Why study
early modern culture? I am often faced with this question, which seems to me indeed
a lot more justified than an analogous one posed to specialists in contemporary
culture. For it is plainly natural that we want to know more about things close
to us and concerning us directly. Therefore, it seems, experts in the field of
contemporary culture much more often study their favourite part of it, e.g.
their favourite poet, who has been personally important to them in their lives.
No wonder they want to dig deeper into the topic.
But why
early modern culture? As far as I’m concerned – because it’s exotic. In the
same way as the culture of Far East or India is exotic. Remoteness in time is
linked to the same strangeness as remoteness in space; and strangeness is often
appealing. But that’s not all. The older culture is a kind of asylum among
research topics. I’m really glad that I don’t have to take a stance in
contemporary disputes on issues historical, political or social, or at least
I’m forced to do it to a much lesser extent than someone dealing with, let’s
say, ethnic conflicts in the modern-day Ukraine. I consider it a privilege to always
be able to say: ‘I have no opinion on that one’.
But, where
there’s a will there’s a way. Numerous publications from after 1945 devoted to
the old culture of Lower Silesia show explicitly that interpreting facts
according to a given ideology is possible regardless whether these facts occurred,
say, in the 1940s or five, or even ten centuries earlier. Here’s an example
(concerning this time medieval period):
‘There was
no weakening of studies on Gallus Anonymus after World War II, on the contrary,
they only intensified after regaining by Poland the Western Lands, Silesia and
Pomerania, where the major part of his chronicle’s action is set – and then
thanks to the thousandth anniversary celebrations, which simply had to expose
the oldest of our chronicles. «Gallus Anonymus is again near to
us» (Stanisław Helsztyński) – this was rightly emphasized in the press of
immediately after the war, in 1945, and the bibliography of recent twenty years
contains a strikingly large number of articles devoted to Gallus in all sorts
of papers and journals.’ (preface to Polish
Chronicle by Gallus Anonymus, 7th
edition, Wrocław 1999, BN I nr 59)
This
quotation, carelessly repeated in each new edition of the Chronicle..., is a perfect example of a formerly widespread, but,
sadly, still present phenomenon of attempting to compulsively justify that the above
mentioned territories should belong to the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). I
will repeat what is already well-known, but I still find it worth mentioning. Every
word in the formula ‘territories regained by Poland’, formula used here, repeated
over and over again, and repeated even today, is false. For neither were these
lands ‘regained’ – they were rather taken by force with no historical
legitimization of such act whatsoever, which, as we know, was accompanied by
savage treatment of Germans living there and throwing out civilians out of
their homes; nor were these lands regained ‘by Poland’ – for no Polish
authority ever took actions or made decisions in order to seize the lands. This
decision was a classic example of Stalin’s policy of mass and often brutal
displacements. Changing borders and, above all, displacement of people was
fully arbitrary and was in this form unknown in politics earlier than that of
the 20th century. Legitimizing such actions by invoking dukes from the Piast
dynasty, ruling Silesia in the medieval times, is at best grotesque. But even
the brutality of German occupation doesn’t justify anything of that sort. On
the contrary, the victims should strive towards being as different from their
oppressor as can be.
But even if
we assumed for a moment that this whole propaganda story was true... what link
would it have to Gallus Anonymus? None, of course. If what we read was
dependent on factors such as shifting borders then Poles would have to quit
reading Shakespeare and Dante, as authors that are not worthwhile for not being
Polish enough. One could give some attention only to Hamlet, thanks to Fortinbras’s return from a Polish war.
The above
described peculiarity of thinking is also present in the book historical
research on Lower Silasia, the topic most interesting to me right now. Polonica
– this word is represented far above average in catalogues, publications and
master theses devoted to the topic. And why should it be? Why Polish books or
those concerning Poland are more interesting than the German ones? I can’t
think of any sensible reason. Of course, the term ‘polonica’ was not coined
after WWII. It was an invention which allowed Karol Estreicher to limit an already
enormous spectrum of his bibliographical research – it’s impossible to describe
the whole world, after all. Later, however, this construct was used to overemphasize
the importance of Polish culture e.g. in Lower Silesia which tendency resulted
in negligence of the main-stream German culture as, for inexplicable reasons,
less interesting.
‘Polish
reader, used to Polish books being almost solely about Poles and Polish issues,
may take against me both the choice of characters and of the topic which I
found interesting. Yet in my view, other people, not only Poles, are also
people. And the topic of the book was an attempt to describe some constellation
of human affairs’. These words were written by Józef Mackiewicz in an epilogue
to his novel Sprawa pułkownika
Miasojedowa (The Colonel Miasojedow’s
Affair), where the characters are mainly Russians. I also think in a
similar way.
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