The Politics of Mourning and the Crisis of Poland’s Symbolic Language after April 10

This article analyzes the deep political and cultural impact of the plane crash on April 10, 2010. The tragedy that cost the life of a president, Lech Kaczyński, his wife, and a group of leading parliamentarians across political divides took place near the traumatically laden site of the Katyń forest and has led to a crisis of communal symbolic language. The crisis has been apparent in the radical polarization of Polish society over the rhetoric of the main political parties and their interpretations of the crash. However, the crisis transcends the political arena and indicates that Polish society no longer shares a unifying meta-narrative to form its sense of national identity. The author analyzes this process of societal polarization by looking at the stages of mourning—shock of the symbolic absurd, communitas, and the Wawel controversy—and the utilization of the communal affect in the presidential campaign led by the president’s twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The campaign is characterized by the appropriation of the crash as Law and Justice’s “foundational myth” coupled with the language of indeterminacy and deferral to define a political program. At the same time, the crisis is fueled by the utilization of a reductive version of the Romantic paradigm, in which the late president is sacralized (as in Rymkiewicz’s poem) and by the proliferation of conspiracy theories that antagonize the society towards the current government and Russia.