Tradition, Literature and Politics in East-Central Europe

Carl Tighe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000332032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Milan Kundera warned that in in the states of East-Central Europe, attitudes to the west and the idea of 'Europe' were complex and could even be hostile. But few could have imagined how the collapse of communism and membership of the EU would confront these countries with a life that was suddenly and disconcertingly 'modern' and which challenged sustaining traditions in literature, culture, politics and established views on identity.

Since the countries of East-Central Europe joined the European Union in 2004 the politicians and oppositionists of the centre-left, who once led the charge against communism, have often been forced to give way to right-wing, authoritarian, populist governments. These governments, while keen to accept EU finance, have been determined to present themselves as protecting their traditional ethno-national inheritance, resisting 'foreign interference', stemming the 'gay invasion', halting 'Islamic replacement' and reversing women's rights. They have blamed Communists, liberals, foreigners, Jews and Gypsies, revised abortion laws, tampered with their constitutions to control the Justice system and taken over the media to an astonishing degree. By 2019, amid calls for the suspension of their voting rights, both Poland and Hungary had been taken to the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament and had begun to explore ways to put conditions on future EU funding.

This book focuses on the interface between tradition, literature and politics in east-central Europe, focusing mainly on Poland but also Hungary and the Czech Republic. It explores literary tradition and the role of writers to ask why these left-liberals, who were once ubiquitous in the struggles with communism, are now marginalised, often reviled and almost entirely absent from political debate. It asks, in what ways the advent of capitalism 'normalised' literature and what the consequences might be? It asks whether the rise of chauvinism is 'normal' in this part of the world and whether the literary traditions that helped sustain independent political thought through the communist years now, instead of supporting literature, feed nationalist opinion and negative attitudes to the idea of 'Europe'.

1 Introduction

Spooks, shadows and unfinished business

I view writing as an intervention in the world, an attempt to insert a personal point of view and angle of opinion into ongoing cultural and political debate. In my academic writing I have engaged with the interface between politics and literature in what Penguin Books used to call ‘the Other Europe’ – specifically, I have engaged with the PRL, by which I mean not only Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (People’s Republic of Poland), but what I call the Polish Republic of Letters – the writers, their opinions, struggles, influence and careers. I have been trying to fathom Polish literary culture, what shapes creativity, what made the modern Polish mind-set, what made Polish literary culture so different from that of the West, what made East-Central Europe the place it is.

I have written three books about Poland (this is the fourth), each in its own way a personal attempt to get to grips with Polish literary culture and ask what shaped the modern Polish mind-set, what made East-Central Europe the place it is and what it is that drives creativity. A great deal of my writing on this topic appeared first in The Journal of European Studies, where editor John Flower consistently and very generously opened up a space for my ideas and encouraged my writing on what Penguin Books used to call ‘the Other Europe’.

I read and write about East-Central Europe in an effort to understand and order my experience. For me, the years 1973–94 were dominated by Poland – by visiting, residence, work, reading, research, Solidarność, Martial Law and the transition to democracy. These were years of tremendous change – physically difficult, politically confusing and very, very stressful: the weather was severe, queues were endless, food was scarce, toilet paper was a fantasy, vodka was cheap, political jokes were grim, denim was ‘in’, a plastic carrier-bag was a status symbol, everyone smoked and the backing track was Abba. My time in Poland was a formative, life-shaping experience that introduced me to the astonishingly rich cultural life and literary legacy of East-Central Europe. I have always said I gained my qualifications in the UK, but I had my education in Poland. This has been a kind of long, on/off love affair, my unfinished business.

My Cold War

My first encounter with the Cold War came on a wet evening in the late autumn of 1956. I went with my father to the gloomy parish hall of Saint Francis’ Church near Villa Cross in Birmingham to find it filled with rows of camp-beds. Several bus-loads of Hungarians had just arrived. They had been travelling for three or four days and a couple had bloody bandages. The remnants of the lives they had abandoned – clothing, boots, rucksacks, quilted jackets, fur hats, toys – lay where they fell. I had no idea what had happened or where Hungary was, but I remember the silence, the stink of exhaustion, shock and utter despair.

