Provincializing memory studies: Polish approaches in the past and present

Abstract

The history of memory studies has usually been told through research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States. This well-established cartography and, thus, chronology of the field can be challenged while taking into account other provinces of thought. The example of Polish sociology and history shows that the Western memory boom took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. Furthermore, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989 researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of terminology related to memory. On the whole, the article argues for the exploration of continuities, ruptures and transformations of categories developed in non-mainstream research traditions to question the beaten tracks of the history of ideas.

Keywords

biographical method historical consciousness history of memory studies Polish humanities

In the established view of the intellectual trajectory of memory studies, research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States represent the three main traditions of the field (Assmann, 2004). Accordingly, the history of memory studies is organized around the following three main moments: the emergence of an interest in memory in the early twentieth century, the rediscovery of memory since the mid-1970s followed by the so-called memory boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, and a surfeit of memory in the last two decades. Ironically, although many scholars advocate a polyphonic approach to the study of memory, the intellectual history of memory studies has been written from a strikingly univocal viewpoint. A case in point is the recent book review symposium in this journal (Onyeneho et al., 2014) concerning one of the finest attempts at historicizing the field – the Collective Memory Reader (Olick et al., 2011). While the participants in the debate pointed to some limitations of the perspective advanced in this volume, such as a gender bias or the lack of a plausible delineation of the field, they did not engage at all with its relatively narrow linguistic and geographical focus even though the Reader’s editors encouraged such a discussion (Olick et al., 2011: 49).

We would like to suggest an alternative perspective on the history of memory studies by taking into account diverse provinces of thought. We argue that a closer look at approaches developed over the last century could allow us to deprovincialize the mainstream of the memory studies. For instance, a great deal of memory research in Australia is based on oral history and has been carried out to seek justice to violence committed against indigenous populations (e.g. Darian-Smith and Hamilton, 2013). In East Asia, research on cultural representations of emotions, such as shame, humiliation and anger, as well as studies on wartime sexual violence have been an important trigger of memory studies (e.g. Kim, 2013; Soh, 2008). In Latin America, in turn, the study of memory has been both a mirror and motor of the scholarly engagement with transitional justice (e.g. Andermann, 2015; Jelin, 2003). In East Central Europe, memory research was entangled with a bundle of different concerns, such as nation-building, struggle for civic and social rights, or coming to terms with the communist past.

This article focuses on the case of Poland. We draw on works by Polish sociologists and historians that appear to us as representative for East Central European specificities. While doing so, we demonstrate that the history of memory studies was shaped by a phenomenon that the German art historian Wilhelm Pinder called the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporary’ (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen). This is to say that the appealing term trente mémorieuses used to describe the advance of memory between 1975 and 2005 does not entirely capture the dynamics of memory studies since it refers mainly to Western European experiences (Rioux, 2006). The focus on the last three decades of the twentieth century ignores approaches to the study of collective representations of the past developed before the mid-1970s in the other parts of Europe (and possibly in other parts of the globe as well). Thus, taking issue with the established chronology of memory studies, this article contributes to such attempts at historicizing the field that question ‘the supposed latency of “collective memory” [research] between 1945 and the early 1980s’ (Olick et al., 2011: 25f). Furthermore, the predominant focus on Western European and English speaking world traditions largely disregards ruptures such as the year 1989 that informed not only the research questions asked by scholars interested in the study of memory but also the categories they used before and after the annus mirabilis. We suggest therefore that researchers working on the history of the field would be well advised to broaden the range of terms they use to set its limits.

Back to the roots: nation-building and struggle for social rights in the interwar period

After 1918, scholars with transnational trajectories, who had cut their intellectual teeth at the turn of the twentieth century, shaped the academic life of the new Polish state. Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), who studied in Leipzig and Berlin, and spent 9 years with Durkheimians in Paris (1902–1911), is a prime example (Czarnowski, 2015). Although Czarnowski did not use the term ‘memory’ in the interwar period, he devoted several articles to the notion of space as a social category and published a monograph on collective representations of the past. From today’s perspective, there are good reasons to view him as the Polish Maurice Halbwachs (Schwartz, 1996: 275–276). Yet while the latter is widely acknowledged as the father of interdisciplinary memory studies, Czarnowski – the student and collaborator of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss – is known primarily in Poland and among a small international circle of scholars of religion.

