Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland

By Kate Korycki

In Poland, contemporary political actors have constructed a narrative of Polish history since 1989 in which Polish and Jewish involvement with communism has created a national concept of “we.” Weaponizing the Past explores the resulting implications of national belonging through a lens of collective memory. Taking a constructivist approach to electoral politics and nation making in Poland’s past, this volume’s dual line of inquiry articulates why and how elites politicize the past, what effect this politicization produces, and contextualizes this politicization to illustrate contemporary production of anti-Semitism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805393528

Kate Korycki

Kate Korycki is Assistant Professor at the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University in Canada. She has published on Polish memory of communism and the Holocaust, on Indigeneity in Canada, sexual identity in Iran, and class and sexuality politics in France.

Book preview

Weaponizing the Past

Worlds of Memory

Editors:

Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia

Aline Sierp, Maastricht University

Jenny Wüstenberg, Nottingham Trent University

This book series publishes innovative and rigorous scholarship in the interdisciplinary and global field of memory studies. Memory studies includes all inquiries into the ways we—both individually and collectively—are shaped by the past. How do we represent the past to ourselves and to others? How do those representations shape our actions and understandings, whether explicitly or unconsciously? The memory we study encompasses the near-infinitude of practices and processes humans use to engage with the past, the incredible variety of representations they produce, and the range of individuals and institutions involved in doing so.

Guided by the mandate of the Memory Studies Association to provide a forum for conversations among subfields, regions, and research traditions, Worlds of Memory focuses on cutting-edge research that pushes the boundaries of the field and can provide insights for memory scholars outside of a particular specialization. In the process, it seeks to make memory studies more accessible, diverse, and open to novel approaches.

Volume 11

Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First-Century Poland

Kate Korycki

Volume 10

The Right to Memory: History, Media, Law, and Ethics

Edited by Noam Tirosh and Anna Reading

Volume 9

Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in Transnational Context

Sara Jones

Volume 8

Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm

Hanna Teichler

Volume 7

Nordic War Stories: World War II as History, Fiction, Media, and Memory

Edited by Marianne Stecher

Volume 6

The Struggle for the Past: How We Construct Social Memories

Elizabeth Jelin

Volume 5

The Mobility of Memory: Migrations and Diasporas in Europe and Beyond

Edited by Luisa Passerini, Gabriele Proglio, and Milica Trakilović

Volume 4

Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

Edited by Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg

Volume 3

Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–89

Gaëlle Fisher

Volume 2

Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture

Veronika Pehe

WEAPONIZING THE PAST

Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First-Century Poland

Kate Korycki

Published in 2023 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Kate Korycki

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Korycki, Kate, author.

Title: Weaponizing the past : collective memory and Jews, Poles, and communists in twenty-first-century Poland / Kate Korycki.

Other titles: Collective memory and Jews, Poles, and communists in twenty-first-century Poland

Description: New York : Berghahn, 2023. | Series: Worlds of memory ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023007754 (print) | LCCN 2023007755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390503 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390510 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory—Political aspects—Poland. | Poland—Politics and government—1989– | Poland—History—20th century—Historiography. | Antisemitism—Poland. | Jews—Poland—Public opinon. | Communists—Poland—Public opinion. | Polish people—Attitudes.

Classification: LCC DK4449 .K679 2023 (print) | LCC DK4449 (ebook) | DDC 943.805/7—dc23/eng/20230501

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007754

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007755[to come]

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-050-3 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-051-0 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390503

This book is for Kate Banks and Cedar Averill, with love.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I. Theory

Chapter 1. Weaponizing the Past, or Memory as Politics

Chapter 2. Theory Localized, or Dramatis Personae of Polish Politics

Part II. Weaponizing the Past: The Case of Poland

Chapter 3. The Patriots—Using Memory Openly and Belligerently

Chapter 4. The Managers—Using Memory Covertly

Chapter 5. The Liberals—Using Memory Defensively

Chapter 6. The Objectors—Refusing Memory as Political Weapon

Conclusion. Looking Beyond: Weaponizing the Past and a Populist Moment

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

All figures have been created by the author unless otherwise stated.

