Polish Identity Research Articles

From policy to practice: the illusion of Polishness in Polish immigrant community language and culture education

ABSTRACT Increasing mobility of people across nation-state borders leads to cultural and linguistic diversification and raises discussions about the inclusion of immigrant minority languages and cultures in education. This contribution investigates possible discrepancies between top-down curricular policies and bottom-up practices at a Polish complementary school in the Netherlands. It focuses on the implementation of the school’s curriculum in times of globalization and superdiversity and explores the maintenance of linguistic and cultural values in a multilingual setting. In doing so it uses the curriculum domains as introduced by Goodlad and colleagues, i.e. the ideological, formal, perceived, operational and experiential curriculum, as an interpretive framework to analyze possible discrepancies between curricular policies and educational practices. The results reveal discrepancies between top-down policies and bottom-up practices. Classroom events and interviews illustrate the complex relationship between language and identity, showing that in a superdiverse classroom monolithic identity categories do not exist and therefore promoting Polish identity is like trying to hit a moving target. This study adds to a growing corpus of multicultural discourse studies on ethnic identity construction in education and raises awareness about the improper use of monolingual and monocultural policies in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

Popularization of music culture through extracurricular activity of Polish schools in Zaolzie in 2019 – from the Zaolzie press research

Music culture is truly close to the residents of Zaolzie. Upon the displacement of the border and hence pushing a large group of Polish people out of their own state’s territory, it became a significant determinant of their own, Polish national identity. In this culture-favorable conditions, a didactic-educational activity is carried out by 25 primary schools with Polish as the language of instruction, including 10 nine-grade schools and 15 five-grade schools. Additionally, in the Czech Cieszyn there is the only – in the region – four-grade Gimnazjum (equivalent to a Polish high school) with Polish as the Language of Instruction. These schools pursue an intense activity, aimed, among other things, to popularize culture and enable pupils to get involved in culture. The article presents results of the diagnostic research and shows selected aspects of music culture popularization through extracurricular activity of Polish schools in Zaolzie in 2019. These institutions pursued then, like in previous years, an exemplary popularizing activity among their pupils. Thanks to the press from Zaolzie, we can receive the current news on a thriving musical activity undertaken by Polish schools. This activity may be already defined as regular, since it occurs on a regular basis, depending on the circumstances: annually or every other year. In the development of their musical activity, particularly the vocal one, Polish schools are supported by the ‘Ars Musica’ Polish Art Society and the Pedagogical Center for the Polish National Education System.

Śródziemnomorskie kody polskości w twórczości Jana Parandowskiego

One is used to regarding Jan Parandowski (1895–1978) as a great connoisseur of the ancient world and a kind of “Olympic” writer with a distance to his own time and space. A thorough exam-ination of his literary essays, short stories and novels hardly proves this opinion. Treating Polish his-tory and culture, especially of the Renaissance epoch, as originating from and inspired by the ancient Roman/Greek tradition (“Poland is situated in the Mediterranean”), he conceals at the same time an evidently emotional approach to national legacy. There are several modes in which he evokes unique Polish history in the 19th century, with the great but problematic heritage of Romanticism as well as the controversial destiny of modern Polish artists obliged to fulfil national duties; he describes in classically discreet style Polish war experiences; he creates in different ways a sentimental image of his lost home country in Lwów. One of the clearest manifestos of the writer’s involvement in Polish identity can be also found in his defence of national sentiments and their qualities against the attitude presented in the famous work La Trahison des clercs (The treason of the intellectuals) by Julien Benda. According to Parandowski’s own declaration, his patriotism was responsive to aesthetic-al and sensory epiphany (geographical, landscape, etc. impressions) rather than to some abstract national symbols and declarations. There is also a close, mutual correspondence between ancient impulses in his work and his biography (Polish history); the writer has been frequently seeking for any consolation in Mediterranean utopian dimensions. Last but not least, the “postmortal” testimony of Polish identity in Parandowski’s biography and work seems to be related to the experience — for a long time unknown and only recently revealed — during his exile in revolutionary Soviet Russia; his pioneering study about “Bolshevism” documents the history of 20th-century totalitarianism and definitely denies the allegedly apolitical mind-set of the “Olympian.”