Like Halbwachs in France, Czarnowski was ‘canonized’ in Poland after World War II (WWII). His five-volume Collected Works, including studies that had never been published before in Polish, appeared in 1956 (Czarnowski, 1956). The Polish reception of Czarnowski’s work has concentrated mainly on his concepts of culture, social time and space (Tarkowska, 2013). However, recent attempts to reconsider his legacy are informed mainly by memory studies (Loew and Traba, 2015; Traba, 2008). This applies, in particular, to his book on the heroization of St. Patrick in Ireland, published originally in French (Czarnowski, 1919), and his reflections on the ‘past in the present’ (dawność w teraźniejszości) in the post-humous volume on culture (Czarnowski, 1938). These two lines of research can be seen to anticipate the theoretical approach advanced in the 1980s by Pierre Nora. Czarnowski’s ‘past in the present’ bears a striking resemblance to Nora’s concept of ‘history of the second degree’ (histoire au second degré). In the same vein, Czarnowski’s book on St. Patrick can be considered as a study of an Irish lieu de mémoire. Scrutinizing ‘the proliferation of [St. Patrick’s] name in churches, folk songs, and heraldry’ (Hubert, 1919: V), Czarnowski inquired into the relationship between the cult of a hero saint and the making of social and political order. While doing so and applying an approach, which would today fall under the heading of ‘constructivist’, he raised the more general question of the role of religion in the process of nation-building (Ossowski, 2008: 89). Importantly, his research interest in Ireland was inspired by the history of his native realm in the nineteenth century: the experience of a stateless nation, whose elites conceived Catholicism as both the main tenet of Poland’s imagined past and an ally in their statehood aspirations (Markiewicz-Lagneau, 1982: 192, Strenski, 1987: 361–362). The outcome of this double Irish and Polish interests situates Czarnowski among the first Durkheimians who understood the correlation between nation-building, religion and the uses of the past for political purposes.

Also the examples of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905) and Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941) show that to advance a coherent formula in an international environment did not suffice to have transnational success. Like Czarnowski, the Marxist Kelles-Krauz spent part of his life in France (Snyder, 1997). He is of interest here because of his ‘law of revolutionary retrospection’ (prawo retrospekcji przewrotowej) presented for the first time in 1895 at the Second Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris (Kelles-Krauz, 1995 [1985]). Responding to Karl Marx’s plea for looking at the past beyond the Middle Ages and referring to the ideas of the French economist Yves Guyot, Kelles-Krauz analysed the nature of social change (Walicki, 1979: 291). Drawing on many examples, he demonstrated that even the most radical revolution refers to the past. Ludwik Krzywicki, who studied and worked in Germany, Switzerland and France, was also influenced by Marxism. In the 1880s, he developed the theory of the ‘historical base’ (teoria podłoża historycznego). It was supposed to explain how the past operates upon the respective present and which role the legacies of previous stages of development play in the historical process (Krzywicki, 1888). Today, neither Kelles-Krauz nor Krzywicki is present in the international history of memory studies.

Apart from macro-sociological concerns, the interwar Polish sociology was informed by the biographical research established by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1882–1952). The latter, in contrast to the Polish founders of academic sociology mentioned so far, had become a household name in global sociology. This is mainly due to his research on Polish migrants to the United States conducted with Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–1920) and, to a lesser extent, to his culturalist approach (Hałas, 2000). Much less known is the biographical research carried out at that time by the aforementioned Krzywicki. The projects of the Institute of Social Economy that he founded in Warsaw in 1920, such as recording the life stories of workers during the Great Depression, were both milestones in the engaged sociology of the time and widely received by the non-academic public.

In the biographical method developed by Polish sociologists, also known as the ‘Polish method’ (Markiewicz-Lagneau, 1976), the material was gathered through open memoir-writing competitions. The golden age of the Polish method in biographical research lasted from the 1920s to the early 1970s.¹ The popularity of this approach in the interwar period is demonstrated by the fact that, between 1921 and 1938, 20 such competitions were organized. Their total output filled 25 published volumes. The themes of the competitions organized by Znaniecki and his students – especially Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979) – included the biographies of peasants (Chałasiński, 1938; Krzywicki, 1935), workers (Chałasiński, 1931; Mysłakowski and Gross, 1938; Wojciechowski, 1930) and the unemployed (Pamiętniki bezrobotnych, 1933); the perception of cities by their inhabitants (Znaniecki, 1931); and the lives of immigrants (Pamiętniki emigrantów, 1939). In the 1930s, the Institute for Jewish Research in Wilno held three other competitions gathering over 600 ego documents of young Jews written in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish. Although many of them were subsequently lost or destroyed, a selection of manuscripts was published in English translation (Shandler, 2002). All of the biographical material collected in the 1920s and 1930s is a goldmine of knowledge about individual subjectivities and the (self-)representations of several social groups. Recently, Katherine Lebow (2012: 299) suggested a new interpretation of these memoirs that is informed by the global history of social rights. She situates them among the first mass-scale attempts to work through the impoverishment and hunger of the Great Depression and the making of the ‘common man’ stories prominent in the public sphere.