Figure 1.1. Political Identities of Parties in Poland as Given by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 2.1. Political Parties in Time, Assigned to Positions Organized by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 2.2. Political Field Divided by Issues.

Figure 2.3. Political Identities of Current Parties as Given by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 2.4. Patriots’ Allocation of Roles.

Figure 2.5. Managers’ Allocation of Roles.

Figure 2.6. Liberals’ Allocation of Roles.

Figure 2.7. Mnemonic Procedures and Effects on Democracy and Nation-Making.

Figure 3.1. Patriots in the Political Field Divided by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 4.1. Managers in the Political Field Divided by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 5.1. Liberals in the Political Field Divided by Mnemonic Capital.

Figure 6.1. Objectors in the Political Field Divided by Mnemonic Capital.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

. . . and here I find that young artists can badly deceive themselves: . . . they can fail to realize that the purpose of scanning contemporary art is to use its articulations for the purpose of realization of their own work. As a carpenter might reach out for a newly invented saw, the work of other artists may suggest techniques or solutions. But the essential struggle is private and bears no relations to anyone else’s. It is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one’s own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations.

—Anne Truitt (1982: 63)

This is my first book. It is thus my first public attempt at the discovery of my sensibility and its honest manifestation. Indeed, although this is not explicit in the text, the book is both the means and effect of the most profound reshaping of mental categories by which I understood the world: I began a child of anti-communist dissidents (I call them the Mangers in this book), then after a long sojourn abroad, I returned to Poland they created, I reread their work and felt betrayed; then I encountered Objectors. . .¹ Both anonymous reviewers of this work commented on an impossibility of bringing all the people found on its pages into one room. This is because the people and their camps shape themselves into implacable enemies, as they compete for power. Bringing them together—if only on a page—made their political machinations and social stakes visible. But it also required a new language and a new way of thinking about the past and the present. The book is the result of that search.

Different people guided, supported, and held me. I want to thank them deeply. Courtney Jung brought me to the field of knowledge that constitutes my enduring scholarly and normative preoccupation. She guided me to the discovery of the emergent and relational nature of group identities; she implanted Stuart Hall’s dictum that theory is always a detour on the way to something more important (2019: 64); she made me forever suspicious of essentialism and psychologizing. She asked good questions and insisted on a good story (the remaining failures are mine). In short, she shaped and created a Jungian. Conversations with Sara Dezalay brought me ever closer to the Bourdieusian conviction that sociology is a marital art (2001), or that it is a particular tool in a deconstruction of the workings of power; and conversations with Ania Zawadzka sparked the deepest introspection and tilling of habitus that underlies this project.² Jan Tomasz Gross, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Patrick Macklem, Ron Levi, and Ed Schatz shared their wisdom and warmth, and their questions, comments and encouragement opened doors and shone light on dark corners. Jenny Wüstenberg, Jeffrey Olick, Matt James, Joanna Quinn, Eleanor MacDonald, Rebecca Dolgoy, and Angela Failler, guided much of my thinking on collective remembering more generally and offered generous and heartwarming endorsement, as well as a necessary sense of a community. Anonymous reviewers of the manuscript read attentively, and their comments and suggestions made me pause, rethink, rewrite. I thank them all, for their kindness, patience, impeccable critique, and suggestions.

This book would not be in anybody’s hand, or screen, if not for the labour and love of three people, whom I am luckiest in the world to also call mentors and friends: Edith Klein, the editor extraordinaire, with overwhelming generosity and a good eye whipped the unruly work into shape. Grahame Lynch, an artist and an inspiration, gave its cover an artistic expression with speed and intense understanding. Anne Hines, a master of words and meaningful connections gave it a title, as well as giving me unflagging support and belief. They make this text better and their generosity humbles me. The patient folks at Berghahn Books guided the process and me well. I have to especially thank Ryan Masteller for his attentive and careful reading and Keara Hagerty for keeping me on track and feeling like I was in good hands.