W trosce o polskość dzieci i młodzieży z okresu drugiej wojny światowej w Nowej Zelandii

The aim of the article is to present the issue of retaining the national identity among the youngest Polish exiles living in New Zealand. To present that issue, methods appropriate for the history of education were applied. The basis of the research were the materials stored in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. As a result of the archival research, at the invitation of the Prime Minister Peter Fraser, a group of Polish children arrived in the settlement of Pahiatua in New Zealand. They were mainly orphans with their carers. The exiles were provided with good living conditions. School children were prepared to return to free Poland after the war, they attended Polish schools in the settlement and the older ones attended New Zealand schools run mainly by the Catholic Church. The moment Poland found itself under the Soviet influence and the power was taken by the communists, the exiles from Pahiatua did not want to return to the enslaved country. They decided to stay in the friendly New Zealand. In that situation, the issue of retaining their national identity arose, along with the need to provide them with education, profession and work. The concept of resisting the policy of depriving the young generation of their national identity was in the focus of the Polish authority in London. It was also a matter of great concern of the teachers and carers in the settlement of Pahaiatua. Many initiatives were taken which aimed at retaining the Polish identity among children and youth living in New Zealand, who gradually started work in the unknown environment. The conducted activities to retain the Polish identity bore positive results. The Polish identity wasretained not only by the exiles but also by their children and grandchildren, who, not knowing the language of their ancestors, cultivate national traditions and remember their roots. As a result of the presented deliberations, we may draw a conclusion that the conduct of the Polish authority in exile in the analysed issue was appropriate. In such a situation one should act similarly and always consistently.

Struggle of Masurians with Polish Identity After the Second World War. Socialist Realist Literature Describing the nationality verification and surveying campaign

This article presents the history of Masuria created by the propaganda of socialist realism. Itsaim is to show how writers presented the nationality-based verification campaign and opinion pollsin the area of former East Prussia. The author attempts to prove that social realist writers describedthe above-mentioned action as “discovering” Polish identity by the inhabitants of Masuria. In orderto do that, four stories included in the anthology Ziemia serdecznie znajoma, published in 1954, areanalysed to show that strong pressure was exerted on the Masurians to confirm their Polish nationality.

Quo Vadis, Polonia? On religious loyalty, exit, and voice

Poland’s public sphere, in the three decades following the fall of communism, has been shaped by tensions between secular and religious visions of the polity. This article analyzes significant trends in the politico-religious landscape of contemporary Poland and discusses the growing polarization of Polish society around religion and politics. While the Catholic Church openly supports the country’s populist and right-wing government and remains strong from the loyalty of a significant portion on the Polish population, resistance to that political alliance and to the traditional association between Polishness and Catholicism is observable in various corners of Polish society. These include factions within the Catholic Church arguing for the depoliticization of Polish Catholicism; apostate and secularist movements; and the support for, and participation in, a notable Jewish revival. The article shows that while very different in both content and form, these movements converge in their effort to secularize Polish national identity and build a public sphere where various religious and non-religious value systems co-exist.

„Mały” romantyzm w sprawie ludu. Przykład Lucjana Siemieńskiego

Romantic literature, dominated by the great artistic personalities (of Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Krasiński), was founded on the category of “folksiness” and “folk culture”, understood as a mythical and spiritual foundation of the Polish identity. However, the dominating trend of “high” Romantic literature was accompanied by the lyrical work of the inland poets, who created another social project, based on the desire to be “the voice of the common people”.“Narzeczony”, “Napierski” and “Czerniawa” are three original poems by Lucjan Siemieński, stylized after rustic dumkas and focused on peasant revolts. The perspective of Siemieński’s poetry enables us to see the “Mickiewicz’s era” as a heterogeneous structure, leaving space for the inland poetry that lets the “folk histories” resound and that treats the issues of peasants as vital societal problems even if they were marginalized within the dominating discourse. The case of Siemieński opens up a perspective of reading the Romantic inland poetry as a space within which there could be produced a revolutionary language of a new social order.

Literary criticism from the right

Since the end of the 1960s, the literary scholar and critic Tomasz Burek has been one of the leading figures in the literary and cultural debates of Poland. These debates often go beyond the field of aesthetics to cover the big questions of society, Polish identity and the country’s painful and heroic historical legacy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Burek gained notoriety as one of the most important conservative, right-wing nationalist voices on the Polish literary scene.

Bakhtin’s ‘borrowed’ voices in the narratives of Polish-born adolescents living in the UK

Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ has often been used in sociolinguistics to examine questions of multilingualism. However, his concept of ‘borrowed’ voices is also useful for work that investigates identity, especially in the investigation of participant narratives. In my study of ethnic-linguistic identity construction of Polish-born adolescents living in the UK, I draw on the concept of borrowed voices to explore how the adolescents shape their narratives of their experiences. The findings suggest that the adolescents’ accounts are informed by the voices of others around them and that they borrow from discourses on Polish identity as they attempt to make sense of their experiences in their new environments.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

The social-cultural aspect of life of Polish population in the Olonets province in the mid-to-late XIX century

The article is devoted to the problem of analysis of saving the national identity of the ethnic Polish group on the territory of the Olonets province (modern Republic of Karelia, Arkhangelsk and Leningrad Oblast) in the historical perspective. Basing on the analysis of the resources of personal nature (memoirs), as well as the Russian and Polish historiography the main distinguishing characteristics of the national Polish identity on the hostile social-cultural environment were studied. Due to the research the authors concluded that the driving force of preserving the national identity was the religious factor, opening itself in the activity of the exiled priests and such traditional Polish leisure activities such as: choral singing, reading of religious and secular national literature, organization is the educational process.

