Dissonant heritage? The architecture of the Third Reich in Poland ebook

Table of contents

The archi­tec­ture of the Third Reich in Poland—dis­so­nant her­itage?

Nazi archi­tec­ture and the con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage (

dis­so­nantes Erbe

)

The asym­me­try of cul­tural mem­ory (

Erin­nerungskul­tur

). Pol­ish and Ger­man prob­lems with dis­so­nant her­itage

Pub­lisher © Copy­right by Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre Kraków, Poland 2021

Rynek Główny 25, 31-008 Kraków, Poland tel.: +48 12 42 42 811, faks: +48 12 42 17 844 e-mail: sekre­[email protected] www.mck.krakow.pl

aca­d­emic edi­tors Żanna Komar Jacek Purchla

trans­la­tion and proof­read­ing Jes­sica Tay­lor-Kucia

aca­d­emic review­ers Mał­gorzata Omi­lanowska Agnieszka Zabłocka-Kos

edi­tor-in-chief Paulina Orłowska-Bańdo

coop­er­a­tion Mag­dalena Machała

ISBN 978-83-66419-22-3

With the finan­cial sup­port of

The elec­tronic ver­sion was pre­pared in the Zecer sys­tem

The archi­tec­ture of the Third Reich in Poland—dis­so­nant her­itage?

The archi­tec­ture of the Third Reich in Poland—dis­so­nant her­itage?

Jacek Purchla

Our atti­tude to the past is no longer rooted in pietism towards mon­u­ments; today it is shaped by a cul­ture of mem­ory as a sys­tem of the col­lec­tive mem­ory of a soci­ety. This is far more than the the­o­ries of Max Dvořák and Julius von Schlosser on Kun­st­geschichte als Geis­tes­geschichte.1

The cult of the past, so deeply rooted in Euro­pean tra­di­tion, is today evolv­ing into our ‘duty of mem­ory’, mem­ory both indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive. The tragic expe­ri­ence of the nations of Cen­tral Europe in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury was such that this ‘duty of mem­ory’ presents a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge. The Holo­caust, changes to so many polit­i­cal bor­ders, eth­nic cleans­ing, and total­i­tar­ian ide­olo­gies were all fac­tors in caus­ing the processes of restor­ing, con­struct­ing, and entrench­ing col­lec­tive mem­ory ini­ti­ated after 1989 to trans­form Cen­tral Europe into a vast bat­tle­field of mem­ory—with Poland at its epi­cen­tre. One major fac­tor in this bat­tle is cul­tural her­itage, and within it tan­gi­ble her­itage.

Cul­tural her­itage is not only the process of con­stant rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the past and its instru­men­tal­iza­tion for con­tem­po­rary aims; it is also the sub­ject of con­flicts (as the exam­ple of bat­tle­fields demon­strates) and con­tro­ver­sies—between states, nations, reli­gions, social groups, regions, and many other cat­e­gories of stake­hold­ers. John E. Tun­bridge and Gre­gory J. Ash­worth even go so far as to claim that all her­itage is by def­i­n­i­tion a forum for debate and con­tro­versy.2

Dis­so­nant her­itage is a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem in Cen­tral Europe, where in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury polit­i­cal bor­ders shifted faster than cul­tural ones. Con­flicts of mem­ory, non-mem­ory, and the issue of dis­so­nant and unwanted her­itage are all part of the Pol­ish expe­ri­ence of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Inde­pen­dence meant not only cre­at­ing new state sym­bols, but also top­pling tes­ti­monies to for­eign dom­i­na­tion and erad­i­cat­ing them from the col­lec­tive mem­ory. Par­tic­u­larly dras­tic forms of destruc­tion of ‘alien’ sym­bols were seen after 1918 in the ter­ri­to­ries of the for­mer Prussian and Russian par­ti­tions. In Poz­nań, for instance, all Prussian mon­u­ments were demol­ished in 1919, includ­ing the statue of Otto von Bis­marck on what is now Mick­iewicz Square.3 While at that point such ‘turnover’ of mon­u­ments was some­thing of a sign of the times across Cen­tral Europe,4 the ‘Bis­marck-Türme’ in the lands of the Prussian par­ti­tion con­sti­tute a chap­ter of their own in the his­tory of dis­so­nant her­itage. In the lands of the Ger­man Empire (and beyond its bor­ders—even on other con­ti­nents), around 240 such ‘Bis­marck tow­ers’ were erected at the turn of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, many of them in the ter­ri­tory of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic (i.e. Poland after its resti­tu­tion in Novem­ber 1918).5 The best known of these is the Bis­marck tower in Mysłow­ice, Sile­sia, erected in the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of ‘Three Emper­ors’ Cor­ner’, the point at which the Russian, Prussian, and Aus­tro-Hun­gar­ian Empires in their 1871–1918 bor­ders met. The stone bea­con, over 20 metres high, was sited on a rise at the con­flu­ence of the Black and White Przem­sza rivers. Fol­low­ing its cer­e­mo­nial open­ing in 1907, the tower rapidly became a tourist attrac­tion and a sig­nif­i­cant land­mark in the topog­ra­phy of the three empires’ bor­der­land region. When in 1922 it found itself in Pol­ish ter­ri­tory, it was renamed the Free­dom Tower and adorned with a bas relief por­tray­ing the insur­rec­tion­ist Tadeusz Koś­ciuszko. In the 1930s, how­ever, it was demol­ished at the behest of the Sile­sian gov­er­nor Michał Grażyński, and the stone used in the con­struc­tion of Katow­ice cathe­dral.6

Sym­bols of Russian impe­r­ial dom­i­na­tion in the lands of the for­mer Russian par­ti­tion elicited far stronger emo­tions. Many Russian Ortho­dox churches erected by the tsarist author­i­ties as a sym­bol of Russian rule and an instru­ment of Rus­si­fi­ca­tion fell vic­tim to the Poles’ rush to throw off the yoke of the par­ti­tions and to ‘de-Mus­cov­i­tize’ Poland’s towns and cities after World War I. After 1918, Ortho­dox church archi­tec­ture van­ished from the sky­lines of cities includ­ing Kalisz, Lublin, Płock, and Włocławek.7 The most dras­tic exam­ple of a con­flict of mem­ory was the demo­li­tion of the mon­u­men­tal Ortho­dox Cathe­dral of St Alexan­der Nevsky on Saski Square, in the heart of War­saw. It had been built in the years 1894–1912 on the ini­tia­tive of gen­eral gov­er­nor Yosif Hurka to plans by Leon­tii Benois, who was cho­sen as its archi­tect by Tsar Alexan­der III him­self.8 Even though the Ortho­dox cathe­dral had been intended as a ‘sym­bol of Russian rule for all time’,9 its demo­li­tion in the years 1924–1926 pro­voked tur­bu­lent debate and protests from intel­lec­tual cir­cles. Among those who voiced their dis­agree­ment was Ste­fan Żerom­ski, who pro­posed that the ‘unwanted build­ing’ be con­verted into a museum of the mar­tyr­dom of the Pol­ish nation.10

The dis­putes and con­flicts of mem­ory of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic period were almost entirely eclipsed, how­ever, by the scale of the tragedy of World War II in the Pol­ish lands. The Yalta order and its polit­i­cal con­se­quences, which included another shift in the coun­try’s bor­ders and sev­eral large-scale eth­nic cleans­ing drives, fur­ther com­pli­cated the prob­lem of its dis­so­nant her­itage. The new def­i­n­i­tion of this issue in the post­war Pol­ish real­ity essen­tially equated unwanted her­itage (unge­wolltes Erbe) with the ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’. One good illus­tra­tion of the scale of anti-Ger­man emo­tions was the expec­ta­tions of the Pol­ish del­e­gates from Masuria to the first Lublin con­ven­tion of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Archi­tects of the Repub­lic of Poland (SARP), who in Novem­ber 1944 called for the ‘abo­li­tion, demo­li­tion, erad­i­ca­tion from the face of the earth of all for­mer Teu­tonic cas­tles, so that no trace of them be left, and their mem­ory be lost’.11 The list of sites that fell vic­tim to this mode of think­ing is long, and still awaits ver­i­fi­ca­tion. It includes both medieval mon­u­ments and nine­teenth- and twen­ti­eth-cen­tury her­itage. One espe­cially dras­tic man­i­fes­ta­tion of this ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’ was the mass destruc­tion of Ger­man ceme­ter­ies in the west­ern and north­ern regions of the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland. This con­tin­ued into the 1970s, even in such large cities as Gdańsk and Wrocław.