Field research is one of the most exciting and difficult of moments in the scholarly project. Here it was made all the more rewarding by the generosity of my guides and respondents in Poland. Peter Solomon sent me off with good thoughts, books, and letters that opened doors. Krzysztof and Agnieszka Jasiewicz eased my landing and the first moments of disorientation. Kasia Wichrowska supplied a warm harbour and most ingenious contacts. Ania Zawadzka offered a space in which I could breathe. Kasia Dębska proved to be an assistant extraordinaire. Agata Tuszyńska marshaled Warsaw’s glitterati to my cause. Just as generously, Andrzej Górski sent me well recommended into the circles of old and grizzled oppositionist printers and foot soldiers. And with long-practiced skill he evaded all my attempts to interview him, or at least repay his kindness with vodka or cake. Robert Krzysztoń from the Stowarzyszenie Wolnego Słowa, with his humour, passion for round-the-clock human rights work, and cigarettes, transported me to Poland of the eighties. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir peeled a kilogram of carrots in Princeton, as we were falling into a whirlwind of a five-hour-long conversation. . . I met and interviewed one hundred and fifty people in Poland, and later in the US. In time, I felt as if I had met everybody. This was of course not true, but with the possible exception of businessman and priests, I entered every professional and class milieu: from the supreme court justices to anarchist squatters, from politicians to writers, from academics to shopkeepers. I found their readiness to share their homes, time, and thoughts, generous and overwhelming. I hope that some felt repaid by the richness of our conversations.

In addition to scholarly and emotional support, my research has been made possible by generous financial contributions from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario government, University of Toronto, and Polish Ministry of Culture.

Lastly, friends and family of many species shared in this project and in all the living that happened while I was thinking and writing. Luke Melchiorre and Melissa Levin restored me, enlarged my intellectual horizons, and brought much joy. They were my necessary and much-loved companions, whose gifts are many. Kara Santokie, Omar Sirri, Carmen Ho, Eleanor MacDonald, Celia Romulus, Yasmin Djerbal, Emma Donoghue, and Chris Roulston were essential fellow travelers, and more, who nourished me with invaluable conversation, good company, and stories of shared pain. My larger family: Colleen Schindler-Lynch and Grahame Lynch, Edith Klein, Jen Baldson and Gigi Knowles, Sarah Box and Colleen Stubbs, Andrea Swanson, and Liz Early and Anne Hines believed in me, suffered my writer’s weirdness, and offered good cheer and love. They all made my life better and richer. Lastly, my little family—Kate Banks, Cedar Averill and now Sophie and Pete—who endured much, and whose love, cooking, silliness, and laughter, sustained me daily. This is for them.

Notes

1. Managers and Objectors are two out of four political camps explored in this book. Adam Michnik may be called the parent of the first, Jan Tomasz Gross of the second.

2. Habitus is a Bourdieusian term describing socialized structures and ideologies that are reproduced in daily and bodily practices and ways of being and acting in the world (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).

INTRODUCTION

Poles, Jews, and Communists

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

—Karl Marx (1963: 15)

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of intellect. . . . It causes dreams, it intoxicates whole peoples, gives them false memories, quickens their reflexes, keeps their old wounds open, foments them in their repose, leads them into delusion either of grandeur or persecution, and makes nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vain.

History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of anything.¹

—Paul Valéry (1962: 114)

On 26 January 2018—one day before an anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—the Polish parliament, the Sejm, passed an amendment to the Criminal Code criminalizing the defamation of the Polish nation. According to this amendment, the defamation involved any mention or suggestion that Poles participated in the Holocaust (Sierakowski 2018). Immediately after the passing of the law, the Polish premier, Mateusz Morawiecki, turned his attention to three groups of people: first, he met with the Righteous Among Nations—Poles who were honored by the Yad Vashem Memorial for saving their Jewish neighbors during the war (Wiadomości dziennik 2018). Second, on a visit to Munich, he placed a wreath on the commemorative stone of the anti-communist unit of the National Armed Forces, a unit that collaborated with Nazi armies and left Poland with them in the face of the Red Army advance (Wiadomości gazeta 2018).² Last, on the same visit in Munich, in conversation with the children of Holocaust survivors—the third group—he spoke of Jewish perpetrators (Noack 2018; Wieliński 2018).