At that time the more run-down parts of Handsworth were where newly arrived immigrants and refugees settled on their way to something better. At Catholic junior school I was mainly with other Irish kids, but there were also Italians, Poles, Palestinians, Iranis, Jordanians, Greeks, Cypriots, Hungarians and Ukrainians. At my secondary school in Erdington the demographic changed a little with Caribbean, Pakistani and Indian kids, but there were several Polish kids – Popliński, Szpotański (Sputnik), Twardowicz, Smójkis (Smudger), Kamiński, Giery and Bach. They taught me a few words of Polish and introduced me to lemon tea, ogórki, kompot, barsczcz and wódka (pickled gherkins, compote, beetroot soup and vodka). Their parents had arrived in Britain after epic journeys via Romania and France or via the USSR, Iran, Palestine and Italy. I later came to realise that, judging by their accents, they were mostly from the kresy – the eastern borderlands annexed by the USSR as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and retained after 1945. At the end of the war their homes were in the Soviet Union, Poland was a communist satellite and they were a stranded embarrassment to their erstwhile allies.

As wartime austerity faded and the culture of deference receded, I went to study English Literature at University College Swansea, where the ’60s hung on into the late ’70s. I became interested in recent translations in the Penguin Modern Poets series, where I ‘discovered’ Herbert, Rózewicz and Miłosz, then moved on to Borowski and Mrożek. Their irony and the idea of the audience these writers assumed appealed to me: the experience and tradition out of which this writing had grown were very different from the kind of writing I was studying at university. I wanted more.

I first visited Poland in 1973. I spent a month in the tiny village of Szczedrzyk, near Opole, teaching on an English Language summer-school run for UNESCO by the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges.¹ This old German village – the local reservoir had been called Hitlersee and the nearby town had once been Oppeln – had been ceded to Poland in the post-war border shift: on the streets the kids went without shoes and a horse-drawn cart was the main form of transport. The simmering resentments Germans and Poles still had to negotiate – a great many Germans who wanted to leave after 1945 had been designated as ‘autochthonous Poles’ and forced to live on among the incoming Poles – meant that on more than one occasion we stepped over blood and teeth in the doorway to the local bar.

A year later I returned to Poland to take up a ‘local contract’ at Wrocław Technical University. At night I sat in my room high above Wrocław (I thought my address at 19/84 Plac Grunwaldzki significant) and, in the absence of TV, I listened to the lions roar in the nearby zoo and copied Herbert’s poems into my notebook. This was a labour of love, a way of engaging, working out the internal structure of the poems, pushing past the language to read the experience that drove it.

In 1975 I moved to the University of Gdańsk, which had opened the previous year, and where I was their first foreign appointment. Every six months I had to register with the milicja. In Wrocław they quizzed me about my inherited wealth, university study, my father’s occupation and which party I belonged to. That my mother was a classroom assistant and my father was a van driver for the Post Office puzzled them enormously. They lost interest completely when they I realised I was not a rich capitalist, did not own a car, had no land or huge inheritance, did not represent some decayed element of the aristocracy and had not attended Oxford or Cambridge. In Gdańsk, however, the milicja asked the same questions and then tried to recruit me as an informer.

‘There are some very pretty students there, yes?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And the staff have lots of affairs.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘So, just tell us – who is fucking who, who is ambitious, who wants promotion, who brings vodka to work in their briefcase, who has parties, who is planning to go to the West. You know, just the latest gossip.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But I don’t speak much Polish and I have very little social contact with staff or students.’

‘What are you, some kind of cholerny pustelnik?’

I had to look this up: ‘bloody hermit’, with just a hint of ‘wanker’.

‘But you will report to us if you hear something interesting…’

‘If I hear of plans for robbery, rape or murder I will report it, just like any good citizen.’

That did not please them.

As a foreigner I was watched, but not very closely. Unlike BBC correspondent Tim Sebastian and other Western journalists I had no ‘minder’, and went wherever I pleased. I suspect several people – colleagues and students – were reporting on me to the police, but I never knew who for sure. And besides, there was little to tell. Normally the milicja leaned on the weaker students, offering to up their grades. But the weaker students could hardly report accurately on conversations in English. One student in particular failed repeatedly but was allowed back to continue his course. I checked the protokoły (student grade record) and yes, every fail-mark I had given him had been amended to a pass. The rumour was that his father was a close friend of local Party chief Tadeusz Fiszbach. In Polish they call it wysokie protekcja (high protection).² Inevitably the question arose: is my apartment bugged? The answer was: of course, but this is communist Poland so the bug is probably broken.

