Body,Sexuality,and Passive Victimhood in the Post-1989 Reimagining of the Polish City of Wałbrzych

Anthropologist Katherine Verdery has observed that Eastern European countries’ transition from communism to liberal democracy has involved not only the building of a free market economy, creation of pluralistic institutions, and introduction of democratic procedures, but also a reordering of the universe of meaning encompassing such notions as morality, social relations, and sacredness. ¹ One noticeable change in the domain of sacredness in all post-Soviet bloc countries (except Russia) ² is the loss of status of the traditional self-sacrificial hero and his or her active martyrdom in the name of the nation at the expense of the passive victim. The difference between these two character archetypes, hero and victim, is that the former voluntarily seeks suffering in the name of an ideal, the fatherland, or God and dies a tragic, but meaningful, death, while the latter has “no political goal, motive or value to deploy against the powers of destruction” and dies as “a defenseless object of violence.” ³ In Poland, the heroic-traumatic tension culminated in 2010 when President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and ninety-four members of the Polish delegation travelling to Russia for the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyń massacre ⁴ died in a plane crash near the city of Smolensk. The uncanny coincidence symbolically connected these two traumatic events in Polish history and further raised the prominence of the passive victim in Polish public discourse. The whole nation united in mourning the deaths of members of the Polish political and cultural elite who perished in the tragic accident. However, the subsequent controversy over the presidential couple’s burial site (Wawel vs. Powązki) divided Poles and spurred the first national debate on the notions of heroism and patriotism in the history of the Third Republic. The heated media discussions about whether President Kaczyński died a hero (a martyr for the truth regarding Katyń) or was a mere victim of a plane crash revealed serious cracks in the everlasting Romantic meta-standards for patriotic behavior and the emergence of new competing understandings (based on civic values) of how Poles should demonstrate their loyalty to the fatherland. ⁵

Similarly, the monuments honoring late President Kaczyński and the other victims of the Smolensk disaster erected to mark the subsequent anniversaries of their tragic deaths carry the ambivalence of a changing commemorative culture. On the one hand, Kaczyński’s monuments have the feel of an anachronistic return to the tradition of state-imposed heroes, while, on the other, group memorials, such as the Smolensk Air Disaster Monument in Warsaw, bear the new charismatic appeal of the passive victims of violence.

The transition from “triumph to trauma,” or, the shift from a dominant narrative of heroic self-sacrifice and courage, to multiple narratives of victimhood and suffering manifested in two distinctive trends: in the desecration of communist-era state monuments and symbols no longer needed to legitimate the new power and in the rise of local dead body (people) politics ⁶ commemorating the suffering of nameless exploited, tortured, and annihilated single or collective victims, grieved only by their small communities. These changes in the sacred domain were facilitated by two administrative reforms conducted in 1990 and 1999, which led to the decentralization of the Polish state and the creation of a three-tier division of local self-governing units. These newly established municipalities took upon themselves the task of articulating the traumas of those whose stories were silenced in the collective national history. ⁷

The notion of Poles as passive victims of external forces has been present throughout various periods in Polish history, but it is only recently that these repressed or forgotten victimhood stories have been brought to the center of cultural awareness. The German cultural historian Aleida Assmann, who coined the term passive victimhood, attributes the appeal of the passive victim to its utter passivity, which connotes innocence, purity, and absolute moral authority. ⁸ Assmann calls the shift from active martyrdom to passive victimhood an “ethical turn,” ⁹ and French World War II historian Henry Rousso sees in this shift a significant passage from a political to a moral understanding of the past. ¹⁰ Suffering and vulnerability, which were once considered shameful, have now been rehabilitated as positive cultural values and a basis on which to construct new post-collapse identities. According to Verdery, the emotional efficacy of human corpses as political symbols is largely due to their self-referentiality: “because all people have bodies, any manipulation of a corpse [or any attack on the vulnerable human body] directly enables one’s identification with it through one’s own body, thereby tapping into one’s reservoirs of feeling.” ¹¹ This new sensitivity toward the human body is a consequence of another shift—the so-called “somatic shift” or the late twentieth-century reconceptualization of the mind–body split in Western thought and the resulting acknowledgment of the importance of the material body in the construction of the self. Thus, in many Central and East European cultures, the new appreciation of the human body and its vulnerability has led to the activation of memories of World War II and communism and to the proliferation of narratives of individual and collective suffering, which for many people have become a main building block of their post-collapse identities. As a result, entire social categories that had been neglected and marginalized before (e.g., ethnic and sexual minorities, migrant groups, and generations) have reevaluated themselves and claimed their entry into full-fledged citizenship.

