Pilecki-Institut Berlin
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Polnisches Kultur- und Forschungsinstitut. Freiheitliche und demokratische Werte gilt es, gegen Geschichtsvergessenheit zu verteidigen.
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“Solidarność was the largest liberation movement in the world since the second world war. It was one of the most important phenomena experienced by mankind in the second half of the 20th century,” wrote Alain Touraine, a French sociologist. Today marks the 46th anniversary of the signing of the Gdańsk Agreement. Solidarity remains both an essential part of Europe’s collective memory and a political blueprint, one that offers a potential answer to the polarisation afflicting contemporary democracies. It embodied Hannah Arendt’s ideal of the agora, providing a common space for political and social currents ranging from left to right. It brought together figures as different as Lech Wałęsa, Anna Walentynowicz, Andrzej Gwiazda, Joanna Duda-Gwiazda, Alina Pienkowska, Jacek Kuroń, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Lech Kaczynski and Bronisław Geremek, though not without tensions and conflicts, and created a genuine alternative public sphere. Solidarity showed that intelligent and persistent political action could do more than defeat communism in Poland: it could set change in motion across central and eastern Europe. The Gdańsk Agreement marked the beginning of the end of state socialism in the Soviet bloc and thus the start of the process that would eventually bring down the Berlin Wall. Signed on August 31st 1980 by a government commission and the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee led by Mr Wałęsa, it proved the most consequential of the four August Agreements. For the first time, a Soviet-bloc state, under pressure from a mass social movement, recognised independent trade unions. In the summer of 1980 Poland was swept by an unprecedented wave of strikes. The immediate trigger at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk was the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz, a trade-union activist. The crucial moment came when the shipyard workers refused to end their strike after winning their initial concessions. Urged on by Ms Pienkowska and others, they continued in solidarity with workers at other enterprises. A local labour dispute thereby became a nationwide movement and solidarity itself a political principle. The strike wave gave birth to the legendary Solidarity trade union, but also to something much larger. Its demands extended beyond bread, better working conditions and independent unions to freedom of expression and a gradual opening of the political system. Through what Jadwiga Staniszkis, a sociologist, called a “self-limiting revolution”, the movement wrested far-reaching concessions from the regime. Before long, it had almost 10m members. In December 1981 the communist authorities responded by imposing martial law. Thousands of opposition activists were interned, strikes were crushed by force and Solidarity was outlawed. Yet the movement survived underground. The Round Table talks and the partly free elections of June 4th 1989 eventually paved the way for the first peaceful transfer of power in the Soviet bloc and helped bring down the Iron Curtain. Solidarity’s resonance extended far beyond Poland. As early as August 1980 the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions declared its support; trade unions and other organisations in West Germany, France, Italy, America and many other countries soon followed. Aid parcels from West Germany became a particularly visible expression of solidarity with Polish society. Printing presses were smuggled to the underground, demonstrations and hunger strikes were organised, and humanitarian assistance, often channelled through the Catholic Church, poured in. Video: Excerpts from Solidarność (1985), digitised and edited by the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library for For Liberty, Justice, and Equality: Unions Making History in America. Source:
Pilecki-Institut Berlin50,223 просмотров • 18 дней назад
Sensational discovery: the memoirs of a German Nazi bureaucrat in occupied Poland come to light The archive of the Pilecki Institute has acquired an extraordinary historical testimony: the previously unpublished memoirs of a German civil servant who worked in the administration of the General Government during the second world war. The 132-page typescript was donated by a private individual. At the donor’s request, both their identity and that of the author remain confidential. What makes the memoirs so significant is the author’s very ordinariness. He was neither a fanatical Nazi nor a senior official, but a young, well-educated civil servant who volunteered for service in the General Government. His account shows how violence, corruption and self-enrichment became routine features of life among the German occupiers, how even being aware of the mass murder of Jews scarcely disrupted bureaucratic work or social life. That is precisely what gives the source its value: it reveals how ordinary Germans sustained the occupation, profited from it and came to regard the suffering of those they ruled as normal. The document is now being prepared for scholarly use. A detailed analysis is due to appear in a peer-reviewed journal; the memoirs will later be made available in the reading room of the Pilecki Institute’s archive in Warsaw. “The Institute’s mission is above all to document the experiences of the victims of totalitarian regimes and preserve their testimony,” says Karol Madaj, the Institute’s director. “Sources left behind by members of the occupation apparatus provide an important complement.” The donor’s wish for anonymity does nothing to diminish the document’s historical value. In a way the memoirs reveal less about the occupiers’ official ideology than about their inner world. They show how a sense of civilisational superiority could coexist with participation in a system of plunder, violence, terror, murder and a profound moral indifference. The result is not merely an account of daily life under German occupation, but a record of the colonial mentality of German officials in the General Government. The memoirs show how violence against Poles and Jews was organised administratively and made to seem normal by those who carried it out. “They offer a rare view from the perpetrator’s side,” says Mr Madaj. That