• 1 Marcin Świetlicki, “Nie dla Jana Polkowskiego” [Not for Jan Polkowski], in Zimne kraje 2 (Warszawa: (...)

What’s new? Not much. We are still using
our extremely artificial rhetoric (…)1
Marcin Świetlicki, Nie dla Jana Polkowskiego [Not for Jan Polkowski]

• 2 See Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, eds., Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupi (...)

3This means that it is now more important than ever to critically respond to the narrow and politically charged framework of collective memory. And a lot has changed in the last dozen years in this regard: the number of critical studies of historical moments that are particularly painful for Polish memory has rapidly grown, as did the count of influential discussions regarding detailed case studies.2 Theories and concepts systematizing collective memory have become not only more nuanced, but also garnered some unexpected public recognition, changing the topic of collective memory into a sphere of interest for the general audience.

• 3 Lucy Bond, Ben De Bruyn and Jessica Rapson, eds., Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction(...)
• 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2021).
• 5 Aleksandra Ubertowska, “Mówić w imieniu biotycznej wspólnoty” [Speaking on behalf of the biotic com (...)
• 6 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009).
• 7 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).
• 8 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subjects. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford UP, (...)

5This issue of Teksty Drugie approaches this development in a distinct manner – especially compared to previous volumes – by collecting papers that have been written over the course of seven years. What is particularly important, in my opinion, is that this is not so much the documentation of the development of research on collective memory in Poland, but rather of the Polish collective memory itself. This shift is crucial here, because we can already talk about the arrival of the fourth wave of memory studies, at least in the framework of global trends, that emphasizes such things as the role and functions of environmental memory, thinking of memory on a whole new scale (which was inspired by such theories as planetary memory3 or planetary age4), or expanding research on memory through the inclusion of non-human subjects (by actively posing the question of whether and how we can speak about the needs of non-humans).5 These changes are more opaque in the case of Polish memory studies, as the main research questions are still focused on the issues of national memory (the subject of the second wave of memory studies) and the ways in which it enters into dialogue with transnational memory (which – through categories such as multidirectional memory,6 dialogical memory,7 or implied subjects8 – set the perspective of the third wave of memory studies).

• 9 See Tekty Drugie 2 (2017), 3 (2018), 4 (2020), 3 (2022).
• 10 See, e.g., Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Bracia miesiące. Studia z antropologii historycznej Polski 1939–1 (...)
• 11 See Engelking and Grabowski, Night without End.

6However, it is difficult to categorize deep immersion in national memory as a disadvantage or backwardness, because the vast majority of texts included here more or less overtly call for certain activist actions regarding Polish collective memory and point to those areas that require immediate intervention. Importantly, the time span between this issue and the 2016 issue (and the ones following it, in which articles on Polish memory were published periodically, such as the issue on the environmental history of the Holocaust, the volume regarding establishing witnesses, the special issue on historical museums, and the issue on the memory of the future)9 allows us to trace certain shifts and decentralizations. In the current volume there are visibly more papers concerning local memories – the ones situated outside mainstream politics of memory – and there are slightly fewer papers that undertake the sensitive task of redefining Polish memory of the Holocaust. This is a significant change, showing that although there is still a lot to be done at the level of politics of memory, the development of world-class scientific research has accelerated, while simultaneously broadening the scope of its subject matter, as evidenced by a number of highly interesting publications that have appeared in recent years. Some of them were in a way “announced” by articles previously published in Teksty Drugie.10 Despite of this, the question of whether everything is going in the right direction remains open. When writing about research on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism conducted in Poland, it would be difficult not to recall the disturbing context of some political actions taken in recent years, including the plain attack on Prof. Barbara Engelking, head of the Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the co-author of the publication Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland,11 among many others. The attempt to interfere with the freedom of scientific research and to force the conduct of research that would support only predetermined theses met with strong opposition of the academic community (a letter issued by the Scientific Council of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, defending both Prof. Engelking and the freedom of scientific research was signed by several thousand scientists from all over Poland); however, it is difficult to predict whether the propensity for control and restriction will become more or less severe in the future.

• 12 See Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization.

7I turn to this case not only to sketch the political context of memory studies and its involvement in current historical politics (regardless of the intentions of specific scientists), but also to show that in this discipline nothing is a given, as a seemingly stabilized field of enquiry can be weaponized at any time. In other words: an event (or multiple events) that slowly changed its status from hot to cold12 and inched its way towards cultural memory may suddenly revert to the sphere of communicative memory and trigger strong affective responses.

• 13 See Lech Nijakowski, Polska polityka pamięci. Esej socjologiczny [Polish politics of memory. Sociol (...)
• 14 Justyna Tabaszewska, Pamięć afektywna. Dynamika polskiej pamięci po roku 1989 [Affective memory. Dy (...)

