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The Poland 100 Years album has been created on the occasion of the centenary of Poland’s independence. The concept of the publication was developed by the Program Council appointed

through a social initiative. Among the creators of the album there are distinguished authors representing different disciplines

of science, economy and culture.

Program Council

Michał Kleiber – Chairman

Jerzy BralczykWaldemar Dąbrowski

Andrzej MencwelWiesław MyśliwskiWitold M. Orłowski

Adam D. RotfeldHenryk SamsonowiczKrystyna Skarżyńska

Bogdan Szymanik

POLAND 100 Years

POLAND 100 Years

Authors of texts

Iwona ArabasWaldemar Baraniewski

Marek BelkaRyszard Bugaj

Wojciech J. BursztaAndrzej Chwalba

Jerzy EislerAndrzej FriszkeMarcin Gmys

Grzegorz Gorzelak Ryszard M. Groński

Michał Kleiber Krzysztof Kłosiński

Krzysztof KonarzewskiAndrzej KruczyńskiTadeusz Lubelski

Dorota MalecAndrzej MencwelDariusz Michalski

Krzysztof MichalskiStanisław Michałowski

Jan MiodekWładysław T. Miodunka

Wojciech MorawskiBolesław OrłowskiWitold M. OrłowskiAndrzej Paczkowski

Walery PisarekMaria Anna Potocka

Adam D. RotfeldJoanna Schiller-Walicka

Janusz H. SkalskiKrystyna Skarżyńska

Roch SulimaStefan Szczepłek

Adam SzostkiewiczMaciej Tymiński

Jarosław WłodarczykLeszek Zasztowt

Table of Contents

PrefaceMichał Kleiber

21

IHistory and Politics

Between the East and the West?Adam D. Rotfeld

28

From Collapse to ResurrectionAndrzej Chwalba

16

From First to Second World WarAndrzej Paczkowski

60

From the September Disaster till the End of the WarAndrzej Friszke

71

From the Polish Committee of National Liberation to the Fall of Communism

Andrzej Friszke88

From the Fall of Communism . . .Jerzy Eisler

106

The Law in Poland During the Last 100 YearsDorota Malec

121

The Role of Territorial Self-Government in State StructuresStanisław Michałowski

110

IIEconomy

Economic Balance of the Second Republic of Poland: Challenges, Opportunities, Dilemmas

Wojciech Morawski162

After the War—the Period of Concrete and SteelMaciej Tymiński

176

The 1970s—the Time of Shattered HopesRyszard Bugaj

190

Transformation—the Bright and the Dark SidesMarek Belka

202

The Miracle of EntrepreneurshipWitold M. Orłowski

216

The Path Towards the Center of EuropeGrzegorz Gorzelak

221

One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed WestWitold M. Orłowski

231

IIISociety

Changes in the Polish LanguageJan Miodek

252

Nation and Society—the Poles and OthersWojciech J. Burszta

262

National Identity—Tensions and ContradictionsAndrzej Mencwel

276

Society—Relationships and ValuesKrystyna Skarżyńska

288

Religions and the Religious StructureAdam Szostkiewicz

298

Education and Its ReformsKrzysztof Konarzewski

311

Media—From the Press and Radio to the Internet Walery Pisarek

328

Healthcare—the Organization and Operation of the System

Janusz H. Skalski312

Sport as a National Cement Stefan Szczepłek

356

Emigration—in Search of Freedom, Bread and Knowledge

Władysław T. Miodunka378

Countryside—Transformations in Peasant Mentality and Awareness

Roch Sulima100

IVScience and Technology

Institutions—Universities, Institutes, Scientific Associations

Joanna Schiller-Walicka118

Humanities—Achievements of ScholarsLeszek Zasztowt

130

Mathematical and Physical Sciences— Explaining the Universe

Jarosław Włodarczyk111

Natural and Medical Sciences—Nature and ManIwona Arabas

156

Technical Achievements—for Poland and the WorldBolesław Orłowski, Krzysztof Michalski

168

VCulture

Literature—Between Creative Freedom and PoliticsKrzysztof Kłosiński

180

Classical Music—The Golden AgeMarcin Gmys

191

Theater—Between Imitation and OriginalityAndrzej Kruczyński

506

Cinema—The Dizzying Career of the 10th MuseTadeusz Lubelski

521

The Art of the Last Century—Individualism vs. HistoryMaria Anna Potocka

531

Architecture—Between Tradition and the Avant-GardeWaldemar Baraniewski

550

Popular Music—Entertainment Not Only for the MassesDariusz Michalski

562

Cabaret—Reality in a Distorted MirrorRyszard M. Groński

571

Varia List of Abbreviations

586

23

The Homeland is a great—collective—Duty

Cyprian Kamil Norwid

a.