Mod­ern her­itage man­age­ment the­o­ries draw atten­tion to issues includ­ing the dis­in­her­ited, since any action in the field of her­itage can engen­der prob­lems for groups sub­jected to aggres­sion or exclu­sion, or ignored.12 Her­itage of the dis­in­her­ited and unin­her­ited her­itage are both ‘prod­ucts’ of the tragedy of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury: the Holo­caust and eth­nic cleans­ing. One prime exam­ple of this phe­nom­enon is Wrocław, the largest city not only in Europe, but any­where in the world, in which World War II caused a total pop­u­la­tion exchange.13 After 1945, Wrocław became a poly­gon of major con­ser­va­tion projects in a bid to recon­struct the ruined city; a true lab­o­ra­tory of her­itage as mem­ory and iden­tity. This is some­thing far more com­plex and del­i­cate than mon­u­ment con­ser­va­tion. For the first Pol­ish set­tlers who arrived there, the ruins of Ger­man Bres­lau were enemy her­itage. Over the ensu­ing decades the think­ing of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of Vratisla­vians around their new small home­land under­went a major evo­lu­tion: from treat­ing it as enemy her­itage, and an alien city, to accept­ing it as their own and recog­niz­ing its uni­ver­sal val­ues. The exam­ple of Wrocław can help us bet­ter to under­stand the power and impor­tance of intan­gi­ble her­itage, our mem­ory and iden­tity, and also the dynam­ics of the process that is her­itage.14

It is thus vital that we draw a clear dis­tinc­tion between two terms that are often—wrongly—used inter­change­ably: ‘mon­u­ment’ and ‘her­itage’, and also between two par­a­digms: the phi­los­o­phy of pro­tec­tion and the phi­los­o­phy of her­itage. Her­itage, in con­trast to the tra­di­tion­ally defined mon­u­ment, need not be beau­ti­ful. This is why Auschwitz is today the most leg­i­ble sym­bol of the her­itage of atroc­ity in the world (and is inscribed on the UNESCO World Her­itage List), and the Stal­in­ist Palace of Cul­ture and Sci­ence in War­saw is a prime exam­ple of dis­so­nant her­itage.15

The con­tem­po­rary bench­mark in state her­itage pro­tec­tion pol­icy in Europe may ulti­mately be expressed in the form of a few fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. Salient among these is the equa­tion of the terms ‘cul­tural assets’ and ‘cul­tural her­itage’, and the cre­ation of the expres­sion ‘our com­mon her­itage’. This may pre­vent the threat of selec­tive pro­tec­tion of his­tor­i­cal sub­stance along ide­o­log­i­cal or polit­i­cal lines.16 But what is the real­ity like?

The most intrigu­ing exam­ple of dis­so­nant Third Reich her­itage in Kraków is Wawel.17 Build­ing no. 5 in par­tic­u­lar, such a dom­i­nant in the Wawel Hill land­scape, was the sub­ject of dis­cus­sions and design stud­ies, and the over­all plans for its devel­op­ment were approved by Hans Frank him­self in March 1941.18 In spite of the stigma of dis­so­nant her­itage and its polit­i­cally incor­rect pedi­gree, build­ing no. 5 in its form as the Verwaltungsgebäude der Kan­zlei Burg sur­vived unal­tered as Wawel’s Third Reich her­itage through­out the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland and for well over a decade into the coun­try’s Third Repub­lic period. It was only in the years 2006–2009 that Hans Frank’s chan­cellery under­went spec­tac­u­lar alterations. The declared aim of this most recent chap­ter in the ‘strug­gle against all things Ger­man’ was ‘to remove, at least par­tially, the stigma of Ger­man activ­ity on the hill and improve the archi­tec­ture of such an impor­tant, rep­re­sen­ta­tive site’.19 More than sixty years on from the fall of the Third Reich, there is no longer space for the Verwaltungsgebäude der Kan­zlei Burg at Wawel in view of its spe­cial sta­tus as a site of Pol­ish col­lec­tive mem­ory. It was the opin­ion of the Pol­ish con­ser­va­tors of the royal res­i­dence that archi­tec­tural her­itage from the Third Reich did not fit with the con­struct of national mem­ory that was the ‘sacred hill of the Poles’. It was con­tro­ver­sial, the more so that a site of such impor­tance to the nation as Wawel is a con­stituent ele­ment of the national iden­tity. In this way, Wawel as lab­o­ra­tory of Pol­ish col­lec­tive mem­ory has also become a touch­stone of our atti­tude towards the her­itage of the Third Reich. Are its mate­r­ial remains in Poland des­tined to remain dis­so­nant her­itage, and should they really be erased from mem­ory?

This is one of the ques­tions that we are ask­ing today. Have we matured to the answer? What is impor­tant is that we at the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre have matured to ask­ing it. It was first artic­u­lated dur­ing a con­fer­ence enti­tled ‘The Dis­so­nant Her­itage of the Third Reich in Poland’, which we orga­nized in part­ner­ship with the Munich Zen­tralin­sti­tut für Kun­st­geschichte in Decem­ber 2018. We asked it at the ICC not because our seat on Kraków’s Main Mar­ket Square was altered in 1940 to serve Hans Frank as the NSDAP head­quar­ters for the whole Gen­eral-gou­verne­ment (Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment).20 We asked it because the ICC itself grew out of Poland’s 1989 trans­for­ma­tion pre­cisely in order to tackle dif­fi­cult issues in dia­logue with its neigh­bours. And our book enti­tled Dis­so­nant her­itage? The archi­tec­ture of the Third Reich in Poland was born out of the same phi­los­o­phy. It con­tains both the fruits of that 2018 Kraków con­fer­ence and spe­cially com­mis­sioned texts.

In the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Poland period, the Third Reich was a sub­ject ignored by schol­ars and banned by the cen­sors. In the Pol­ish con­text, then, Piotr Krakowski’s book Sztuka Trze­ciej Rzeszy (The art of the Third Reich), pub­lished by the ICC in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Irsa, was a pio­neer­ing move to break this taboo.21 In it, how­ever, Pro­fes­sor Krakowski did not touch on the issue of Nazi archi­tec­ture in Poland. Today, over a quar­ter-cen­tury later, we there­fore want to go fur­ther—the more so that this archi­tec­ture was addressed in major Ger­man stud­ies as long ago as in the 1990s. One impor­tant and infor­ma­tive out­come of this research is the ground­break­ing study by Niels Gutschow enti­tled Ord­nungswahn. Architek­ten pla­nen im „eingedeutschten Osten” 1939–1945, pub­lished in 2001.22

A boun­ti­ful spe­cial­ist lit­er­a­ture has grown up around Third Reich urban plan­ning and archi­tec­ture, above all—under­stand­ably—in Ger­man and Eng­lish. Recently, this is also a field that has started to inter­est a grow­ing group of Pol­ish schol­ars at sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties. Their stud­ies have addressed not only Wrocław and Szczecin after 1933, but also other Pol­ish cities, includ­ing ones that in 1939 were incor­po­rated into Reich ter­ri­tory, such as Poz­nań, Łódź, Toruń, and Oświęcim, as well as Kraków and War­saw.23 In 1945, then, post-war Poland com­prised regions that had been part of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic, but also ter­ri­to­ries that had pre­vi­ously been an inte­gral part of the Ger­man Reich. This fact itself cre­ates a research per­spec­tive that is unique in Europe. In the future it would also be worth­while to work together with Poland’s east­ern neigh­bours—Belarus and Ukraine, for instance—to analyse those parts of the Sec­ond Pol­ish Repub­lic that as a result of the Ribben­trop-Molo­tov Pact came under Soviet occu­pa­tion in 1939. It was ‘only’ in 1941, after the Ger­man aggres­sion on the Soviet Union, that these regions became the sub­ject of fur­ther Nazi visions and plans. This applies above all to the Białys­tok dis­trict, which was sub­sumed into East Prus­sia, and ‘Dis­trikt Gal­izien’, with its cap­i­tal in Lviv, which in 1941 became part of the Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment.

Ger­man sub­ju­ga­tion plans and Nazi geno­cide pol­icy, which patic­u­larly in Poland were directly linked to the occu­piers’ urban plan­ning visions, caused the entire out­put of the Third Reich’s archi­tects to be qual­i­fied unequiv­o­cally as ‘her­itage of atroc­ity’. Nonethe­less, this must not lead to the entire issue being passed over and ignored in the study of twen­ti­eth-cen­tury art in Poland—which also cov­ers Ger­man urban plan­ning visions for Pol­ish cities. The major­ity of these never went fur­ther than the design stage, and the struc­tures actu­ally built by the Ger­mans between 1940 and 1944 have become part of the land­scape. It is thus worth tak­ing a closer look at these projects.

