission operates in public, it makes its reports available, and its meetings take on a solemn character. A truth commission is the beginning of a new history for the whole of society, in order to prevent it from returning to authoritarianism or conflict.

MARCIN KOMOSA holds a doctorate in political science and is a cultural anthropologist, the author of the monograph Sprawa Pinochet. Odpowiedzialność za naruszenia praw człowieka (The Case of Pinochet. Responsibility for violating human rights) 2005, and the book Komisja prawdy. Mechanizm odpowiedzialności za naruszenie praw człowieka (The Truth Commission. A mechanism of responsibility for human rights violations) 2013.

The text in Polish was published in a special Genealogies of Memory supplement in the latest issue of Tygodnik Powszechny on 11.12.2013.

ABSTRACT

Recent calls for a shift of the centre of gravity of memory in Europe are confronted with a deep asymmetry in master narratives in political societies across the former Iron Curtain. This paper examines the experiential basis under which narrative commitments have been made in Eastern Europe. The major focus here will be on the dialectics between spaces of experiences and horizon of expectation. Like individuals societies acquire habits of remembering, which are transmitted, challenged, and collected across the inter-generational memorial fabric. The basic argument defended here is that societies are initiated into interpreting their past by ‘learning’ specific acts of commemoration, performance, and ritual. The past is thus to be considered not as a by-gone and well defined period but rather a social organism in gestation. This paper first examines how experiences of state-formation, conflict, and practices of communist rule have been stored in Eastern Europe’s cultural memory. It then goes to suggest that the search for constitutive mythologies needs to take into account that in Eastern Europe different ‘initial zeros’ are competing with each other. Experiences of forgetting, the impact of cultural trauma on carriers of memory, and the difficulty to code performative rituals of memory account for a lack of sense of rupture with the past.

Shifting the Centre of Gravity of Memory?

In his address to the Memory at War project at Cambridge in 2010, Jay Winter urged shifting the centre of gravity of memory in Europe. A shift from Paris to Warsaw would make ‘European memory’ look very different. This call, both overdue and necessary, points to the potential integration of master narratives by discovering commonalities and analogies. Such integration would explore the roots of dissonances and conflicts arising from cultural traumas such as world wars and genocide, which are cognitively remembered but whose experiential background is fundamentally different. However, it is also deeply problematic because it potentially relativises the founding narratives of post-war Europe. In Western Europe, the politics of official apologies and regret have progressively instrumentalised the ‘duty to remember’ into political strategies of governing by looking back. Such practices rely not only on moral judgements about the nature of totalitarian regimes and the impact of genocide, but also on practices of transitional justice and policies of compensation, rehabilitation, and the political recognition of collective belonging to the citizenship of minority groups or former victims. Conversely, post-communist Eastern Europe has been characterized by divided memories and systematic attempts at historical revisionism, in which nationhood is rewritten as a constant and finally successful struggle against foreign domination. Historical revisionism addresses a triple task: it aims at genetic interpretations of the origins or beginnings of independent statehood; it focuses on heroic narratives of resistance, liberation, and survival in order to establish and maintain positive discursive and narrative markers of nation-building; and it maintains the centrality of collective victimhood for the political community.

Narrative commitments to specific memory regimes depend on how experiences and expectations are recast and imagined in the evolution of political societies. Such narrative commitments cannot be mastered from the knowledge, practices, and duties that have been generated under specific experiences. Rather, they originate in the cultural memory of each society. Like individuals, societies are initiated into interpreting their past by ‘learning’ habits of remembering, performance, and ritual, which are transmitted, challenged, and collected across generations. My hypothesis is that the experiential basis of narrative commitments is fundamental for understanding the integrative or potentially conflictual nature of constitutive mythologies. In Reinhart Koselleck’s terms, ‘there is no collective memory but there are collective conditions of potential memories’.¹ We have first to clarify the conditions under which terminological, ethical, normative, and political dimensions of memory have evolved. Shifting the gravity of memory towards Eastern Europe cannot simply imitate the western model.

The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, taking the departure from an analogy between comparative democratisation studies and memory studies, I suggest that hegemonic models of ‘memory by western design’ unduly discount the communist experience. Second, following Koselleck, I shall suggest that the cultural specificity of memory regimes includes particular forms of making sense of experience and expecting alternative futures. If memory is a carrier of meaning, it is imperative to understand how carriers of memory make sense of violence, trauma, and despair in the tension between experiences and expectations. Finally, the hegemony of western memory models depends on the ways carriers of memories across complex socio-political processes have established ‘founding’ memories by means of performative habit.

Mapping the Field

Aware of the deep asymmetry in European memory, the new members who joined the European Union in 2004 claimed the need for the acknowledgement of differences in historical legacies. A memorandum drafted by prominent historians from Eastern Europe argued that the new Europe has brought new historical experience, new grievances, and new complaints, all ignored in the West so far.² In their view, the more established western members have not forgotten their past. Rather, they have had the opportunity to reassess it and thus have found more common values to share. Since Eastern Europeans did not participate in the process of ‘constructing Europe’, their experience of the shared values of Europe is bound to be thinner, as is their understanding of the informal rules and meanings. If Europe wants to unite, questions such as ‘What is the full history of Europe?’ or ‘How do we deal with different histories within Europe?’ must be asked.

Such asymmetries are problematic for two main reasons. On the one hand, accepting founding narratives of post-war construction in Western Europe, based on normative claims for reconciliation, apology, and regret, would neglect the ‘eastern’ communist experience. On the other hand, evaluations of Eastern European memory work within conceptual paradigms that are hegemonically western’. To illustrate the notion of hegemony a quick glance at the literature on democratic and capitalist transitions in Eastern Europe may be instructive. Nearly two decades ago, scholars of comparative democratisation argued that, for all its particularity, Eastern Europe could nevertheless be summarised under the conceptual apparatus of the ‘transitions to democracy’ paradigm.³ They were opposed by another group of scholars who suggested that, culturally and historically, the East European experience was unique. Both sides of this literature worked with the axiom that democracy was a normative goal. The transition to a market economy was also assumed to be a central goal, which had to be designed democratically. The problem here was not only how to achieve various transitions – in society, politics, the law, and the economy – simultaneously. It was also the monopolistic status of liberal capitalism by democratic design that was introduced in a fundamentally undemocratic way, making choices or alternatives obsolete.

Can debates about memory politics learn from the controversies about transitions to democracy? An important tendency in Western scholarship has replicated this idea of a normative goal within memory studies. Apologetic forms of political memory based on the hegemonic anti-fascist narrative are fundamental to the legitimisation of the post-war reconstruction of Europe. In Western Europe, this ‘normality’ has been profoundly shaped by the legacy of the transitions from authoritarian rule towards democracy and the normative signposts formulated in international law after 1945. As Jeffrey Olick showed, this politics of regret is the contingent outcome of socio-political processes across the political evolution of western societies.⁴ From the perspective of citizens of the new Europe, building European identity on strategies of forgetting appears ill-suited. On the one hand, the shaping of collective memory is required as a moral imperative but also as a political necessity, aimed at appeasing identityconflicts between ethnic groups or social classes but also at acknowledging wrongdoings against minorities. On the other hand, memory appears helpless against the challenge to commemorate crimes of absolute evil, to remember as ‘it truly was’. Precisely because memory is inherently contentious and partisan, authors such as Tony Judt argued that only the historian can ensure that Europe’s past can furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose.⁵ In the centre should be an ‘austere passion for fact, proof, evidence’.