Who is a Lithuanian? In Search of Władysław Mickiewicz’s Motherland

Władysław Mickiewicz (1838–1926) was one of most active members of the Polish-Lithuanian diaspora: biographer, journalist, librarian, translator, political, social activist, and prolific publicist. Despite all this, he was mainly known as a son and a follower of his father, the great poet Adam Mickiewicz. The lives of these two men intertwined in many ways: both of their youth years were marked by great rebellions, and both had missed them, both having spent most of their adult lives in Paris, writing and dreaming about their motherland. However, while for Adam the motherland was the land of his childhood and youth, for Władysław, it was not that easy to define. For him, Lithuania, Poland, and his great Father had formed a certain ideal – an ideal to live for. Władysław Mickiewicz was a servant of this ideal all his life, constantly pre-serving, popularizing, and sometimes interpreting it – the legacy of his father. These ideals of an eternal Union between Poland and Lithuania, of an archaic Lithuanian Arcadia somewhere in a secluded part of the world, looked so natural in the Romantic days of the poet. It had grown less and less clear at the second part of the 19th century, and especially during the turbulent years of the First World War and the beginning of the interbellum, which brought such a sharp division between Polish and Lithuanian identities, making old ideals appear strange and antiquated. Yet despite this, Władysław Mickiewicz never renounced them. This article explores his life, writings, and the interpretations of the works of his father with the hope of finding his true motherland.

Polish Memory Laws and Historical Identity in Europe: Analysing the Defence of 'Disinformation'

This working paper focuses on the growing body of Polish memory laws, including the 2016 ‘Street De-Communization' Law and especially the 2018 Law on historical expression that introduced changes to the Act of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The analysis first reconstructs evolution and current legal governance of historical identity in Europe, to further investigate how the recent Polish memory laws stand vis-a-vis general standards on memory regulation in the Council of Europe and the European Union. The analysis further zooms in on, in particular, the ‘Jewish’ and ‘Ukrainian’ components of the 2018 Polish memory law, putting this legislation into the wider context of 'memory wars' through memory laws in Central and Eastern Europe. The examination concludes that there is a discrepancy between the rationale to adopt this legislation in Poland, namely to counteract historical disinformation, and the legal solutions contained in the 2018 Law.

Polish young people in Latvia: between Polish and Russian identity, a dilemma of the identity of students in Polish schools in Daugavpils and Rēzekne

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the results of field research into the Polish minority in eastern Latvia conducted in the autumn of 2016. The focus of the research was the sense of national identity felt by young people of Polish descent in Latvia and their ties with Poland, in particular as evidenced by the pupils of two Polish schools in Daugavpils and Rēzekne. The methods used were survey questions and memory maps. The findings indicate that the local Polish minority is strongly Russified, especially in their language of everyday communication. Paradoxically, however, the Polish school students express deep emotional ties with Poland.

European? National? The identity of teachers-to-be examined fi fteen years after Poland joined the European Union

This paper examines the identity of the youngest Polish adults intending to be school and pre-school educators. As the examination is carried out fi fteen years after Poland joined the European Union, the respondents have spent nearly all their lives within the borders of the united Europe. The question, therefore, is how this fact has affected their identity. The identity is represented as their personal feeling/conviction of being citizens of the United Europe (and of Poland). The results demonstrate that though their conviction of being citizens of Europe, even if it is reasonably strong, is not as intensive as that of being citizens of Poland (despite the experimental control of two situational factors that might potentially affect the participants’ responses), their identity could be classifi ed as Polish-European of the positive-sum nature. That is, the young people’s Polish and European identities seem by no means to be in confl ict or at each other’s expense. This offers an optimistic view as far as their future profession of educating next generations is concerned.

