Abstract
Is memory studies a secular enterprise? This timely intervention from Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper contends that, while religiously inflected forms of remembering may not be ignored by scholarship, they are not receiving as much attention as they deserve. The authors of this study, which builds on their collaborative research project Milieux de Mémoire in Eastern Europe – the Polish Case Study (2014–2017), analyze the intersections between religious practice, local commemoration, and national history. Their empirical focus is the memory of the Second World War in the Polish countryside: they carry out ethnographic work, museum analyses, and interviews in four localities where war commemoration is a major aspect of community life: Kałków-Godów, Michniów, Jedwabne, and Markowa. The result is a fascinating exploration of these lesser-known (other than Jedwabne) sites of memory in Poland, with an emphasis on religious and vernacular commemoration.
Whilst this book will be an invaluable resource for students of recent Polish memory politics (on which more below), its thematic and theoretical framing is perhaps not as ambitious as the title suggests. To begin with, it is undoubtedly a book about a single country, without a great deal of comparative analysis or general theoretical reflection. This seems, to this reader at least, a missed opportunity: occasional overtures to comparativism could have supplied some insight into the specificity of Polish local memory, as well as more universalistic observations on how milieux de mémoire (“environments of memory”) operate. For example, a comment on the outward similarity of the Michniów memorial to those at Khatyn in Belarus or Lidice in Czechia (at all three places, rural civilian populations were eviscerated by Nazi occupiers) could have been insightful. As a result, we can learn a great deal about “Local Communities, Religion and Historical Politics” in Poland – but not as much about “Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity” per se.
Moreover, the book’s dialogue with Pierre Nora is somewhat perfunctory, with the consequence that it is not entirely clear what Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper mean by milieux de mémoire. Their treatment of Nora’s term is confined to a few paragraphs in the introduction, where they admit that Nora “did not define what, in his view, these environments possessing real memory actually consisted of” (p. 15). Working with the French historian’s contrasting of pre-modern milieux de mémoire with modern lieux de mémoire (“there are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory” (Nora, 1989: 7)), Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper study the “narrative, ritual, material and spatial dimensions” of religious forms of remembering (p. 16). In other words, it is the commemorative practices of local parishes (in all cases, Roman Catholic ones) that implicitly comprise the contemporary remnants of pre-modern memory. The obvious critique of Nora’s concept – that he essentializes the pre-modern past as an organic, idealistic realm that too crisply contrasts with the troubled times of modernity, in which communal memory becomes a social necessity – is not considered, and the authors appear to carry over their acceptance of Nora’s dichotomies to their own conceptual armoury. It is not, then, clear what the term milieux de mémoire can add to the vocabulary of critical memory studies, three decades after Nora. After all, is religious practice not, in its own way, a modern phenomenon that has changed and adapted to the present day? Does religiously inflected vernacular memory need to be analyzed as somehow different than secular commemoration? Is the church not one of many non-state actors within a remembering community, and if so, why does it warrant this special concept of milieux?
These theoretical doubts aside, however, Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper have produced a very fine study of contemporary memory politics in Poland. Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity offers an analysis of four (somewhat ironically) lieux de mémoire, memorial sites that are removed from both the country’s metropolitan centers and the gaze of mainstream scholarship. Thus, this study offers not only a conceptual corrective, putting religion (back) onto the agenda of memory studies, but also a geographical one, exploring the often neglected Polish countryside. For example, the first case study on the Our Holy Cross Lady of Sorrows Sanctuary at Kałków-Godów opens with the startling statistic that its annual number of visitors – around 800,000 – easily eclipses the roughly 600,000 visitors who go to the much better-known Warsaw Uprising Museum (pp. 51–52). Illuminating the social importance of these peripheral sites and institutions, all four chapter-length analyses show in great depth the tensions between local and national politics, and religious and secular narratives of the past. In each case, the authors explain in detail: the historical context of major wartime events that characterize each place; the history of commemoration, from the early socialist period onwards, through the years of transformation to the present day; controversies and debates that are specific to the given lieu de mémoire; and reflections on the role of religion in local memorialization. The study is meticulous in its attention to social agency: we learn the names and profiles of significant memory activists, such as parish priests and local historians who contributed to the founding and popularization of the museums; and the research is also based on multiple participant interviews with local residents, so that we gain a “living” picture of local memory dynamics. The overall result is a very accomplished, interdisciplinary exploration of these less accessible sites: a mixture of ethnography, museum analysis, and history containing a wealth of insight into the memory politics of the Polish provinces.