In what follows, I use two surrealist Polish plays, Peregrynacje Czarnej Izy Wałbrzyskiej (2009) [The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych] and Świadectwa wzlotu upadku wzlotu wzlotu wzlotu upadku i tak dalej Antka Kochanka (2012) [The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek] by the tandem Andreas Pilgrim/Sebastian (Seb) Majewski, ¹² to explore the post-1989 mechanisms for the desecration of old heroes and consecration of new ones. In particular, I examine how these mechanisms were utilized in reordering a crisis-stricken community’s universe of meaning and forging its new identity. The community in question and setting of the two plays is the Lower Silesian town of Wałbrzych, infamous in Poland for the deep crisis it underwent during its transformation from a communist coal-mining center to a modern post-industrial urban space. The plays were part of a larger project of the Jerzy Szaniawski Theater in Wałbrzych, the Kierunek 074 [Direction 074] series, whose purpose was to engage with and translate problems of the city into the language of theater.

Searching for an inspiration for his plays, Pilgrim/Majewski wandered the streets of Wałbrzych and talked to locals who introduced him to two old city legends with peculiar names: Black Iza and Antek Kochanek. The former belonged to a famous town prostitute from the 1950s and the latter was a street name in one of the old German neighborhoods. The full names of the prototypes of Pilgrim/Majewski’s play characters were Izabela Sobolewska and Antoni Kochanek and, like the majority of the inhabitants of post-war Wałbrzych, they were not local. A German city before World War II, Wałbrzych (Waldenburg) was transferred to Poland after the borders of Europe were redrawn at Potsdam in 1945. The vacated houses of German expellees were hurriedly populated with Polish migrants from the Eastern borderlands who had been similarly uprooted and dispossessed by the Soviet Union’s annexation of those territories. ¹³

Another large group of newcomers to Wałbrzych comprised the Polish migrants employed in the coal-mining industries in France and Belgium following World War I. They were lured by the Communist government to return to Poland after 1945 because of the high demand for qualified workers to operate the vacated German mines. It is important to note that Antoni Kochanek never set foot in Wałbrzych. He belonged to the Polish migrant community in France, where he worked briefly as a miner in the early 1930s, and thus his connection to Wałbrzych was indirect and symbolic. The Communist officials’ decision to name a street in Wałbrzych after him was based not only on his employment in the coal-mining industry but also on his membership in the French Communist Party, political activity as a trade union leader, and heroic death in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. ¹⁴

Whereas Antoni Kochanek was a revered communist hero, Izabela Sobolewska was the secret love of the first Party men in Wałbrzych in the 1950s and 1960s. Although she was a real person who lived in Wałbrzych, her identity is wrapped in mystery because there are no preserved records of her existence. Iza’s surviving contemporaries disagree on almost every detail concerning her life. She arrived in Wałbrzych from Piła or Poznań or maybe Gdańsk at the age of twenty-four, or a bit older. Some say that she prostituted her body for a bag of potatoes, others that she was a high-class escort and charged 200 złoty per hour. It is unclear whether she died in 1964, 1965, or 1969. There are also multiple versions of her death: rumors attest that she was murdered by a sadistic client (for biting off his penis), or that she tripped while intoxicated and suffered fatal injury. Yet younger women recall how their parents scared them into obedience by threatening that the same black Volga ¹⁵ that abducted “Black Iza” will take them away. However, the one detail upon which Iza’s contemporaries agree is her extraordinary beauty; she had long and thick dark hair and a seductive curvy body that turned heads. ¹⁶

At first glance, Antek Kochanek and Black Iza have nothing in common. While he had never been to Wałbrzych, she lived in the town for about a decade, yet his symbolic connection to the city remains marked by a street sign, while her short physical presence has left no material signs. However, the local legends share one commonality and that is the faded memory of their stories. According to the playwright’s initial research, Wałbrzych’s inhabitants, especially the older generation, still recognized Antek Kochanek’s and Black Iza’s names, but could hardly remember the reasons for their fame. This ambiguity, and its capacity to evoke a variety of meanings, is, according to Verdery, the necessary condition for the symbolic effectiveness of the dead in politics. ¹⁷ Similarly, Seb Majewski, in his then capacity as artistic director of the Jerzy Szaniawski Theater, saw in the engagement with the dead the possibility to reassess the recent past and address questions central to reshaping the identity of the city. In the tradition of the socially committed theater, ¹⁸ Pilgrim/Majewski created two plays centered on the human body and sexual otherness ¹⁹ whose strong emancipatory message sought to instigate change by unsettling the culturally stagnant community.

