ABSTRACT
In her poem ‘The End and the Beginning’, written only four years after the end of communism in Eastern Europe, Wispawa Szymborska contemplated our ability to relegate even the most traumatic events to the realm of history, implying that forgetting the past is both natural and inevitable. What is more, she appeared to suggest that, once the conflict is over, it is neither defeat nor victory that matters, but the practical issues that the onset of peace forces us to confront. The first line of the poem boldly declares that ‘After every war someone has to tidy up’.1 The process of cleaning up takes countless forms and is neither morally heroic nor visually dramatic: there are ‘no sound bites, no photo opportunities, / and it takes years. / All the cameras have gone / to other wars’ (lines 18-21). Szymborska ends the poem with a reflection on the onset of total amnesia:
From time to time someone still must dig up a rusted argument from underneath a bush and haul it off to the dump.
