Prologue: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Poland
What is a mausoleum to memory?
It is a phrase I created, an epithet to encompass the complex ways we remember, recontextualize, and reconcile the past. I must return yet again to the source of inspiration for this video series, Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering’s Mnemonic Imagination. They describe the mausoleum as “enabl[ing] us to establish continuities and shifts in the trajectories of our experience over time, and creatively transform[ing] memory into a resource for thinking about the transactions between past, present, and future.” By creatively revisiting our existing understandings of the past and the medium which it is represented, memory becomes a resource for connecting our past experience to our present selves. As identity embodies narrative, the mausoleum to memory serves as the pen and ink, the medium in which we choose to write our story.
Mausoleums to memory are tangible symbols of identity. In this video, we will explore the rich history of Poland and its struggle to reclaim identity through landscape. I will be speaking extensively on current theories of geopolitics and European history. Poland has such a rich history that there is no effective way to include it all in a single work. I will do my best to recount events as they relate the current thesis. However, I will link a video timeline on Polish history I created as well as other videos and articles with more complete information in the description below. I highly recommend you check them out after this.
Landscape’s symbolism involves two dimensions of identity: space and time. The very connotation of landscape suggests both spatial discreteness and temporal continuity. “Land” evokes distinct space, contained within visceral and recognizable borders while “scape” evokes images of expanse across time. Applied to geopolitics, a nation defines itself by both its borders and the anthropological evidence which connects communities that once occupied that space with its present people. Polish professor of sociology Slawomir Kapralski expresses the duality of landscape as “one hand defining their collective identity and, on the other, symbolically expressing their attempts to morally and intellectually incorporate the physical space – by moral claims and the process of labeling – into their cultural self-definition” (Kapralski, “Battlefields of Memory: Landscape and Identity in Polish-Jewish Relations”). In this essay, I will examine the methods by which the Polish people have expressed their attempts to incorporate landscape into self-definition. In building their mausoleums to memory, landscape becomes a battlefield. Poland’s national story, after three centuries of partition, occupation, and subjugation, fixates on discretion and extrapolates its people against external threat to cultural identity. This manifests by urban border design and land memorialized as inherent to the national consciousness. However, in no other case has a nation been forged without a land to tie its people to, and Poland’s resurrected identity across time and space bears testament to the power of storytelling, the shaping of land.
Urban borders are unique in forging cultural identity due to the intersection of diverse populations in dense, small landscapes. By analyzing the spaces which individual communities interact, common themes conjoin to form the foundation for a collective identity. Specifically, Poland’s urban borders form two axes of dichotomy: subjugation versus domination and alien versus familiar. To exemplify this, let’s examine the urban layout of Krakow. The Main Square forms the heart of the city. At its epicenter lies Cloth Hall, a place of commerce, festivals, and thriving street life where all factions of Krakow unify. Extending from the Main Square are glorious gothic and neoclassical cathedrals. Just beyond them lies Wawel Castle, the residency for Polish monarchy and lair of the mythological dragon Smok Waweleski. As one walks further south to admire the eclectic street shops, the city falls to ruin. Crumbling concrete, abandoned scaffolding, and the pastel colors of ilapidated graffiti create a stark contrast from the thriving urban activity just beyond its borders. These are the Jewish Quarters, or the Krakow Ghetto. A place frozen in time, paved with stumble stones, and embedded in the inordinate beauty of decay.
Its position relative to the center of town fixates both the palace and Jewish Quarters on the axis of alienation, physically separated from the communal center by a public park. The suburbs and churches lie opposite, representing all that is familiar, the basilica even entrenched in the landscape of the Main Square. Yet the towering spires and the mountainous fortress also symbolize domination, physically elevated above the Krakow skyline by impenetrable brick and stone. Thus, urban borders facilitate a distinct cultural identity, one that positions Poles in axes both familiar and subjugated, furthering opposition against domination inherent to the Polish identity. The use of antitheses exaggerates disjunction, separating landscape which symbolizes both unfamiliar and subjugating forces in Polish society. Thus, the Poles of Krakow become distinct. They manifest the land into a collective consciousness, both by physical and metaphysical borders separating Poles from non-Poles. The city itself is transformed into a mausoleum to memory, the explicit urban design choices revealing means to organize communal life and thus collective identity.
However, landscape’s symbolic power arises from the interaction of space and time. Memorialization embodies temporal continuity, demonstrating that the medium which communities choose to frame the past shapes cultural narrative. The haunting, inordinate suffering associated with the name of Auschwitz-Birkenau speaks to the power of a place across time. It is very important to the Polish people that the place is memorialized as the “Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp.” This explicitly separates Auschwitz’s physical location as a memorial in Poland from involvement in the Nazi’s Holocaust. Both international media and those who visit often refer to it as a “Polish Concentration Camp,” which horrendously undercuts the thousands of Poles who suffered and died there and erases the widespread Polish resistance to the Nazi regime. Poland was not complicit with the Holocaust. So I urge you, out of respect for those who perished there, to articulate more precise language and bear witness to the memorial of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This ensures that Poles’ efforts – which saved more Jewish lives than any other Allied organization – and the efforts of countless others who sacrificed their lives to stop mass murder are not erased nor understated… but honored and remembered. Fighting corruption, subjugation, and occupation is deeply entrenched in Poland’s national consciousness. The nation has reconciled the unspeakable tragedy associated with Auschwitz-Birkenau by creating an incredibly informative, deeply moving, and respectful memorial. It serves as warning to humanity that the past use of a space cannot define the present or future. The space transcends national borders and encompasses a vital need to protect and defend human life. In the words of author, activist, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”
Poland’s mausoleum to memory immortalizes a people’s struggle against oppression, desperate for the right to self-determination. The nation has undertaken the journey to rediscover its roots, rewriting its national story that is cognizant of the legacy of the past and memorializing it in meaningful ways. Let the Polish people bear testament to the power of storytelling. Perhaps your story may not have a very happy beginning, but that does not make you who you are. The beauty of the mausoleum to memory is that you have the power in its construction. Perhaps the notion of identity’s relativism has been overwritten and its death buried by the vast body of literature evaluating it. However, we cannot undermine the power of invention and imagination both in reconciling with painful pasts and the active choice to impact the present. After all, in navigating the landscape of memory, you author your own story. Thank you.
Learn More About Polish History Here:
"After the Blank Spots are Filled: Recent Perspectives on Modern Poland" by Padraic Kenney
"Battlefields of Memory: Landscape and Identity in Polish-Jewish Relations" by Slawomir Kapralski
"'Drang nach Westen'?: Polish Archaeology and National Identity" by Wlodzimierz Raczkowski
"Migrant Memories, Migrant Lives: Polish National Identity in Leicester since 1945" by Kathy Burrell
"Animated History of Poland" by Suibhne
Part 1: https://youtu.be/jV98XaAlg1o
Part 2: https://youtu.be/8CwFHH_y2So
Part 3: https://youtu.be/8P1y2v0BwnM
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