For Wałbrzych, the process of change and the building of a new identity began with the fall of communism and the Polish state’s abrupt decision in the early 1990s to shutter the coal plants in the city that for many years sustained not only Wałbrzych but the entire region. The collapse of the mining industry proved particularly traumatic for the miners, who had a hard time parting with their communist self-image as the embodiment of the ideal of working-class manhood. As key contributors to the socialist economy, miners enjoyed a privileged social and economic status, albeit at the expense of their own bodies, which had been objectified by the regime as labor tools.

Pilgrim/Majewski’s plays challenge Wałbrzych’s post-collapse identity discourse centered on the traumatic loss of the coal-mining industry, by undermining hegemonic male heterosexuality’s exclusive claim on collective trauma and inscribing female and queer ²⁰ trauma into collective suffering. By heroizing two marginal characters with “socially inappropriate” sexual behavior, the playwright brings to the fore alternative subjectivities predicated on gender, sexuality, and the body, thus advocating for a more inclusive, polyvalent citizenship.

In its essence, the idea of the sexual citizen attempts to overcome the long-standing political view of the citizen as the abstract, disembodied individual of reason and rationality. ²¹ The idea also bridges the long-held divide between the private and the public by allowing “previously marginalized people—those belonging to sexual minorities—to define themselves both in terms of personal or collective identities by their sexual attributes and to claim recognition, rights and respect as a consequence.” ²² Finally, the emergence of the sexual citizen is a result of the decline of the concept of the self as something inherent and fixed. Therefore, on a broader note, the author questions essentialist understandings of the self as a set of immutable core attributes (hinting at Wałbrzych’s clinging to its traditional identity as a coal-mining center) and promotes the social constructivist approach to identity as a fluid entity, a product of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.

In fact, the two competing identity theories—essentialism and social constructivism—serve as frameworks for the two plays, creating insightful synergies and thus making the consideration of the plays as a diptych more productive. The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych is based on foundational sacrificial myth, which according to French anthropologist René Girard marks the beginning of every human culture and is then re-staged ad infinitum to divert social crises and maintain the status quo. ²³ In contrast, the structure of The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek is modeled after an internet forum (online discussion), which relies on the actively constructed presentation of oneself.

In The Peregrinations, Pilgrim/Majewski exposes the anachronism of the centuries-old ritual of sacrifice and its compromised ability to produce selfless martyrs/heroes. Moreover, it reveals the real status of the (self)sacrificed as victims of political manipulation aimed at legitimating and preserving power. Among all the victims of communism, Pilgrim/Majewski chose to pay tribute to the least obvious one—the prostitute—who was neglected or mistreated by the Party state ²⁴ and who sometimes disappeared without a trace because of her loose integration and marginal existence. The deliberate choice of a prostitute as the lead protagonist of the play and as a ritualistic scapegoat foregrounds the body and bodily experiences in an attempt to elicit a sensuous response in the reader/viewer and thus open new epistemological channels that may eventually break the long-standing taboo on the corporeal. ²⁵ To this end, the playwright catapults the migrant-prostitute from the 1950s to the late 1980s in order to symbolically connect the two major traumas in Wałbrzych’s recent history: the post–World War II migrations and the collapse of communism, which shattered the world of the privileged and socially protected miner community. The play captures the eve of the transformation, when the deep crisis is already palpable and the first Party men in the city are seeking ways to either preserve the status quo or minimize the level of destruction. Human communities have long alleviated social tension and escalation of violence by scapegoating. The belief in the efficacy of one victim and one violent act to prevent major social upheaval and restore peace has perpetuated the phenomenon of sacrifice up to the present day. As a rule, persecutors stage the sacrificial rite by identifying an irrelevant victim and then inciting the whole community against the scapegoat. Even though Pilgrim/Majewski abides loosely by the conventions of the sacrificial myth, he opts to preserve that rule and tells the story of Black Iza’s scapegoating from the point of view of the first Party men in Wałbrzych. As former clients of Iza, and possibly rivals for her attention, they become reconciled and united by the plan to annihilate the woman who, in their minds, has become the embodiment of the miner city’s deterioration and ugliness. While the specific victim of the scapegoating ritual is irrelevant to the social crisis, victims, as a rule, are targeted by physical appearance or membership in a certain class or group. Iza’s professional affiliation is a strong factor in her identification as an expendable member of the community, given both the Catholic Church and the Party state’s condemnation of the world’s oldest profession as incompatible with religious and communist morality. Yet Iza’s physical appearance further exposes her otherness and deepens her vulnerability, supporting Girard’s observation that communities accustomed to selecting their victims from certain ethnic, religious, or social categories also tend to attribute physical deformities to them, further antagonizing the majority against the scapegoats. ²⁶ Iza’s persecution appears to be a textbook example in that regard: once attracted by her exotic beauty, her lynchers now see in her black hair and olive complexion a reflection of the polluted Wałbrzych. To augment the correlation between the prostitute and the deteriorating city, the first Party men organize a ritual bathing for Iza, reminiscent of the funerary practice of washing the body of a dead person. The ritual takes place at Iza’s parents’ apartment, and her mother and father give her the purifying bath. The Nowotkos ²⁷ remain deaf to Iza’s pleas for help and proudly prepare their daughter for her final journey, convinced of the nobleness of the sacrificial act. Their attitude contains neither doubt nor the prospect of eventual vengeance, thus satisfying the main selection requirement for the scapegoat: to be as loosely socially integrated as possible so that “it can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal.” ²⁸

