ABSTRACT
The collapse of communism opened up a unique opportunity for Poland to revise its national historical narratives and to reshape its commemorative landscape. The country’s communist rule could finally be re-examined, and a collective reckoning with the past could begin. Whether this opportunity was seized and, if so, to what effect, is one of the most contentious issues in post-communist Poland. Were the 1990s years of a deliberate collective amnesia? Has the Third Polish Republic promoted the ‘right kind’ of memory of the national past? Should the re-examination of a country’s history be left to historians rather than politicians? Whilst these questions had begun to surface during the decade following the collapse of communism, by the early 2000s they started to dominate public debate as academics and old opposition groups clashed over their divergent assessments of the role the state should play in the construction of a national memory. The seriousness of the situation prompted Paweł Machcewicz, a historian and former Head of the Public Education Office of the IPN, to declare in 2008 that, ‘calm and somewhat impartial debate about the recent politics of history and also about the Third Republic’s attitude to the past is almost an impossible task today’. 1 In the same year, sociologist Ireneusz Krzemiński, commenting on debates about Polish collective memory, noted that, ‘Polish intellectual life of recent years – even in academic sociological analyses – is excessively saturated with a narrow political context and scholars’ and authors’ party political bias’. 2
