Abstract
For the vast majority of Americans, the mention of Warsaw conjures up images of the Holocaust and World War II. In comparison with other Central European capitals such as Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, Warsaw remains fixed as a site of wartime suffering and destruction in English-language publications. In part, these impressions stem from the fact that interwar Warsaw was a major center of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, and stories of this center’s flourishing and destruction attract the largest number of American readers. Because the Holocaust relentlessly reduced this Jewish center to a ghetto and then a ghost town, tributes to the Polish Jewish dead and memoirs of the Holocaust’s survivors naturally dominate English-language tales of the city.
In part, the physical ruins of the entire Polish capital still mesmerize us with the recurring tragedy of modern Polish history: the vain resistance of a diminished nation against the mighty empires of Prussia/the Third Reich and tsarist Russia/the Soviet Union. More specifically, a razed Warsaw tells another irresistible story of valor and wholesale sacrifice, in which the Polish Home Army’s desperate 1944 uprising to liberate the capital provoked the Reich’s military fury and the Soviet Union’s cynical disengagement. The second largest group of English-language publications on Warsaw is devoted to this story, usually in the form of survivor memoirs.
One might also argue, along with city historian Olgierd Budrewicz, that the “sins of urban planning” committed by Stalinist-era architects erased most of Warsaw’s historic charms and therefore its travelogue value for American presses. 1 Warsaw is recognized as a phoenix city, but its resurrection resulted in an unholy mix of meticulous reconstruction with Soviet monstrosity. The Polish capital cannot compete with a magical Prague or Budapest for American tourists. No other European capital had to depend on an actively antagonistic donor to fund its rebuilding from the rubble up. The tsarist government partially or temporarily disfigured the city with its Citadel and the billeting of occupying troops in major squares. Yet none of its humiliations could approach that of a widened Marszałkowska Street bounded by hulking socialist realist blocs or the skyscraping excrescence of the Palace of Culture in Parade Square, that “gift from the Soviet people” that keeps on giving.
Our limited English-language purview on Warsaw contrasts sharply with the Poles’ Varsavianistyka (Warsaw studies), a burgeoning field that encompasses numerous publications (e.g., reprints of nineteenth-century memoirs of Varsovians, encyclopedias and monographs about the city’s material culture and social history) as well as public lectures and graduate academic programs. 2 Indeed, Poles today seem particularly fascinated with the last incarnation of an independent capital between the world wars. Popular histories and coffee-table albums highlight Warsaw life and landmarks during the two decades of the Second Republic (1918–1939). An interactive digital map of Warsaw in 1935 is remapping the city block by block with old photographs; overseen by the popular historian Ryszard Mączewski and supported by a host of different investors, this site also offers a virtual museum, library, and gallery of artifacts. 3 Attracting the greatest fanfare is a 3D film in production at the Newborn Studio. Warszawa 1935 is designed to recreate a day in the life of the prewar city in glorious color and painstaking detail, drawing on photographs, postcards, newspapers, and artifacts as source material. The film will enable viewers to tour Warsaw from the Rotunda to the Old Town as the camera tracks down a once lovely Marszałkowska. Its final section will feature Nalewki, the old Jewish quarter of the city, reportedly displacing grim scenes of the wartime Ghetto with images of a bustling commercial center. Warszawa 1935 has been forthcoming for over a year, and its studio has whetted public appetite for a trip to “the Paris of the North” with YouTube trailers. 4
It’s time that American scholars of Polish culture and history joined Polish scholars in the broader pursuit of Warsaw studies, though we should be wary of false beautification projects. The following cluster of essays represents one such collective effort in English-language Varsavianistyka. In chronological scope, the cluster covers 69 years in Warsaw’s turbulent twentieth century, from 1914 to 1939 and 1945 to 1989; World War II lurks in the background. Our essays’ disciplinary focus shifts from sociocultural history to the popular performing arts to analyses of literature and film. Robert Blobaum analyzes Varsovians’ ordeals and interethnic conflicts during the First World War. Beth Holmgren explores the modeling of a progressive multicultural Warsaw by the stars and shows of the city’s interwar literary cabaret. Ewa Wampuszyc examines how Tadeusz Konwicki, perhaps the city’s foremost postwar chronicler, sequentially re-envisions the symbolism of its most controversial socialist landmark. We offer our English-language work in Warsaw studies as a means of recruiting collaborators for a major undertaking: to engage American readers with this important capital’s 500-year history.