Last week my students at the University of Warsaw responded to my assignment and gave terrific presentations on war memorials: one in Warsaw, one in Moscow, one in Murmansk. (Tomorrow another student will speak about a memorial in Budapest.)
The "Four Sleeping Soldiers" monument is currently again controversial, because the new metro line being built on the "Praga" side of Warsaw (the right bank of the Wisla or Vistula) runs right through its former location.
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The class was split. On the one hand, of course, this monument -- like the hated Palace of Cultures -- was a "gift" from the Soviets in 1945. The soldiers represent the Soviet military and economic influence over Poland after WWII, and the location of the statue makes the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis after the Warsaw uprising of August 1944 that much more bitter -- everyone knows that the Soviets sat on the right bank and watched the Nazis dynamite Warsaw's downtown.
The beautiful "Paris of the East" was deliberately wiped off the face of the earth -- vindictively and gratuitously -- by the Nazi army as they retreated. But the Soviets didn't intervene.
So why were my students split? Well, they reasoned that the soldiers depicted on the monument were not responsible for Warsaw's demise -- they are simply Soviet and Polish army soldiers, all of whom sacrificed to win the war. Sure, someone gave that order not to march into Warsaw and stop the Nazis, but the soldiers themselves had no input.
The fact that my students (in their late teens and twenties) have that much respect for the misery of war and want to honor the effort of the Soviet and Polish foot soldier is actually quite awesome.
Another story I recently heard contrasts with this one. One of our colleagues grew up in a small town between Warsaw and Krakow. Her town was beautiful -- because the Soviet general who needed to march through it to get at the Nazis couldn't bear to see it destroyed. Instead, he went around, and lost 20,000 men in the process. The town put up a monument to him, honoring the sacrifice of life for the sake of medieval buildings and the integrity of a town. But in the post-Communist era the monument was moved out of the center and relegated to the cemetery of Soviet soldiers. The hatred of the Russians was so great, the citizens couldn't separate the gratitude they felt that their beloved and beautiful city had been spared by the Soviet army from their wholesale rejection of the Communist era.
Generally we are finding that the young people can look at the repercussions from WWII and from the Communist era with pretty clear eyes. Which is a good thing for Poland, I imagine.
I've been thinking more and more about the film Warszawa 1935, which I have now seen twice.
This film is a 3-D presentation based on archival photographs of Warsaw before the war. You sit in the theater and fly over the city, slowly -- from above and from street level, zooming through the quiet streets full of beautiful buildings, cars and horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians. Large squares with trees and plantings, the same tram lines as today -- along Marszalkowska (pictured above) you follow the 17 tram, the same one we take to our favorite coffee shop in Warsaw now.
But I was teaching last week in the Artes Liberales program in a course entitled "Reading Literary Texts" (my favorite thing!) and brought up the film in relation to my reading of Ivan Bunin's 1944 story "Cleansing Monday," which is about the loss of a beloved and complicated cultural and geographical space in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and WWII.
A student challenged my impressions of the film, arguing that her understanding of the 1920s and early 1930s was that Warsaw was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city with a lot of energy and cultural diversity, and she felt that the grays and sepias of the film, not to mention the slow movements of all the computer-generated cars and people and the depressing music belied and betrayed the true Warsaw of 1935. Warszawa 1935 was precisely not complex enough to render the city Poland lost.
I think these views are complementary. The film strives for historical authenticity and uses all of today's technology to achieve it. The factoids that run across the screen attest to Poland's advances in the field of technology in the first part of the 20th century -- early airplane construction, record flights across the Atlantic, the tallest skyscraper in Europe. But those things -- and the cityscape we are lovingly experiencing in the theater -- were all stopped, destroyed, nullified. This film is a requiem -- with its appropriately dirge-like music -- to all that Warsaw and Poland were and all that they might have been.
If not for the Soviets and the Nazis.
That's the subtext of the film and of the Polish national conversation. Who would we be now if not for the Nazis, who killed all our Jews, and for the Soviets, who derailed any Polish independence?
And for the Russians, who in the eyes of conspiracy theorists are even now running the Polish government as a puppet regime?
Spring has finally arrived in Poland this year, and Warsaw has been transformed. It really does remind me of Paris. Sidewalk cafes, pavilions and restaurants in the parks, fountains and annuals and flowering trees. The soundtrack of Warsaw now is laughter and bicycles whizzing by and children playing soccer with their dads, not the dirge of Warszawa 1935.
Can Warsaw forget? And should it? The memorial plaques and Warsaw uprising graffiti are everywhere. The new museum of the History of the Jews in Poland has just opened up. Should we commemorate everything, or only the betrayals and killings? Can the youngest generation move on while gaining a perspective on WWII and the Communist period that their elders don't even strive to achieve?