Both positions share a central characteristic: evaluations of the past limit memory to a function of the present, an affair of the living. Memory by ‘western design’ evokes a programme of pedagogical assistance based on a greater degree of maturity, knowledge and societal development. The ‘western experience’ has not only a well-established anti-fascist narrative of European integration in place. The politics of enlargement also include the ingredients for a moralising narrative of the duty to remember based on the idea of reconciliation around the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.

Conversely, the ‘eastern experience’ in the guise of the ‘double legacy’ of Nazism and Soviet communism has recently been used to magnify the level and gravity of victimhood in the ‘bloodlands’ of eastern Europe.⁶ Rather than being seen as the contingent outcomes of a specific experience, ’dealing with the past’ and the drawing of history lessons follow paths of memory politics by western design. As Judt argued, since 1989 Europe has been constructed upon a ‘compensatory surplus of memory’. The focus was on institutionalised public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. For Judt, this will not endure. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is a necessary condition for civic health.⁷ Garton Ash suggested that the path of history lessons and ‘truth-telling’ may be more promising than trials or purges. Historians would be the professionals best equipped to teach these lessons.⁸ He advocates putting texts into historical context, applying intellectual distance but also essential imaginative sympathy with all the men and women involved. Only historians with their impassionate, objective, and scholarly scrutiny are able to achieve history lessons. If purges, trials, or rehabilitation programmes are impracticable, is it the historian’s duty to teach people lessons of remembering? The claim for history lessons has an air of normality around it. Rather than succumbing to myths, narratives of heroic sacrifice, or ever-present memories of martyrdom, the idea is to become a normal country.

Experience and Expectation

Narrative commitments are made by carriers of memory who give meaning to experiences. Fundamentally, cultural and social forms of memory also define new expectations that make life worth living, political dreams realistic, and construct the foundations for a better future. In the transitions to the capitalist market economy and to political democracy, people in Eastern Europe craved the normality of the West. The experience of communism could be overcome by reaching out for the expected bright future, characterised by democracy, capitalism, freedom, and normality. The idea of approaching 1989 as the overcoming of some specific experience and the opening up of new expectations raises interesting analogies with the establishment of communism in the region. More fundamentally, however, it opens up the question of how to understand memory regimes in the tension between experience and expectation.

I would like to introduce here a categorisation developed by Reinhart Koselleck, which is the distinction between experience and expectation.⁹ Koselleck’s hypothesis is that the temporality of history and of human beings depends on anthropological foundations such as experience and expectation. The weight of each and their mutual relationship have changed across the course of history and thus enabled potential histories and different perceptions of time. Koselleck originally suggested that modernity – besides many other particularities – is characterised by specific perceptions of time. He located in the French Revolution a movement that would leave spaces of experience (Erfahrungsraum) behind, whilst focusing attention and energy on horizons of expectation (Erwartungshorizont). Experience can be understood as a contemporaneous past, whose events have become internalised and can be remembered. This accounts both for rational thinking and for unconscious attitudes. Even very ‘minor’ occurrences in personal lives can produce big effects. Individual memory is always social memory, insofar as anyone’s own experience contains experience of others mediated through distant historiographical sources, inter-generational narratives, institutions, or the media.

Similarly, expectation is related to individuals and to collective groups. Expectations are formulated in the present; they are a contemporaneous future, aiming at the not yet experienced but at what can be hoped, feared, or anticipated, through rational analysis or through diffuse and hazy expectation. Yet, the presence of the past is different from the presence of the future. For experience, it is adequate to use the metaphor of ‘space’ because, despite chronological specification, experience is seen as a totality that assembles different layers of earlier times. It can be likened to the glass front of a washing machine, where various bits appear but are contained in the same drum. Conversely, expectation is closer to the metaphor of the horizon. The future confronts an absolute limit that can only be anticipated, not experienced.

Spaces of experience and horizons of expectation are socially reconfigured with the passage of every generation. The crucial point is that biological decline and renewal are the conditions that enable meaningful connections between present and past, and perception of historical continuity across the longue durée. Carriers of memory grow old and die whilst new people are born and enter the social world. In a seminal essay on the links between the transformation of language and event-history, Reinhart Koselleck made the case for the meta-historical biological preconditions for history, which precede and remain outside language.¹⁰ The time span between birth and death determines human finitude. Diachronically, the constant transitions between earlier and later are crucial for any history to be perceived as a meaningful sequence of occurrences. This perception of temporalities is not a matter of either individual recollections or collective forms of commemoration. Rather it is structured by the sequence of generations.

New generations usually enter into conflict with the values and aims of their parents and the established generation. If the parental generation has failed miserably, this conflict may become very polarised. The fact that most Germans nowadays consider Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945 not as a defeat of the nation but as the liberation from a dictator owes a crucial debt to the generational conflict after World War II.¹¹ In West Germany the fathers’ generation – who had held responsibility during Weimar and the Nazi regime – had to cope with individual guilt and self-blame. The young post-war generation, however, had to face not only military defeat but also the stigma of belonging to a nation responsible for barbaric acts. The collective guilt imposed on Germany by the outside world made people born just before or after 1945 emphatically reject what had been most sacred and meaningful to their fathers: patriotic glory and national greatness. Experience is transformative. Living through critical junctures changes states of consciousness and shapes ways of remembering and forgetting. Any society, nation, regional community, or generational unit has its own formative experiences that will support the constitutive imagination in cultural memory. I shall briefly discuss the Eastern European experience of state-formation, the tension between admiration and resentment in relations with Western Europe, and the impact of the Yalta system. Eastern Europe has been a transitional zone between Western and Eastern models of state-formation. The dominant role of the state contrasts with the subordinate role of society, which could not develop spheres of economic and legal autonomy similar to societies further West. The late achievement of independent statehood for some countries, and the frequent dismemberment, invasions and foreign rule as well as territorial instability of others, would shape expectations in the cultural unconscious, which focused on redemption from servitude and backwardness but also on the return to some form of normality. In the particular case of Poland, different institutions symbolically maintained the notion of the nation in cultural memory in the absence of a territorially independent state between 1795 and 1918. In Poland, meanings of power (władza) have been strongly linked to foreign domination, whereas society (społeczeństwo) carried connotations of an independent nation. The nation was associated with imagination, a reality to be aspired to rather than an existing collective reality that could be engineered by the tools, devices, and educational policies at the disposal of a central state. The central goals of social movements such as Solidarność were formulated as aspirational utopias focused on romantic ideas, strongly embedded in cultural memory, of gentry democracy or the myth of the subjectivisation of the nation. The fundamental characteristic of many Eastern European societies after 1989 could be seen in a schismogenic dynamic where versions of the ‘miracle myth’ promised a better future and a ‘return to normality’. This better future would be provided by the economic, technological, and socio-political benefits of western capitalist democracy. Meanwhile, key events in the nation’s pre-communist past would mobilise memories that would shape identities through discursive strategies such as ‘back to the truth’, ‘back to the nation’, ‘back to normality’, ‘back to Europe’, or ‘back to the present’.¹²

Another founding element in the cultural memory of many eastern European nations is the experience of a civilisational divide: Few ‘westerners’ conceive of the ‘enlargement’ of the European Union other than in terms of a generous gift offered by Europe. ‘Europe’ here means ‘western’ Europe, the free and civilised part, which was not the Europe behind the Iron Curtain. From the ‘inside’ perspective, however, Poles, Czechs, Latvians and others subjectively regarded themselves as an integral part of (Western) Europe. If they already belonged ‘naturally’, the notion of enlargement was either offensive or nonsensical, and possibly both. As former Hungarian prime minister József Antall put it, Eastern Europe had won the third world war for the West without firing a shot, but this expression of love was unrequited. Not unlike the adoption of market capitalism and the transition to democracy, Eastern Europeans have looked towards the West in a mix of admiration, neediness, and resignation in order to be recognised as ‘equals’.