The need to under­take and pur­sue sys­tem­atic research extends both to the few pieces of mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture left behind by the Third Reich in Poland and to sites imma­nently con­nected with the his­tory of the Holo­caust. Sites of mem­ory have an par­tic­u­larly impor­tant role to play in the ‘her­itage game’. As cat­a­lysts of col­lec­tive mem­ory and iden­tity that have endured for gen­er­a­tions, com­pris­ing both mate­r­ial and intan­gi­ble ele­ments, these have become part of our social, cul­tural, and polit­i­cal mores.

Third Reich archi­tec­ture is one facet of the wider issue of dis­so­nant her­itage, but a par­tic­u­larly dis­so­nant one, and this is the rea­son for the espe­cial dif­fi­culty inher­ent in its study. It is impor­tant to recog­nize and artic­u­late the excep­tional sta­tus of Poland in respect of Third Reich archi­tec­ture. In the lands that were within the bor­ders of the Ger­man state prior to 1939, the Third Reich had already devel­oped an impres­sive build­ing stock in the 1930s. This included not only the char­ac­ter­is­tic archi­tec­ture of major cen­tres such as Wrocław, Szczecin, Opole, Gli­wice, Bytom, and the Free City of Gdańsk. The her­itage of the Third Reich as one ele­ment of its iden­tity in the Ger­man lands prior to 1939 com­prises town halls, the seats of author­i­ties and admin­is­tra­tive bod­ies of var­i­ous lev­els, court build­ings, mil­i­tary com­pounds, rail­way sta­tions, schools, etc., scat­tered through­out local­i­ties of all sizes in Sile­sia, Pomera­nia, and Warmia and Masuria. Among them were also sites of sym­bolic impor­tance to the ide­ol­ogy and pro­pa­ganda of the Third Reich, such as Annaberg (Góra Świętej Anny) and Tan­nen­berg (Olsz­tynek), as well as model Nazi train­ing cen­tres like Ordens­burg Krössinsee (Zło­cie­niec), and ambi­tious, large-scale infrastruc­ture invest­ments includ­ing motor­ways, canals, and sport­ing facil­i­ties, among them the Olympic sta­dium in Wrocław. This is undoubt­edly a reflec­tion, and even a sig­nif­i­cant ele­ment of the her­itage of the Third Reich that pre­dates the aggres­sion against Poland, and an intrigu­ing chap­ter in the his­tory of the rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and ide­ol­ogy, and the total­i­tar­ian polit­i­cal sys­tem. Poland is also dot­ted with numer­ous ‘mon­u­ments’ to the bloody Ger­man occu­pa­tion, how­ever, many of which are mate­r­ial illus­tra­tion of the cat­e­gory ‘archi­tec­ture and crime’. In the Pol­ish ter­ri­to­ries taken by the Wehrma­cht in 1939 we have evi­dence of the colo­nial aspect of the Nazis’ plans for the for­mer Sec­ond Repub­lic of Poland. This includes not only built projects but also plans and designs that offer con­fir­ma­tion of Hitler’s crim­i­nal inten­tions, both in ter­ri­to­ries within the Sec­ond Repub­lic that were sub­sumed into the Reich in 1939, includ­ing cities such as Poz­nań, Katow­ice, Łódź, Toruń, Ciechanów, and Oświęcim, and in the Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment, where one key issue was that of Krakow’s unde­sired cap­i­tal sta­tus. The con­texts in which par­tic­u­lar struc­tures were erected also var­ied, as did the com­mit­ment and atti­tudes of Ger­man (and Pol­ish) archi­tects and urban plan­ners in their exe­cu­tion. The dis­cov­ery of this stock and its diver­sity is bur­dened with the stigma of the crime sym­bol­ized by the Holo­caust and mas­ter­minded by Hitler from his mil­i­tary com­mand cen­tre at the Wolf­ss­chanze near Kętrzyn.

Thus the area of the urban plan­ning solu­tions and archi­tec­ture left by the Third Reich in the ter­ri­tory of post-war Poland can­not be con­fined to research founded solely on tra­di­tional art his­tor­i­cal tech­niques. I firmly believe that the key to plumb­ing the essence of this issue is an approach based on cul­tural her­itage the­ory. Not inven­tor­iza­tion of arte­facts alone, but an inter­pre­ta­tion of them that tack­les their taboo, will help us to for­mu­late con­clu­sions and develop a cohe­sive stance on the her­itage left by the Third Reich in Poland.

How, then, can we for­mu­late our research pos­tu­lates today? What are the objec­tives and direc­tions of the stud­ies cur­rently being con­ducted in many cen­tres in Poland? In the first place we see a need for dia­logue, coop­er­a­tion, and geo­graph­i­cal sys­tem­ati­za­tion of research. The diver­sity of func­tions and archi­tec­tural gen­res that fall within the scope of our sci­en­tific inter­est invites the obvi­ous ques­tion: to what extent and in what areas should the dis­so­nant her­itage of the Third Reich be pro­tected? This book is an attempt to find answers to this and many other ques­tions. I hope that it con­sti­tutes a wor­thy record of the newest fruits of the work of Pol­ish and Ger­man aca­d­emics on the archi­tec­ture and urban design of the Third Reich inher­ited by post-war Poland, and inspires broader reflec­tion on the phe­nom­enon of dis­so­nant her­itage.

Nazi archi­tec­ture and the con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage (dis­so­nantes Erbe)

Nazi archi­tec­ture and the con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage (dis­so­nantes Erbe)

Chris­tian Fuhrmeis­ter

Chris­tian Fuhrmeis­ter, assis­tant pro­fes­sor, ini­ti­ates and coor­di­nates research projects at the Zen­tralin­sti­tut für Kun­st­geschichte in Munich. His work mainly focuses on the art, archi­tec­ture, and art his­tory of the 20th cen­tury (from Max Beck­mann to war ceme­ter­ies, National Social­ist art, and prove­nance and translo­ca­tion research). In 2013 he defended his post-doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion on the Ger­man mil­i­tary office for the pro­tec­tion of art in Italy in the years 1943–1945. He lec­tures at the Lud­wig-Max­i­m­il­ians-Universität in Munich.

This short paper sets out to offer a gen­eral reflec­tion upon the impli­ca­tions of the con­cept of ‘dis­so­nant her­itage’ for deal­ing with (traces, frag­ments, rem­nants, and ruins of) Nazi archi­tec­ture. Per­haps these con­sid­er­a­tions can con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of an aca­d­emic per­spec­tive as well as the for­ma­tion of a cer­tain moral atti­tude con­cern­ing those build­ings that are present and vis­i­ble on the ter­ri­tory of today’s Rzecz­pospolita Pol­ska.

In a cer­tain sense, one can argue, all cul­tural her­itage is pro­foundly dis­so­nant, as it is the prod­uct of gen­uinely asym­met­ri­cal power rela­tions. At no point in human his­tory can we speak of a per­fectly bal­anced, mul­ti­lat­er­ally acclaimed prod­uction of cul­ture for the ben­e­fit of all. Cul­ture is, by def­i­n­i­tion, the prod­uct or by-prod­uct of a soci­ety with a dis­tinct social, eco­nomic, and mil­i­tary order. As such, cul­ture has almost always been par­tial and par­ti­san, biased, unfair, unjust, one-sided. It is dis­cor­dance that has always shaped cul­tural her­itage most rad­i­cally, not accor­dance. It has always been mil­i­tary or aris­to­cratic rulers, polit­i­cal or admin­is­tra­tive gov­er­nors, reli­gious lead­ers, wealthy mer­chants and bankers, and other pow­er­ful indi­vid­u­als or groups with actual or assumed author­ity and supe­ri­or­ity who have decided upon the prod­uction, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and recep­tion of cul­ture, cul­tural arte­facts, and cul­tural her­itage, and they have always done so alone, with­out con­sul­ta­tion or coun­sel, and of course with­out ask­ing for approval.

Con­se­quently, all her­itage is, in a sense, fun­da­men­tally dis­so­nant, rep­re­sent­ing some voices while sup­press­ing oth­ers.1 So why is the con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage such a rel­a­tively new phe­nom­enon, dis­cussed only since the 1990s in broader aca­d­emic cir­cles? Why is it mean­ing­ful, help­ful, and needed?