In the understandable outcry over the law and the subsequent antics of the premier, two issues escaped general notice. When the antidefamation law was debated and voted on in the Sejm, it was opposed by five deputies. More specifically, 279 deputies hailing from the ruling party and their acolytes voted yes, 130 deputies from the opposition abstained, and 46 deputies were absent. In other words, 5 deputies out of 460 actively objected to the law as presented (Uhlig 2018).

Second, Polish political and media elites narrated the ongoing events in different ways, but they all advanced the same interpretive frame. This frame saw the passing of the law, the premier’s actions, and the subsequent international outcry as a crisis in Polish-Jewish relations. More specifically, it cast the events as a conflict between Poland and Israel.³ The politicians and commentators alike were preoccupied with Poland’s image in the fight with Israel—some claimed to defend it, others saw it as being besmirched—but they all agreed that Poland had a great and heroic history, which appeared to be under attack.

These much-abbreviated but emblematic events offer a snapshot demonstration of a political space structured and constricted by memory. In such a space elites of all stripes politicize the past—that is, they use and manipulate it for present-day political payoffs, and they channel the political conversation into identitarian frames—that is, they turn it into a fight between nations, or kinds of people. In this book, I explain this generalized preoccupation with the past—or more specifically for the story at hand, with the communist past—and its connection to national identity construction. Communism, by the way, was not referenced directly in the events recounted above, but, as I will show in the chapters to come, it was why Nazi collaborators came to be venerated, and it was why the Jewish people came to be called perpetrators. To be clear, Weaponizing the Past is not a book of history in which I examine whether Jewish people were guilty of crimes against the Poles; rather, Weaponizing the Past is a book about memory in which I explain why, how, and to what effect Polish contemporary elites narrate the Jewish people as having perpetrated crimes in the past.⁴ To be clear again, I take the broad, active, and multifaceted participation of Poles in the Holocaust as an established historical fact, and I examine how this established fact is treated and used by Polish political classes. I also show that my straightforward confirmation of this fact reveals my political identity in Poland, in the same straightforward way that a declaration of being pro-life or pro-choice reveals party affiliation, and a vision of national belonging, in America.⁵

In empirical terms, I follow and analyze the articulations of contemporary antisemitism as I examine the present-day stories of Polish and Jewish imbrications with communism. In theoretical terms, I explore the reasons, mechanisms, and stakes of politicizing the past as I track their effects on democracy and national belonging.

Antisemitism and exclusionary nationalist rhetoric and violence are on the rise globally. Their increased intensity and frequency are usually seen as a result of the assent to power and growing legitimacy of new right-wing populist leaders, who mobilize voters and organize their resentments with nostalgic appeals to long-gone folk nirvanas. In this telling, right-wing populism, exclusionary frames and collective memory of some imaginary past are empirically and conceptually entwined. My account does not challenge this view but complicates it. It shows that all dominant parties in Poland played with memory for political ends, and even though each one narrated and condemned communism differently, they all ended up conflating it with Jewishness. In doing so, they gained sharp political identities and polarized the political discourse; they also elevated a narrowly ethnic vision of the national community. Antisemitic tropes in Poland, therefore, even if they appear to be more directly visible in the rhetoric (and actions) of the current rulers, have a continuity and universality. They were used by liberal and neoliberal parties, and this trend need not end if the current ruler leaves office. This suggests that even if right-wing populism relies on memory narratives, not all memory narratives, even if they advance exclusionary imaginaries, need to be classified as populist.⁶ (I return to this theme more fully in my conclusion, in which I tie the insights from the Polish case to the present-day theorizing on the right-wing populist turn.)