Major turning points in the twentieth century have produced different social memories. The collapse of empires in 1918 became the opportunity to re-establish the Polish republic and to achieve independent statehood in the Baltic republics. Czechoslovakia appeared on the map as an independent state, whilst Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory, a cultural trauma it has not yet overcome. Recently, Adam Michnik compared the round-table negotiations in 1989 with the beginnings of the Second Polish Republic under conditions of extreme contention, mob violence, and political assassination.

The often evoked moralisation of international politics after World War II, which can be exemplified in the Nuremberg trials, the genocide convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, was not a founding experience of states on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Due to the socialisation of warfare, the extermination of enemies of the people or entire collective groups due to their racial, ethnic, and political difference, trauma was not to be communicated to the outside world, expanding knowledge and creating empathy. Besides a heavy blood toll, devastation, and mass expulsion, the end of the war bequeathed deep moral confusion, leaving many of these societies in an in-between condition, between victory and defeat or ‘victory in defeat’.¹³ For much of non-Russian eastern Europe, World War II cut off ties with the West.

Memories of threats to the nation produced particularly strong narratives, which narrowed down the nation to ethnic and racial conceptions with disastrous consequences.¹⁴ Experiences of state-formation, of perceived backwardness in relation to the west, and of ‘defeat in victory’ after a world war produced expectations that were based on cultural memories of experiences of humiliation and suffering but also on redemptive myths of belonging and new beginnings. One could certainly make the case for seeing the ‘memory boom’ in the social sciences and in Western Europe as a reflection of a somewhat opposite dynamics. The disillusionment with expectations would focus societies back onto their experience. The demise of ideology, the dissolution of utopian promises, the lack of alternative models to established capitalist modernity, and the growing uncertainty about the future have fuelled the discovery of memory. The distinction between Eastern and Western Europe was reinforced by the establishment of communist regimes during and after World War II. Their practices of fashioning experiences and expectations systematically eliminated elites, destroyed the built environment, and promoted mythic time dimensions. These practices placed serious difficulties in the way of making narrative commitments to constitutive mythologies, and on the contrary entailed schismogenetic forms of contested narrative commitments.

Following Nietzsche, only that which is burnt into a human being and does not cease to cause pain can remain in memory.¹⁵ Human beings build identity and the possibility of life in general on the capacity of forgetting. In eastern Europe, a series of socially traumatic experiences led to the disintegration of identities, forced expulsion, foreign domination, and the impossibility of mourning victims and commemorating traumatic events. The systematic destruction of elites was a central element of Nazi occupation, in particular in Poland. The systematic uprooting of people by communist regimes destroyed experiences by transforming language into meaningless Newspeak in the service of power. As a consequence, narrative and performative commitments to critical self-assessments or the acknowledgement of guilt have been rare. The implementation of communism in Russia after 1917 and in Eastern Europe in the wake of two devastating world wars failed to establish a firm narrative commitment to one founding generation.¹⁶ In Russia, the Bolsheviks had grown up as outsiders, exposed to exile, persecution, and suffering. Bolshevik communists aimed to uproot people by systematically attacking the very foundations of interpersonal links, cultural reference-points, and sociability. Not only did the Communist party apply rigorous forms of self-confession, purges, and trials. Stalin’s Great Terror was also a terminal assault on the revolutionary generation of the original Bolsheviks. Elites in the inner circle of Stalinist power lived in fear of annihilation as potential victims of their enemies and recipients of suffering, a condition that only came to an end after Beria’s death in 1953.

The establishment of communism in post-1945 Eastern Europe coincided with the social revolution of the mass killing of elites, expulsion of minorities, border changes, and failed uprisings. The annihilation of the Polish state in 1939 was accompanied by the ruthless occupation regime and the extermination of approximately two million members of the professional and intellectual elites. The self-sustained, society-wide underground state and the ultimately unsuccessful resistance movements added to the failure of the Polish elites to redeem the country from the double invasion of 1939. This moral confusion fell on fertile ground in a region where myths of victimhood were particularly pervasive. Although the post-totalitarian system abandoned the practice of purges, it relied heavily on ritualistic self-censorship and dissimulation in behaviour typical of Soviet citizens, making the switching of faces a ritualised skill. The line of culpability ran through individuals themselves.

Communist regimes were anti-modern in ideology but hyper-modern in the ways they aimed to reconfigure states and societies in practice. As a consequence of the way state-building processes have worked in Eastern Europe, as well as of the establishment of Soviet communism after 1945, time regimes have privileged future utopias as opposed to spaces of experience. Communism appeared in an economically backward society. Whilst rejecting capitalism and democracy as organizational forms of modernity, it was hyper-modernist in embracing ideas of social engineering and progress in order to catch up with and overcome the West. One central focus of social engineering was to uproot people from their habitual locus, traditional living environment, and social habits. In the Soviet Union, the social upheavals in the 1920s and 1930s left a durable effect on demography, industry, urban life, and agriculture. Stalin’s revolution from above transformed a rural country, where on the eve of the First World War between 80 and 85 percent of the population lived in the countryside, into a country where, in 1990, 66 per cent of the population lived in cities. The destruction of the built environment and the uprooting of people from their homes in the industrial revolution resulted in a ‘car pulled by a horse’, whilst the urban revolution led to ‘cities without citizens’.¹⁷

As Paul Connerton has argued, modernity is characterized by forgetfulness.¹⁸ The major source of forgetting is associated with processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions. The increased scale of human settlement, the production of speed, and the repeated and often intentional destruction of the built environment have all generated a diffuse yet all-encompassing and powerful amnesia. In Connerton’s view, locus is a more important carrier of place memory than memorial. The memory habit of being ‘at home’ is very inexplicit, experienced daily and therefore inattentively, in a state of distraction. Conversely, remembering by establishing places of memory speaks of fears of amnesia. ‘The threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials begets forgetting.’¹⁹

Finally, the falsification of history by organised forgetting would promote mythical time-dimensions. The ‘permanent revolution in one country’ imposed a latent civil war on Soviet society, producing a recurrent loss of memory.²⁰ In Solzhenitsyn’s words, ‘we forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering… It makes us an easy prey for liars.’²¹ As Connerton put it, ‘to remember, then, is precisely not to recall events as isolated; it is to become capable of forming meaningful narrative sequences. In the name of a particular narrative commitment, an attempt is being made to integrate isolated or alien phenomena into a single unified process.’²²