One key rea­son is that most efforts to con­cep­tu­al­ize the rel­e­vance of cul­tural her­itage adopt a fun­da­men­tally affir­ma­tive approach, hold­ing that a given set­tle­ment is char­ac­ter­is­tic for the colo­nial impe­tus of the early inhab­i­tants of its region, or that a build­ing embod­ies the key traits of the local peo­ple, or that the col­lec­tive iden­tity is easy to see in the way a cer­tain motif in art or crafts has remained vir­tu­ally unchanged over the cen­turies, and so forth. Here, her­itage—and by that, the past in gen­eral—is seen as pos­i­tive in the sense that it is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of a cer­tain (some­times fic­ti­tious) col­lec­tive or national iden­tity. Essen­tially,

his­tory has been gath­ered up and pre­sented as her­itage—as mean­ing­ful pasts that should be remem­bered; and more and more build­ings and other sites have been called on to act as wit­nesses of the past. Many kinds of groups have sought to ensure that they are pub­licly recog­nized through iden­ti­fy­ing and dis­play­ing ‘their’ her­itage.2

The his­tory of mon­u­ment pro­tec­tion proves that this atti­tude has been for­ma­tive and deci­sive;3 the belief that her­itage thus serves a unique and dis­tinct social pur­pose—fos­ter­ing pride and self-esteem, built on an autochtho­nous tra­di­tion—was ubiq­ui­tous for cen­turies and is still very wide­spread.

Dis­so­nant her­itage, by con­trast, acknowl­edges that the past is, more often than not, a his­tory of con­flicts, pain, prob­lems, losses. This ren­ders iden­tity build­ing—in the sense of Hob­s­bawm’s Inven­tion of Tra­di­tion (1983)—while not com­pletely impos­si­ble, much more prob­lem­atic and con­stantly demand­ing. The con­cept of dis­so­nant her­itage pro­duces a spe­cific under­stand­ing of the past, and its accep­tance requires a spe­cific mind­set. As such, it is a crit­i­cal con­cept—partly because ‘pol­i­tics of the past’ (Ver­gan­gen­heit­spoli­tik, i.e the way a par­tic­u­lar image of the past is devel­oped, trans­mit­ted, and com­mu­ni­cated4), ‘pol­i­tics of mem­ory’, and ‘iden­tity pol­i­tics’ need to be reflected upon, analysed, inter­preted, and under­stood. As a mat­ter of fact, seen in this per­spec­tive, all cul­tural her­itage is noth­ing but a mate­ri­al­iza­tion of much larger world views, indeed con­cepts and man­i­fes­ta­tions of (chang­ing) def­i­n­i­tions of mankind. Con­se­quently, remem­ber­ing as such has been called dis­so­nant: Whose mem­o­ries and whose her­itage are addressed, and whose mem­o­ries and her­itage are not rep­re­sented at all?5

That said, the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with dis­so­nant her­itage are intri­cately linked to ‘uses of the past’, as they mir­ror his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent con­flicts of own­er­ship, pat­ri­mony, and cul­tural her­itage. Again, this is a mat­ter of nar­ra­tives, and these are usu­ally shaped by the dynam­ics of present-day atti­tudes, beliefs, and con­vic­tions. ‘Putting the past to use’ can take var­i­ous forms: affirm­ing or reaffirm­ing col­lec­tive iden­ti­ties, evok­ing or enforc­ing national iden­ti­ties; attribut­ing mean­ing, dig­nity, nobil­ity, and also com­mer­cial or mar­ket value; strength­en­ing regional or eth­nic affil­i­a­tions and tra­di­tions in a com­pet­i­tive, non-inclu­sive way; con­trol­ling, shap­ing, and defin­ing present and future con­cepts of col­lec­tive iden­tity.

It is within this larger field of—ulti­mately polit­i­cal—def­i­n­i­tions, eval­u­a­tions, and assess­ments that both con­cepts: cul­tural her­itage and dis­so­nant her­itage, are sit­u­ated. For good rea­sons, dis­so­nant her­itage has out­paced other denom­i­na­tions like dif­fi­cult, dark, or uncom­fort­able her­itage: it is more pre­cise in acknowl­edg­ing the diver­sity of per­spec­tives, and it accepts these dif­fer­ences as a given. In their sem­i­nal study Dis­so­nant Her­itage. The Man­age­ment of the Past as a Resource in Con­flict—pub­lished in 1996 and writ­ten dur­ing the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) and the col­lapse of the Apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994—John E. Tun­bridge and Gre­gory J. Ash­worth have also high­lighted the spe­cific prob­lems asso­ci­ated with what they call ‘her­itage of atroc­ity’, linked to human trauma and suf­fer­ing. The Nazi archi­tec­ture in Poland is cer­tainly asso­ci­ated with this type of ‘delib­er­ately inflicted extreme human suf­fer­ing that can be called atroc­ity’. They state that ‘the dis­so­nance cre­ated by the inter­pre­ta­tion of atroc­ity is not only pecu­liarly intense and last­ing but also par­tic­u­larly com­plex for vic­tims, per­pe­tra­tors and observers’.6

This assess­ment is entirely cor­rect, and it poses a num­ber of prob­lems—for pol­i­tics and admin­is­tra­tions at large, at the national level, on the level of fed­eral states and munic­i­pal­i­ties, for insti­tu­tions of cul­tural her­itage like offices for the preser­va­tion and pro­tec­tion of mon­u­ments and his­toric build­ings, and for the human­i­ties in gen­eral and art and archi­tec­tural his­tory in par­tic­u­lar: What ele­ments of the past deserve preser­va­tion, inves­ti­ga­tion, and analy­sis? What is included and what is excluded from both the canon and mem­ory? Why pre­serve the archi­tec­ture of a con­cen­tra­tion camp, why that of an exter­mi­na­tion camp? If the col­lec­tive iden­tity is built on suc­cess­ful trans­for­ma­tion (after all), then why bother with what has been over­come?

Hence, look­ing at Nazi archi­tec­ture from the per­spec­tive of dis­so­nant her­itage inevitably boils down to ques­tions of def­i­n­i­tion and con­trol, of shap­ing an image of the past, of inter­pre­ta­tion and the con­struc­tion of nar­ra­tives—in short, to ‘power strug­gles involved in nego­ti­a­tions over col­lec­tive mem­ory’.7 In turn, analysing these processes of attribut­ing mean­ing to Nazi archi­tec­ture in the past 75 years ulti­mately pro­vides ‘a deeper under­stand­ing of how post­war Ger­man soci­ety has dealt with the Nazi legacy’. 8 In doing so, cur­rent con­cerns, present fears and assump­tions, recent expe­ri­ences, and lat­est devel­op­ments invari­ably influ­ence our per­cep­tions of processes that ended long ago, and of those of their prod­ucts that remain vis­i­ble and tan­gi­ble today.9 It is vital that our ana­lytic frame­work (our frame of ref­er­ence) take account of this dynamic com­plex­ity of feed­back (Rückkopplung) processes, of per­ma­nently over­lap­ping, mul­ti­lay­ered, inter­twined, and inter­de­pen­dent inter­ac­tions.10

A case in point is, not sur­pris­ingly, the reg­u­lar or con­tin­u­ous resur­fac­ing of cor­re­spond­ing debates in Ger­many. Look­ing only at 2019 and 2020, I want to briefly men­tion three debates or dis­courses. The first is the issue of ‘Rechte Räume. Bericht einer Euro­pareise’, pub­lished on 24 May 2019 in the jour­nal Arch+ Zeitschrift für Architek­tur und Urban­is­mus, and com­pris­ing reports on the ‘spa­tial pol­i­tics of right-wing pop­ulism’ (and, by con­se­quence, their rela­tion to his­tor­i­cal exam­ples of fas­cist and Nazi archi­tec­ture). This insti­gated a heated dis­cus­sion in the press, prompt­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of a sep­a­rate, 24-page sup­ple­ment, Arch + fea­tures 96, in Octo­ber 2019, assem­bling and doc­u­ment­ing the reac­tions to the orig­i­nal piece. The sec­ond was the minor media storm that blew up around plans to extend the small museum in the house and stu­dio of Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950) in Jeste­burg, south of Ham­burg, due to the fact that, accord­ing to some crit­ics in the press, the artist’s affil­i­a­tion with ‘völkish’ ideas and ide­olo­gies had not been prop­erly addressed.11 The third and final exam­ple is that of the debates con­cern­ing the sculp­tures in the Berlin Olympic Sta­dium, ignited by the arti­cle ‘Weg mit diesen Skulp­turen!’ (‘Away with these sculp­tures!’) by Peter Strieder in Die Zeit (Nr. 21, 14. Mai 2020: p. 43). From 1996 to 2004 Strieder (b. 1952) was respon­si­ble for urban devel­op­ment in Berlin. His arti­cle cul­mi­nated in the sug­ges­tion that the entire area of the for­mer Reichss­port­feld be ‘denaz­i­fied’ (ent­naz­i­fiziert) by strip­ping it of all sculp­tures, fres­coes, murals, and by clear­ing away the ‘Maifeld samt Führertribüne’ and trans­form­ing it into a ‘lively park for sport and leisure’ (‘zu trans­formieren in einen lebendi­gen Sport- und Freizeit­park’). Strieder’s argu­ments pro­voked many let­ters to the edi­tor and fur­ther opin­ion­ated arti­cles,12 includ­ing a report in The Times (29 May 2020) by David Cross­land, enti­tled ‘Berlin split over calls to bull­doze Aryan stat­ues at Hitler’s sta­dium’.

