Another blogmeet last night in central Warsaw, featuring Toyah, Adthelad and Lemming. Over curry and beer the conversation was as ever sparkling, erudite and civilised, without a trace of the unpleasantness that one might expect from reading some of the posts and comments at Salon24-land and thereabouts.
We talked about post-war West Germany. My thinking is that if you compare the Federal Republic in 1965, 20 years after VE-Day, and Poland today, 20 years after the fall of communism, you could expect to find certain parallels. None of us confessed to knowing too much about the ins and outs of West German politics, but an investigation into the extent to which former Third Reich allegiances shaped the divide between the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats) and the SPD (Social Democrats), but the parallels concerning reconcilliation with a guilty past are obvious.
The key is lustracja (screening) of ex-Nazis and former communist apparatchiks. Lemming informed us that out of 12,000 German staff running the death camp at Auschwitz, only 800 – one in 15 – were ever brought to book for their role in the genocide. So the rest were running around being proper West Germans.
Krzysztof mentioned a book, Co u pana słychać?, written by Krzysztof Kąkolewski in 1975. The investigative journalist tracked down prominent Nazis who had managed to settle into comfortable careers in West Germany – a Bundestag deputy, university professors, lawyers – or else were living in comfortable retirement. Among those he tracked down was Heinz Rheinefarth, the SS general whose troops were responsible for countless atrocities during the Warsaw Uprising; mayor of a sleepy village in the Friesian Island.
What difference is there, I asked, between the way Germany handled its Nazi criminals, and the way that Poland is now torn by its reconciliation with its communist-era past? Surely the scale is entirely different ("total war", said Lemming) but I think it's also worth looking (beyond Spain after Franco or Ireland, where the political divide is still 'whose side was your grandfather on in the Civil War') at countries that had shaken free of foreign occupants, and the way they dealt with collaborators.
Poland's communists were in the first instance willing collaborators with the Soviet occupant, but over the decades party-joiners became opportunists, people entirely free of any ideological imperative. This is why I think the PiSite ideology can't stomach them - they are devoid of a moral compass, of virtue. People who could slip into capitalist corporations as easily as into the upper echelons of party cadres.
I guess that when it comes to saying 'forgive and forget', it's not easy for me or Adthelad or any other Pole born and raised outside of communist Poland to imagine the day-to-day humiliations that our countrymen and women would have had to endure during that period. This I can appreciate. But many of the people currently having dogs hung on them (to use a Polish metaphor) by the PiSites - Adam Michnik, Leszek Balcerowicz, Lech Wałęsa, Bronisław Komorowski, Donald Tusk - did their bit (and more) in the opposition, helped to bring down communism. Their sins were either to have (once upon a time) been in the communist party before going into (personally risky) opposition, or to have not distanced themselves sufficiently from the Old Order. I wonder how this looked in 1965 West Germany (indeed 1965 France or Norway, 20 years after the Nazi occupation). Or in 1995 (20 years after the death of Franco).
It would be sad if Polish politics turned out like Ireland's; nine decades of recriminations about what the correct way of dealing with the aftermath of British occupation which ended in 1920 - a fight to the finish ('Ulster for the Irish') or accepting the status quo.
I would love to hear your views on how views about the (communist) past is reflected in the current political scene. You note PiS's position, but this is only a partial reflection. I personally see very limited parallels with Eire/N Ireland, with historic imperatives there having being a real current day feature of political prejudices. Poland has no Ulster to fight for, just memories of a (very slowly) fading past.
ReplyDeleteIn a metaphorical sense, The Past is Poland's Ulster. It is a fight between two views of history. In one, the Round Table and its result (partially-free elections, 'Thick Line' absolution of past transgressions of communists, and the way that former apparatchiks enriched themselves in the early, unregulated, free market) was a disgraceful fiasco. In the other, the Round Table was the only way to bring communism to an end, reconciliation was necessary to ensure a bloodless transition.
ReplyDeleteThe hardliners in PiS I'd compare with the Republicans during the Irish Civil War, the moderates (who morphed from ROAD via UD, UW to PO) with the Free Staters who were satisfied with a compromise solution leaving the Six Counties in the UK.
What I find strange is that the PiS hardliners have more bile and anger at PO than against the old communist nomenklatura. Indeed, PiS and SLD did a deal to carve up the public media.