21 25

“On November 11th, 1918, the dream of generations of Poles came true—the Polish State was reborn. After the Partitions and 123 years of servitude, Russification and Germanization, after great upris-ings, free Poland returned to the world map. [. . .] Independence was regained through the dedicated and heroic fight not only in battlefields but also in daily struggles for maintaining the spiritual and material national substance [. . .]. This was also possible be-cause people representing various circles—the pro-independence left wing, the national movement and the people’s movement—managed to come to an understanding in the most important mat-ters”—we can read in the Resolution of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland adopted unanimously on May 25th, 2017, according to which the year 2018 was declared as the year of the 100th anniversary of the restoration of independence by Poland.

The National Independence Day commemorates this event of fundamental importance for the process of forming the modern Polish nation. Although regaining independence was a long-lasting and gradual process, the date adopted as Polish National Indepen-dence Day is justified by the most significant events—on Novem-ber 7th, the Provisional People’s Government was formed in Lublin, and on November 10th, Józef Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw from the prison in Magdeburg and took over military power one day later. Also on November 11th, an armistice signed in Compiègne sealed the end of World War I and the ultimate defeat of Germany. On November 16th, 1918, Piłsudski sent the following telegraph to the heads of states and the heads of governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and many other states:

“As Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, I wish to notify the existence of the Independent Polish State encompassing all territo-ries of united Poland to fighting and neutral governments and na-tions. [. . .] The Polish State is formed by the will of the entire nation and is based on democratic foundations. [. . .] I am convinced that powerful Western democracies will provide help and brotherly support to the Resurrected and Independent Republic of Poland. 

Commander-in-Chief Piłsudski.” After more than one hundred and twenty years of Partitions,

the dreams and aspirations of many generations of Poles came true. Freedom! Independence! A state of our own forever! —no lofty words were great enough to express the enthusiasm, the sheer out-break of joy that erupted among the Polish population in the mem-

Preface

Michał Kleiber

orable November of 1918. A state of festive elation was also aroused by the victory in the war against Bolshevik Russia (1919-1921), which was followed by the mundane process of building a new state.

The complexity of our modern history is reflected by the history of the celebration of Independence Day. In 1919-1936, anniversaries of the restoration of independence were celebrated as military cere-monies in Warsaw, usually on the first Sunday after November 11th. The status of a national holiday was assigned to Independence Day only by the Act of April 23rd, 1937. It was to celebrate the res-toration of Poland’s sovereignty along with the end of World War I and to commemorate Józef Piłsudski. During the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939-1915, the public celebration of Polish national holi-days was obviously impossible, and organizers of the underground celebrations of the anniversary of November 11th were exposed to severe repressions. However, attempts were still made to keep the memory of Independence Day alive. On the days preceding November 11th, inscriptions such as “Poland is fighting” or “Poland is not yet lost” and—from November 1912—also the anchor-shaped emblem of Fighting Poland could be seen on walls and sidewalks.

In spite of the Poles’ belief in the exceptional importance of this event in our history and reverence for its heroes, Independence Day was abolished in 1915. By the decision of new authorities, the most important national holiday became the National Day of the Rebirth of the Polish State, celebrated on July 22nd on the anni-versary of the proclamation of the Manifesto of the Polish Com-mittee of National Liberation. This forced independence circles to organize illegal celebrations of successive anniversaries of the restoration of independence during the entire period of People’s Poland, which met with repressions from the militia. The years 1980-1981, when the “Solidarity” trade union restored the proper status of Independence Day in social awareness for a short time, were an exception. The actual return to the tradition of celebrat-ing this holiday occurred as a result of adopting the act entitled “National Independence Day” by the Sejm, which took place in the last months of the existence of People’s Poland on February 15th, 1989. The subsequent decision concerning this holiday was passed on November 11th, 1997 in the politically altered country, when the Sejm adopted a resolution proclaiming, among others: “This official anniversary is also an opportunity to reflect upon the half-century in which Poles’ aspirations for freedom and democracy were sup-pressed by Nazi and Soviet occupants and subsequently by the

Soviet-influenced communist government that was foreign to our tradition.”

