All Quiet ? The Memory and Historiography of the First World War in Poland Maciej

On 5th of August 2014 the Tower of London moat filled with exactly 888.246 ceramic poppies symbolizing soldiers of the British Commonwealth fallen in the Great War. Watched from the distance, they resembled a sea of blood pouring out from one of the Tower’s windows. Everyday, short after sunset, a moving ceremony takes place there. A beefeater reads aloud data of 180 fallen soldiers, including their names, rank and military unit they served in. A guardsman accompanying him (or her) plays the trumpet, touched spectators contemplating the moment in silence, disturbed solely by the traffic sounds. This ceremony will repeat everyday till 11 th of November, when the poppies will be removed and sold for charity purpose.

densely populated territory of central Poland count as well?How do you actually identify the nationality of the fallen imperial subjects?What was the identity of illiterate peasants who died for their tsar, emperor or king?And prisoners of war, refugees and expelled who died in camps in Siberia, Austria or Bohemia, (during escape) when escaping or upon their return home?What category of victims do they belong to?
The differences of memory cultures between Eastern and Western Europe are partly an effect of a striking misbalance of historical knowledge about the course of the war and its effects.Although collective memory and historiography are surely not the same, there is a connection between the two.The weakness of the memory in Eastern Europe is partly the cause and partly the effect of the long standing negligence on the part of indigenous historians.Therefore, without a closer look to the memory cultures of Eastern Europe, any report on the state of the art of the regional First World War studies would be incomplete.
We live in a time when the division of Europe into the capitalist modern West and communist backward East is becoming increasingly irrelevant.The Elbe River, a once obvious border, has grown less and less important in economy and politics.Our memory, the memory of cataclysms of the twentieth century in particular, is a stronghold of the old order.In this light, in the East (not without exceptions, though) the status of the First World War is in fact slightly different, less prominent, than in the West.Below I will try to address the following three issues: firstly, why is the war forgotten in this very part of the world?; secondly, are there any areas in this public amnesia in which the Great War plays a momentous role?; and thirdly, what scientific, political, and social effects can be caused by recent phenomenaespecially the expected boom connected with the centenary of the conflict?
The insignificant presence of World War I in Eastern European communities' collective memory may come as a surprise, especially bearing in mind the physical consequences of these hostilities.The figures are really striking, even if we consider just the territory of Poland.More than four hundred thousand Poles in the military uniforms of three empires were killed, and over twice as many were injured.The oftencompulsory Russian evacuation in the summer of 1915 comprised nearly one million people, whose return stretched out until the mid-1920s.The destroyed cities and villages, material and cultural losses could be compared to those of the worst-affected land near the front line in Belgium and northern France.Small wonderthe battles on the Eastern Front were no less fierce and bloody than those on the Western Front, only that they were fought in larger areas.Due to the fact that it was a manoeuvre warfare, more arduous and also more dangerousto both the soldiers and the civiliansthan a position warfare.
There are a number of explanations, and each of them concerns not only Poland but also some other states in the region.In the East, great empires fought with each other; however, it was mainly representatives of smaller nations those who lost their lives.In spite of the fact that practically all nationalities remained loyal to the throne, none of them could imagine a potential victory of their state.On the contrary, enfeebling the ruling elites in order to win concessions from them to Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Jews, Serbs, Croatians or Slovenians was in the interest of the majority.Their fighting spirit must have been mitigated by a feeling that fellow countrymen would most presumably fight and die in the uniforms of an enemy empire.When the war was over, that is to say, when the history of its memory and commemoration had begun, some events occurred that downgraded the previous four years almost completely.The emergence of new nation-states was a result not of the war, but of the defeat of empires.When the dust of battle settled, it turned out that it was not the majority, namely, combatants who fought for the Tsar or the Emperor, who were in possession of collective memorybut representatives of numerically marginal groups.The number of Polish legionaries, like Czechoslovak soldiers or Croatians fighting on the Allied side, never exceeded 1 per cent of the country's military personnel.Small wonder then, that the tale of war, which they had monopolised, did not become a common heritage.As a matter of fact, it was soon overshadowed by the memory of another war, whose consequences in this region were even more tragic.The year 1945 exacerbated the situation by connecting memory to the rigours of geopolitics, andin Yugoslaviato mandatory forgetting of the conflict, in which Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians and Bosnians dressed in Habsburg uniforms fought against Serbs.As it turned out later, making the First World War taboo in Yugoslavia seemed like a very reasonable idea.In the 1960s, when both historiography and pop culture rediscovered the Serbian Golgotha and made it a pillar of the independent, Serbian collective memory, the hitherto consistent structure of the multi-ethnic federation, began to break.