The basic premise of biographical research in Poland – to give a voice to people who had had none until then – is very close to that of the post-war oral history movement in Western Europe and the United States (Nevins, 1998; Perks and Thomson, 2010). Yet, whereas the latter is considered as an important contribution to the discovery of memory as an object of investigation, the former usually remains absent to accounts on memory studies. Given that the Polish interest in collecting memories from the interwar period pre-dated the (Western) European and US-American ‘era of witness’ since the 1960s, this very time lag should prompt us to reconsider the established chronology of the field.

This brings us to the central argument of this article. The early stage of research on collective representations of the past is usually associated with Maurice Halbwachs, as well as with Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud and Aby Warburg, that is, with French- and German-speaking scholars explicitly using the term ‘memory’. The question arises, however, whether the history of the field told through the very lens of ‘memory’ does not fall into the trap of teleology. As it is known in the sociology of knowledge, the emergence of any new concept can be better explained if its study includes also the so-called dead ends of similar research traditions: instances of notions and terminologies which fell into oblivion, and the causes of their non-reception. More specifically, the international and interdisciplinary success of memory could be better understood if we knew more about its genealogy. Furthermore, an integrative (i.e. not exclusively Western European) perspective on the first wave of interest in memory could contribute to a deeper understanding of the interwar humanities, in general, and the transnational (non-) circulation of ideas in particular.

Post-war development: from comparative historical consciousness to collective memory of the nation

The reception of Czarnowski’s work in post-war Poland was particularly influenced by his student Nina Assorodobraj (1908–1999), who combined the Durkheimian legacy with a sound knowledge of the Annales school of history and Marxist thought, developing an innovative agenda for comparative research. After completing her doctoral dissertation with Czarnowski in Warsaw, she continued her research in Paris (1937–1939), consulting with Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, Ernest Labrousse and Lucien Febvre. A Holocaust survivor, Assorodobraj, engaged with the ruling communist ideology in the late 1940s and early 1950s before she became one of the party’s revisionists. From 1956 onwards, she and her husband Witold Kula, a renowned economic historian, maintained a close intellectual exchange with the second generation of the Annales school. As a result of the anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, she lost her academic position and withdrew from scholarly life.

Assorodobraj’s interests ranged from the making of the Polish working class and the history of European social thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to processes of nation-building in Eastern Europe and post-colonial Western Africa. In two articles from the 1960s, she developed a programme for sociological research on historical consciousness, which she termed ‘living history’ (żywa historia). Assorodobraj called for a typology of its forms and functions arguing for a comparative analysis of nation-building processes (Assorodobraj-Kula, 1963, 1967). Her work significantly pre-dated reflections on the relationship between history and memory by Pierre Nora, Paul Ricœur or Jacques Le Goff as well as Western German research on historical consciousness carried out in the didactics of history, in which the very term ‘living history’ (lebendige Geschichte) played an important role (Rüsen, 1989). Although her plea for comparative studies on the relationship between historical consciousness and transformations of social structures, types of state power and historiography has gone largely unheeded, she inspired two generations of Polish sociologists who, from the 1960s onwards, were involved in a series of quantitative research projects on the perception of the past in Poland.

There were two sources of the sociological interest in exploring the historical consciousness at that time. First, Assorodobraj was concerned with the impact of the Communist Party’s propaganda on Polish society. In the 1960s, the politics of history pursued by the government brought it into an open conflict with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the millennium anniversary of Polish statehood in 1966 should be interpreted in Christian or secular terms. This issue was widely discussed among intellectuals, and it received much coverage in the press, in independent media and on Radio Free Europe. Second, the 1960s was a time when a quantitative sociology inspired by American empiricism took root in Poland (Sułek, 2010).