To repeat, all the major political parties, which have held power in Poland since 1989, condemned communism, and all of them conflated it with Jewishness. But why did they bother with the past at all? Why did they dress their identities in costumes borrowed from history—to paraphrase the opening quote—and why did they not simply and directly discuss taxes and hospitals? The expectation that political parties establish their identities by dealing with mundane policy issues originates in stable regimes, and in a discipline reluctant to see identities as imagined, constructed, and changing, often through narratives, or what Rogers Smith called ethically constitutive stories (2003: 59).⁷ There is no reason to suspect that democratic regimes in the process of forming—emerging from transition, or conflict, or some other dramatic past—will simply turn toward the future and move on, or that they will follow models formed elsewhere, or that they will not engage in their own muddling through. There is also no reason to suspect that they will not use resources available to them or, more precisely, that they will not invent and invest in new resources, ripe for the picking in their contexts.

The context I have in mind is an end of a protracted conflict, in which no clear winner emerges (as in Northern Ireland, for instance), or a normative collapse of a regime, in which the adversaries—the compromised ruler and its dissident opponent—negotiate their way to the new order, in which both are legitimate political players in the emerging democracy (as in the end of apartheid in South Africa, or slavery in the United States, or indeed communism in Eastern Europe). In the context of such transplacements, to use Samuel Huntington’s term (1991: 113),⁸ the transition lacks purity, as its losers emerge standing and its winners get to power by negotiation. As I will show, the degree of legitimacy of the old ruler and the purity of the new one will become the subject of a political struggle and will implicate narration and judgment of the past. In other words, it will open up the past as a political resource in the present.

In short, in weaving my tale, I will show how Polish elites engage the narratives of the past and implicate two conceptual fields. First, I will argue that they structure political competition through a political resource I call mnemonic capital. That is, they gain political identities and appear distinct from one another by narrating the past and judging the past. In a clear breach of expectations of scholars studying political parties, local actors compete fiercely, but they do not use platforms to do so. Instead of platforms, they use differentiated stories of the pre-transition past. Second, I will show that in weaving the stories of the past, the parties circulate particular imaginaries of national belonging. That is, they reinvent the nation (Wodak et al. 2009). Contrary, again, to mainstream literatures on the topic, which see nations as historical and static—invented in their generality about two hundred years ago, implemented in their particularity and plurality since then, and simply persisting by the force of their normativity (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1972; Tamir 2019)—political elites in Poland demonstrate active engagement with (re)shaping the nation, or who is we to what them (Brubaker 2009).They, in Poland, are narrated as hostile and ethnically coded, and they are narrated in stories of the past. As my account will show, however, even though they are narrated in the past, the way they are imagined both shapes and constricts the notions of the present-day we.

In pursuing this dual line of inquiry, and in heeding Bernhard and Kubik’s call for more explicit theorizing of memory in politics (2014), I draw on, adapt, and braid three distinct scholarly literatures spanning political science, sociology, and collective memory studies. In the process, I formulate an interdisciplinary politicized memory framework, a framework that explains why political parties engage the past, what work it does for them, and how it affects democracy and national belonging. Since my home discipline of political science approaches past-related issues—legacies, commemorative rituals, and transitional justice practices—as singular events that need explaining, and since it looks to political and institutional arrangements of the polity as a source of that explanation, I reached to collective memory studies and to Bourdieusian forms-of-capital analysis to illuminate an inverse relationship, one in which the stories about the past told in the present by political actors affected the electoral game and reshaped the notions of present-day nation. Political science, in other words, supplied the puzzle and questions animating the book, sociology provided theoretical insights that explained the puzzle, and collective memory studies gave me the apparatus to articulate a constructivist approach to political identity of political parties, and a constructivist approach to nation-making as done by the political parties. Together, the three fields allowed me to show empirically and explain how Poles are imagined—that is, made or created—into a narrowly ethnic nation, and how the turn to the past and condemnation of communism are inimically entwined with the contemporary production of antisemitism.