The weakness of memory of the Great War in the East has two sources.The first is an inability to relate with any side of the conflict, as most of the states there at the outset failed to survive until 1918.The second is a potentially toxic memory of the fratricidal conflict, orin Serbia, Bosnia and Croatiathe conflict between nations inhabiting one state after 1918.However, there are no rules without exceptions.If we take a closer look at local communities and civic initiatives, the picture becomes quite complicated, and regional differences, which do not always respect present-day political borders, come to the fore.
These regionalisms have been justified by the material heritage.Yet, due to the turbulent decades after 1918 and especially 1939, many artefacts connected to the First World War disappeared or fell into oblivion.Warsaw, to take perhaps the most striking example, does not have a commemoration of the Great War.The only place that, albeit only partly, does justice to the soldiers of 1914-1918 is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.However, all of the dozen-or-so battles from that period that had been inscribed on memorial tablets refer to the minor battles fought by Polish Legions within the Austro-Hungarian army and the tiny group of Polish volunteers to the French army.Quite recently, Robert Blobaum, an American historian, expressed his hope that the 100 th anniversary would contribute to the reconstruction of the only Warsaw monument devoted to the sufferings of city's civilian population, the sculpture by Xawery Dunikowski.It had been erected in 1922 but removed temporarily in 1930, and finally destroyed in the Second World War.Reconstructed, it could be a hitherto missing symbol of the Polish World War experience."There remains the monument of the desperate mother and her two hungry children which once stood prominently on Hoover Squareto my mind the most symbolic representation of everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War.The planned reconstruction and resurrection of that monument, originally announced in 2006, has been inexplicably delayed.I can imagine no better moment than the centennial of August 1914 for a ceremonial unveiling of that statue, not necessarily "in gratitude to America" (the inscription on the original statue), but in remembrance of a forgotten war and its horrific impact on the lives of the majority of city's non-combatants" 2 .Small wonder that Blobaum's hope remained Rubrica Contemporanea, VOL (NUM), AÑO ISSN.2014-5748 GÓRNY All Quiet?disappointed.Hoover Square has been reconstructed without the stone symbol of gratitude.

Local Exceptions
But outside big cities of Eastern Europe there are places that preserve the memory of the Great War.An ever-present feature of the landscape of East Germany (including the former East Prussia), Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary is crosses and small monuments commemorating those who died in one or both world wars.In Poland we can come across them in Cieszyn Silesia, for example.Military cemeteries, especially the ones established by Austro-Hungarian military authorities during the war, constitute a special vestige.Several dozen of them are outstanding creations of the Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovičfascinating both for their historical significance and for their artistic merit.In the area of the former Russian region of partition, and also in Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia, there are not as many symbols of affinity between local communities and casualties of the Great War and, more importantly, only very few people can read them.Sometimes local memory preserves scraps of information about the First World War, yet it associates it with the real war that followed.In fact, it is hard to find cities and towns here whose experiences between 1914 and 1918 were so dramatic that World War II could not blot out the memory of them.Consequently, exceptions become even more prominent.In the Galician towns of Gorlice and Przemyśl, World War I constituted the worst disaster in history.The battles of Riga, Belgrade, Warsaw, or Kaunas were merely a glimpse of the atrocities that followed.