The ritual bath marks the beginning of a series of eventually deadly manipulations of Iza’s body, turning it into an arena of two competing truths—that of the lynchers trying to portray her as harmful for the city and that of Black Iza attempting to defend her own innocence. The two conflicting parties represent two different paradigms of knowledge: the visual (to see is to believe) utilized by the lynchers and the tactile (to touch is to know) embodied by Iza. The conflict is manifested physically in the fact that Iza is blindfolded most of the time and has to rely primarily on her senses of touch and sound, while the lynchers’ vision—the highest in the hierarchy of senses—is unrestricted. To demonstrate that vision and truth can no longer be associated unequivocally, the author exposes the gap between the lynchers’ active efforts to destroy the heroine’s body and their pretended concern for her deteriorated looks and faded beauty.

director of the mines:

Oh/ you look a little wretched/ without makeup/ even worse/ than wretched

sb-major pseudonym świerczewski ²⁹ :

iza/ you look bad/ yes, the director of the mines/ told me that/ but I didn’t believe him/ and I said:/ if black iza looks bad/ it must be the end of the world/ but he was right/ are you tired? ³⁰

To the highly subjective and over-dependent on cultural norms visual perception, the author juxtaposes the overlaying of visuality with tactility as a more reliable epistemological system. As touch is a near sense requiring a direct contact between the object perceived and the sensitive areas of the body, the tactile poetics is an inherently participatory poetics (to touch is to be touched) that directly implicates the reader in the construction of meaning. ³¹ Tactility is employed in the description of one of the violations of Iza’s body, involving the replacement of her fashionable Pewex ³² clothes with an oversized formal attire, more appropriate for an older peasant woman than for an urban bachelorette: woolen stockings, black boots, black pleated skirt, white shirt, and a houndstooth jacket. The final detail that completely transforms the young prostitute into an unattractive aging woman is the traditional Ukrainian head scarf, which her mother ties under her chin. In specifying the textures of the clothing items, the author activates the sense of touch in the reader, making his or her body resonate with that of the heroine through the vicarious experience of her discomfort. This resonance is amplified in the description of Iza’s face when one of her lynchers takes off the blindfold:

Police officer pseudonym finder ³³

takes the bag off the woman’s head/ she is all sweaty/ her black hair stuck/

to her skin/ her face—expressionless ³⁴

What the tactile poetics accomplishes here is to bring an object up close, so close as to give the reader a glimpse of its finest texture. This allows the reader to explore the suffering body of the protagonist while realizing his or her own vulnerability, and it is in this process of identification where Pilgrim/Majewski’s tactile, participatory aesthetics most powerfully engages with “the political.”