Plan of Work

Multiple audiences may reach for this book, and for different reasons, and to ease their entry into the text I divided it into three parts: part I is devoted to theoretical reflection; part II offers a deep reading and reinterpretation of the Polish contemporary political sphere; and the conclusion specifies my Poland-inspired and memory-related theoretical contributions to the most recent writing on right-wing populism.

More specifically, part I introduces the theoretical language I develop to intertwine the insights of three disciplines, and it also explains my framework. It comprises two chapters: the first presents the theoretical preoccupations of the book, deals with questions and gaps in extant literatures, and explores the power of mnemonic capital in post-regime transition settings as it introduces the collective memory field to political scientists and political sociologists. It answers the questions, Why do elites weaponize and politicize the past (or reach for mnemonic capital)? and What effects does this weaponization produce? Very deliberately, to make the theory generalizable to other settings, the Polish case with its narratives of communism and Polish and Jewish imbrications makes almost no appearance here, and when it does, it is only in passing. In chapter 2, I introduce the Polish actors of the drama, constituted according to my theory, and I present the main themes of their narrations of the past. In doing so I demonstrate their mild programmatic differentiation and their efforts to achieve relational, sticky, and memory-derived identities. The chapter compares them across the political spectrum, first concentrating on differences of narrated themes—to show their productivity in creating political identities; and later concentrating on the similarity of themes—to show their productivity in shaping the notions of the national we. It is here that I specify how, despite the differences among the narratives of the past, and despite their explicit avowals to the contrary, the main parties in Poland conflate communism with Jewishness, and how, in so doing, they retrieve a narrowly understood and ethnically derived vision of the polity. In other words, I show how memory constricts progressive and inclusionary politics in Poland.

This chapter, although empirical, localizes and historicizes my theory, or it retells the theory with stories. I place it in the theoretical part I precisely for this exemplifying effect, but also because I return to theoretical reflection at the chapter’s very end. I do this to explore the inductively derived concept of mnemonic procedure, which helps me demonstrate how turning to narrate and judge the past creates structuring effects on the polity. Chapter 2, therefore, provides a bridge between the theoretical propositions of chapter 1 and the empirical case explored in depth in part II.

In part II, I trace the stories of the past seventy years, as told by Polish political actors in the present. I use and employ deep interpretative analysis of party platforms, party historical narratives, and 150 semistructured interviews with politicians—ranging from former presidents and sitting MPs to leaders of anarchist urban social movements—as well as parties’ intellectual milieus, mostly in the media, think tanks, and academia. I subject my data to two sets of comparisons: as mentioned, in chapter 2, I compare platforms, strategies, and stories across party lines; and in chapters 3–6, I compare the what with the how of the presentation within each party’s narrative. In making both comparisons, I identify the assumptions, meanings, and effects of the political language; that is, I decode or translate that language. If the theoretical part I allows me to answer why questions, the deep ethnography of one political space carried out in part II permits me to explore the how and to what effect questions; that is, the mechanisms by which the past enters and structures the politics of the post-transition polity.

To trace the politicization of the past and its stakes, I anchored my inquiry in the 2015 Polish parliamentary election. By all accounts, the election was a watershed moment in the Polish post-transition trajectory. It brought to power the first majority government since transition, and a government now considered populist, ethno-nationalist, and displaying authoritarian tendencies (Bonikowski 2017). The 2015 election spelled out the end of one of the three major political blocks represented by the postcommunist successor party (the party continues to operate at the subnational and extranational levels, and it may yet revive, but it has not done so as of this writing), and the election was emblematic of the political conversations that defined Polish politics since the transition. (It bears noting that the majority winner of the 2015 election repeated its feat by winning a second term in office in 2019, again as a majority. In the 2019 election, the past-related themes were present but muted, and the party concentrated its attacks on the invented gender ideology [Korycki 2022].)

In chapters 3–6, I delve into the actual stories, as told within the four stable camps of Polish politics—I call them the Patriots, the Managers, the Liberals, and the Objectors (I explain the monikers in chapter 2). This static presentation allows me to show the internal dynamics of the clusters’ self-presentation, the narratives of the