Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference
Arizona State University - Tempe, AZ
October, 2023
In the first film of Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s trilogy And Europe Will be Stunned a young political leader, played not by an actor but rather Sławomir Sierakowski, a Polish left-wing activist, issues a declaration in the vacant ruins of Warsaw’s National Stadium for the return of Poland’s Jews. In his demonstration, the politician tells the story of an old woman who sleeps under a quilt taken from a Jewish girl who has fled persecution. Night after night, the Polish woman has nightmares. With this anecdote the activist offers a shocking proposition: “This is a call, not to the dead, but to the living. We want three million Jews to return to Poland to live with us again!”[1]
Bartana’s bold and controversial video trilogy premiered at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice and has gone on to be presented at dozens of art galleries spanning several continents. Throughout her trilogy an imagined political movement dubbed The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) forms.
Initially a fictive campaign to rebuild the Jewish population of Poland, it turned into a quasi-reality in the form of a conference during the 2012 Berlin Biennial. In it, academics, artists, cultural critics, and political activists discussed proposals, some tongue-in-cheek, to return Jews to Poland as a kind of reverse Zionism. Whether Jews returning to Poland is realistic or not, however, was beside the point. At issue was a proposition that served to open our minds to the juncture of a multitude of political issues, including the failed utopia of Israel, the unresolved trauma of World War II, and the destructive trappings of nationalism. Of central concern is the invoked need for diversity not only against the flattening powers of the global market, but also against the homogonous ethno-Catholic makeup of Poland. This is perhaps best expressed in the conclusion of Bartana’s manifesto for the Jewish Renaissance Movement which was released alongside the films: “With one religion, we cannot listen. With one color, we cannot see. With one culture, we cannot feel. Without you we can’t even remember. Join us, and Europe will be stunned!”[2]
The provocative manifesto challenges Poland’s ethnic homogeneity that would become even more pronounced a few years later with the political successes of the religious Right. The Law and Justice Party (abbreviated and referred to as “PiS”) which won the Presidency and Parliamentary super majority in 2014 attempts to define the symbolic boundaries of the Polish nation under ethnic religious terms, that of the Polak-Katolik.[3] The portrayal of Catholic Nationalism as the antidote to the growing discontent with multicultural and secular values imposed by the West has pushed for a nationalistic patriotic narrative of the past, and reinforced the historic stigma toward Jews as the “internal other.”[4] In her study The Crosses of Auschwitz sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki notes that Jewishness is often employed to exclude unwanted ideological elements that do not fit with the Right’s ideally defined model of Polishness.[5] Jews, either imaginary or real, are coded by ethno-nationalists as communist and Oriental at the same time as they are coded as Western, liberal, and cosmopolitan. More importantly they are a threatening reminder of a more diverse past in which the country was defined not by religious but by civic, legal terms.[6] Poland is thus host to the perplexing phenomenon of antisemitism in a country with very few Jews, roughly 7,000-13,000 compared to its pre-war population of 3.3 million.[7]
This paper outlines several contemporary Polish films that challenge the homogonous ethno-Catholic vision of the country through indigenizing the figure of the Jew. With varying degrees of success they accentuate anxieties associated with the unresolved question of Jewish property, offer subtle criticisms of the Law and Justice Party, and, like the Jewish Renaissance Movement, controversially use the nostalgia for Jewish inclusion as a drive for West-modelled liberal, multicultural openness in the present. Attention will also be paid to any critical responses from government officials who seek to discredit the film’s view of Polish-Jewish relations that challenge the Law and Justice Party’s version of history.
The first film, Władyslaw Pasikowski’s 2012 Aftermath, is perhaps the most controversial film in the last two decades of Polish cinema because it takes as its inspiration the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne famously exposed by Jan Gross in his 2000 study Neighbors. In his research Gross finds that the attack, which ended with the surviving Jews locked into a barn and burned to death, was planned not by the occupying German army but by local Polish officials. The study challenged the myth of Polish martyrdom Communist leaders promulgated for decades by revealing to many that not only were Poles not World War II’s main victims, but that they were even the perpetrators of some of its horrors.[8] The study caused for Poles what Zubrzycki terms a “narrative shock” in which “the key story of a nation is seriously challenged, shaking its identity to its core.”[9]
In Pasikowski’s version the story revolves around brothers Józef and Franek who have been shunned by the community for acquiring and displaying on their farmland dozens of Jewish tombstones which had been used by German occupying forces as paving stones in a now abandoned road. They literally unearth and make public the village’s Jewish past, which stokes the ire of villagers who want to keep it silent. It is eventually uncovered that these Jews were burned to death by the villagers in their family’s former house, and that their own father was directly involved in the murder. In the climax of the film Franek finds his brother Józef beaten, stabbed, and nailed on the inside of the barn door with his arms outstretched.