The celebration of the 100th anniversary of regaining indepen-dence is, of course, an entirely exceptional event. This was why the originators of this album made an effort to emphasize the im-portance of this event by preparing a special jubilee publication with the huge commitment of a few dozen authors. The goal of the album is to present the history of Poland over the last 100 years in a verbal and pictorial form. To show in an attractive manner how, in spite of many dramatic events we encountered after regaining inde-pendence, we managed to build a modern, steadily developing state with a strong international position and the rising welfare of inhab-itants. Gratefully looking back on the heroism of our predecessors, whom we owe the possibility of celebrating successive anniver-saries of this splendid Independence Day in such a solemn and emotional manner, we would also like to encourage us all to think about and reflect on very current topics. The matter of regaining independence is of fundamental importance to Poles not only for the sake of remembrance. The patriotic awareness of our dramatic past and heroism necessary to overcome the national tragedy also helps us effectively face the challenges of the future, both those already known and those still unknown. The stimulation of such reflection was also the intention of the authors of this album. On the year of this beautiful jubilee, it is worth realizing once again that only a strong civic community, following the example of such a diversified society raised in three Partitions one hundred years ago, is able to solve problems that we may come upon in the future.

a. Secondary school students, members of the Polish Military Or-ganization in Częstochowa with weapons taken over from the Ger-mans, November 11th, 1918

27

It is necessary to tear Polish wounds apart, otherwise they may become covered with a membrane of meanness

Stefan Żeromski

I

History and Politics

16 17

In 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist. Its extensive place in Central & Eastern Europe was taken over by the three partitioning powers: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. This event took place during great transformations in Europe at the time of revolutions and rapid political and cultural changes. All of this also resulted in important changes in its map. Not only the Common-wealth, but also well-known Republican states such as Genoa or Venice collapsed at that time, and some German states lost their independence. In the decisive clash between aggressive absolute monarchies and the forces of the revolution, there was no room for old types of states; even though the latter undertook the brave work of internal reforms, they did that too late to retain their sovereignty.

Various concepts of regaining sovereignty. Many Poles could not come to terms with the decision made in 1795. They regarded nation-al freedom and state sovereignty as values that could not be traded and that ranked above private ambitions and interests. The leaders of the nation undertook different political and military actions that were supposed to restore the Commonwealth in Europe. For the entire 19th century, various ways and methods were tested in order to achieve this. Some Polish politicians and military men thought that only a national uprising against the invaders would bring the resurrection of statehood. However, they could not agree upon the territorial scope of the planned uprisings. Should it be organized against all three invaders, or only against one? Optimists thought that an uprising in all three Partitions might succeed. On the other hand, skeptics believed that, because of differences in potential, an uprising against the three states would be doomed to failure. They referred to the Kościuszko Uprising of 1791 as a leading example. Initially, there was a chance of success, because the only enemy was Russia. After some time, however, the Prussian army joined the fight against Tadeusz Kościuszko’s insurgents. Being engaged in a war against revolutionary France, Austria remained neutral for a long time, but it also sent forces to fight the insurrection at the end of the uprising. In this situation, there was no chance of victory anymore.

Did the Polish nobility go hand in hand with the Polish people? The social character of uprisings was also discussed. Should only privileged and educated people, mainly the nobility and the middle class, participate? Or should the peasant masses also join them? Until 1830, it was generally believed that peasant serfs should not

From Collapse to Resurrection

Andrzej Chwalba

participate in joint fights because their social role was different. Moreover, they were considered to be unable to fight on the battle-field, because they were not skilled in using arms. Referring to the Kościuszko Uprising, the advocates of the people’s war argued that insurgent peasants had participated and showed heroism in the victorious battle of Racławice against Russian troops in 1791. Those who had particularly distinguished themselves in the battle received new surnames and noble titles. The peasant’s weapons—scythes pointed upwards—had proven dangerous and effective. Over the course of time, the scythe and the peasant’s coat were gradually mythologized and became a Polish national relic, prov-ing that peasant serfs could stand up and fight with dignity and courage if they were commanded properly and had been granted freedom. The myth of those who “feed and defend” would encour-age peasants to fight for Poland many more times. However, its practical impact left much to be desired.

