Re-mapping Polish-German Historical Memory: Physical, Political, and Literary Spaces since World War II

Trauma, Memory, and Justice: A Few Notes on Polish-German Historical Memory and Its Prospects

Trauma, Memory, and Justice: A Few Notes on Polish-German Historical Memory and Its Prospects Adam Michnik Opening a conversation about problems related to memory is like opening Pandora's box. Memory is, above all, a heritage; it represents all that came before us. At the same time, it embodies also tradition. In other words, it is what we choose from our heritage as constitutive of our own identities: events and their heroes, books and their authors. But memory is also a political instrument. And when we hear about the politics of history today, we recognize a game being played with our memories. Namely, the state's game is to impose memory, to make our memory contingent on policy. And this imposition of memory is achieved through textbooks, museums, monuments, and street names, through budgets for cultural policy and academic research. Such policies are always dangerous. And this danger is visible in Germany just as it is in Poland. In Germany, the whole project of the Center against Expulsions is an embodiment of historical politics. In Poland, meanwhile , such politics devolve into the sort of political propaganda that requires of our politicians to speak as if Auschwitz or Katyri were yesterday. But memory is also trauma, the sum of traumatic experiences repressed into the subconscious. We do not want to remember that which is depressing and shameful. Thus, taking the German case as our point of departure for these reflections, we ask, whence did the "expellees" come, and why were they expelled? So, their expulsion was a consequence of war, but who started that particular war? And, we Poles should ask ourselves, did those expellees suffer wrongs in the course of their expulsion? If so, what wrongs, and at whose hands? And this series of questions leads us to the heart of the matter for Poles: whom have we wronged, we Poles? In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a signature dialogue that captures the book's essence. One of the brothJustyna Beinek and Piotr H. Kosicki, eds. Re-mapping Polish-German Historical Memory: PhYSical, Political, and Literary Spa ces since World War II. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2011 , 197- 205. (Indiana Sla vic Studies, 17.) 208 Adam Michnik ers, Fyodor Pavlovitch, recalls having been asked, "Why do you hate so and so, so much?" His response: ''I'll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him."! This type of sentiment is a hallmark of collective memory. I look at these issues from a Polish perspective that is unavoidably subjective, marked as it is by Polish martyrology. Czeslaw Milosz called this an "innocence complex.,,2 And a century before Milosz, Cyprian Kamil Norwid wrote, "The Pole is a giant, but the human being inside the Pole is a dwarf."3 Our most remarkable 20th-century writers- Witold Gombrowicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Slawomir Mrozek-have expounded at length on Poland's complexes. Polish memory is full of pain, which produces in turn megalomania and xenophobia as well as a critical, bitter self-assessment. I see German memory in the same light. Namely, as far as Poles are concerned, Germans are defined, by and large, by a certain dualism. On the one side, we see the successes of de-Nazification, including the trials of Nazi criminals or the barring from office of those with an unclean past, remembered in Poland in a positive light. Also in this column is the success of de-communization in the wake of German reunification . Poles often point to the German Federal Republic's assimilation and declassification of the Stasi Archives as a model worthy of emulation. Yet there is also the other side of the coin of Germans-as-seen-byPoles : on this side, Germans serve as objects of fear and anti-German complexes. At the forefront here is the ongoing affair of the Center against Expulsions and the activism of its most vocal exponent, Erika Steinbach. There is, furthermore, the problem of formerly German property on the territory of the present Polish state. And, finally, there is the matter of the German-Russian gas pipeline that reawakens for many of my fellow countrymen the specter of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. While the first dimension of Polish perceptions of Germany lends itself to instrumentalization in national politics-justifying lustration, ! The passage is from Chapter 8 of The Brothers Karamazov. The quotation comes from the classic translation from the Russian by Constance...