While much critical attention is appropriately paid to the crucifixion scene, it is the last scene that frames contemporary Jewish-Polish relations. In it, a group of young Israeli Jews being led by an Orthodox Rabbi recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead, in front of a formal memorial stone at the now restored cemetery in the area of the stones that Józef had placed in his fields.
As they pray, they stand apart from the film’s action, unaware and untouched by what has just transpired in this little town. Their return does not offer comfort or redemption but only dramatizes the distance between the Jews of the past, the Jews of the present, and the Poles who exist outside the frame, and who are no better off than before the truth was revealed.
The film, initially titled Kaddish, failed to receive sufficient funding when it was first written in 2005. The coproducers and Director took the hesitation from the government as a rebuke to historical truth-telling. The groundswell of support from the centrist press, and an A-list production team of Polish nationals who had expressed interest over the years put the pressure on financing.[10] It took five years to raise enough money, but the Polish Film Institute eventually contributed nearly 40 percent of the film’s budget.[11] After its release the film renewed a national debate that began with Gross’ book. Nationalists labeled the film as a tool in the “pedagogy of shame,” that is, of intentionally un-teaching Poles of national pride, and was censored from several local cinemas amidst some public backlash.
Within days of the film’s release, Wrpost, a weekly magazine, ran a photo of lead actor Maciej Stuhr on its cover with a Star of David and reads, “Maciej Stuhr was lynched at his own request.”[12] The publication accuses Maciej of becoming “a symbol of simplicity and manipulating history for commercial gain.” Although Stuhr doesn’t identify as Jewish, the right-wing press continued to insist he is of Jewish origin and that he is “mendacious and harmful for Poles.”[13]
The historical arguments and political division stirred by Aftermath would arise again the following year with the release of Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida. Set in 1962 Ida follows a young woman, Anna, who is on the verge of taking vows as a nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation, she is ordered by her Mother Superior that she must meet her aunt before taking her final vows.[14]
Immediately upon meeting her aunt Wanda, a minor state judge and Communist Party member, she tells her niece that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and that she’s Jewish. Wanda proposes they go on a road trip together to discover what became of Ida’s parents during the war. The father of the Christian family who now owns their old home, Feliks, agrees to tell them where Ida’s parents are buried if she promises to give up any claim to the house and land. Feliks then takes the women to the burial place in the woods. While digging up their bones he admits to Ida that he, and not the German authorities, killed her parents, and Wanda’s son. Ida, however, was given to the convent.
The revelation leads Wanda to suicide, and, after a brief experiment with profane pleasures, including smoking, drinking, and a one-night stand with a jazz musician, Ida dons her novitiate habit again and presumably returns to the convent to take her vows.
The film’s intimate drama places pressure on the aspects of life where the Catholic, Jewish and Communist strains of Poland’s endlessly and bitterly contested national identity intersect. Will Ida be faithful to the traumatized family that she was born into or take an oath of allegiance to the one that raised her? Or, is there a third option, in which she may be both a Jew and a Catholic? Can one flee from the past once it has been re-discovered? Unlike in Aftermath, very little is stated directly; instead, we glean things from casual remarks and subtle suggestions. Despite being a far more poetic and ambiguous film, it still spurred much controversy for bringing such tense topics to the foreground. PiS Prime Minister Beata Maria Szydło chided the film as a bad promotion of Poland.[15] Its distribution in the country was the smallest among the top twenty films released in 2013, and it was only the 10th most watched film released in Poland that year.[16] Protests and petitions against Ida were launched by Poland’s nationalist groups after the film was nominated for Academy awards.[17] Shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony, the Polish League Against Defamation circulated a petition against the Polish Film Institute charging that the film failed to acknowledge the German occupation.
The historical argument presented in the film was also contested by Polish Television (TVP), which is the only public national broadcaster in Poland and the largest Polish television network. When Ida was shown on TVP it was preceded by a 12-minute editorial program that claimed the film to be historically inaccurate. Title cards stating many Poles helped to save Polish Jews were also added.[18] During its editorial program TVP alleged that the film won an Oscar only because of its pro-Jewish point of view. Moreover, the inclusion of the theme of dispossession in the film renewed attention to the sensitive fact that Poland is the only country from the former Soviet bloc that has not taken steps to provide restitution and compensation to their pre-war Jewish citizens. The battle concerning the film’s view of history, and its lack of focus on Poles as martyrs, would be a precursor to the Law and Justice Party’s 2018 amendment to the Institute of National Remembrance Law which threatened up to three years’ imprisonment for “anyone claiming publicly and against the facts” that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” Under international pressure the revision removed the possibility of criminal prosecution, but the legislation unveiled the Party’s desire to enshrine by force of law that Poland may only be seen as a Christ among nations, a trope of national mythology developed in the nineteenth century when the disappearance of Poland from the map of Europe was represented in literature as its crucifixion. The blinding power and historical injustice produced by the martyrological narrative is the focus of Marcin Wrona’s 2015 dark comedy Demon.