Iza does not represent the typical communist conceptualization of the female body as an instrument of labor and reproduction; rather, she exhibits a different type of utilization of the corporeal in service of the authoritarian regime connected to the process of knowledge production. In her victimizers’ eyes, Iza’s popularity in the city, her knowledge of the peoples’ secrets, scams, and clandestine affairs has grown out of proportion.

major świerczewski:

you are a slut/ you serve/ the most important people/ in this city/ directors/ secretaries/ mayors/ priests/ policemen/ teachers/ miners/ councilmen/ did I miss anybody?/ . . . / you have absorbed in yourself/ the whole city/ its joys/ and sorrows/ secrets/ dark affairs/ embezzlements/ scams/ you have soaked in all of this/ like a sponge/ and now we have to/ squeeze out/ that sponge/

prosecutors lenin dymitrow ³⁵ Liebknecht ³⁶ (together):

in the name/ of The People’s Republic of Poland ³⁷

Casting Iza as a passive vessel of information suggests a very limited range of epistemic possibilities. The Party men burdened her with unsought information and tasked her with storing it, but did not trust her with its usage, implying that under communism, female bodies were not seen as active cognitive agents and producers of knowledge but as mere containers of an imposed and ideologically filtered episteme. ³⁸

To transcend the communist limitations and restore Iza’s agency, the author valorizes her body as a cognitive tool capable of producing knowledge and transmitting it through somatic channels. Her inability to see, literally and figuratively, the appeal of self-sacrifice for the common good ³⁹ and her reluctance to accept the dominant vision of the Party-state alter the final outcome of the sacrificial ritual: instead of preventing the potential crisis, Iza’s sacrifice brings total destruction. Her dead body fails to secure the status quo, but her violent death evokes “somatic empathy” in the readers by activating their bodies’ sensual and affective memory and thus forming a firm ground for readers’ identification. Through the effect of somatic transference, the scapegoated prostitute becomes an embodied communicable metaphor ⁴⁰ for the perils of prejudice against the human body and sexuality, and for the necessity of cultivating a more tolerant attitude toward otherness in its various manifestations. ⁴¹

The adoption of the gender and sexuality analytical perspective on Polish socio-political transition illuminates the important work remaining in order to restore the connection between gender, body, and human subjectivity ⁴² severed by the communist regime and patriarchy. ⁴³ The unburdening of the gendered body from ideological service and patriarchal expectations is a process requiring deep shifts in collective consciousness, but it is a necessary step toward building a new democratic society. And although individuals and communities alike often resist change fearing the unknown, the failed ritual of scapegoating as a framework of the play transmits yet another idea—that trying to preserve the status quo at all cost can have dire consequences, and that embracing change is the only way to a better future for the crisis-stricken former industrial city.

* * *

Whereas The Peregrinations focuses on the most prominent trend in post-communist dead body (people) politics (i.e., the sanctification of anonymous, passive victims of communist oppression who have been overlooked in official history), The Testimonies reveals the full range of processes taking place in the sacred domain after 1989—from the desecration of the state-imposed and self-propelled socialist hero through the consecration of passive victims belonging to marginal social groups to the rising popularity of the cult of celebrity at the expense of traditional hero worship. In contrast to The Peregrinations, The Testimonies explicitly promotes flexibility and transformation as an effective approach to political cataclysms and social crises.

The play opens with an appeal for change: Mrs. Jadwiga Śląska, a Wałbrzych citizen and a resident of Antek Kochanek Street, demands that the street be renamed. As Maoz Azaryachu has argued, “street names reflect and manifest certain political identity. They also help form a desired political consciousness among the population. It is not surprising, therefore, that major political changes are reflected in the renaming of streets.” ⁴⁴ A central question in the street renaming process, however, is who demands the name change. The name Jadwiga Śląska ⁴⁵ denotes a popular Catholic saint, a patron of Silesia and of the entire Poland, blending the values of Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism. As an embodiment of the Catholic-nationalistic ideal, Mrs. Śląska perceives the communist hero, Antek Kochanek, as an impediment to post-collapse nation building, which requires new cults and models for identification and therefore demands Kochanek’s desecration as a street symbol. She goes even further in her desire to disgrace and destroy the former hero by ascribing to him a host of other negative characteristics. “Rumors have it,” says Jadwiga Śląska, “that he was also a bastard/ gigolo/ Jew/ Gypsy/ faggot/ pimp/ drunkard/ mason/ and even an alien.” ⁴⁶ The implication is that this list of identities and behaviors is incompatible with the new post-communist morality and represents a threat to the Wałbrzych/Polish community. The list also suggests that membership in the community is now carefully determined based on one’s birth, ethnic origin, sexuality, social behavior, and membership in different organizations. Moreover, the enhanced scrutiny with which the traditional hero is being reevaluated indicates that in democratic societies that do not require mass mobilization and total ideological control, “the hero has become not only redundant, but also morally suspicious.” ⁴⁷

