Men of Paper: Polish Lustration Law and Its Faulty? Biographical Basis

Abstract

This article describes how, in contemporary Poland, the questionable nature of the materials in the formerly secret police files is sometimes forgotten, most significantly in the process of lustration. It attempts to explain why the public would support lustration laws and/or engage in gossip stemming from the files, despite knowing their shortcomings. After briefly summarizing the long process by which agreement was reached concerning the Polish lustration bill, and describing some of the unique qualities of Polish lustration, the article presents arguments for why the formerly secret police files might be popularly accepted as the foundation used for the judicial process. The main justification discussed is found in literary and scholarly attempts to read the files biographically and to use them as inspiration for new biographies. The article shows that scholarly queries into secret police files as historically useful sources coincide with Polish popular interest in non-fiction literature and memoirs. I propose that fitting the police files within the already popular genre of biography offers entertainment value, while at the same time offering the documents legitimacy. This article shows that whereas scholars and authors of popular memoirs treat the files within a range of possibilities, the lustration process has room only for a straight forward reading of a file as a truthful story about an individual.