The film playfully utilizes the Jewish myth of possession by a dybbuk to combat the myth of the martyred Pole.[19] In Wrona’s Demon an English-speaking groom, Piotr, unearths a skeleton the day before his wedding while digging in the yard of his bride’s inherited estate, and wedding venue.[20] He is haunted that night by the vision of a woman in a wedding dress. While dancing during his wedding the next day Piotr has epileptic-like seizures and becomes possessed by a Yiddish-speaking dybbuk. Instead of stopping the wedding, the overbearing father of the bride, Zygmund, is keen to keep his breakdown and apparent possession quiet from the wedding guests by distracting them with more vodka and even louder music. He locks Piotr away in the cellar so that he may be interrogated.
The local Jewish elder who speaks Yiddish converses with the dybbuk and learns Piotr is possessed by a prewar Jewish girl named Hana most likely murdered by Staszek, the Bride’s grandfather. The response to Piotr’s distress reflects how Poles at large would react to a confrontation with specters of the past that disrupts the dominant historical discourse. Agnieszka Kotwasinska in her essay on the film notes that it is not just Hana’s refusal “to speak in a language acceptable to her hosts—not just a Polish language but also a language of historical obedience and of uncontaminated past” that frighten them.[21]
Despite the celebratory mood of the wedding constantly being disrupted by death, the partygoers, led by Zygmunt, refuse to confront present-day anxieties, and communicate with the prewar past. They choose to bury it, and collectively forget any historical injustices. One guest laments “in the old days it was simple. Everyone was Polish […] And then the bad ghosts came in and divided the Poles […] First Germany, then Russia, then finally Israel.”
Zygmunt, the symbolic marker of Polish repression and of the stance of Law and Justice party politics, regales his inebriated guests, saying, “We must forget what we didn’t see here,” and explains away the groom’s possession as a “collective hallucination.” He does not want to accept responsibility for the stolen possession of Hana’s property by his father and wants to exorcise not the demon but the memory of its presence.
The disrespect for the dead is again punctuated in the following scene when the guests disperse in a drunken stupor and crash into a funeral procession which they treat only as an obstacle. The film is a carnivalesque microcosm of a Polish township unwilling to face up to both its own complicity in and profit from the historic extermination of its Jewish populace. The final shots show the house being bulldozed, as though by Poland’s inclination to move forward at the cost of preserving sites of memory.[22]
Aftermath, Ida, and Demon focus less on the actual trauma of Holocaust victims than on working through an underdefined Polish trauma caused by several decades of repressed memory enforced by the soviet state. By portraying the willing cooperation of gentiles to rid Jewish neighbors these films undermine the revisionist historical policy of the Law and Justice Party which prefers to highlight Polish martyrdom. Through its national film fund, the Polish Film Institute, political officials have transfigured the screen as a battleground of historic memory by propagating a mythologized heroic, Christian past. Among them are some of the most expensive national films made in recent years.
Jerzy Hoffman’s historical epic Battle of Warsaw, 1920 (2011)[23] about the decisive Polish victory during the Polish-Soviet War, for example, received the most amount of funding in the Polish Film Institute’s history.