According to Katherine Verdery, for instance, time regimes in Romania kept people permanently off balance.²³ This etatisation of time undermined the sense of a ‘normal order’ and entailed a yawning gap between elites and the population. While party elites lived by promised images of a radiant future, the populace lived with an impression of flattened time and endless repetition. Communism stripped history of its eventfulness, squeezing societies between a promised utopia and a range of foundation myths. Heroic narratives and narratives of martyrdom and victimhood led not only to practices of screening, retribution, or disqualification, but also to a pervasive sense of domestic ‘enemies’ and the escalation of ethnic violence.²⁴ After 1945 Yugoslav state propaganda used myths of anti-fascism, the founding partisan experience, and the idea of brotherhood and unity as the dominant drivers of official memory. A central ‘fact’ in history books was to fix the total number of Yugoslav dead during World War II at 1.7 million, considerably higher than the historically more accurate 1 million. In the climate of growing tensions amongst the federal republics and after Tito’s death in 1980, the second post-war generation, especially in Serbia, would use these numbers to ‘prove’ the huge numbers of Serbs killed by Croatian Ustasha. In the memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences of 1986, Yugoslav history was portrayed as a systematic persecution of the Serbian minority, threatened by physical annihilation.²⁵

The Search for Constitutive Mythologies

What has become clear from this outline is that the legacy of communism or the ‘eastern experience’ of memory has to be addressed by looking at different layers of spaces of experience. Notions of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ experience are much more than narratives of collective suffering, collective heroic resistance, or the incapacity of dealing with the past would have it. The ‘legacy of communism’ is, therefore, not only a space of experience that needs to be overcome. The communist experience produced dialectics between death and birth, decay and renewal, violence and the sacralisation of its victims, all of which have engendered different habits of memory. The evolution of communism was punctuated with liminal moments in which experiences and expectation were decisively re-imagined or forgotten, but also incorporated into new habits.

As Michel de Certeau has argued, historiographical discourse engages with the modalities of what was once a liminal in-between situation, an ‘initial zero’.²⁶ Because the beginnings of the history of nations, classes, or empires are lost objects, the task of historiography is to represent a scene of violence which is concealed and erased from memory. In other words, the death that made it all possible is kept alive by historiography in order to play an ‘active’ role in the sense of structuring social relations. Potential ‘initial zeros’ abound in Eastern Europe. As Tony Judt put it, Eastern Europe is scattered with islands of the past: 1918, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1945, 1948, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1989; it is difficult to point to a clear hierarchical order of decisive turning-points which would become markers of certainty in social imaginaries.

We are not only the past that we (can) remember but we are also the past that we can forget. Communist manipulation of history could organise forgetting for the purpose of distorting historical truth, but it did not produce blessed acts of oblivion. In contrast to the memory of Auschwitz in Germany, memories of key events such as World War II, the Polish Solidarity movement, or the Round Table are anything but unequivocal. Frank Ankersmit made an interesting distinction between four types of experience of forgetting. The first type of forgetting refers to those aspects of the past that are devoid of any relevance for our present or future identity. The second type concerns forgetting something that is truly relevant to our identity and our actions, though we were unaware of this importance. The third refers to events that put too much of a strain on collective consciousness, causing pain or trauma. The outstanding event of that type in the twentieth century is the Holocaust, which was ‘forgotten’ in Germany and elsewhere over approximately two decades. In the fourth type, this forgetting of a trauma is arguably not possible. One may think of the great transformations such as revolutions or socialised warfare. What is relevant here is the distinction between the third and the fourth types of forgetting as to the quality of the trauma and the possibility of creating a new identity. In the third type of forgetting, however dramatic, two identities may coexist (the former one and a new identity, crystallising around the traumatic experience), whilst in the fourth type of forgetting historical transformations cause feelings of a profound and irreparable loss, of cultural despair, and of hopeless disorientation. Traumatic experiences become more dramatic, since a former identity is irrevocably lost forever and superseded by a new historical or cultural identity. Consequently, the new identity is constituted by a trauma for which no cure is to be found and which leads to a permanent loss of the former identity.

In Eastern Europe, the competition between victims for a higher status of victimhood exemplifies the difficulty of forgetting. In Poland, the spirit of defeat in victory after 1945 propelled myths of martyrdom and active heroism. The different expectations of Poles and Jews after 1945 led to competing and often conflicting accounts of sufferings during the Nazi occupation. Essentially, ‘the Poles competed with the Jews for [the] palm of martyrdom. Both sides accuse each other of the heinous theft of suffering.’²⁷ As Meike Wulf has pointed out, two narratives are central to the new anti-communist memory regime in the post-Soviet space. These are the ‘narrative of collective suffering’ (of nations oppressed by Soviet Russia) and the narrative of ‘collective resistance’ (against foreign occupation). The former was the prevailing political narrative of the 1990s, whilst the latter came to be prominent around the time of EU accession. The narrative of collective suffering is an attempt at redressing the imbalance caused by one-sided Western approaches which place a greater emphasis on the suffering caused by Fascism.

In post-communist Estonia, the narrative of collective suffering concentrates on the Estonian suffering under Soviet rule while issues of collaboration with the occupiers are being blanked out from the national martyrology as part of the externalization of the communist past.²⁸ The narrative of collective resistance glorifies national heroes and is exemplified in the new Victory Cross on Tallinn’s Freedom Square, which was intended to be unveiled in time for the 90th anniversary celebrations of the Estonian Republic in 2008 commemorating the Freedom Fighters of the war of independence (1918-20) and by extension all the Freedom Fighters of subsequent wars, such as the anti-Soviet partisans (the ‘Forest Brethren’), the Estonians fighting in the Finnish Army, and indeed in German uniform. This shift from suffering to resistance may further be explained by the fact that in the long run, national identity cannot be consolidated on a negative self-image of suffering (and the trope of victimhood), but needs a positive basis instead. When comparing this to the situation of postreunification Germany, a reverse process can be observed as an increasing focus was placed on the suffering of the German perpetrators and more broadly of German civilians during the war (while the question of German guilt has been increasingly re-contextualised in a European context). After 2003, Polish public opinion was deeply critical of tendencies in Germany to create a Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen (centre against expulsions). It was felt that these commemorative efforts by Germany signified a grave form of historical revisionism or relativism that would turn ’perpetrators into victims’.

The recent Katyń catastrophe symbolises this strong tension in diametrically opposed interpretations.²⁹ The heroic interpretation sees the deaths of president Kaczyński and his fellow passengers in a plane crash in Smolensk on April 10, 2010 as another heroic sacrifice in the on-going struggle against the evil empire of Russia. The rival interpretation takes Kaczyński’s determination to pay a visit to the Katyń site three days after prime minister Donald Tusk’s visit at the official invitation of Vladimir Putin, and to force a landing there in critical weather conditions, as an indication that the victims are Kaczyński’s victims. Ultimately, the sense of imagination of Polish victimhood, martyrdom, sacrifice, and living in the past hinder Poland’s turn toward a future in Europe and the country’s liberation from its own past.