Thus, after Mrs. Śląska deprives Antek Kochanek of his original timelessness and sanctity, he dissolves into a profane time-bound person. ⁴⁸ Conventionally, in the lives of saints and heroes, the emphasis falls on their self-sacrificial death and a few personal details that show the life path leading to that death. It is not surprising then that the first attribute Antek Kochanek acquires after losing his heroic status is a personal biography. Pilgrim/Majewski uses a creative technique to generate the details of Kochanek’s ordinary life, namely, an online discussion forum. In fact, the author builds the entire structure of the play from discussion posts commenting on the Antek Kochanek controversy. This discussion thread also mimics a court hearing/beatification procedure since Mrs. Jadwiga Śląska not only strips the communist hero of his sacred quality, but also accuses him of criminal and sinful behavior. Interestingly, only women come forward in the virtual courtroom and they all testify in his defense.

Putting together the mosaic of Antek Kochanek’s fragmented identity begins with the testimony of his adopted sister who helps to clear his reputation as a detested communist hero and establish his citizenship in the Wałbrzych community. She traces his origins to Ternopil/Tarnopol, a former Polish city in the eastern borderlands. After the city’s annexation by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, Antek and the remaining citizens are forced to migrate to the West and settle in Wałbrzych. Antek’s sister also denies the accusations that he is a bastard and Jew by telling the story of his early orphanhood. The reader discovers that it was Antek’s father, Antoni Kochanek, who embraced communism and died a hero in the Spanish civil war, not Antek himself. ⁴⁹ His mother perished in a Nazi extermination camp because of the name Golda, which she had adopted in the pursuit of political dividends during the earlier Soviet occupation of Ternopil/Tarnopol.

Antek’s family history echoes the foundational story of the Wałbrzych community and thus secures his membership in it by virtue of origin. This type of identification is typical for traditional societies, in which the foundations of identity are always metasocial; “they lay in the mythical time of origin or are associated with the holy figure of a founding ancestor.” ⁵⁰ The transition from traditional to modern industrial society has gradually led to the desacralization of the roots of identity and their relocation within the society itself, in the network of social relations. ⁵¹ The fact that subsequent testimonies radically turn to the most intimate corners of Antek Kochanek’s life may seem like a digression from the author’s intent to establish Antek’s citizenship in a public community, but, actually, these testimonies reflect the increased freedom of today’s people to define themselves as autonomous individuals in response to constantly evolving life circumstances. They also reflect the growing discontent among gender and sexual minorities with the fixed gendered and sexualized public–private dichotomy in which the two spheres are treated as separate. ⁵² Pilgrim/Majewski’s play echoes these ideas by highlighting the fragmentary identity of its main protagonist, Antek Kochanek: each one of his subjectivities places a claim on his belonging to the Wałbrzych community, but the emphasis falls on the defining one, as his name suggests, ⁵³ his (queer) sexuality.

Thus, appearing to contextualize Jadwiga Śląska’s further accusations against Kochanek as a womanizer and a gigolo is Anna Krajowy, ⁵⁴ a post–World War II political prisoner sentenced to forced labor in one of Wałbrzych’s coal mines. She meets Antek in a reproductive experiment organized by the communist authorities, in which Antek is delegated the role of an inseminator of the female political prisoners and tasked with producing a new generation of communist citizens with an unshakable political consciousness. Anna and the other female prisoners welcome the physically attractive, musically gifted, and flashily dressed Antek, whose otherness is a breath of fresh air from the coarse masculinity of their co-miners. As a result, he is able to exceed the baby production quota. For his efforts, Antek Kochanek is named a Stakhanovite and recognized by the record-setting Soviet miner Alexey Stakhanov himself. Equating Antek’s production record with that of Stakhanov’s boldly mocks the traditional exclusion of queer men and women from the construction of nation and nationality because of their rejection of the heterosexual imperative of citizenship to procreate, which poses a profound treat to the very survival of a nation. ⁵⁵ In its more narrow meaning, the comparison of Kochanek with Stakhanov challenges the Wałbrzych coal-mining community’s exclusive focus on heterosexual masculinity and calls for a more inclusive membership. Anna Krajowy’s testimony similarly voices the trauma of the women-victims of the communist regime’s gender politics and demands their rightful representation in the communal discourse of suffering. Although the patterns of exclusion from full citizenship of heterosexual women and of queer men and women may vary, their exclusion shares one commonality and that is their association with the body and sexuality. ⁵⁶ By extending the support of the ideologically oppressed women to Antek Kochanek, Anna Krajowy confirms Assmann’s assertion that “whereas the sacrificial victim is confirmed within the context of his or her own community, by contrast, the passive victim [. . .] is initially dependent upon the recognition of other groups to have this status conferred upon him or her.” ⁵⁷