The then surveys gauged the varying levels of historical consciousness in different social groups. Over the course of time, they were completed with questions concerning the most remembered historical personages and events (Possart, 1967; Szacka, 1967, 1981, 1983; Szacka and Sawisz, 1990). Summarizing their results, Barbara Szacka, a student of Assorodobraj-Kula, suggests that the various attitudes towards the past can be grouped into two main categories: ‘historicist’ and ‘escapist’. The former perceive the present as a continuation of the past, the latter would prefer to live in the past rather than in the present. As for the period after 1989, Szacka added a third category – the ‘tourist’ attitude – where the past is (in the words of Lowenthal, 1985) perceived as a ‘foreign country’ and an attraction to be visited (Szacka, 2006).

Under communism, (self-)censorship was a major obstacle to disclosing the meta-narratives shaping the social interpretations of the past. A good illustration of this problem is a large-scale project on the memory of WWII conceived by Anna Pawełczyńska (1922–2014) in the mid-1970s. It revealed that family memory still had a major impact on perceptions of the war. At the same time, its published outcome relates only to the German occupation, suggesting therefore that in the 1970s the Polish experience of the Soviet occupation had fallen into oblivion (Pawełczyńska, 1977). This makes it an interesting historical document that illustrates the limited scope of what could be said about WWII in the People’s Poland.

In the 1970s, quantitative methods were also applied by a team under Jerzy Szacki (2011 [1971]), Assorodobraj’s successor in the Chair of History of Social Thought at the Warsaw University and the author of a seminal work on tradition. One of Szacki’s (1973) projects explored the perception of history in family settings – a topic studied by Polish sociologists also after 1989, when family memory was analysed through opinion polls (Derczyński, 2000) and qualitative methods (Kurczewska, 2006).

Recently, all these lines of research were brought together in a single project: Between Everyday Life and Macrohistory. WWII in Polish Memory (Kwiatkowski et al., 2010). It contains the results of the largest investigation ever conducted in Poland using survey-based methods and focus group interviews. Its crucial questions overlap with those asked in the 1960s and 1970s. Terminologically, however, it traces a shift from the concept of historical consciousness to the notions of collective and social memory. Another illustration of this conceptual evolution are two series of publications edited by roughly the same research team of Warsaw sociologists. The three-volume series published in 1989 and 1990 is called Studies in Historical Consciousness. Its direct continuation launched in 2006 has been named Contemporary Polish Society Towards the Past: Each of the eight volumes deals explicitly with collective memory.

The above-mentioned example corresponds to a broader conceptual and semantic predominance of ‘collective memory’ in Polish sociology that can be observed in the last two decades. It also resembles a similar process in the (West) German humanities, where the category of historical consciousness, which was very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, has been gradually replaced by terminology derived from the concept of memory. However, there is an important difference between these two developments. Whereas since the 1980s, the West social sciences and humanities have been shaped by the transnational turn and growing Holocaust sensitivity, in Poland – as in other countries of the region – the subject of the nation has remained central. Furthermore, although the questions asked by Polish sociologists originated in Nina Assorodobraj’s broader comparative interest in tensions between historical consciousness and nation-building processes, the comparative dimension was later lost. The national focus, while an advantage during the communist period, has become a burden after 1989.

The conceptual shift from ‘historical consciousness’ to ‘collective memory’ leads to a more general issue, which can be labelled ‘the problem of substitution’. If we explore the history of Polish memory studies in the narrow sense of the term, that is, looking for works which explicitly use terminologies of ‘memory’, we get a radically different picture than if we cast our conceptual net a little wider in search of related terms such as ‘historical consciousness’ but also ‘historical culture’ or ‘tradition’. As will be shown, many Polish historians were writing about shared representations of the past already before 1989, yet without using the term ‘memory’. If we allow simple substitutions in these scholars’ terminology, for example, replacing their ‘tradition’ or (collective) ‘imagination’ with ‘memory’, it turns out that Polish memory studies have a much richer history than first meets the eye. As the already mentioned German example suggests, the Polish case is not an exception in this regard.

Belated historians? The transnational moment

In 1997, the prominent intellectual historian Jerzy Jedlicki (1997) expressed his doubts as to the utility of the concept of collective memory:

There is no collective memory. Memory is always individual; this is not altered by the fact that some memories may be shared by many people and that there exist a […] ‘social framework of memory’. But perhaps we can do without such pedantic reservations? Isn’t everyone who writes about ‘collective memory’ aware that they are being figurative, using a convenient linguistic shortcut to point to the convergent memories shared by many individuals at the same time […]?

In fact, I am not convinced that this is the case. Such reified abstractions generally serve as supports for our popular thinking, and sometimes for scholarly thought as well.