Storage forms of memory point to the resonance of the cultural unconscious. A large part of our memories, in a Proustian twist, ’sleeps’ within our bodies until it is awakened or triggered by some external, often haphazard, stimulus. The learning of memory is often an unconscious and non-agentive process. The Prague Spring, for instance, would mean different things to different age-contingent communities. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring did not arise as a spontaneous happening but was, in Vaclav Havel’s words, the result of a gradual awakening, a sort of creeping opening up of the ‘hidden sphere’ of society.³⁰ The defeat of reform attempts within socialism would, by the late 1970s, mark a radical shift.³¹ Whilst before 1968, young radicals wanted to reform socialism, the formative experience of their generation – the failure of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion - would become central to the political identity of dissidence per se. However, much as western radicals did not see that the real event of 1968 was, in Rudi Dutschke’s words, not Paris but Prague, so too many radical easterners also failed to see its meaning. In Hungary, for instance, opposition figures would become convinced that the defeat of the Prague Spring finally revealed the ’true meaning’ of the destruction of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. After 1989, memories of the domestic ’small revolutions’ were sidelined from official memory. With regard to 1968, shame loomed large as the source of the lack of interest professed by the Czechs for their recent past. This shame or even cynicism might stem from the irreconcilability of two histories or truths that were inherent to 1968: on the one hand, the account of a civic, human, and spontaneous Prague spring; on the other, the representation of 1968 as a failure rooted in the political naivety of Czechoslovaks.

Such a position casts doubts on propositions by historians who have suggested the need for coming to terms with the past by learning ‘history lessons’. Historians are after all products of generational chains with key formative experiences. Their professional work also reflects their search for meaning amidst passions, constraints, and social and individual memories that resonate in their expectations. In a recent study on post-Soviet historians in Estonia, Wulf and Grönholm used generational group identities among Estonian historians to examine how professionals engage actively in the transformation processes and support nation-building processes.³² They elaborated on four different strategies Soviet historians used in response to the new conditions of historical research - conformism, opportunism, withdrawal, and passive resistance – and relate these strategies to different generational groups of Soviet historians. Their post-1991 biographic accounts show how various modes of talking about past experiences, such as glorification, denial, self-justification, apologetics, distancing, resignation, and destiny reveal strategies of coping with loss and of generating new meaning.

Finally, Eastern Europe lacks a sense of rupture with the past. The collapse of communism occurred not in a war or a violent revolution, but by means of peaceful, negotiated pacts. Unlike the authority vacuum of Germany, a distinct set of backward movements aimed to retrieve expectations for the future from an often by-gone past. The Polish writer Gustaw Herling- Grudziński deplored the fact that Poland in 1989 lacked a cathartic rupture with the past such as occurred in post-World War II Europe. Purges such as in post-war France or Italy or trials such as Nuremberg were impossible. The only systematic trials occurred in reunified Germany, a special case given the ‘colonisation’ of East by West Germany. In this sense, the peaceful transition from communism became a curse because the dividing lines between friend and enemy, victim and perpetrator, judge and accused were blurred. It is often said that memories became unfrozen only once communism had collapsed. There is some truth to this. However, the opposite perspective is legitimate and even more instructive.

The violent repression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Prague spring in 1968 have bequeathed social and communicative memories that would become instrumental in the peaceful transition after 1989.³³ Much of the work on memory politics in Eastern Europe has focused on difficulties in overcoming the double legacy of Nazism and communism. Memory is often associated with pangs of conscience, cultural trauma, and the difficulty of forgetting. Yet memory, more generally, binds people to commitments in the future. This relates not only to the reliability in relationships and trustworthiness in business, but also to key formative experiences that occurred in the particularly sensitive times of late adolescence and early adulthood.

Appeals to integrate the eastern experience into the founding narrative of European memory abound. In 2008 the signatories of the ‘Prague Declaration’ demanded the formulation of a common European approach regarding crimes of totalitarian regimes and the acknowledgement of the common legacy of Communism and Nazism.³⁴ In line with the ‘Prague process’, an open letter to the EU justice commissioner was authored two years later by six-post communist states (Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania) demanding that the denial of any totalitarian crime should be treated according to the same standard as Holocaust denial.³⁵ In 2009, the European Parliament passed a resolution to commemorate the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 as the European Day of Remembrance of the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, in a compromise solution rather removed from the demands of various post-communist countries to treat Soviet crimes according to the same standards as the Holocaust, and to put the two totalitarian regimes on an equal footing. Indeed these countries would have chosen a different wording, namely the European Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. All these attempts at the inclusion of the East European wartime experience into the (western) European memory of the war are not so much a question of political will or crafting of collective memory.

How do memories become lasting markers of foundation or moral markers of certainty? We recall revolutions, wars, or major transitions in a country’s history through personal memories in literary expression, autobiographies, memorials, or semantic symbols. Yet a far more important claim to memory is the fact that social experiences create ritualised habit memory. Habit memory is the capacity to undertake acts of performance. The key idea of a wide range of recent studies in memory is that memory can no longer be seen as a reflection, or a cognitive record of the past. Rather it should be seen as performative. It comes into existence ‘at a given time and place through specific kinds of memorial activity’.³⁶ Theorists of memory such as Paul Connerton and Jan Assmann have provided strong accounts of how commemorative rituals, bodily practices, and the coding of memory allow for remembering such bodies of generative mythology. Jan Assmann suggests that Judaism – in an age of extreme uncertainty – established memory techniques in the service of bonding memory.³⁷ As exemplified in the book of Deuteronomy, symbolic representations and ritual commemoration bind people through techniques such as learning by heart, conversational remembering, oral transmission, or canonization of the text of the covenant (Torah) as the foundation of ‘literal’ adherence.

Such ‘coding of memory’ can become culturally hegemonic. According to Connerton, commemorative ceremonies engage members of the community by enacting cults, encoding gestures, and ritually repeating movements. The aim is to remind the community of its identity. Revolutionary periods leave an extraordinary impact both on the self-definition of the regime and on the social memory of citizens. The emotional intensity of the French Revolution would, as Kant realized at the time, never be forgotten. The Revolution generated rituals as symbolic representations, which unfolded in opposite directions. The trial and execution of Louis XVI was enshrined in a ritual performance of extraordinary power, which not only killed a king but revoked a ruling principle.³⁸ Conversely, the triumph of the people would be remembered through rituals of triumph such as the storming of the Bastille, and also through public festivals.³⁹

We remember how to ride a bike, mow a lawn, or assemble furniture. The memory of these performative acts is like learning a lesson. As Paul Connerton put it, ‘the better we remember this class of memories, the less likely it is that we will recall some previous occasion on which we did the thing in question.’⁴⁰ This type of memory sustains by far most of our actions in daily life but it is based on forgetting, i.e. on disconnecting with the personal memories of when it was learned or the cognitive memories of how to do it. Yet unless we encounter a problem and have to consult a manual, we would not necessarily recall when, how, or where we learnt it. The emergence of performative habit memory is often rooted in founding or strategic generations. Such carriers of memory will - often with a considerable delay in time – produce a variety of testimonies that they will communicate to their kin, the wider public, and even across national boundaries. This habit memory will inscribe and incorporate its experience into national consciousness through literary expression, semantic symbols, and ritual performance.⁴¹

