ABSTRACT
The sphere of public commemoration in post-1989 Warsaw is both typical of, and unique for, the kind of redrawing of public memory experienced in central and eastern European cities. Typical, because it followed patterns of semiotic reconfiguration seen, for different reasons and in the service of different political agendas, in cities as diverse historically, ethnically, and politically as Bucharest, Tallinn, Dresden, or Moscow. Streets were renamed; religious institutions reinvigorated; statues of communist heroes removed and replaced with national (or nationalistic) figures from the past; socialist realist urban ensembles were repurposed, sometimes seamlessly, but often awkwardly, to suit the programmes of a market economy. However, beyond these general similarities lie two phenomena specific to Warsaw. The first is a sense of tremendous dislocation resulting from the scale and method of World War II destruction in the city—what the Polish sociologist Stanisław Ossowski has called the ‘dehumanisation or deculturalisation of [Warsaw’s urban] matter’ (Ossowski, 1967, p. 396; cf. Chmielewska, 2012). The second, its correlate, is the uncommonly dense, complex, and contested system of plaques and monuments commemorating hundreds of sites of public mass executions, attacks on Polish and Jewish civilian and insurgent groups, mass deportations, zones of racial exclusion, and other forms of wartime and post-war Nazi and Stalinist repression. Consequently, making public space in Warsaw requires close and careful attention to the local layers of intersecting physical and discursive spaces, which testify to the oppression of the city’s Polish and Jewish populations and the mass destruction of its urban infrastructures.