Oświata i szkolnictwo polskie na Białorusi. Analiza dyskursu prasowego «Głos znad Niemna na uchodźstwie» w latach 2014–2016

Artykuł koncentruje się na analizie dyskursu prasowego dotyczącego oświaty i szkolnictwa polskiego na Białorusi w latach 2014–2016 w tygodniku «Głos znad Niemna na uchodźstwie». Sytuacja polskiej mniejszości na terenach Białorusi była zawsze trudna ponieważ polityka władz białoruskich skupiała się na niszczeniu wszystkiego co związane było z polską kulturą oraz posiadającego polskie korzenie: inteligencja, szkoła, teatr, prasa. Sytuacja Polaków należących do polskiego społeczeństwa zamieszkującego obszar poza granicami we współczesnej Białorusi wydaje się być skomplikowana. Z jednej strony, stanowią oni duży odsetek społeczeństwa na Białorusi, jednakże z drugiej strony, znaczna ich część ma problemy z zachowaniem polskiej tożsamości. Polska prasa na Białorusi odgrywa ważną rolę w procesie tworzenia i rozwoju świadomości narodowej. Przez wiele lat tak ważną rolę odgrywał tygodnik «Głos znad Niemna na uchodźstwie» wydawany przez organ prasowy Związku Polaków na Białorusi. Analiza dyskursu prasowego okazała się być szczególnie pomocna w odniesieniu do spraw etycznych oraz mniejszości narodowych. Przeprowadziliśmy analizę pięciu wybranych artykułów w odniesieniu do oświaty i szkolnictwa polskiego na Białorusi na łamach tygodnika «Głosu znad Niemna na uchodźstwie». Zaobserwowaliśmy jakie tematy porusza się w prasie w odniesieniu do polskiej oświaty, czym jest dyskurs i tworzenie, rodzaje stosowanego słownictwa oraz struktur, jak i osiągnięte zmiany w zachowaniu oraz mentalności czytelników.

Searching for National Components in Building own Legal Culture: The Debate on the Legal Situation of Women in Interwar Poland

Broad legislative works conducted in interwar Poland and concerning various branches of law focused, on the one hand, on the uniformization and reform of particular district systems inherited from the annexing powers, and on the other hand on the idea of building a national codification. In that context the programme for modernisation of socio-economic relationships and the elements derived from foreign legal systems, rooted in the previous century, were balanced with the values, customs, and specific features, regarded as native and constituting components of national identity of the Poles. Against this backdrop, a debate on the legal situation of women was taking place, of key importance from the perspective of legislative changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in other legal systems around the world. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze its course from the angle of components of Polish national identity, tradition, and legal culture, defined in broadly understood public debate.

Place-based Textiles in Post WWII Poland

When WWII broke out, textile art faculty Stefan and Helena Galkowski left the Arts Academy in Crakow, Poland to take refuge in the countryside. There, they continued their artistic practice, utilizing materials close at hand - undyed sheep’s wool – to make work they regarded as carrying on a distinctly Polish and politically-charged weaving tradition. After the War, even sheep’s wool was scarce. Polish textile artists like Magdelena Abakanowicz seized upon a plentiful local material – sisal – to improvise new textile art-making methods and forms. In the wake of WWII, the nascent Polish communist government saw in pre-WWII artisan cooperatives connected with the arts academies in Crakow and Warsaw a model for post-war economic development. Under the auspices of an agency called Cepelia, the government organized a nationwide network of artists and artisan cooperatives that undertook primary ethnographic research on rural textile practices and then produced limited editions of textile art inspired by folk traditions. Cepelia also exported blankets, kilims, and tapestries to retail outlets in the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands. Emboldened by new international connections they were able to forge, Polish textile artists joined a vanguard of fiber artists who entered works in and traveled to the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials (1962-1995). This paper will consider how Polish textile artists created place-based artwork in response to post-WWII material constraints, ideological shifts, and centralized governmental efforts to promote a nationalist Polish identity rooted in folk traditions to both local, national, and global audiences. It will review the experiments in materials, the varying visual iconographics of works made to articulate and “sell” a new Polish national identity, and the perhaps unintended consequences of Cepelia’s national and international reach.

The Need to Suffer: The Case of Poland

Abstract This article explores the construction and various representations of Polish collective suffering and victimhood in Polish literature. It argues that the loss of independence (1795–1918) and the subsequent struggles to regain it can be read as Poland’s most important cultural trauma that heavily marked Polish identity. It discusses how the paradigm was created and established, as well as the unsuccessful struggle with the paradigm of suffering over the subsequent years. Overall, it argues that literature after 1945 lost its power over the national imagination as Polish identity is no longer bound by the past representations of suffering.

The Touchstone of Polishness? Suffering Exhibited in “New Museums” in Poland

Abstract This article discusses the issue of suffering and martyrdom as paradigms structuring the Polish identity narrative and confronts it with the discourses of museums in contemporary Poland. Museums, understood as “memory devices,” are analyzed in terms of the experience they create for the visitors through repeating, reinventing and modifying general patterns of the Polish memory and identity. Exhibitions of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa and The Silesian Museum in Katowice are investigated in detail, revealing different ways in which the suffering is depicted and highlighting the theme’s functions in the message conveyed.