Ritualised habits in West Germany included forgetting values such as glory and patriotism, and learning the internalisation of guilt. In German habit memory, representations of patriotism have become practically impossible.⁴² The central memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany at the Neue Wache in Berlin now is dedicated to the ‘victims of war and tyranny’ (Den Opfern43 von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft).⁴⁴ Referring to the passive Opfer (the victims), it reinterprets the motivations and feelings of German soldiers. Their sacrifice for the nation, i.e. their active Opfer, is ex-post replaced by the idea that they were seduced, corrupted, and died for the wrong cause. It is even more problematic when the term Opfer is applied to the Jews. There is no doubt that the Jews objectively were a passive victim. They were killed practically without resistance; they were not given any chance to commit acts of self-sacrifice. However, official commemoration of the Jews as victims in a not insignificant way subscribes to central elements of Nazi ideology. The Nazis insisted on the necessity to make the Jews the victim par excellence with the aim of ‘liberating’ the world from them. According to Koselleck, this very ambiguity of Opfer indicates the limit of patriotism, which is no longer capable of being represented by monuments (denkmalfähig).

Conclusion

We can now return to some of the implications of a shift of memory’s centre of gravity in Europe. In the social sciences, comparisons usually aim at establishing analogies amongst clearly distinct cases. After 1989, the ‘liberal consensus’ eviscerated historical experience and cultural specificity in the name of hegemonic models. As much as the liberal-capitalist model of development aroused a state of expectation in post-1989 Eastern Europe, ‘memory by western design’ appears to have become the default master narrative, a sort of normative standard by which to ‘judge’ memory regimes. Is the post-communist condition of contested memory regimes yet another scenario in which Eastern Europe has no choice other than to follow western designs? The temptation is great to see contested memories in Eastern Europe as pathological, a continuing nightmare from which it is difficult to awake. Arguments about the incapacity and immaturity to deal with the past abound. The question, however, is whether such claims are intellectually sound and historically tenable.

Memory by western design may suggest a ‘return’ to a normality that cannot be imagined without the ‘western’ experience. The promotion of a ‘return to normality’ by accepting western master narratives as opposed to the various eastern counter-narratives carries the risk of reducing ‘eastern experience’ to the darker sides of communism and pre-communist ‘backwardness’. Such a position would deliberately ‘forget’ about the courageous and exemplary actions that turned acts of violence, humiliation, and indignity into dignified means of protest, national mobilisation, and the voicing of expectations in a way that proved capable of overcoming a despotic dictatorship. Conversely, both the West German and French memory regimes have gone through periods of ‘communicative silencing’, the mourning of victims, and heroic resistance myths. Only gradually – and not without decisive shifts in the self-imagination and performance of political leaders, artists, intellectuals, and the wider public – could the victim syndrome undergo a transition in the direction of a diversity of memories, an increase of official commemorations, and a more critical understanding of the forms of coming to terms – or failing to come to terms – with the past. This paper has attempted to focus on the legitimately ‘eastern’ experiential basis of memory regimes. By attuning habits of memory to the tensions between spaces of experience and horizons of expectations, common forms of memory in Europe need to embrace the changing forms of cultural meanings ‘stored’ in a nation’s memory.

Harald Wydra, a fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. After studies of history and political science at the Universities of Regensburg and Salamanca, he took a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. Before coming to Cambridge in 2003 he taught Political Science at the University of Regensburg. He held visiting fellowships at the International Political Anthropology.

ENDNOTES

1 R. Koselleck, ‘Gebrochene Erinnerung? Deutsche und polnische Vergangenheit’, in: Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Jahrbuch 2000, Gottingen 2001), pp. 19-32 (20).

2 W. Roszkowski, G. Schopflin, T. Valdo Kelam, G. V. Kristovskis and V. Landsbergis, United Europe – United History: A Mission to Consolidate a Common Memory.

3 P. Schmitter and T. L. Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travel of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East should they attempt to go?’, Slavic Review Vol. 53, No. 1 (1994), pp. 183-194.

4 J. Olick, The Politics of Regret (London: Routledge, 2007).

5 T. Judt, Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945 (London, 2005), pp. 830-1.

6 T. Synder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

7 Judt, Postwar, p. 829.

8 T. G. Ash, ‘Trials, Purges, and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe’, in J.-W. Muller (ed.) Memory and Power in Post-War Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 265-82.

9 Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).

10 R. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), p. 38.

11 See Elias, The Germans.

12 Mikko Lagerspetz, ‘Postsocialism as a Return: Notes on a Discursive Strategy’, East European Politics and Societies Vol. 13, No. 2 (1999), pp. 377-390.

13 K. Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland 1943-1948 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 469-70.

14 See Adam Michnik’s analysis of the ‘Polish gutter’ and the extreme version of Polish nationalism in the early days of the Second Polish Republic, in A. Michnik, In Search of Lost Meaning (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2010).

15 F. Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, Band 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), p. 802.

16 For a more systematic development of this argument see H. Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 111-61.

17 Quoted in K. Pomian, ‘Anatoli Vichnevski. La faucille et le rouble’, Le Débat 107 (1999), pp. 59-60.

18 P. Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

19 Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, p. 29.

20 H. Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 122-28.

21 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Vols I and II, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney (Boulder, 1998), p. 299.

22 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 26.

23 K. Verdery, What was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 54-57.

24 Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy, p. 232.

25 Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy, p. 201.

26 M. de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 74.

27 P. Wrobel, ‘Double Memory: Poles and Jews after the Holocaust’, East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 560-74.

28 J. Mark, The Unfinished Revolution (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2010).

29 See A. Nowak, Memory at War Newsletter, 2011, 3-4.

30 V. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in J. Keane (ed.) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Eastern Europe (London: Hutchinson&Co., 1985), p. 43.

31 P. Apor and J. Mark, ‘Mobilizing Generation: The Idea of 1968 in Hungary’, in B. Weisbrod (ed.) Generational Belonging and the 68ers in Europe (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 99-117.

32 M. Wulf and P. Gronholm, ‘Generating Meaning Across Generations: The Role of Historians in the Codification of History in Soviet and Post-Soviet Estonia’, Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2010), pp. 351-382.

33 For detailed analysis see Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy, pp. 219-43.

34 See for the full text of the document defending history.com/Praguedeclaration.

35 See: www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/czech-mep-throws-damper-onappeal- for-eu-ban-on-denial-of-communist-crimes (accessed 30.09.2011).

36 N. Wood, Vectors of Memory. Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p. 2.

37 J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 16-21.

38 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 7-9.

39 W. H. Sewell. Logics of History(Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 225-70.

40 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 23.

41 For an analysis of generations of English poets and writers as makers of national consciousness, see B. S. Turner, ‘Strategic Generations: Historical Change, Literary Expression, and Generational Politics’, in J. Edmunds and B. Turner (eds) Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield 2002), pp. 13-29.

42 Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), pp. 232-3.

43 The German word Opfer combines the meaning of victim and sacrifice.

44 It features the sculpture Mother and Her Dead Son by Kathe Kollwitz and was inaugurated in 1993.

This article has been published in the first issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies.