These clichéd, almost patriotic textbook-like stories about events of national importance have not received critical recognition nor met audiences’ expectations. Established filmmakers from Agnieszka Holland have decried the use of national film funds for such big budget jingoistic films.[24] The degrees of separation, however small, between the Polish Film Institute and its governing political bodies has allowed films like Aftermath and Ida to source funding, and advocate for the possibility of a broader range of significations of national identity. Additional films worth briefly mentioning include Borys Lankosz’ 2015 Grain of Truth in which a detective must solve a series of violent murders in a rural town whose population fear Jewish ghosts have cursed the town and caused the murders, and Wojciech Smarzowski’s 2021 The Wedding in which the senile grandfather of the bride suffering from dementia “sees” Jewish people from his youth attending his granddaughter’s wedding. In their attempts to demythologize a glorious, uncontaminated past through representing the existence of homegrown pre-war Polish antisemitism we must recognize these productions as acts of disobedience that, for now, exist without the threat of lawful punishment.[25]
Just as Catholicism was once the site of moral and political resistance to state socialism, especially during the era of the Solidarity movement, it is now Jewish culture and the despair over Jewish absence that serves to challenge the Law and Justice Party’s vision of an exclusivist ethno-Catholic Poland. Markers of Jewish identity, be they religious or secular, dilutes the monopoly of the Catholic Right over the definition of Polishness. While challenging statist historical revisionism is appropriately considered a transgressive artistic intervention, the project of envisioning a modern multicultural society through Jewishness must nevertheless take to task the following questions: If Jewishness is used to enable Poles to imagine a truer, better, and more diverse version of themselves then does that risk fetishization, and a further “Othering” of Jews? And, more broadly, what are the limits of using ethnicity as the means through which to attempt to transcend ethnonationalism? As Zubrzycki notes in her book Resurrecting the Jew the creation of a multicultural Poland is imagined “not with the small but visible community of Vietnamese who now constitute the largest ethnic minority in Warsaw; nor through Silesians, Poland’s largest ethnonational minority; nor Ukranians, the country’s largest immigrant group; nor through the welcoming of Syrian or Afghani refugees. A multicultural Poland is imagined through Jews.”[26] Sociologist Marta Duch-Dyngosz similarly observes that the revival of Jewish culture and the preservation of Jewish memory has been carried out mainly by non-Jews and, for the most part, for non-Jewish audiences.[27] None of the Directors of the discussed films, for example, are Jewish. Can we thus perceive the phenomenon as a cultural theft lacking authenticity? Or is the nostalgia for a more Jewish Poland, such as the one simultaneously parodied and championed in Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement, the best way for progressive nationalists to overcome the narrow and ideologically loaded notion of the Polak-katolik? Even though recent elections have swung political power to Donald Tusk’s more moderate Civic Coalition the answer to these questions will remain critical for imagining a civic nationalism that does not treat its “internal Other,” whether real or imagined, as a “threatening Other.”
WORKS CITED
[1]. Yael Bartana, Nightmares as part of …And Europe Will Be Stunned video trilogy installation (Jewish Renaissance Movement, 2008).
[2]. Yael Bartana “…And Europe Will Be Stunned” Exhibition, A Cookbook for Political Imagination, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011).
[3]. PiS is still the most popular party in Poland with 38 percent according to Politico. “Poland – 2023 general election,” Politico, October 1, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/poland/.
[4]. This is especially visible in the rise of popularity with the far right Confederation Party which receives 11% of the vote from the electorate. “Poland – 2023 general election,” Politico, October 1, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/poland/.
[5]. Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland, (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 12.
[6]. more see Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present by Joanna Beata Michlic. (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). The preferred version of Poland’s past referred to by Leftists is typically that of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth when Jews had legal protections, the era between 1830 and 1860 in which Jews were referred to as the “Poles of the Faith of Moses,” and especially during the January Uprising against Russia in 1864 when they fought as “brothers-in-arms” with Christians.
[7]. “Poland,” Institute for Jewish Policy Research, accessed October 1, 2023, https://www.jpr.org.uk/countries/how-many-jews-in-poland
[8]. In Gross’ findings 1,600 Jews were murdered, but a state-sponsored inquiry later suggested that the number of those killed in the pogrom was considerably smaller (around 700). The inquiry nonetheless accepted Gross’ main thesis that Poles “played a decisive role” in the crime, though it ascribed broader responsibility to the German occupiers.
[9]. The other major “narrative shock” that spurred much debate is the changing of Auschwitz from a symbol of Polish to Jewish victimhood.
[10]. Some notable crew members include Production Designer Allan Starski, an Oscar winner for Schindler’s List, and cinematographer Pawel Edelman, who shot The Ghostwriter and The Pianist for Roman Polanski.
[11]. The film’s coproducer, Dariusz Jabłoński, explains that Russian, Slovak, and Dutch production companies later supported the project (each funding 10%). The film’s purported message was to distribute knowledge about a “difficult past” to Poles dressed up in the aesthetics of popular cinema. In an interview for the film Pasikowski states that “the film is about restoring our memory, the film is about us. Our examination of conscience, which we should make after leaving the cinema.” Tom Tugend, “’Aftermath’ Exposes Dark Secrets in Poland’,” November 13, 2013, https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/124257/.
