Hardly any neighborhood in Europe has had so much attraction, rejection and influence on the course of European history as relations between Germany, Poland and Russia, in all their various configurations. This mutual history is inevitably catching up with current politics in Europe. Today our relations are affected by images, stereotypes and prejudice even more than it was expected some 10 to 15 years ago. Mythology, politicization and historical parallels in relations between the Germans, Russians and Poles are being revisited at the start of the new century. Sometimes, propaganda prevails over hard facts and the young seem to be ready to repeat the mistakes of the older generation.
Why is this happening? Why are politicians appealing to old prejudices and using the grievances of the past to pursue transitory political objectives? Polish, Russian and German historians and journalists were trying to find answers to these questions at a meeting in the Volga area the other day, organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the head of its Moscow office Falk Bomsdorf and the Association of Russian Society Studies (AIRO-XXI).
I was very surprised to hear some Polish colleagues reproach their current rulers for adopting the worst possible phobias to have developed from prejudice against Germany and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, which led to the emergence of a mania for "romantic nationalism" and the popular image of an isolated Poland fighting against mythical enemies. This black-and-white picture is tragic not only per se, but also in the context of the United Europe. At the same time, it has seriously jeopardized an opportunity to find some kind of modus vivendi with modern Russia.
In turn, Russian historians admitted that the majority of Poles are hardly aware of the link between the new official Russian holiday of November 4 and the events of Polish history in the early 17th century. Common people are very far from understanding the problem of Poland's legal responsibility for the mass deaths of Red Army officers and soldiers in Polish captivity in 1920-1921. Russian-Polish relations are seriously affected by different interpretations of the crime in Katyn, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Red Army's actions in 1939, and the significance of Poland's liberation by Soviet troops in 1944-1945.
Likewise, Russian-German relations are affected by the ongoing quest to establish the whereabouts, rightful ownership and return of cultural treasures looted by both sides during the war, and the assessment of German crimes in Russia and Russia's crimes in Germany at the end of World War II.
German scholars have raised the following question - Why do the losers find it easier to criticize their past than the winners? Under certain circumstances, there emerges a peculiar social condition that has been dubbed "the culture of defeat." After WWII, the Poles were on the horns of the dilemma of self-definition - being victors de jure, they felt like losers de facto. But this was not necessarily helpful for the comprehension of history. In some cases, this gave rise to messianic portrayals of the past (Sienkiewicz's Poland), but there are other examples as well - Andrzej Wajda's film "The Channel" or Jan Yusef Lipsky's article "Two homelands, two types of patriotism."
There have emerged three distinctive national cultures of remembrance in the German-Polish-Russian historical discourse. The German culture is dominated by a negative attitude to the Nazi dictatorship and its crimes. The critical interpretation of the past has prompted the Germans to develop an anti-authoritarian consensus. Now German scholars and the public at large have renounced even the most durable legends, cultivated in West Germany for decades, like the myth of the "untarnished Wehrmacht," which ostensibly had nothing to do with the elimination of Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. But this reappraisal of the past took decades of continuous and difficult effort. While some tried to hush up certain events and erase them from memory, others urged an unflinchingly critical approach to history and an admission of past mistakes.
Polish remembrance culture is now defined by different traditions. It is dominated by the anti-Communist-backed effort to present Polish history as a history of struggle for freedom and heroic resistance to foreign oppression (primarily Russian and German). The pluralistic culture of the post-1989 period of transformation, with its focus on sub-national topics and attempts to de-mythologize history, is now on the defensive.
In Russia, signs of a return to the Soviet version of history are even more striking. Critical understanding of major turning points in history is obstructed not so much at the local and regional levels, as by the general ideological climate, which is ridden with the complexes of national history.
As Director of the Polish Institute in Germany Prof. Dieter Bingen noted succinctly, "the taming of the past" has always been "the taming of the present." Indeed, the problems of the past are overlapping with the modern issues. It is difficult to square the different versions of history offered by the Russians, Germans and Poles, and this is why problems in trilateral relations persist.
Not all the scholars participating in the Volga meeting shared this view, and some suggested discussing how national histories correlate to the pan-European record, in order to rid history of the domineering influence of today's politics.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