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

The text was originally presented by dr. Andrea Mork during 'European Remembrance' Symposium in Gdańsk on 15 September 2012.

Szanowni Państwo, Ladies and Gentlemen, meine sehr verehrten Damen und Herren,

Thank you for inviting me. I very much appreciate this opportunity to present the key aspects of the new museum project of the House of European history in Brussels to you. I am very pleased that for the first time since we started working I am able to fully explain the concept of the permanent exhibition to an external auditorium.

Is there such a thing as a common European history? The answer to this question is decisive to the realisation of our project. If the answer is no, any further discussion would be superfluous. Of course there is a common European history. It is about a shared history in the dual sense of the word: at the same time both uniting and dividing. Common European history has bound us together and it has divided us.

Our common history is not in competition with national narratives, but it is their corrective and supplement. It is a contribution to a European public space that does not yet exist.

Even though our work is still very much in progress and even though we are currently in a turbulent phase of work, I should like to provide a short overview of this embryonic project and describe: 

1. a short history of its formation
2. the theoretical basis of our concept
3. the narrative and structure of the permanent exhibition.

1. The formation of the project

• The project to establish a House of European History was initiated by the former President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering in his inaugural speech in February 2007: "It should be a place where a memory of European history and the work of European unification is jointly cultivated, and which at the same time is available as a locus for the European identity to go on being shaped by present and future citizens of the European Union."
• In December 2007, the European Parliament set up a committee of experts, historians and museum professionals to draft a 'Conceptual Basis' paper.
• As set out in the paper, the museum will contribute to a better understanding of European history with a special focus on the 20th century since WWI, paying special attention to European integration after WW II.
• The HEH will be housed in the Eastman building and contain a permanent exhibition of 4000 m2 and a temporary exhibition of 800 m2.
• With the aim of transforming this former dental clinic, currently an office-building, into an exhibition building an architectural competition was organised in 2009.
• In 2010, the architectural consortium Chaix et Morel from Paris was selected to carry out the transformation of the Eastman building into a museum building.
• From January 2011 onward, an academic project team - now composed of 20 historians, museum professionals and assistants - started to work on the project, discussing the exhibition and collection policies, the mission and vision of this House and the historical content and narrative of the exhibition. (content team 14, the whole group covering 14 languages)
• An Academic Committee advises the project team. A Board of Trustees, with representatives of the political groups in the EP and from its parliamentary committee for culture, from the European commission and representatives of the Brussels authorities acts as a supervisory body.
• The highly ambitious plans for this project foresee that the building will be finished at the end of April 2014. In late spring 2014, we will begin the installation of the exhibition.

2. Theoretical basis

The project team started its work by defining a theoretical basis. First of all the methods and objectives needed to be spelled out. Let´s start with the provocative and emotive term "Identity" which is already at the centre of the perception of the HEH in public debate.

Can the House of European History create a European identity?

In today's theory of culture, the question of collective identity seems to have become central to any understanding of history. Since the 1990s this key concept has had an overwhelming success. But it can also be seen as the sign of deep-rooted crisis. In a situation of crisis, the call for a stronger sense of community and of awareness of belonging together, of binding people in a community of shared values - beyond political imperatives and economic interests - is altogether understandable.

But the term “identity” is highly debatable. ‘Identity is the prototype of ideology’. (Negative Dialektik: 115) These words of warning from the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, accentuate the fundamental criticism of the idea of identity:
• There is no truly general, universally accepted definition of what European identity is supposed to be. Attempts to describe it are so general that they lose all concrete meaning. A clear-cut definition of European identity is too simplistic and reductionist. European culture cannot be described as a homogeneous entity. The concept is too static.
• Finally: Having the House of European History define a European identity would be an authoritarian step that would block rather than foster the necessary social debate on this highly meaningful question.
• So our answer had to be this: the concept of identity is unsuited for the laying of a theoretical basis. The House of European History cannot be a stage for the presentation of a pre-defined European identity.

Can the House of European History be a reservoir for a collective European memory?

Instead of defining an identity ‘from the top down’, it seems more appropriate to us to single out the idea of ‘collective memory’, which was developed in the 1920s by Maurice Halbwachs and was reintroduced into the German and international debate from the 1990s onwards by Pierre Nora and Aleida and Jan Assmann.

For our theoretical concept, the definition expressed by the Swiss writer Adolf Muschg, is defining our route: ‘What binds Europe together and what divides it, is quintessential: the common memory...’ (NZZ, 31.5.2008)

The HEH should become a "reservoir of the European memory" as the basis for the evolution of a common consciousness. The advantage of this concept lies in its multiple perspectives and its critical potential. Its particular appeal is the twofold perspective that leads us in very practical terms to the following questions. These should be formative for the permanent exhibition:

• What binds Europe together? What are the core elements, characteristic features and key events of European culture and civilisation, social and political history?
• What are the historical experiences, interpretations and memories that bind the various nations and social groups to these central events and developments in European history, each of the nations and groups having been involved in a different way? What experiences, traditions and achievements could present-day Europeans recognise as the basis for their awareness of a shared past?

As a consequence the House of European History will not be just an addition or the representation of the multiplicity of national histories. It will be a reservoir of European memory, containing experiences and interpretations in all their diversity, contrasts and contradictions. Its presentation of history will be complex rather than uniform, more differentiated than homogeneous, critical rather than affirmative, but it will be one with a synthetic perspective towards the European Community which itself seeks to combine views and ideas in such a way as to forge a common European self-awareness.

3. Narrative and structure of the House of European History

What is the central theme of the House of European History and what are the ideas that guide it?

Two narratives will run through all of the exhibition:

• In line with the conceptual basis paper, the 20th century will be the centrepiece of the permanent exhibition, with particular attention paid to the process of integration after WW II.

• Even if we reject any teleological approach to this process the exhibition should explain that European integration is based on foundations, achievements and traditions whose roots reach far back into history. Thus, the documentation of post-war history will be embedded in a broader context aiming at explaining the long-term developments of European history.

Doing this the exhibition will focus on phenomena,
a) which are originally European,
b) which have spread all over Europe and
c) which are relevant up to now and considered as distinctive marks of a common European civilisation.

Even though the museum will have a special focus on the history of the European integration, the HEH will not restrict its narrative to the outer borders of the European Community or European Union. Such a limitation would not be deserving of the notion of “European history”. Our perspective and the radius of our presentation encompass all of European.

In the meantime we have worked out the narrative of the permanent exhibition. At the same time we developed together with Arnauld Dechelle, a French architect living in London, first ideas how to present the content in the framework of the highly difficult architecture of the building.

Now, let´s have a look how the narrative is organized.