The reason for this scepticism was not Jedlicki’s aversion to Western ‘novelties’. Rather, he was expressing a fundamental reservation about the analytical potential of ‘collective memory’, as has also been done at that time by, for example, Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam (1996) or Reinhart Koselleck (2001). In a way, this reluctance showed that the memory boom had come to Poland too, and it also points to a particular trajectory of Polish humanities.

Born in 1930, Jedlicki belongs to the generation of researchers that substantially shaped Polish humanities. Initially Marxists, the members of this generation, revised their positions after 1956. Some of them had to emigrate in 1968, and many of those who stayed in Poland became sympathizers of the democratic opposition. They wrote the best chapters in Poland’s history of ideas.² These researchers and their followers engaged with the development of national myths and stereotypes (as opposed to Marxist and socialist traditions), that is, with issues that were later often subsumed under the heading of ‘memory’. The study of collective identities and identifications was central in the work of not only Jerzy Jedlicki (1988) himself but also Marcin Tomasz Kizwalter (1999), Kula (1991), Tadeusz Łepkowski (1987) and Andrzej Walicki (1982, 1988). Sociologists such as Antonina Kłoskowska (1996), Stanisław Ossowski (1939) and Jerzy Szacki (1962, 1970), as well as the literary scholars Andrzej Mencwel (1990) and Maria Janion (1998, 2000, 2006) also shared these interests. Their preoccupation with the discursiveness of national history, especially with the formation of collective identities and shared interpretations of the past, represents the main regional approach to the issues addressed in France and other Western European countries under the label of collective memory (Górny and Kończal, 2016). It can also be argued that this approach was the Eastern European equivalent of Anglo-Saxon constructivism in the study of nations and nationalism, which was, as it happens, well received in Poland. In such a way, Polish studies on national mythologies, historical consciousness, national stereotypes and other identity-related discourses would appear to confirm that there are many ‘constructionist themes in the historiography of the nation’ (Stråth, 2008) that go beyond the vocabulary of collective memory.

Against this background, it becomes clearer why in the 1990s the terminology of memory did not gain a foothold in Polish historiography, although the French humanities had had a major impact on post-war Polish historians and sociologists (Pleskot, 2010). For instance, Halbwachs’ Social Frameworks of Memory appeared in Poland as early as 1969 (Halbwachs, 1969). Nevertheless, the mainstream of Polish historiography did not stray from their preferred terminology. If memory appeared in works of Polish researchers, it did so abroad – more specifically, in France where both Bronisław Baczko (1984) and Krzysztof Pomian (2006) moved after 1968 and 1973, respectively.

Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire, largely considered as one of the main historical approaches to the study of collective memory, has become popular in Poland only recently. Between 2006 and 2015, it has been reformulated in a large-scale Polish-German project, exploring the ways in which political conflicts structured collective interpretations of the past in modern Poland and Germany (Hahn and Traba, 2012–2015). Following Moritz Csáky (2004), its authors stress that due to the complex ethnic structures of the region and the weak centralizing power of the state, East Central European lieux de mémoire divide communities more often than they unite them. The points of crystallization of collective identities are therefore replete with contradictory meanings. For this reason, in East Central Europe, the same lieu can serve the mémoire of different social, ethnic or religious groups and cannot be analysed in purely national terms. This transnational and transcultural reinterpretation of Nora’s category confirms that dealing with the history of East Central Europe sharpens the researcher’s sensitivity for entanglements, tensions and conflicts about the past (Kaelble, 2006).

The memory boom meets memory studies after 1989

Although the mainstream history of memory studies acknowledges the significance of the year 1989 as one of its watersheds (similar to earlier collapses of dictatorships in Southern Europe or Latin America), from the local, East Central European perspective, everything changed after this date: the political, economic and social situation; the access to archives and forms of international cooperation. This complex set of factors not only played a crucial role in the framing of the region’s politics but also reshaped the methods and tools used by scholars interested in the representations of the past.

Interestingly, most memory-related scholarship in post-1989 Poland has not been a deliberate rethinking of previous research categories. It has resonated, rather, with commemorative performance in the new political setting. The lion’s share of the new scholarship revolves around two opposing but mutually reinforcing normative trends within the public debate: nostalgia for and criticism of the national history.