In a nut­shell, these three recent—unre­lated—debates neatly indi­cate the cur­rent state of affairs (in Ger­many): Nazi ide­ol­ogy and archi­tec­ture—whether in its more or less orig­i­nal state, or in slightly mod­i­fied, heav­ily altered, or almost com­pletely changed form—remains the fun­da­men­tal touch­stone for estab­lish­ing a post-total­i­tar­ian posi­tion vis-à-vis the past. Today, easy, sim­ple, reduc­tive views meet with ardent responses, and are chal­lenged and refuted. But the out­come is open, and it remains a per­ma­nent task to develop a respon­si­ble atti­tude. The her­itage of atroc­ity is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to geospa­tial con­fig­u­ra­tions like build­ings and infrastruc­tures. The idea of dis­so­nant her­itage—which always includes stew­ard­ship of rem­nants and remains of the influ­ences of for­eign forces and pow­ers, and of the debris of occu­pa­tion regimes—seems to be a very use­ful con­cept, espe­cially since it poses vital ques­tions about estab­lish­ing and main­tain­ing (col­lec­tive and indi­vid­ual) iden­tity in a fun­da­men­tally dynamic, migra­tory, shift­ing, unsta­ble world with­out secu­rity or sta­bil­ity.13

The asym­me­try of cul­tural mem­ory (Erin­nerungskul­tur). Pol­ish and Ger­man prob­lems with dis­so­nant her­itage

The asym­me­try of cul­tural mem­ory (Erin­nerungskul­tur). Pol­ish and Ger­man prob­lems with dis­so­nant her­itage

Robert Traba

Robert Traba, pro­fes­sor of social sci­ences and his­to­rian work­ing at the Insti­tute of Polit­i­cal Stud­ies at the Pol­ish Acad­emy of Sci­ences (PAN). Founder (1990) and for many years the chair­man/edi­tor in chief of the Olsz­tyn-based peri­od­i­cal Borus­sia. Founder and direc­tor (2006–2018) of the PAN Cen­tre for His­tor­i­cal Research in Berlin, hon­orary pro­fes­sor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In 2007–2020 co-chair of the Pol­ish-Ger­man Text­book Com­mit­tee. His main areas of research inter­est are cul­tural his­tory, social mem­ory, and the bor­der­lands of Cen­tral Europe. His most recent pub­li­ca­tions are The Past in the Present. The Con­struc­tion of Pol­ish His­tory (2015), Die deutsche Besatzung Polens. Essays zur Erin­nerungskul­tur (2020), and (ed.) Niedokońc­zona wojna? „Pol­skość” jako zadanie pokole­niowe (The Unfin­ished War? “Pol­ish­ness” as a Gen­er­a­tional Task) (2020).

What is dis­so­nant her­itage? The pub­lish­ers and authors of this vol­ume all set out to define it on the basis of their own research expe­ri­ences and cul­tural com­pe­ten­cies. After Gre­gory J. Ash­worth, and in emu­la­tion of the prac­tices of the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre in Kraków, dis­so­nant her­itage can be treated as a sit­u­a­tion in which there is a lack of cohe­sion between a given group of peo­ple and her­itage con­sid­ered to be theirs: inher­ited from their fore­bears or pro­moted as a com­po­nent value of their iden­tity.1 Dis­so­nant her­itage is a legacy char­ac­ter­ized by dishar­mony in the inter­pre­ta­tive strate­gies devel­oped by those val­u­at­ing it.

We in Poland are not alone in our issues with the process of inher­i­tance as active engage­ment with a recog­nized and accepted cul­tural canon com­pris­ing arte­facts, mate­r­ial objects, and intan­gi­ble mod­els once belong­ing to ‘oth­ers’. These lat­ter may either con­firm our tra­di­tion or—due to the judg­ments of his­tory, wars lost or won, rev­o­lu­tions suc­cess­ful or failed, or polit­i­cal sys­tems founded or foundered—present us with axi­o­log­i­cal dilem­mas. What can be inher­ited? What can vio­late a cul­tural space already formed? What can present—whether real­is­ti­cally or merely appar­ently, in our imag­i­na­tions—a threat to the cohe­sive­ness of our nation, social group, con­fes­sional body, or regional com­mu­nity?

Among our neigh­bours to the west, the Ger­mans, the issue with her­itage is of a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter.2 Their dif­fi­cult her­itage con­sists above all in their con­fronta­tion with their own per­pe­tra­tion, with their own her­itage of the rule of the crim­i­nal National Social­ist sys­tem. Rever­ber­at­ing in the back­ground are also the echoes of their set­tle­ment of accounts with the colo­nial and impe­r­ial legacy of impe­r­ial Ger­many. The main­stream in pol­i­tics and the major­ity of soci­ety vehe­mently reject the her­itage of Nazi Ger­many. One sig­nif­i­cant site in the present-day topog­ra­phy of Berlin con­nected with the Ger­mans’ com­mem­o­ra­tion of their own National Social­ist crimes is the city’s most pop­u­lar mon­u­ment and doc­u­men­ta­tion cen­tre (which attracts some 1.2 mil­lion vis­i­tors every year): Topogra­phie des Ter­rors at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Nonethe­less, as the Ger­man-Israeli his­to­rian Mar­i­anne Awer­buch (1917–2004) said in the pop­u­lar daily Der Tagesspiegel in 1998, in fact the whole of Ger­many is a mon­u­ment to the com­mis­sion of crimes under National Social­ism.3 If there is dis­sent, it is over the ways in which the fas­cist past should be de-ide­ol­o­gized in the con­tem­po­rary land­scape, and how pro­tec­tion may be extended to sites which came into being between 1933 and 1945 but are nonethe­less of sig­nif­i­cant artis­tic value.

In this vol­ume, which focuses on the prob­lem­atic char­ac­ter of mate­r­ial her­itage, my aim is to exam­ine the sub­ject from the per­spec­tive of cul­tural mem­ory (Erin­nerungskul­tur) with­out lim­it­ing myself to arte­facts recorded in the cul­tural land­scape. The nat­ural asym­me­try of cul­tural mem­ory in Poland and Ger­many also prompts reflec­tion that goes beyond the dis­so­nant Nazi her­itage that is the inspi­ra­tion for this vol­ume. Why? In Poland this cat­e­gory of her­itage is not a prob­lem, because it is invis­i­ble, in the sense that it merges with what is col­lo­qui­ally referred to in the com­mon per­cep­tion as ‘for­merly Ger­man’, above all in the ‘Recov­ered Ter­ri­to­ries’ in the west of the coun­try. Only occa­sion­ally does it ignite dis­cus­sions (as in the case of Wawel), but these are largely eclipsed by debates on her­itage.

My reflec­tions are struc­tured around two research cat­e­gories/per­spec­tives devel­oped over many years: cul­tural suc­ces­sion, and read­ing the land­scape as one of the forms of applied his­tory. In this case they are inter­wo­ven in the Pol­ish-Ger­man his­tory of mutual influ­ences.

Ger­many

I shall make ref­er­ence only to exam­ples of events, from a range of areas of pub­lic life, in which I was per­son­ally involved in the period 2016–2018, when I worked at the Cen­tre for His­tor­i­cal Research at the Pol­ish Acad­emy of Sci­ences (PAN) and the Freie Universität Berlin.