Introduction: Shaping Europe

'Shaping Europe' has as its purpose to engage visitors with the fundamentals of Europe and to familiarise them with core issues of its history. As the starting point of the permanent exhibition, this theme will provide an introduction into the subject matter of the House of European History.
Geographically, Europe is not a self-evident entity – the perception of Europe, its images and concepts have changed radically from antiquity until today. Maps determine and reflect the image of Europe and the political self-image of the continent. They are not defined by sharp-edged geographical boundaries, but rather by cultural characteristics and distinctions.
Europe is shaped by history. It has a common heritage, meaning that it is characterised by particular features, traditions and achievements, which distinguish it from other continents.
The introduction makes the visitors aware of the fact that memory is formative for mankind, as the basis of its self understanding and of its learning, whether as individuals or as members of a social group. The visitor will become aware of the fact that memory is inextricably intertwined with oblivion. Memory is never fixed and is continually changing. That is why any reflection on cultural identity and any description of history are, essentially, constructions.
Europe owes its name to the ancient myth of Europa and the Bull. The tale of the Phoenician princess, robed by Zeus, has become the emblematic figure for the continent and has been interpreted in a multiplicity of ways throughout history. Viewed from a modern standpoint, the myth hints at the fact that European culture has ancient roots beyond Europe. It can be related to the fact that the Greeks adopted the Phoenician script and developed their own full alphabet from it.

The 19th century

The narrative, in the proper sense of the term, begins within the 19th century. In the 19th century Europe entered modernity - politically, economically, socially and culturally. The concepts of human and civic rights, self-determination, industrialization and liberal market economy were the leading factors in this transformation process. Before WWI, Europe reached the peak of its global power. The exhibition will point out that social and political tensions and international rivalries led to the build-up of an enormous and multifaceted potential for conflict, which then exploded at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Age of Destruction

The first half of the 20th century was an 'Age of Destruction' - shaken by two traumatic world wars, an economic crisis of unprecedented depth and the decline of liberal democracy, while totalitarianism advanced. The rivalry between three social systems (Fascism, Communism, and Parliamentary Democracy) was the signature of the interwar period. The dialectics of modernity became manifest in the mutation from extreme rationality, as it had been developed in modern times, into the extreme irrationality which became apparent in the different scenarios of mass war and totalitarian terror.

The topic entitled 'Rise and Fall of Democracy' is the centrepiece of this theme, pointing out the wave of political change in the aftermath of World War I on the one hand and the rapid decline of the new democracies created by the Versailles Treaties in the interwar period on the other hand. In this context the comparison between National Socialism and Stalinism is a constituent part of the exhibition. These two extreme manifestations of totalitarian systems should be placed face to face in order to explain both their similarities and their differences.

The exhibition pays special attention to the memory of the Shoah. As the 'break of civilization', the Shoah is the beginning and the nucleus of the European discourse of memory. For a long time, not only did German society repressed its guilt, but also other nations were equally silent about their failings. In the meantime, the recognition of the Shoah as a singular crime against humanity has become the negative reference point of European self-consciousness.

Fragile Stability

The third theme encompasses the period of time from 1945 to 1973.
In 1945 Europe was a landscape of ruins, disempowered and divided,
the theatre of the Cold War between two antagonistic political systems. Nevertheless, for nearly 30 years, on both sides of the 'Iron Curtain', Europe experienced a period of unexpected economic growth. The idea of European integration marks a turning point in European history, laying a political path towards the principle of supranational cooperation.

After World War II, Europe had hit rock bottom. It was transformed from being a leading global power into a devastated continent, dependant on the two superpowers even in decisions on its own future. The 'Iron Curtain' became the historical divide of the continent. The United States and the Soviet Union each emerged with antagonistic programmes corresponding to their mission: economic liberalization and democratization on the one hand, modernisation via state-planning and the leadership of the communist party, on the other hand.

Western Europe experienced a phase of international reconciliation, economic prosperity and consolidation of democratic institutions and structures. On the other hand the Socialist states under Soviet control underwent a period of forced industrialization, alphabetization and social security, under duress from varyingly brutal dictatorships, stabilized under the pressure and military support of the Soviet Union.

The European Economic Community, an entirely unique form of organization with the aim of integrating the economies and to some extent the legal systems of a number of independent nation-states, marks a turning point in the history of the continent. It prevents Western Europe from falling back into previous chauvinistic, aggressive, imperialistic mechanisms. The exhibition will focus on the key events of this process: Extending from the Hague Congress in 1948 to the European Coal and Steel Community, the failure of the European Defence Community, the Treaties of Rome, as well as the establishment of a common agriculture policy, the Elysée Treaty, the 'Empty Chair Crisis', and the first enlargement of the E.C. in 1973. Thus, the exhibition points out that the European integration was a “child” of the Cold War.

Breaking Boundaries

The 1970s mark the end of the post-war era. Western Europe entered a period of long-term economic transformation and far-reaching political and social diversification. The Socialist countries, already concerned about their relative economic backwardness, were now confronted with systemic problems and the decreasing legitimacy of their socio-political system. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the following enforced globalization, the process of European integration has undergone considerable acceleration and deepening.

In relation to the constant confrontation of the two antagonistic camps in Europe, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was a turning point bringing about a ‘change through rapprochement’ in this period of time.
The Helsinki Final Act (1975), which largely through the initiative of the European Community established human rights as a basic norm for relations among European states, became the reference point for dissidents and opposition in Eastern Europe. It serves in the exhibition as the starting point for the description of the final phase of Socialist countries. Stagnation, the growing discrepancy between promise and reality and the erosion of public authority were palpable. People mobilized for more freedom, social justice and political reforms, later on encouraged by Gorbachev´s reforms in the USSR and the recall of the Brezhnev doctrine. These movements finally led to the 1989 revolutions and to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War, which had dominated and had frozen the political situation in Europe for 45 years, came to an end.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire accelerated the European integration process. This became most evident in the enlargement 'marathon'. In deepening the supranational structures and the expansion of its competence to more and more fields of politics, the Europe Union has been breaking political, geographical, economical and mental boundaries.

1989 was the starting point of a phase of a serious and seismic re- interpretation of history, a time of fierce debate, which continues to this day. This will require another detour into the domain of memory in this part of the exhibition. In the last two decades, the Shoah and the GULAG have become the central points of reference in European history. On the one hand, the exhibition will reflect the fact that the memory of the two dictatorial systems of the 20th century did not unify but, very clearly, divided the continent. On the other hand, the interpretations of the two most brutal dictatorships of that past 'century of the extremes' reveal astonishing similarities in their deep structures. Because we deal with history on the basis of a set of mostly common values the visitor should be able to learn to be able to tolerate very different interpretations of history and memories on this basis.

Conclusion

To summarize: There are three devices, which are fundamental to our project:
1. It is our firm conviction: Memories both divide and unify us. This is the basis of our research. Shared memory can be the starting point for a learning process in which different experiences and diverse interpretations are mirrored and related to each other in a new way.
2. The HEH should become a platform for the dialogue on European identity. The refusal to give a complete answer does not make the question of identity redundant. On the contrary: We will not offer complete answers but rather, historical interpretations competing for acceptance.
3. Since Eric Hobsbawm (The Invention of Tradition, 1992) we know about invented traditions. It was not only nation-states which sought legitimacy by inventing a fictional past and which made great efforts to create a particular bond that held people together. In contrast to these historical precursors, the construction of a transnational, pan-European memory should take place through a process of communication, in the light of public discussion - as Jürgen Habermas would put it. (Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida: Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas. FAZ, 31.5.2003)

It is our view that the House of European History will be a good place for a public debate on this topic!