makes them especially valuable for the Institute’s research and educational work. For Mr Madaj, the circumstances of the donation matter, too. “The fact that these memoirs were entrusted to us has a special significance for me, not least because they were donated by a German private individual through our Berlin branch.” This, he argues, demonstrates the importance of maintaining a permanent Polish research and educational institution in the German capital. The Institute’s Berlin branch is headed by Hanna Radziejowska. “The memory of Germany’s occupation of Poland must also have a place in Germany, not as an accusation, but as an invitation to confront the past together.” Mr Madaj sees the voluntary donation of a document that may challenge comforting ideas about national and family history as a remarkable expression of trust. “That trust is expressed not in a declaration, but in an act.” The donation also suggests that the Institute’s work is needed and that the public trust built up over many years is bearing fruit. In this case, it has opened access to a rare source on the painful history of the second world war, one that might otherwise have remained beyond the reach of researchers. The memoirs are now being examined by Dr Joanna Nikel, a historian who has spent years at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw studying German administrative personnel in the General Government and the operation of the occupation authorities in Poland. She is placing the account in its wider documentary context, comparing it with archival records concerning the author, the offices in which he served and the occupied society he describes. Rafał Ruciński is also contributing to the research. “The memoirs entrusted to our archive are an exceptional and rare source. Their power lies precisely in their ordinariness,” says Dr Nikel. The author was neither an ideological zealot nor a high-ranking servant of the regime. “He was a young, well-educated civil servant who consciously chose, without external compulsion, to work in the civilian administration of the General Government. It is precisely this deliberate decision that gives his account its particular value as a source.” The picture that emerges is far removed from Nazi propaganda’s image of the German civil servant: a disciplined bearer of culture bringing German order to a supposedly backward East. Instead, the memoirs depict an occupying society in which heavy drinking, sexual excess, corruption and personal enrichment through public office were not aberrations, but part of everyday life. “We are dealing with an account in which even knowledge of the mass murder of the Jews does not substantially disturb the author’s daily life,” says Dr Nikel. “There is no sign of despair or of any kind of moral unease. The bureaucratic routine continues, as do social life and the pursuit of small pleasures.” The author describes the plight of the Polish population in similarly dispassionate terms. He sees the misery, the children living in abject poverty and the material devastation. Yet he scarcely considers his own place in the system that created this reality. On the contrary, he benefits from it. The 132-page typescript is divided into 17 chapters and was written after the war. It focuses on the author’s time in the General Government, particularly in the Radom district. Research in Germany’s Federal Archives and the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia has enabled Dr Nikel and Mr Ruciński to establish the dates of his posting: he was in the General Government from October 1943 until June 1944. The findings are expected to appear in an academic journal and will subsequently be published on an open-access basis. Because the article is still undergoing peer review, publication is expected early next year. “Primo Levi wrote that in a criminal system there were only a few real monsters,” says Dr Nikel. “But they alone did not make the system so dangerous. More dangerous were the ordinary people prepared to carry out the tasks assigned to them without objection.” Her observation echoes Hannah Arendt’s formulation, after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, of the “banality of evil”: an evil requiring no demonic motive, but capable of arising from thoughtlessness from the unexamined performance of a function within a bureaucratic machine. “That is precisely why these memoirs matter so much,” says Dr Nikel. “They show that the German occupation regime in Poland was not established and maintained only by ideological fanatics and those who directly carried out its terror. It was also sustained by ordinary Germans: officials and employees of the occupation institutions who had learned to accept violence, inequality and their own privileged position as natural features of everyday life.” The memoirs thus reveal something much harder to discern in official records: the daily workings of occupation and the psychological mechanisms that enabled its functionaries to inhabit a world of violence, plunder and mass murder without seeing themselves as perpetrators. The newly examined source is of central importance to the study of the General Government as a colonial space. Most revealing is the contradiction between the author’s deeply rooted belief in German civilisational superiority and the occupiers’ actual conduct. As his memoirs show, that conduct was driven by baser impulses: greed and excess, opportunism and the lust for power, contempt for the weak, brutality and indifference to the suffering of others.
Pilecki-Institut Berlin29,181 просмотров • 10 дней назад
Hanna Radziejowska im Gespräch mit Deutschlandradio: „Im deutschen Gedächtnis fehlt der 1. September 1939. Das Morden begann sofort, nicht erst 1941. Es fehlt das Wissen darüber, dass im Zuge der sogenannten Intelligenzaktion zwischen Herbst 1939 und Frühjahr 1940 bereits etwa 100.000 Menschen ermordet wurden: Lehrer, Priester, Beamte, Ärzte, Künstler, Sportler und andere Angehörige der polnischen Eliten. All das war bereits vor dem deutschen Überfall geplant.“ Zum Gespräch: Fazit | Überfall auf Polen – Die Lücke im deutschen Gedächtnis In dem Gespräch geht es außerdem um unser aktuelles Weiterbildungsseminar für deutsche Lehrkräfte in Warschau, die Herausforderungen für die Erinnerungskultur, die aus dem Erstarken der AfD erwachsen, sowie um weitere Themen. Deutschlandfunk
Pilecki-Institut Berlin25,029 просмотров • 15 дней назад
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