Female sympathy for Antek does not cease even during the discussion of his most scandalous transgression—his adoption of a homosexual identity in a communist prison. Appearing to speak on his behalf are such female historical figures as princess Daisy von Pless, ⁵⁸ Rosa Luxemburg, ⁵⁹ Emma Himmler, ⁶⁰ and Edith Stein, ⁶¹ all of whom had a Polish–German connection and experienced profound personal transformations during their lifetime. Their spirits are evoked to reinforce the idea of the fluidity of human identity and the necessity to constantly reformulate oneself in response to environmental changes. Alberto Melucci defines adult selfhood as “an ability to produce new identities by integrating the past and the choices available in the present into the unity and continuity of the individual life-history.” ⁶² From this perspective, the condemnation of Antek’s adoption of a homosexual identity in prison appears premature. Antek does engage in promiscuous sex with the other prisoners, but according to his cellmate Mr. Zdzisława, ⁶³ with whom Antek develops a romantic relationship, he did not become a homosexual, he simply continued to do in prison the two things he did best in life—singing and love-making. Proponents of social constructivist theory posit that sexuality is not only an inherent part of a person but also may be a construct of that person’s society. ⁶⁴ Prisons are known to form their own subcultures, which force inmates to adopt new identities. As a highly adaptable person, Antek does not resist the centrifugal forces of prison culture and adopts what seems a culturally approved behavior, but at the same time, he preserves the substance of his identity and the continuity of his life-history.

The careful reader should have noticed by now that the polyvocal discourse of Antek Kochanek’s life story constantly oscillates between innocence and guilt, victimhood and indulgence. The desire to lift him up seems to be accompanied by an equal and opposite desire to bring him down. To a sympathetic observer, Antek does appear as a passive victim of communist gender oppression and religious prejudice, but under more scrupulous examination he comes across as a morally weak individual who gives in to the temptations that his physical attractiveness and pansexuality engender. The character’s ambivalence is reflected in the two alternative endings to his story provided by the last witnesses. Sister Wioletta Orańska’s ⁶⁵ confession places Antek Kochanek in the pantheon of Polish martyrs and heroes for the suffering he endured in a psychiatric asylum together with his cross-dressed homosexual cellmate, Mr. Zdzisława. Unlike the traditional Polish hero who dies a self-sacrificial death in the name of the fatherland, Antek Kochanek is subjected to hormonal and electroshock treatments conceived and conducted by the communist state and the Catholic Church in order to alter his deviant sexuality and political orientation. As a hospital employee directly involved with the experiment, Sister Orańska testifies that the treatments not only suppressed Antek’s sexual drive and vitality but eventually killed him. Although at the time of the experiment Sister Orańska’s loyalties lay with the regime and the Church, her present perspective seeks to restore objectivity by asserting that the veneration of Antek and all the victims of gender oppression is acceptable. This symbolic opening of the Polish pantheon to passive sufferers of gender persecution in the first ending of the play implies a reciprocal opening of the notion of citizenship for those who were previously excluded on the basis of sexual attributes.