In 2016 I was party to a dis­pute ini­ti­ated by the well-known Ger­man his­to­rian Mar­tin Sabrow of the Hum­boldt Uni­ver­sity in Berlin. From the local level in Han­nover, an echo of the issue spilled over into the pop­u­lar weekly mag­a­zine Der Spiegel.4 The issue in ques­tion was the renam­ing of Hin­rich-Wil­helm-Kopf-Platz in Han­nover, the cap­i­tal of the province of Lower Sax­ony. Kopf was the first post-war min­is­ter pres­i­dent of Lower Sax­ony, and a lead­ing politi­cian from the Social Demo­cratic Party of Ger­many with sig­nif­i­cant ser­vices to his city and region. His slo­gan on his poster in his first cam­paign for elec­tion to the provin­cial par­lia­ment (Land­tag) was: ‘I am a social­ist because I am a Chris­tian!’ He died in 1961, at the height of his fame as a respected politi­cian, local gov­ern­ment activist, and pro­po­nent of the devel­op­ment towards democ­racy of the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many. Only in the early twenty-first cen­tury did research reveal that under National Social­ism not only had he sup­ported the Nazi regime, but he had also been gov­ern­ment trustee for reset­tle­ment of the Pol­ish Jews and con­fis­ca­tion of their prop­erty in the occu­pied Gen­eral Gov­ern­ment. While there is no evi­dence that he took any­one’s life, he did play an active part in the crim­i­nal appa­ra­tus. A scan­dal erupted. Kopf’s grave in the munic­i­pal ceme­tery was stripped of its hon­ourable sta­tus, and the square that bore his name was renamed after the out­stand­ing philoso­pher Han­nah Arendt, a deci­sion with which, at the time, I con­curred. Mar­tin Sabrow was of a dif­fer­ent opin­ion. He held that appro­pri­ate infor­ma­tion on Kopf’s ‘for­got­ten’ activ­ity should be added to the sign, but that for the rest, ‘die Demokratie muss aushal­ten’: a mature Ger­man soci­ety should have to deal with con­fronting its dif­fi­cult past every morn­ing. I still believe it was right to delete Kopf Square from the map of Han­nover, because, as the recent suc­cesses of the right-wing party Alter­na­tive for Ger­many show, learn­ing from his­tory in this way does not always have pos­i­tive con­se­quences for the present or the future. In our times, of the deval­u­a­tion of the word and the dom­i­na­tion of hyper­me­dial con­tent (mean­ing ‘any­one can write any­thing on the inter­net’), democ­racy is not always able to with­stand through dia­logue the tor­rent of infor­ma­tion noise that floods the space.

The deci­sion taken by the Vien­nese author­i­ties in the case of Karl Lueger (1844–1910), a great mayor of the city and the cre­ator of the mod­ern Vien­nese metropo­lis, was dif­fer­ent. In the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury Lueger com­mu­nal­ized a range of basic pub­lic ser­vices that had pre­vi­ously been pri­vate, and thus expen­sive—from gas and elec­tric­ity sup­ply, through pub­lic trans­port, to funer­als. It was he who laid the infrastruc­tural foun­da­tions for the ‘red Vienna’ of the 1920s. At the same time, he was one of the archi­tects of mod­ern anti-Semi­tism, and also whipped up pub­lic opin­ion against immi­grants from Bohemia and Moravia to such an extent that the emperor refused to endorse his nom­i­na­tion to the post of mayor. Around 2010 a dis­pute erupted over the com­mem­o­ra­tive plaque founded in his hon­our in the 1930s. The plaque was not removed, but a trans­par­ent Per­spex plaque was mounted over the orig­i­nal (lauda­tory) inscrip­tion, detail­ing his igno­min­ious anti-Semitic involve­ment. More­over, in 2012 the Karl-Lueger-Ring lead­ing to the main build­ing of Vienna Uni­ver­sity was renamed.

Two more con­tro­ver­sial exam­ples are com­mem­o­ra­tions which for years gen­er­ated a level of resis­tance that pre­cluded their unveil­ing in the urban space. The Mem­o­rium Nurem­berg Tri­als museum (Mem­o­rium Nürnberger Prozesse), which oper­ates as part of the Ver­bund der Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, and the site of the Katzbach camp in Frank­furt am Main, offer a reflec­tion of prob­lems not so much with her­itage recorded in the land­scape as with the gen­er­a­tion and rein­force­ment of ‘her­itage of atroc­ity’ (Ash­worth). The his­tory of the foun­da­tion of Mem­o­rium from the per­spec­tive of the Allies, the vic­tims, and their descen­dants might seem sim­ple: the first trial of Nazi crim­i­nals, as a kind of legal redress for the vic­tims and as a warn­ing to suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions, should at the same time serve as a purge of demo­cratic Ger­man soci­ety. In many cir­cles in Ger­many, how­ever, the Nurem­berg tri­als were for decades seen as a form of humil­i­a­tion, an exam­ple of enforced jus­tice. The museum was not founded until 2010, after a decade of long, often tur­bu­lent debates.5

Pub­lic opin­ion in Frank­furt am Main, in turn, is still not con­vinced about com­mem­o­rat­ing the Katzbach camp estab­lished towards the end of war in the for­mer Adler works in the city.6 Of its more than 1,600 internees, most of them Poles, barely a few dozen sur­vived. If any of its vic­tims are com­mem­o­rated, it is the Jews who were mur­dered there. At the end of the war, how­ever, the largest group of pris­on­ers in Katzbach were insur­rec­tion­ists from the War­saw Ris­ing, and their fate is absent from the pub­lic debate. After the war an awk­ward silence fell in Frank­furt. The Adler works resumed out­put imme­di­ately. Its direc­tor, Ernst Hage­meier, under­went the de-Naz­i­fi­ca­tion process with­out a hitch, and in the years of the eco­nomic mir­a­cle was awarded the Cross of Merit of the FRG. Not until 1985 did two local his­to­ri­ans, Ernst Kaiser and Michael Knorn, together with a youth group from the Gal­lus dis­trict of the city, start to delve into the his­tory of the Adler works (their book, Wir lebten und schliefen under den Toten, came out in 1994). This civic move­ment in time spawned the ama­teur Gal­lus The­ater, and even­tu­ally the city of Frank­furt reacted. In 2018, sev­enty-three years after the end of the war, the Bauer Insti­tute launched research on the site.7

Poland

Today, Pol­ish prob­lems with dis­so­nant her­itage deter­mine above all atti­tudes towards the legacy of com­mu­nism (which is statu­to­rily for­bid­den her­itage) and rela­tions to the ‘not our’ national tra­di­tion and mon­u­ments to which the Pol­ish state, by virtue of ter­ri­to­r­ial changes and the tragedy of World War II and the Holo­caust, has become the legal suc­ces­sor. These are today Pol­ish in respect of the ter­ri­tory, but in cul­tural terms belong chiefly to the pre-war Jew­ish cit­i­zens of Poland, or were cre­ated in the Pol­ish-Ger­man bor­der­land region which before 1945 was part of Ger­many or was occu­pied by Ger­mans/Prus­sians as col­o­niz­ers.

In the insti­tu­tional dimen­sion, the Pol­ish seman­tic expres­sion of sto­ries about the past, and Pol­ish cul­tural mem­ory, are ‘exclu­sively national’ across the board, from the Min­istry of Cul­ture and National Her­itage, through the National Her­itage Insti­tute, to the Insti­tute of National Remem­brance (IPN). What does this mean? In the con­text of the pri­mary leg­is­la­tion, which deter­mines the nor­ma­tive char­ac­ter of the Pol­ish cul­tural space, the nation may for­mally be said to be rep­re­sented/cre­ated not only by eth­nic Poles but also by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of other nations who were cit­i­zens of the Pol­ish Repub­lic. The con­sti­tu­tion of 2 April 1997 for­mu­lates this as fol­lows:

[…] we, the Pol­ish Nation—all cit­i­zens of the Repub­lic, both those who believe in God […] and those who do not share this faith […], grate­ful to our fore­bears for […] the cul­ture rooted in the Chris­tian her­itage of the Nation and uni­ver­sal human val­ues […].

Thus on paper, only that which was imposed by force or, as in the case of part of the Ger­man her­itage, became part of the Pol­ish state after the 1945 bor­der shift, is ‘not ours’. In prac­tice, how­ever, this ‘ours’ tends to be inter­preted in a nar­row sense, close to the eth­nic def­i­n­i­tion of ‘Pol­ishness’. Among the Oth­ers whom for a long time we were unwill­ing to accept as part of this com­mon tra­di­tion were our imme­di­ate neigh­bours, the Jews. At present we are restor­ing them to mem­ory, and this is a new phe­nom­enon. The process began about a quar­ter-cen­tury ago. The Kraków dis­trict of Kaz­imierz is an exam­ple of how Jew­ish her­itage is even under­go­ing a pop-cul­ture fes­ti­val­iza­tion, which means that there is demand for it in the pop-cul­ture dimen­sion. But another phe­nom­enon is also wor­thy of note: for almost two decades, cen­tral Poland has been see­ing the estab­lish­ment of cen­tres of cul­tural dia­logue, muse­ums, and cul­tural cen­tres in the aban­doned syn­a­gogues of its for­mer shtetls. Per­haps the most inter­est­ing exam­ple of this cur­rent is the ‘Świę­tokrzyski Sztetl’ Edu­ca­tion Cen­tre and Museum in Chmiel­nik.

