Textualizing Trauma: From Valesa to Kosciuszko in Polish Theatre of the 1980s

Coping with the trauma of defeat was the most pressing obligation of Polish cultural mythology in the wake of the military coup of 13 December 1981. Less than two years earlier, Solidarity embarked on an ambitious program of political reforms. ¹ The process of democratization came to a stop when the military regime declared Solidarity illegal and forced the anticommunist opposition underground. The events between August 1980 and December 1981 seemed to have been organized with a dramatic sensibility: first the glory of the Solidarity breakthrough, then reversal: the destruction of hopes and the tragic fall, just as Solidarity launched Poland on the road to democracy.

In the echo chamber of Polish cultural mythology, the defeat of 1981 resonated with many precedents. It confirmed a widely shared, fatalistic conceptualization of the Polish experience of political reality as, to quote the historian Krystyna Kersten, “a succession of defeats which History (spelled with a capital letter) has inflicted on Poles for several centuries.” ² The shock that generated the trauma for the earlier generations was the loss of independence in 1795. Poland fell to the imperial expansion of its neighbors, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and it was erased from the map of Europe. Following D.E.S. Maxwell’s distinction between settler colonies and invaded colonies, it can be said that until 1918 Poland existed a colony of military intervention. ³ To silence the native subject, the colonizers placed Polish culture and education under significant restraints. German and Russian were the languages of power, while the public use of Polish was circumscribed by law. Options open to the colonized community polarized along familiar lines: resistance or assimilation. On the eve of the annexation of 1795 and for decades to come, Poles fought back, earning the labels of freedom-loving heroes, suicidal idealists, and obstreperous troublemakers. The major wars of independence were those of 1794, 1830–31, and 1863–64. All of them ended in defeat. After World War I, Poland regained independence. But the German and Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1945 and the subsequent neocolonial domination by the Soviet Union extended the colonial pattern until 1989.

As the Polish cultural mythology of the 1980s worked across the confines of time, it drew on the traumatic inheritance of the national community. The events of 1980–81 were telescoped into yet another lost war of independence, and the imprisoned members of the political opposition were seen as heirs to the nineteenth-century freedom fighters who had been exiled to Siberia. ⁴ The palpable sign of such time warps was a resurgence of mourning crosses. Polish men and women once again began to wear small crosses made of plain, black-coated metal, with the Polish eagle in place of the Passion. Similar crosses had been popular before and after the failed insurrection of 1863–64.

The topic of this study is the ambivalent, contradictory enterprise of textualizing the palimpsestic experience of defeat. This is not to describe “the way things really were” or to privilege the narrative of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how a narrative of perceived reality was imagined. I propose to theorize negotiations of defeat incarnated in the figure of a national hero who has failed to deliver his people from oppression. I will focus on three plays that eloquently articulate conflicting tendencies in Polish cultural mythology during the 1980s: Valesa (Waleza) by Kazimierz Braun, Alpha (Alfa) by Slawomir Mrozek, and A Polish Lesson (Lekcja polskiego) by Anna Bojarska. ⁵ Written and premiered between 1982 and 1988, they make a context for one another, thematically as well as conceptually. ⁶

Tradition, of course, has established a set of expectations about a hero’s integrated identity and capacity both to lead and to embody his people. My starting point is a deceptively simple query: how do Valesa, Alpha, and A Polish Lesson construct the identity of a national hero who has failed at his task of liberation? I will examine not only the articulated claims of each text, but also its elisions, contradictions, and aporias. I will...