Since the outset of transformation to democracy, there has been a proclivity to demand memory rather than to study it, with calls for the recovery of lost memories, especially those extinguished or manipulated by the communist regime. The nostalgic wave gave rise to the widespread expectation that the new state would ‘tell the truth’ about the history of WWII and pass judgement on the communist dictatorship. These expectations were accompanied by the call to ‘come to terms with the past’. The main institution charged with this task, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), created in 1998, combines several responsibilities: the prosecution of Nazi and communist crimes, the management of the state security archives, lustration, historical research and public education. In the law establishing the IPN, there are references to the need to cultivate the memory of ‘the huge sacrifice, loss and damage suffered by the Polish Nation in the years of WWII and after its conclusion’ and ‘the patriotic traditions of the struggle of the Polish Nation with occupiers, with Nazism and Communism’ (Ustawa, 1998). Thus, from the very beginning, the IPN was intended to be a guardian of national and community values rather than an institution for the critical study of history. This approach to the discourse of national martyrdom has also been supported in several exhibitions, with the Warsaw Rising Museum taking the lead (Szczepanski, 2012). The politics of memory pursued in Poland after the elections from 2015 suggest that this type of interpreting the past will be further strengthened.

Perhaps even more interesting than the conservative, thoroughly explored strands of Polish public discourse is the relatively understudied and less visible phenomenon of transnational ‘borrowings’ among conservative milieus across East Central Europe (Miller, 2012: 9f). Here, the notion of two equally brutal totalitarian regimes that traumatized the region has been preserved (e.g. Placák, 2015). At the end of the conservative scale, one can also find opponents of such concepts as ‘European memory’, which (according to its detractors) represents a sort of political correctness aimed at adjusting the allegedly ‘wrong’ memories of Eastern Europeans (Nowak, 2016).

As for the proponents of a critical discourse, they have been largely influenced by global studies on Holocaust memory and an awareness of human rights. Their focus is to disavow the self-congratulatory narrative of national pride and martyrdom. Among the most discussed books, we find those by Jan Tomasz Gross: Neighbors (2000), Fear (2008) and Golden Harvest (2011), dealing with the involvement of Poles in the wartime genocide, the plundering of Jewish property and post-war pogroms. Gross’ works gave rise to heated debates on Polish guilt, and aroused interest in the growing number of publications on the Holocaust and Polish–Jewish relations. Established in 2003 at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research has played a major role in this development.

In a sense, institutions like the last mentioned and IPN were in competition with each other to propagate different interpretations of the past. For instance, the more cases of anti-Jewish violence Holocaust scholars brought to light, the more energy other milieus invested in commemorating Polish righteousness. However, all of that also prompted more balanced historical research (Machcewicz and Persak, 2002; Zaremba, 2012) and the flourishing of memory studies, with works on the Holocaust memory (e.g. Forecki, 2010; Kaźmierska, 2012; Kucia, 2005), the genocide of the Roma (Kapralski, 2012) and many others.³ Still, despite an increasing number of interesting volumes published, it did not produce an innovative household agenda comparable to that of Polish memory studies avant la lettre in the 1930s and 1960s. It rather allowed for integration with the global streams of ideas. As a result, Polish scholars refer today much more often to the Western ‘new classics’, such as Pierre Nora or Jan and Aleida Assmann, than to the local ones.

Conclusion

This short foray into the past and present of Polish sociology and history was an attempt at scrutinizing a non-Western European and non-US-American genealogy of memory studies. As we have seen, the ‘memory boom’ took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. ‘Memory’ as such gained currency in Polish scholarly discourse only after 1989, when the first signs of a crisis in memory studies became apparent in the West. The same applies to other countries of the region as well. Yet, research traditions discussed above also showed that many scholars studied similar issues using different vocabularies, such as imagination, myth, tradition, historical culture or historical consciousness. Accordingly, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989, researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of memory.

We consider the developments taking place in Poland as a starting point for a general reflection about more integrative approaches to the chronology and cartography of memory studies. A broader, that is, not exclusively Anglo-Saxon, German and French, perspective could serve as an invitation to take into account ‘forgotten’ and ‘related’ research traditions while speaking about memory, and to think about memory studies beyond the trente mémorieuses.

As it is known, new research questions do not arise in a vacuum but are usually reactions to new social concerns. At the same time, they trigger public debates and political interests. It would be a fascinating intellectual task to re-contextualize the history of the humanities and social sciences during the long twentieth century through the lens of memory studies: remembering about various provinces of thought, different layers of time and abandoned research traditions.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland. Grant number 1bH 15 0133 83.

Notes

Author biographies

Kornelia Kończal is a junior fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany.

Joanna Wawrzyniak is the head of the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw.

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