The aspect of her­itage most debated of late, how­ever, is statu­to­rily for­bid­den her­itage. This is reg­u­lated by the ‘Decom­mu­niza­tion’ Law of 1 April 2016. Pur­suant to this leg­is­la­tion, the names of pub­lic facil­i­ties may not ‘com­mem­o­rate per­sons, orga­ni­za­tions, events, or dates sym­bol­iz­ing com­mu­nism or any other total­i­tar­ian sys­tem, or prop­a­gate any such sys­tem in any other way’ (Jour­nal of Laws of the Repub­lic of Poland/Dz. U. RP 2016, item 744). The act was passed by the lower house of the Pol­ish par­lia­ment unan­i­mously (with one absten­tion). It gave the IPN the sole com­pe­ten­cies to rule whether or not a given object/name­sake sym­bol­ized or prop­a­gated the com­mu­nist sys­tem. Local author­i­ties were given a period of twelve months to imple­ment the changes sug­gested by the IPN. Fail­ure to do so would give the voivode with ter­ri­to­r­ial juris­dic­tion the com­pe­tency to change the name­sake of a given insti­tu­tion. This solu­tion was designed to ensure the effi­cacy and immutabil­ity of the deci­sion. Among the mon­u­ments that dis­ap­peared were not only ones wrongly memo­ri­al­iz­ing unwor­thy party func­tionar­ies or pseudo-heroes of com­mu­nist rule, but also oth­ers com­mem­o­rat­ing emi­nent fig­ures such as Lud­wik Waryński or col­lec­tive heroes who fought to lib­er­ate Poland and the wider Europe from the total­i­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ships of Ger­man National Social­ism (the 1st and 2nd Pol­ish Armies) and fas­cism (the sol­diers of the Inter­na­tional Jarosław Dąbrowski Memo­r­ial Brigade, known as the Dąbrowszczaki, who fought on the Repub­lican side in the Span­ish Civil War). They were super­seded by com­mem­o­ra­tions of mem­bers of the anti-com­mu­nist under­ground, among them sol­diers of the Holy Cross Brigade who col­lab­o­rated with the Ger­mans, includ­ing con­tro­ver­sial indi­vid­u­als such as Józef Kuraś, pseu­do­nym ‘Ogień’, or Romuald Rajs, pseu­do­nym ‘Bury’, who was charged with crimes against civil­ians in the Pod­lasie region.8

In many cir­cles, chiefly those of young activists draw­ing on left­wing tra­di­tions, this act was received as an attempt to remove left-wing name­sakes from the soci­etal con­scious­ness and hence to enable the right to win full hege­mony in the Poles’ space of mem­ory. Accord­ing to research by Jakub Wys­mułek, the dom­i­nant inter­pre­ta­tion of this law is con­nected with the per­cep­tion of decom­mu­niza­tion in the broader con­text of the actions taken by the IPN to date, above all when taken together with the simul­ta­ne­ous inclu­sion in offi­cial his­tor­i­cal pol­icy of nation­al­ist ele­ments, e.g. hon­our­ing the actions of the National Armed Forces (Nar­o­dowe Siły Zbro­jne, NSZ), or com­mem­o­rat­ing the ‘cursed sol­diers’ (żołnierze wyk­lęci), i.e. glo­ri­fy­ing en bloc the entire post–war inde­pen­dence-focused and anti­com­mu­nist under­ground. Wys­mułek’s study of the reac­tions in soci­ety to the removal from the topogra­phies of War­saw, Gdańsk, and Olsz­tyn of streets named for the Dąbrowszczaki uncov­ered protests so strong, of such gen­er­a­tional sol­i­dar­ity, and uncor­re­lated with any party, expressed chiefly in the fil­ing of law­suits, that the IPN (or the voivodes) were forced by bind­ing ver­dicts to retract their deci­sions.9

While in Ger­many fig­ures such as Karl Marx and Rosa Lux­em­burg have the sta­tus of cult heroes among some groups, but are seen as neg­a­tive, or at least con­tro­ver­sial, by oth­ers, nobody removes images of them from the pub­lic space. In Poland, by con­trast, they are almost uni­ver­sally regarded as ele­ments of an alien, com­mu­nist her­itage, which by force of law can­not func­tion pub­licly. And yet this blan­ket ban obscures impor­tant infor­ma­tion such as the fact that in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tury Friedrich Engels was one of the most ardent defend­ers of the right of the Pol­ish state to exist, and Rosa Lux­em­burg actively defended speak­ers of Pol­ish from forced Ger­man­iza­tion.10

The above exam­ples show­ing the dif­fer­ences in under­stand­ing of dif­fi­cult her­itage in Poland and in Ger­many reveal the extent to which we func­tion in sep­a­rate, national sys­tems of cul­tural mem­ory despite com­mu­ni­cat­ing in a range of dimen­sions of pub­lic life, whether through inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions or by means of meet­ings at the Euro­pean or global level. Mem­ory is a prod­uct of national dis­courses and national tra­di­tions. From the out­set, then, dis­so­nant her­itage has an entirely dif­fer­ent place in the two coun­tries’ national sys­tems of cul­tural mem­ory.

A shared prob­lem—a case study

Among the ninety-nine canon­i­cal Pol­ish-Ger­man sites of mem­ory there was no space for Adolf Hitler’s most impor­tant mil­i­tary head­quar­ters, the Wolf­ss­chanze (Wolf’s Lair, 1940–1944), sited on the fringes of what was at that time the Ger­man province of East Prus­sia. As the ini­tia­tors of the project enti­tled ‘Pol­ish-Ger­man sites of mem­ory’, we con­strued loci memo­riae as sym­bols, arte­facts, or fig­ures from the Pol­ish-Ger­man space which have actively influ­enced the iden­tity-form­ing processes in both coun­tries and have thus become part of both the Pol­ish and Ger­man con­cepts of cul­tural mem­ory.11 The Wolf­ss­chanze was his­tor­i­cally speak­ing too Ger­man, and in the medial sense almost global in sig­nif­i­cance, but not Pol­ish enough, and this was a sine qua non con­di­tion of inclu­sion of a site in the cat­e­gory of Pol­ish-Ger­man sites of mem­ory. Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauf­fen­berg, the orga­nizer of the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Hitler in the war room on 20 July 1944, sym­bol­i­cally lost out to another site of mem­ory, one inscribed into the Pol­ish-Ger­man Treaty of Good Neigh­bour­ship (1991): the anti-Nazi oppo­si­tion Kreisauer Kreis (Krąg z Krzyżowej) and its leader, Count Hel­mut von Moltke.12 When in 2008 the project team was select­ing the sites of mem­ory, the Amer­i­can film Valkyrie (2008), directed by Bryan Singer and star­ring Tom Cruise as Col. von Stauf­fen­berg, was just hit­ting the screens. It attracted over ten mil­lion view­ers in the cin­e­mas, and was repeated hun­dreds of times on the inter­net and on tele­vi­sion in both Poland and Ger­many, and prob­a­bly mil­lions more times world­wide. Valkyrie put the Wolf­ss­chanze on the global pop-cul­ture map. Notwith­stand­ing the Poles’ neg­a­tive atti­tude towards the site, every year more than 200,000 peo­ple, most of them domes­tic tourists, visit Hitler’s bunker in Gierłoż near Kętrzyn in the Masuria region. Could Hitler’s war room evolve from being a dis­so­nant site to a joint chal­lenge in the process of gen­er­at­ing a shared body of Pol­ish and Ger­man cul­tural mem­ory, and what would this serve?

Any­one who has seen the Wolf­ss­chanze will real­ize that the archi­tec­tural gigan­to­ma­nia of this site (orig­i­nally com­pris­ing 200 build­ings scat­tered over an area of around 250 hectares, plus some 800 hectares of wood­land and a ded­i­cated rail­way sta­tion and air­field) and the fig­ures asso­ci­ated with it will always com­mand a group of curi­ous afi­ciona­dos of dark tourism and mil­i­taria, as well as ordi­nary his­tory lovers, who will want to touch this authen­tic place, one of the com­mand cen­tres of the Ger­man Nazi war and crime machine. Today this site is dis­so­nant not only in the Pol­ish-Ger­man dia­logue on her­itage but even in its Pol­ish-Pol­ish strand.

This sym­bol of the com­mand of a total war of attri­tion is in the ter­ri­tory of Poland, the first vic­tim of Ger­man aggres­sion in 1939 and the coun­try which suf­fered pro rata the great­est loss of human life and mate­r­ial dam­age dur­ing the occu­pa­tion. It is a fur­ther para­dox of his­tory that until 1945 these lands were part of the Ger­man province of East Prus­sia (Ostpreußen), which, pur­suant to a deci­sion taken by the Allied pow­ers (above all Stalin) in Yalta and Pots­dam, were incor­po­rated into the Pol­ish state as Warmia and Mazury. For the Ger­mans, then, the region was an ele­ment of the ver­lorene Heimat (lost home­land), in both the real and ide­o­log­i­cal dimen­sions, while for the Poles it was part of the new ‘Recov­ered Ter­ri­to­ries’. Today it is one of the most attrac­tive tourist areas of Poland, the ‘Land of a Thou­sand Lakes’, vis­ited by thou­sands, mostly sum­mer hol­i­day­mak­ers, every year.