As early as the 1980s, a grassroots social movement emerged for the protection of the heritage of the Great War, military cemeteries in particular.It developed during the following decade, as a renovation of necropolises in Slovakia and in Poland was initiatedoften supported by Austrian institutions (chiefly the Austrian Black Cross).Recently, an informal network of Polish, Slovak, Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian associations have taken care of the cemeteries and propagated the knowledge of the First World War in the region.They shall have enough work to keep them busy: Austro-Hungarian architects, whose job was to blend the graveyards in with the submontane scenery, built many crosses and fences using wood, i.e. a material that is hardly permanent.Furthermore, in the 1920s, stealing lumber from cemeteries was extremely common.This phenomenon had the biggest impact in the former Russian region of partition, but ordinary citizens and then the nationalism of the new authorities left their imprint on military cemeteries in Galicia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, too.Many of the cemeteries which had not been destroyed were nationalised by the new national states.The procedure involved distorting the truth about the origin of the deceased.Multi-ethnic graveyards officially became the burial grounds of Polish legionaries or Latvian riflemen, although in some of them not even one representative of these formations had been buried 3 .Sometimes inor next tograves from the First World War, graves of victims of the following hecatomb appeared.

Historiography
The centenary of the Great War has enabled grassroots initiatives for heritage protection to come to prominence, to gain access to the media and regional education programmes, even though in most of Eastern Europe there were no official commemorations to the outbreak of the hostilities.It has also increased the (hitherto weak) interest of historians from Eastern Europe in the subjectpartly due to external causes rather than an inner need: international projects need and actively seek Polish partners.Local topics and authors thus benefit from the widely acknowledged need to write a truly global war history, which cannot be achieved without the Eastern and the Balkan fronts 4 .This new approach can be traced in the monumental Cambridge history of the Great War with sections penned by American and German specialist in the history of Eastern Europe (notably Peter Gatrell and Christoph Mick) 5 .It is definitely too early to judge whether this transnational phenomenon translates into (the) a growing interest in the topic within the Polish historiography.
A slight rise in popularity of the First World War can be observed in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and Romania; all the neighbours, however, are now outdistanced by Serbia, where Christopher Clark's well-known book about the causes of World War I has been discussed even more ferociously than in Germany.In Poland, two new syntheses of the First World War history appeared in 2014, after more than twenty years from the last volume penned by Janusz Pajewski 6 .The first, authored by Andrzej Chwalba, offers a traditional, well-informed narration of the military and diplomatic affairs accompanied by scant chapters devoted to the social and cultural history of the war.It concentrates on Western Europe, while short section on the end of the book gives a telegraphic report on the emerging and re-emerging states in East Central and Southeast Europe 7 .The second Polish synthesis, authored by Włodzimierz Borodziej and this author, concentrates on East Central and Southeast Europe solely, while devoting most of the interest to non-military issues, such as the social and cultural history of the region.It is organized along the division of the three types of wartime experience, into front, hinterland and occupation 8 .In Polish bookshops these two books compete with translated volumes 9 .Unfortunately, none of the path-breaking newer syntheses of the Great War can be found among those translations.The absence list is long and includes prominent authors.Neither Hew Strachan's classic volume 10 , nor the brilliant book by Jörn Leonhard (which devotes quite a few pages to the problems of East Central Europe) 11 found their way into the Polish publication programmes.Alan Kramer and John Horne remain equally inaccessible to the Polish-reading audience 12 .This may, though not necessarily must, lead to certain blockades in the reception of new ideas and in their implementation onto the Polish or East Central European subject matter.Let us take a closer look on how recent trends in the Polish First World War research correspond to the general pattern of historiographical development.
Jay Winter and Antoine Prost identify three phases of the development of First World War historiography.In the first phase the diplomatic history dominated whereas military historians restricted their interest to generals and great battles.The absence of a common man, a poilu or a civilian was an Achilles' heel of that paradigm.This weakness was then recognized mostly by the Western European researchers influenced by Marxism.In their view, was played the main role was the fact that dominating in the field throughout the second half of the 20 th century, social processes, accommodation and resistance to the military discipline as well as changing moral norms of the European societies .The third turn in the First World War studies started in the 1990s.Without abandoning the social bias of the latter, it enriched the research perspective with cultural studies.Individual and group experience of the war belong to the typical topics of this research trend, along with cultures of memory, representations of the war and gender issues 13 .In practical terms, this development shifts historians' interests from the military to the civilians' matters.This, in turn, quasi naturally elevates the position and meaning of Eastern Europe for the new military history.Suffice it to remind that the main characteristics of the manoeuvre warfare on the Eastern and on the Balkan front that differed most from the Western front had been precisely constant proximity of military and civilian affairs.Contrary to mostly regular trench war, in the East soldiers met their civilian compatriots or the population of the enemy country on a daily basis.Some of the specific modes of contact between civilians and the military belong to the most promising fields of the Eastern Europe's First World War studies: occupation (of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia and Romania), voluntary and forceful migrations as well as the phenomenon of violence which is inseparable from both aforementioned questions.Interestingly enough, traditional military history seems to be in decline in comparison with these rising topics.It is surely not an accident that one of the most interesting recent studies of this latter genre devotes more attention to the political and symbolic conflicts around the alleged desertions of Czech soldiers in the Habsburg army than the critical events on the battlefields of Galicia 14 .
