Abstract
The aim of this article is to discern and analyse three dominant strategies in the memory games employed in public discourse in Poland, all of which have the aim of ‘finishing the revolution’. These are: neutralization, retribution and zombification. Within this discursive framework, the dark legacy of the Communist secret police is seen to loom constantly over the rebirth of Poland and to be the root cause of social problems such as poverty, economic inequalities and ‘lack of moral standards’. Neutralization, retribution and zombification reflect three underpinning narratives that are interwoven into the politics of memory in Poland. The ‘neutralization’ approach, embedded in the vision of the past controlling the present, stands for an effort to deprive the perpetrators of their supposed hidden powers. The strategy of retribution translates into a demand to restore justice, thought of as a kind of ‘moral equilibrium’, both using legal measures and symbolic representations of the past. Finally, I use the term ‘zombification’ to describe widespread attempts to manipulate collective memory in order to bring dead perpetrators back to life.
Highlights
The aim of this article is to discern and analyse three dominant strategies in the memory games employed in public discourse in Poland, all of which have the aim of ‘finishing the revolution’
Neutralization, retribution and zombification reflect three underpinning narratives that are interwoven into the politics of memory in Poland
The strategy of retribution translates into a demand to restore justice, thought of as a kind of ‘moral equilibrium’, both using legal measures and symbolic representations of the past
Summary
‘ The Night of the Files’ is a well-known expression in the Polish public discourse, denoting one of the most dramatic political crises after 1989. The aim of this article is to discern and analyse three dominant strategies in the memory games employed in public discourse in Poland, all of which have the aim of ‘finishing the revolution’ My aim is to examine what sort of visions of the past have been conveyed by the ‘memory entrepreneurs’ of that time – to deploy a term coined by Elizabeth Jelin to denote those who take advantage of their privileged position to impose their own interpretation of the past onto others – acting almost unanimously.4 These narratives of memory, albeit produced by many different subjects, share a common logic and ‘grammar’ and evolve into one easy to define direction. Their evolution traced in this paper seems clearly to prove the idea widely accepted in memory studies that ‘with time, the “politics of the past” becomes instrumentalized as part of the “politics of the present”’.5
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