10It appears that despite the passing of time this event is far from being closed or worked through. Recent political pressure shows that for Polish national identity, the defending of the black and white image of society’s involvement in the events of 1939–1945 is extremely important and politically burdened (the unequivocally and exclusively positive attitude of Poles in the face of the Holocaust is to be an argument for Poland’s special position on the international arena). At the same time, maintaining this image is, by definition, impossible without radical interference with the scope of memory studies: Second World War and the Holocaust are events researched well enough for us to know the spectrum of behavior of the Polish society,13 including the not unblemished image of Polish involvement in the war atrocities. This complicated situation undoubtedly contributes to the phenomenon that I have previously described as the process of the looping of Polish memory: the work of memory, consisting in, for example, transforming communicative memory into cultural memory, or functional memory into memory storage, is disturbed and the memory of a specific event begins to function in both such spheres simultaneously. Moreover, the memory of Second World War shapes the memory framework of the political transformation of 1989 as much as it itself is shaped by that event (accompanied by the possible futures that the transformation unlocked).14

• 15 See previous attempts to create a framework for European memory: Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenb (...)

11The looping of the memory of Second World War and the time of transformation is clearly visible in Polish politics of memory: the year 1989 is sometimes interpreted as the “true end” of Second World War and the date of regaining full independence (which, in turn, links the memory framework of the 1989 breakthrough with the memory of the end of First World War, transferring the expectations of the year 1918 on to 1989), and sometimes is perceived as a somewhat fake, deficient breakthrough, which needs to be “completed” through some other political change. Despite the existence of these contradictory frameworks of memory, the period of political transformation in the 1990s is significantly less researched than Second World War, and, most likely, the study of this period will be the next step in the development of memory studies in Poland. One can even speculate with a high degree of confidence that in the light of recent political events (especially the Russian attack on Ukraine), the memory of the political transformation will be of interest not only to researchers of national memory, but also to scientists interested in the broader framework of Central and Eastern European memory.15 This direction of the development of memory studies – that is, the search for frameworks of memory that are broader than national but at the same time narrower than global – will most likely become a vital part of new trends in memory research.

• 16 Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Anthony Rowland, eds., The Future of Memory (New York: Berghahn B (...)
• 17 Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 201 (...)

12The next stages in the development of memory research will therefore provoke the emergence of new challenges: the character of some of them will be cumulative (after all, there is more and more to remember, and the perspectives from which memory of specific events is reconstructed only grow in number), but the nature of others will be structural. More and more attention in memory studies is (and will be) paid to previously marginalized phenomena: from the non-human subjects of memory, through environmental and planetary memory, to research on broadly understood temporality and the function of the future in defining memory.16 At the same time, recent years have further added some complex memory nodes: from the pandemic, through the climate crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Each of these events already affects the current framework of collective memory, and their impact will be, in all probability, fundamental. What is more, it is difficult to expect that the events defining the present will not influence how the past is remembered and how it is enacted in the present. The first symptoms of this change are already visible in the fourth wave of memory studies: the reorientation towards the environment and the discovery of supra-human scales of memory are certainly related to the sense that the climate catastrophe, although extended in time, is already happening17 and will shape both our future and the memory of the past. The climate and ecological catastrophe is also at least partly responsible for the increasingly clear formulation of the question of how to reconcile human understanding of time, memory, and agency with the long duration of ecosystems.

• 18 Gavriel Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing?” The Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (20 (...)
• 19 Cf. Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18.
• 20 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanf (...)

16I am returning here to the question that was posed in slightly different words some years back by Gavriel Rosenfeld,18 who referred to the impact that the events of September 11, 2001 should have on memory studies. The thinker pointed out that in the face of the threat of terrorism, we should focus much more on the future than on the past. Although Rosenfeld’s question aroused a strong response among memory researchers – and it was rather negative, pointing to the fact that preparing for the future requires detailed knowledge of the past19 – it is worth recalling it now for a at least two reasons. Firstly, because contrary to Rosenfeld’s predictions, memory studies did not lose their momentum after 9/11, although questions of their purpose are even more relevant now than they were when Rosenfeld posed them. Secondly, because orientation towards the future in memory studies is now an increasingly apparent trend, and one directly resonating with his doubts. Typically, the relationship between the past, present, future, and memory is explained in this context by reference to the ideas of Reinhart Koselleck,20 who pointed out that our present is shaped equally by references to the past and the future. While the past is the realm of experience which gives shape to our experience of the present, the future is the horizon of imagination which, on the one hand, is defined by contemporary perceptions of the sphere of possibility, but, on the other hand – through this conceptual backward projection to the present actually influences what will happen in the future.