Authors

Agata Zysiak¹;  ¹ University of Vienna, Austria

Discussion

The struggles with modernity as well as the subsequent modernization attempts shaping Eastern Europe took an unexpected turn in 1945. With the whole region, Poland became a part of a giant experiment: a try to rethink the world order. While the war irreversibly shook the old’s world foundations opening unforeseen possibilities. Thie latter included forms of citizenship, which officially have been inclusively reconstructed, however on the level of practises new forms needed to be forged.

I am interested in the social revolution happening in the postwar period from a perspective of the non-intelligentsia citizens: how they made sense of the changing reality, how they shaped it and narrate it. The methodological challenge in such a quest is how creating a new narrative was possible, like with every subaltern voice, how their was possible to be articulated and heard. I examine a case of the postwar memoir competitions: method’s developments, discussions and materials gathered.

The postwar period remains on the margins of a recent people’s turn in Polish social sciences and humanities, which focuses mostly on serfdom and peasants. How can we trace and try to understand the role of people in the People’s Republic of Poland? The memoir competition play a crucial role in revisionist interpretations of postwar history of Poland, state-socialism, and to limited extend the whole socialist world.