The case studies are heterogeneous, with differing historical backgrounds, different trajectories of commemoration, and different dynamics of bottom-up memory activism versus top-down pressure from the Polish state. Kałków-Godów and Michniów (both in central Poland, south of Warsaw) are sites at which wartime mass murders against Polish-Catholic villagers are commemorated; the former, however, has become dominated by the Our Holy Cross Lady of Sorrows Sanctuary (opened in 1984), which foregrounds “the Polish nation’s twentieth century martyrology” (p. 68), especially in the structure called the “Golgotha of the Polish Nation”. Local memory has been marginalized at the site, where a religious metaphor of national suffering and redemption is embodied. In contrast, Michniów is analyzed as a site in which local grassroots initiatives yielded, over many years, an expanding influence on the national, eventually resulting in the foundation of a Mausoleum of the Martyrdom of Polish Villages during the 1990s. Here, in a metonymic mode of narration, the part strives to stand for the whole. Local vernacular memory is “deeply embedded within this village’s local community” (p. 125), but also gains an outlet to the world at large through the narrative institution of the Mausoleum, which seeks to “embed the village’s importance to the history of Second World War Poland” (p. 124). The two sites also differ in terms of the prominence of religion: at the Sanctuary at Kałków-Godów, Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper find that the institutional religious narrative “prevails over both vernacular and national history” (p. 82). In Michniów, in contrast, vernacular commemoration through shared prayer retained its significance to the local community to a greater degree, partly due to the construction of a dedicated chapel (p. 251). Religiosity of memory is thus more of a bottom-up enterprise than the latter.
The second pair of case studies concerns sites that enshrine, and are troubled by, issues of Polish-Jewish history. The town of Jedwabne in north-eastern Poland came to the world’s attention in the early 2000s after the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (2001; Polish original: Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka, 2000). The site of a pogrom against local Jews by Catholic Poles in June 1941 that was all but forgotten until Gross’s book was published, Jedwabne has come to function as a symbol of Polish anti-Semitism. It is the focal point of a highly contested debate on Polish guilt and responsibility during the Second World War, and (unlike the other sites analyzed in the book) there is a wealth of literature on the subject, in Polish as well as in other languages. Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper’s novel approach is to foreground the local angle, analyzing the community’s response to the surge of national and international attention that resulted from the furor over the revelations about the pogrom. They coin the term “monument therapy” to denote the process by which local residents – with the local parish as a key actor – constructed “an alternative history for their town” (p. 129). Religiously inflected memorials to the historical suffering of local non-Jewish Poles, such as a giant cross to commemorate the deportation to Siberia of Jedwabne residents by the Stalinist regime, serve to deflect from the burden of guilt that the legacy of the pogrom imparts upon the town. Overall, the authors speak of an “irresistible impression that the Jedwabnians were actually attempting to erase the past by enshrouding the crime that had been committed in their own suffering, transforming Jedwabne into a Polish domain of martyrdom” (p. 156).
The commemoration of the Ulma family in Markowa, a village in south-eastern Poland, serves a similar purpose, but with a very different context. Wiktoria and Józef Ulma and their six children were murdered in their home in Markowa by Nazi occupiers in March 1944 for sheltering eight Jews – who were also, of course, murdered. Bogumił and Głowacka-Grajper trace the transformation of memory about the Ulmas from a topic of local interest to its sudden bursting onto the national scene during the first term of the current Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) government, elected in 2015. The local historian Mateusz Szpytma, who is related to the Ulmas, was especially instrumental in the emergence of commemorative practice: his publications and activism, in particular a campaign (still in progress) to have the family beatified by the Catholic Church that was also supported by a local parish priest, brought the family to the limelight. Szpytma also helped found, and served as the first director of, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa, which was launched in 2016; the opening ceremony was attended by state dignitaries, including President Andrzej Duda. It is thus as a representative symbol of Polish Catholic national virtue that the Ulmas have come to be remembered – though not without criticism from academics and some sections of civil society – and the state’s co-opting of their legacy accents this angle of interpretation, as the chapter shows. The Markowa study is particularly topical given ongoing controversies over the recent so-called “Polish Holocaust Law”; the authors demonstrate the gradual genesis of such national redemptory narratives, with roots in local initiative and ecclesiastical memory.
Overall, this book is a highly illuminating analysis of contemporary memory politics in rural Poland, where the local and religious dimension is particularly prominent. For scholars of memory with a particular empirical interest in the country, it should be an enlightening read.