The second ending of the play has a similar egalitarian motivation, but with a pop culture bent. It presents the final deconstruction of the old type hero and his transformation into a celebrity figure. Consistent with the Catholic “blessing” of the hero’s profanization, the playwright tasks the Catholic saint of Jewish descent, Edith Stein, with providing the details of Antek Kochanek’s post-asylum life. Channeling for God, Stein reveals that Antek eventually fled to Germany, where he made a successful career in show business. He remained true to his identity as an entertainer but had to quit singing, switching to DJ-ing, as he had lost his voice during the sexuality-altering treatments. The play ends with God’s final verdict, which demands Antek Kochanek’s absolution from his ideological and sexual transgressions and celebration as a precursor of club music and clubbing culture. Antek’s final metamorphosis demonstrates the transformation of the traditional worship of the martyr/hero into celebrity cult. The shift from achieved to attributed celebrity is suggested by the use of social media in generating the facts of Kochanek’s new biography, a deliberate choice on the part of the playwright emphasizing the essential role of publicity in shaping celebrity status. Predictably, the cult metamorphosis has a direct correlation to the post-1989 rebranding of Wałbrzych as a cultural hub. In an interview for the Wrocław Gazeta Wyborcza in 2009 Seb Majewski expressed his wish for the characters of his two plays to become literary icons, attracting national and international fans to Wałbrzych and thus shaping the city’s new image as an attractive tourist destination:

It is my dream that, in a few years, people would tour Wałbrzych in the footsteps of local legends in the same way tourists go to Dublin to follow the trail of Joyce’s most famous protagonist, Leopold Bloom. I would like to see commemorative plaques attesting that “Here lived Antek Kochanek” and “Here died Black Iza.” If that happens, it would be not only my success, but also the success of those forgotten legends. ⁶⁶

The Lower Silesian town of Wałbrzych has been going through a long and painful process of reinvention after the collapse of communism and the shuttering of the coal-mining industry. For many years, the town has consistently received bad press nationally and internationally ⁶⁷ because of the skyrocketing levels of unemployment, alcoholism, and crime, which have solidified its reputation as one of the worst places to live in Poland. In its most trying times, when Wałbrzych seemed to have been abandoned by local and state institutions, the Jerzy Szaniawski Theater came to its rescue. Since 2002, ⁶⁸ the Theater has organized multiple initiatives aimed at engaging the city’s problems, while also presenting alternative perspectives on the transformation. Continuing the legacy of his predecessors, Pilgrim/Majewski created two Wałbrzych-centered plays, choosing as their main protagonists two nearly forgotten city legends—Black Iza and Antek Kochanek. Iza’s and Antek’s ambiguous and polysemic stories lend themselves particularly well to the playwright’s creative interpretations, whose intention was to offer the Wałbrzych community a possible escape from the bottleneck of the socio-economic and identity crisis. The choice of Pilgrim/Majewski not to directly focus on the miners’ trauma was deliberate and motivated by the conviction that the miner community did not need further validation of its suffering, but a wake-up call, a shock. Thus, the author centered his plays on the trauma of two marginal individuals connected by their sexual otherness. By rewriting Iza’s and Antek’s stories as passive victims of communist and patriarchal gender oppression, Pilgrim/Majewski foregrounded the suffering human body as a valuable entity and invited the miner community to restore their bodily subjectivity (as the communist regime objectified miners’ bodies as labor tools). It was the author’s hope that recognizing and empathizing with the trauma of the cultural Other would prompt the citizens of Wałbrzych to venture out of the insulation of their supposed exclusive suffering, adopt a more tolerant outlook, and consider new possibilities for identification in the post-collapse reality.

Did Majewski succeed in educating his audience? The reception of the two plays does not provide grounds for an enthusiastically positive response. While The Testimonies was part of the Jerzy Szaniawski Theater’s program for three years (2012-2015), The Peregrinations had a much shorter stage life. The citizens of Wałbrzych were scandalized by Majewski’s frivolous interpretation of the legend of Black Iza and hurt by his criticism of the miner community’s conformism that helped propel the communist regime. ⁶⁹ The audience resented the notions that the city was responsible for its own demise and that it should find strength within itself (not wait for a miracle) to break out of the post-collapse stagnation; such ideas undermined Wałbrzych’s self-adopted victim identity. While the audience responded more positively to The Testimonies, the play ultimately did not fulfill its didactic mission, which suggests that the shock intervention into collective memory and the undermining of the exclusivity of Walbrzych’s/Poland’s suffering were not effective strategies for debunking regional and national stereotypes and promoting social tolerance.

Over the years, the playwrights and directors who have tried to engage the problems of the city in their works in order to aid in Wałbrzych’s reinvention oscillated between two disparate strategies: openly blaming the city for its passivity and urging it into action, or empathizing with the stigmatized Wałbrzych. Both strategies were impactful in their own ways, provoking strong emotional reactions among the community. But that was all the theater could do: “disturb and provoke,” realized Piotr Kruszczyński in an interview for Polityka in 2010. ⁷⁰