This week marks the 58th anniversary of the end of the second world war.
I think I'll mark it by going to yet another film about the war, featured prominently in the "Planete + Doc" film festival coming up. More about that next week.
The "Four Sleeping Soldiers" monument is currently again controversial, because the new metro line being built on the "Praga" side of Warsaw (the right bank of the Wisla or Vistula) runs right through its former location.
.jpg)
The beautiful "Paris of the East" was deliberately wiped off the face of the earth -- vindictively and gratuitously -- by the Nazi army as they retreated. But the Soviets didn't intervene.
So why were my students split? Well, they reasoned that the soldiers depicted on the monument were not responsible for Warsaw's demise -- they are simply Soviet and Polish army soldiers, all of whom sacrificed to win the war. Sure, someone gave that order not to march into Warsaw and stop the Nazis, but the soldiers themselves had no input.
The fact that my students (in their late teens and twenties) have that much respect for the misery of war and want to honor the effort of the Soviet and Polish foot soldier is actually quite awesome.
Another story I recently heard contrasts with this one. One of our colleagues grew up in a small town between Warsaw and Krakow. Her town was beautiful -- because the Soviet general who needed to march through it to get at the Nazis couldn't bear to see it destroyed. Instead, he went around, and lost 20,000 men in the process. The town put up a monument to him, honoring the sacrifice of life for the sake of medieval buildings and the integrity of a town. But in the post-Communist era the monument was moved out of the center and relegated to the cemetery of Soviet soldiers. The hatred of the Russians was so great, the citizens couldn't separate the gratitude they felt that their beloved and beautiful city had been spared by the Soviet army from their wholesale rejection of the Communist era.
Generally we are finding that the young people can look at the repercussions from WWII and from the Communist era with pretty clear eyes. Which is a good thing for Poland, I imagine.
I've been thinking more and more about the film Warszawa 1935, which I have now seen twice.
This film is a 3-D presentation based on archival photographs of Warsaw before the war. You sit in the theater and fly over the city, slowly -- from above and from street level, zooming through the quiet streets full of beautiful buildings, cars and horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians. Large squares with trees and plantings, the same tram lines as today -- along Marszalkowska (pictured above) you follow the 17 tram, the same one we take to our favorite coffee shop in Warsaw now.
But I was teaching last week in the Artes Liberales program in a course entitled "Reading Literary Texts" (my favorite thing!) and brought up the film in relation to my reading of Ivan Bunin's 1944 story "Cleansing Monday," which is about the loss of a beloved and complicated cultural and geographical space in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and WWII.
A student challenged my impressions of the film, arguing that her understanding of the 1920s and early 1930s was that Warsaw was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city with a lot of energy and cultural diversity, and she felt that the grays and sepias of the film, not to mention the slow movements of all the computer-generated cars and people and the depressing music belied and betrayed the true Warsaw of 1935. Warszawa 1935 was precisely not complex enough to render the city Poland lost.
I think these views are complementary. The film strives for historical authenticity and uses all of today's technology to achieve it. The factoids that run across the screen attest to Poland's advances in the field of technology in the first part of the 20th century -- early airplane construction, record flights across the Atlantic, the tallest skyscraper in Europe. But those things -- and the cityscape we are lovingly experiencing in the theater -- were all stopped, destroyed, nullified. This film is a requiem -- with its appropriately dirge-like music -- to all that Warsaw and Poland were and all that they might have been.
If not for the Soviets and the Nazis.
That's the subtext of the film and of the Polish national conversation. Who would we be now if not for the Nazis, who killed all our Jews, and for the Soviets, who derailed any Polish independence?
And for the Russians, who in the eyes of conspiracy theorists are even now running the Polish government as a puppet regime?
Spring has finally arrived in Poland this year, and Warsaw has been transformed. It really does remind me of Paris. Sidewalk cafes, pavilions and restaurants in the parks, fountains and annuals and flowering trees. The soundtrack of Warsaw now is laughter and bicycles whizzing by and children playing soccer with their dads, not the dirge of Warszawa 1935.
Can Warsaw forget? And should it? The memorial plaques and Warsaw uprising graffiti are everywhere. The new museum of the History of the Jews in Poland has just opened up. Should we commemorate everything, or only the betrayals and killings? Can the youngest generation move on while gaining a perspective on WWII and the Communist period that their elders don't even strive to achieve?This week marks the 58th anniversary of the end of the second world war.
I think I'll mark it by going to yet another film about the war, featured prominently in the "Planete + Doc" film festival coming up. More about that next week.
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