There has been a great interest of the specialists in military occupations in the East that has been devoted -not without the influence of Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius' seminal workto the Ober Ost 15 .In many ways, this bias distorts the perspective, since Ober Ost by no means represented a norm.Suffice it to mention that, contrary to other occupied territories, Ober Ost retained strict military government up to 1918.In consequence, forced labor and lack of self-government remained characteristic for this region for the whole period of the war.German occupation of the so called Congress Kingdom (the Russian partition of Poland) was as different in nature from the semicolonial, militarist and brutal reign of Ludendorff over Lithuania, Belarus, parts of Latvia and Eastern Poland (that constituted Ober Ost's territory) as was the German occupation in Romania 16 .In Warsaw and in other regional centers there had been local political representation capable of influencing the policy of the German Generalgouvernement.Yet, interestingly, this fact has been largely neglected by historians up to the present.In recent works by Arkadiusz Stempin 17 and Marta Polsakiewicz 18 the consensual character of the German occupation is problematized and its liberal cultural policy rightly estimated.On the other hand, almost a year of Russian occupation of Eastern Galicia (from autumn 1914 to summer 1915) still awaits a comparable treatment.It is worth mentioning that more than a decade ago a monograph of Warsaw historian Włodzimierz Mędrzecki on the German military intervention in Ukraine in 1918 also analyzed another example of the negotiated occupational regime 19 .
Voluntary and forced migration, known as the Great retreat, had been common experience of various groups: Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Lithuanians and Latvians.Perhaps the most striking feature of studies devoted to this phenomenon is separate treatment of individual nationalities, mostly but not exclusively done by scholars representing this particular nationality.Researchers dealing with the Jewish community do not bother to study similar war experiences of the Jews' neighbours.And vice-versa 20 .This ethnic segmentation is typical for Polish scholars in the field as well 21 .Interestingly enough, though rather unintentionally, this perspective dates back to the First World War itself.Already in 1914 an ethnicization of the refugee policy had been an issue.Suffice it to remind that the inefficient Russian authorities delegated the bulk of charity work to the organizations of ethnic or religious character.
wars in the former empires of Habsburg and Romanov had been analyzed by Jerzy Tomaszewski 28 .Later, a thorough history of the Jewish community in the immediate postwar years was studied by Piotr Wróbel, who continues his research on the topic to this day.Among the younger specialists, Konrad Zieliński excels in the study of Polish-Jewish relations 29 .
Apart from the aforementioned thematic triangleoccupation, forced migrations and violencesome individual research perspectives enrich the Polish history agenda.The memory of the war (or lack thereof) is recently gaining some interest, pointed out by the articles and conference papers of Marcin Jarząbek 30 .Marek Przeniosło specializes in peasant attitudes the Polish irredentism in 1914-1918 31 .Jerzy Z. Pająk published a regional account of the wartime experience in Austrian Galicia 32 .Tomasz Kargol touched upon an important and still largely ignored question of economic losses caused by war on the Polish territory 33 .The author of this study published a monograph devoted to Eastern European anthropology, geography, and psychology in the context of the Great War 34 .Piotr Szlanta studies political sympathies of the Polish population 35 .Ryszard Kaczmarek entered quite a new field in his work on the Polish soldiers serving in the German imperial army 36 .
3. Jerzy PAŁOSZ, "The Military Cemetery as a Form of the Cult of the Fallen Soldier: The History of the Idea and Its Destruction on the Example of Austro-Hungarian Cemeteries in 'Russian Poland'", in Remembrance and Solidarity.Studies in the 20th Century European History, 2/March 2014, pp.299-323.