Unlike Wrocław, Gdańsk was a very tense and prickly place. There was an undercurrent of anti-Party feeling and one of the first buildings pointed out to me was Party Headquarters, burned out in the protests of 1970, but then rebuilt a provocative one storey higher. As a port city, the black market was very active and well developed, but that made those who ran it and those who depended on it very nervous. Being a foreigner in Gdańsk could be tricky. Several times I saw German tourists beaten up. Most weekends there were fights between the Finns and Swedes who were building the new North Port. It was possible to see both parties glowering at each other across the room, bandaged, splinted and stitched, at Sunday morning breakfast in the Grand Hotel, Sopot.

In my spare time I was researching the background to Günter Grass’ novels. At that time very few people in Poland had heard of him and, wandering around the city, I continually had to make it clear – sometimes by showing my passport – that I was not a revanchist German, come to reclaim my family home. My first name did not help.

At the university I delivered courses on literature from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century and I was instructed to focus closely on issues of literary structure and dialogue. But there were problems in the English department. Some of the younger lecturers were unhappy with our department manager. I thought of him simply as a manager, but in their eyes he was a figure of suspicion: what they suspected him of I could not make out. He was a pietistic Catholic, but my colleagues insisted that to reach this level of responsibility he must have come to an ‘accommodation’ with the Party. For some of these lecturers I suspect it was just envy – after his doctorate our manager had published almost nothing and chosen the ‘managerial route’. However, the underlying pulse was that several lecturers nurtured an ambition to establish an English department in Suwałki, around which they hoped a new university would form.³ They spent their time in tireless intrigue against our manager, questioning his decisions, undermining him, recruiting staff to teach at their fantasy university and trying to find someone in the Party hierarchy with the power to set it in motion.

In Gdańsk, as people became increasingly frustrated at shortages in housing, medicine and food, at dangerous working conditions in the factories and shipyards, and at proposed changes to the Polish Constitution, fliers and posters for Wolne Związki Zawodowe Wybrzeża (Free Trades Unions of the Coast) began to appear on the buses, trams, and the local blue and yellow coastal trains. As soon as posters appeared at the railway station the milicja tore them down. Tension was building to the protests of 1976 and the birth of Solidarność in 1980. The milicja had caught wind of something at the university, but they could not work out what. For them – and very few milicja were graduates – university was a baffling place. They probably connected unrest in the English department with the posters and fliers, and with the dissident Uniwersytet Latający (Flying University). In trying to recruit me as an informer they were looking for some kind of ‘leverage’, a way into the rapidly growing underground civic movement.

Eventually the atmosphere in the English department became so poisonous Party chief Tadeusz Fiszbach called a meeting at which attendance (even for the foreigners) was compulsory. This tall, bald man with enormous glasses and a disconcerting yellow and orange check jacket made it very clear that this discontent had come to the Party’s notice and that the Party did not approve of constant jostling: there would be no further talk of a university in Suwałki unless the Party said so. He attempted to re-focus the staff with a pep-talk about responsibility, duty, the function of a university in People’s Poland, and of course the leading role of the Party.⁴

I had been ill with a kidney infection over the winter and by June 1976, with my teaching finished, I wanted to return to the UK. However, the Gdańsk milicja refused me permission to leave until September. This was my punishment for not cooperating. Instead of arguing with them I asked for a permit to visit friends in West Berlin for a weekend. They said this would be fine, so I bought my train ticket, packed my few possessions and, clutching my guitar, I left. At the Polish border one of the passengers denounced me to the guards, saying I was carrying drugs – probably to distract from the fact they were carrying drugs. The guards took me away, strip-searched me and did a finger-tip search of my luggage. They were disappointed to find sugar, vodka and sausage in my bag. The border guard said:

‘What is this for?’

‘It is a thank-you to my friends in Berlin for offering me a bed.’

‘Don’t you have these things in the West?’

‘Certainly, but they are expensive.’

‘Your friends in the West are poor?’

‘Most people I know are poor. That’s capitalism.’

The guard looke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Spooks, shadows and unfinished business
• Chapter 2: Kundera’s ‘Kidnap’ revisited
• Chapter 3: Polish writers and tradition: Partition and Independence
• Chapter 4: Polish writers and tradition: Nazism and communism
• Chapter 5: Hungary – Writers in Transition: Budapest Diary December 1990
• Chapter 6: Poland translated: Post-Communist writing
• Chapter 7: Lustration: The Polish experience
• Chapter 8: The end of history, return to Europe, and rise of illiberal democracy
• Bibliography
• Websites
• Index