On three occa­sions, in 1992, 1994, and 2004, on the anniver­sary of the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Hitler, offi­cial Pol­ish-Ger­man cer­e­monies have been held, attended by state and church del­e­ga­tions and mem­bers of the von Stauf­fen­berg fam­ily. The most solemn of these occa­sions was that held in 1994, when the respec­tive del­e­ga­tions were led by Rita Süssmuth, pres­i­dent of the Ger­man Bun­destag, and Józef Oleksy, mar­shal of the Pol­ish Sejm.13 As the plaque unveiled in 2004 states, this Pol­ish-Ger­man site of mem­ory was not a direct ref­er­ence to Stauf­fen­berg but a more gen­eral ‘com­mem­o­ra­tion of the resis­tance move­ment against National Social­ism’. Adam Krzemiński, a jour­nal­ist with the War­saw cur­rent affairs weekly Poli­tyka and cor­re­spon­dent for the Ham­burg-based Die Zeit, attempted to cre­ate an ide­o­log­i­cal ‘cra­dle’ for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion on the basis of the resis­tance move­ment in Poland and Ger­many, i.e. the con­spir­acy that planned and car­ried out the attack on 20 July 1944, and the out­break of the War­saw Ris­ing twelve days later. Cog­nizant of the incom­men­su­ra­bil­ity of the two events—on the one hand a few dozen assas­sins, and on the other the thou­sands who made up the Home Army (Armia Kra­jowa), 200,000 vic­tims, and the razed Pol­ish cap­i­tal—Krzemiński nonethe­less per­ceived a cer­tain anal­ogy:

The aim of both the Ger­man con­spir­a­tors and the Pol­ish insur­rec­tion­ists was to show the world that they existed: that there were Ger­mans who were not in thrall to Hitler, and that the Poles, despite being pushed around from one cor­ner of Europe to another by their own allies, were sov­ereign in their deci­sions. […] And, though they failed, both ges­tures proved morally vic­to­ri­ous.14

In 2004, when the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion between Poland and Ger­many was tense due to con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the com­mem­o­ra­tion of the expul­sions, Krzemiński’s voice failed to win over the major­ity in pub­lic opin­ion in either Poland or Ger­many. The anniver­sary also brought to light von Stauf­fen­berg’s colo­nial­ist views, which he had expressed in a let­ter to his wife at the begin­ning of the 1939 aggres­sion on Poland:

The local pop­u­la­tion is an uncon­scionable rab­ble, a great many Jews and cross­breeds. In order to feel com­fort­able, the nation evi­dently needs the whip. The thou­sands of pris­on­ers of war will in all cer­tainty help to develop our agri­cul­ture.15

Indeed, Krzemiński him­self, in a kind of auto-polemic, mused that in spite of the evi­dent empa­thy on the Pol­ish side, it would be hard to imag­ine any kind of men­tal Pol­ish-Ger­man com­mu­nity at the Wolf­ss­chanze:

While what the Ger­mans see is a piece of their own his­tory pet­ri­fied in rein­forced con­crete, the Poles’ van­tage point is an exter­nal one, as if they were sur­vey­ing the entrance to Lucifer’s cave in Dante’s Inferno. This his­tory is alien to us, even though it affected us directly. For it was here that the plan to raze War­saw was hatched.16

The inter­ven­ing fif­teen years have seen no polit­i­cal will on either side for a joint under­tak­ing to develop the site as a museum or other sym­bolic project.

Para­dox­i­cally, in spite of the overt pro­pa­ganda empha­siz­ing antiGer­man accents, the most con­struc­tive period for the com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Wolf­ss­chanze in Poland was the 1960s, fol­low­ing the thor­ough minesweep of the site. There was a small museum and a cin­ema, the best of their day, and a group of pro­fes­sional guides was trained (who have lost none of their com­pe­ten­cies to this day).17 More­over, in 1968, a fea­ture film was pro­duced, a clas­sic of the Pol­ish film school, on the basis of the prose of Andrzej Brycht (1935–1998): Danc­ing w kwa­terze Hitlera [A teadance in Hitler’s quar­ters], directed by Jan Batory (1921–1981) and scored by the emi­nent com­poser Woj­ciech Kilar (1932–2013). Since 1989 there have been two dom­i­nant trends: the impo­tence of the state and/or pri­vate com­mer­cial­iza­tion. The State Forests (Lasy Państ­wowe), the owner of the site, have been left alone with the bur­den, with the effect that, although the ruins of the bunkers have been secured, the rest of the site resem­bles a cross between a half-hearted attempt at a museum (a recon­struc­tion of the room in which the attack took place, and an exhi­bi­tion on the War­saw Ris­ing) and an amuse­ment park fea­tur­ing var­i­ous muta­tions of carved wooden wolves and sol­dier fig­ures (in the botan­i­cal part of the site run by the Srokowo Forestry Man­age­ment Com­mis­sion [Nadleśnictwo Srokowo], not far from the entrance to the site of the bunkers, there is even a fig­ure of Mar­shal Józef Pił­sud­ski!), and the sou­venir kiosk sells all man­ner of gad­gets, from coats, T-shirts, and umbrel­las with the ‘Wilczy Szaniec’ [Pol. wolf’s lair] logo, to themed mugs and play­ing cards.

Another reflec­tion of the low-brow taw­dri­ness of the site in its present incar­na­tion is a ded­i­cated amuse­ment park, Mazurolan­dia, founded in 2009 a kilo­me­tre away in the direc­tion of Węgorzewo, on the out­skirts of the vil­lage of Pracz. Its web­site reads:

[…] we have redis­cov­ered for you the ruins and under­ground parts of Hitler’s Gar­den, which was built at Wilczy Szaniec to sup­ply Adolf Hitler with fresh veg­eta­bles. The Führer of the Third Reich was a veg­e­tar­ian, and did not smoke or drink alco­hol, so para­dox­i­cally, had he not been one of the great­est crim­i­nals of our world, he could have been called a pro­mo­tor of healthy eat­ing.18

Until recently, the cul­mi­nat­ing point was a recon­struc­tion called ‘Walkiria’ (Valkyrie), a ‘breath-tak­ing march-past through the streets of Kętrzyn. The par­tic­i­pants are recon­struc­tors who recre­ate his­tor­i­cal units of the Wehrma­cht, the Waf­fen-SS, the Red Army, and the Pol­ish Army, com­plete with period mil­i­tary vehi­cles’.19 Accord­ing to the tourist com­pany Tri­pad­vi­sor, approx­i­mately as many vis­i­tors are sat­is­fied with what Mazurolan­dia has to offer as are crit­i­cal, though inter­net users’ reviews are pre­dom­i­nantly unequiv­o­cally neg­a­tive. I was moved by the opin­ion of one young cou­ple:

Unfor­tu­nately, there is noth­ing of inter­est here. […] We went there as part of a visit to Wilczy Szaniec, where we went with our 3.5-year-old Son—inter­estingly, our child liked Wilczy Szaniec more than Mazurolan­dia. It is a place for chil­dren, so the opin­ion of our child is all we need:).20

In the vir­tual dimen­sion noth­ing con­vinc­ing by way of com­mem­o­ra­tion or view­ing of the Wolf­ss­chanze site has been pro­duced, even on the Ger­man side. Across the bor­der, attempts have been made to teach the sol­diers’ civic stance;21 sev­eral doc­u­men­tary films have been made, and a large num­ber of pop­u­lar works pub­lished. Among the ones that have attracted par­tic­u­lar inter­est are those which reveal aspects of Hitler’s pri­vate life through the voices of for­mer kitchen staff at his head­quar­ters.22 On the Ger­man, French, Mex­i­can, and British Ama­zon sites, the most pop­u­lar result for the search term Führerquartier, which dom­i­nates in Ger­man-lan­guage search engines, but as kwa­t­era wodza (lit.: the leader’s [Führer’s] quar­ters) does not func­tion in Pol­ish, is the 1996 film Führerquartier Wolf­schanze [!]. Befehls­stand in Ostpreußen (still avail­able to bor­row from some local libraries in Berlin in 2019!). The most curi­ous thing about this pro­duc­tion is that it is com­posed almost in its entirety of copies of orig­i­nal film and news­reel footage from the war, which show—uncom­men­tated—the ‘glo­ri­ous leader’ sur­rounded by Euro­pean lead­ers vis­it­ing him at the Wolf­ss­chanze, laud ‘Ger­man hero­ism’ dur­ing the war, and make ref­er­ence to ‘the Ger­man pre­ven­ta­tive war against the Soviet Union’ and to Stauf­fen­berg as a ‘trai­tor of the Ger­man rai­son d’état’.23