[12]. Magdalena Rigamonti, “Was Maciej Stuhr lynched at his own request?” Wrpost, December 15, 2013, https://www.wprost.pl/357017/czy-maciej-stuhr-zostal-zlinczowany-na-wlasna-prosbe.html
[13]. J. Hoberman, “The Past Can Hold a Horrible Power,” The New York Times, October 15, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/aftermath-a-thriller-directed-by-wladyslaw-pasikowski.html.
[14]. Paweł Pawlikowski, Ida (Polish Film Institute, 2013).
[15]. Stanley Bell, “Review of ‘Ida’: Identity and Freedom,” Notes from Poland, January 9, 2015, https://notesfrompoland.com/2015/01/09/review-of-ida-identity-and-freedom/. PiS Prime Minister Beata Maria Szydło has remarked “this particular film was definitely not a promotion of Poland,” and that “it rather painted a negative image of it.”
[16]. Marek Haltoff, Polish Cinema: A History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 312. 243,466 viewers (number 10 on the list of Polish films released in 2013), compared to 500,00 in France or 100,000 in Italy.
[17]. Andrew Pulver, “Polish Nationalists Launch Petition Against Oscar-Nominated film Ida” The Guardian, January 22, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/22/ida-oscars-2015-film-polish-nationalists-petition.
[18] Katarzyna Grynienko, “Polish Filmmakers Protest TVP Interference in Ida Broadcast,” Film New Europe, February 3, 2016, https://www.filmneweurope.com/news/poland-news/item/112262-polish-filmmakers-protest-tvp-interference-in-ida-broadcast
[19]. Unlike the somber realism of Ida, Demon is a supernatural tale with spectral images of Jewish ghosts which, as many scholars have noted, is a transgressive motif that goes as far back as Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1901 play The Wedding. The motif of Poland being haunted by ominous figures of Poland’s past now dominates the contemporary discourse of Jewish memory in cultural practices from Igor Ostachowicz’s novel Night of the Living Jews to the postmemorial aesthetics of Wojciech Wilczyk’s photographic project “There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye.” Wojciech Wilczyk, There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (Atlas Sztuki, 2010).
[20]. Marcin Wrona, Demon (The Orchard, 2015). The film also has a clear connection with Stanisław Wyspiański’s play Wesele (“The Wedding”) from 1901, in which, Rachel, the daughter of a Jewish innkeeper, welcomes specters of the Polish past to the wedding at which she is a guest. Her gesture is a catalyst for the all-encompassing testing of the wedding guests’ capacity to confront the truth; a truth which has to do with their indolence to fight Austrian dominance.
[21] Agnieszka Kotwasinska, “Dis/Possessing the Polish Past in Marcin Wrona’s ‘Demon’”, Humanities 9, no. 59 (2020); 13.
[22]. The gothic tone of the film echoes Intimating intergenerational Polish-Jewish encounters via ghostly encounters even pervades the Jewish Renaissance Movement’s manifesto. Speaking on behalf of a displaced yet returning Jewish population that once thrived in Poland, the manifesto states: “We plan no invasion. Rather we shall arrive like a procession of the ghosts of your old neighbours, the ones haunting you in your dreams, the neighbours you never had the chance to meet.”
[23]. Dorota Hartwich, “Box Office Poland,” Cineuropa, October 12, 2011, https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/210383/. €2.25 m Euros was the most ever given in history by the Polish Film Institute. This expensive production by Polish standards (its budget was $9 million, including $3 million provided by the PISF) was the first Polish 3-D feature film (photographed by Sławomir Idziak). Another highly anticipated yet failed film was Siberian Exile (2013, Janusz Zaorski), about the fate of Poles sent to Siberia after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. Perhaps the most spectacular was the failure of Łukasz Barczyk’s epic costume drama Influence (2015) with a budget of $7 million, which was advertised as a spiritual thriller.
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. Christopher Vourlias, “Amid Rightward Turn Under Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Filmmakers Look to a ‘Heroic Past’,” May 21, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/global/hungary-orban-historic-dramas-1235257772/. “I think [the NFI] have other priorities,” says Ildikó Enyedi. “They are supporting big-budget, historical films about the very heroic past of Hungary.”
[25]. In this way these filmmakers are continuing a rich tradition of combatting the governing party’s injustices, with the most documented example being Andrjez Wajda’s subtle allusions to Władysław Gomułka’s bigoted campaign against Polish Jews in his 1970 film Landscape After Battle.
[26]. Geneviève Zubrzycki, Resurrecting the Jew, (Princeton University Press, 2022), “With One Color, We Cannot See”.
27. Marta Duch-Dyngosz, Oxford Bibliographies, “Jewish Heritage and Cultural Revival in Poland,” https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0213.xml (accessed Oct. 20, 2023).