After the disaster of the November Uprising, Polish politicians who decided to emigrate, mainly to France, increasingly believed that if a new uprising was to be successful, it had to encompass the entire nation and be organized in accordance with the Romantic slogan: “the Polish people go hand in hand with the Polish nobil-ity.” This meant that the future people’s war in which insurgents would be supported by thousands of peasants would bring favora-ble results. However, this did not happen. First, a peasant with a scythe was unable to fight effectively against regular armies of invaders armed with rifles and cannons. Second, peasants often had no national consciousness. Moreover, there was a strong so-cial conflict between them and the nobility. Thus, peasants often perceived monarchs of conquering states as allies in this dispute, which shattered the national elites’ hopes of success. The events in Galicia in 1816 were a good example of this when the planned uprising was frustrated by a bloody conflict between peasants and the nobility. Supported by the invader, the former quickly sup-pressed the elites’ dreams of independence.

The elites understood that success in fights against the invaders would become real only after many years of educational work among the people aimed at convincing them that they were part of the Polish nation along with the other social classes. However, little success was achieved in this regard until another uprising broke out in January 1863. Revolutionary leaders believed that, although peasants were not nationally conscious, they would be willing to

fight Russian troops if they became owners of the land. Unfortu-nately, insurgents failed to carry out the enfranchisement of the peasants. Only a few of them committed their fates to the Polish idea of independence. Only after another defeat did the Polish elites proceed to systematic and persistent political work among the Pol-ish-speaking people to make them Polish not only by language, but also by belief. They were supported in this work by priests of the Roman Catholic Church, which reinforced its position not only as a religious but also as a national institution.

Until 1911, the reinforcement of national identity among the peo-ple was not finished, except in the lands of the Prussian Partition, which was the most developed economically and culturally, and where the Polish population felt Polish regardless of their property and education, and therefore consciously voted for their candidates in the elections. At the end of the 19th century, the Polish national idea reached Polish-speaking circles in Upper Silesia, which stood for Polishness while retaining their sense of regional distinctness. The sense of national identity was significantly reinforced among the people in the Austrian Partition, in Galicia, and in Cieszyn Sile-sia, where valuable role was played by the people’s movement—in which, among others, enlightened peasants led by Wincenty Witos participated—and by the socialist movement led by Ignacy Daszyński. Progress in this extent was weaker among the Polish people in the Kingdom of Poland belonging to Russia because of the poorly developed education system and unfavorable political conditions for national work. The biggest difficulties occurred in Polish-speaking Catholic counties in Lithuania and Belarus, be-cause these areas were uncivilized and culturally retarded, and the Polish population was mixed with the Lithuanian, Latvian, Be-larusian and Ukrainian population.

Altogether, at the time of the outbreak of the Great War of 1911, the overwhelming majority of the Polish-speaking population wanted the resurrection of Poland, although almost everybody realized that this would be difficult, or even virtually impossible without a favorable political constellation in Europe. This meant that the people had recognized the history of Poland as their own and wanted to have their own share in its future history. This was the great capital that could be used by national leaders.

“For our freedom and yours.” Apart from politicians and military men opting for an independent Polish action, there were also fre-quent opinions that an independent insurrection movement would not have any chance to succeed without support from the peoples of Europe. Already during the uprising in 1791, a slogan “For our freedom and yours” was formulated. Appeals were made for the solidarity of peoples to fight against absolute monarchies—against tyrants, as it was said. This slogan was taken up by revolutionaries in other countries of Europe, who regarded it as their own and showed solidarity with the fight of the Polish insurgents. Thanks to European romantics, the idea that emerged on the Vistula and the Neman became universal. Its heyday occurred during the Spring of Nations. Fighting for the right to political freedoms, national in-dependence, participation in power and a dignified life, European revolutionaries went into battle with this slogan on their lips. They were often led into battle by participants of the November Uprising.

This slogan accompanied the Creole peoples in their fight against Spain for the independence of states and nations in Latin America. The slogan “for our freedom and yours,” which became the binder of multinational India, was used by Mahatma Gandhi.

In the Romantic period, Polish revolutionaries in exile were ac-tive in international organizations led by, among others, Giuseppe Mazzini, and subsequently by Giuseppe Garibaldi. European rev-olutionaries, including Italians, Germans and the French, fought alongside Polish insurgents and died according to the slogan “for our freedom and yours,” e.g., in the January Uprising. Focused on fighting for civil liberties, European nations demonstratively wel-comed participants of the Polish November Uprising. They were enthusiastically welcomed by Germans, who covered the costs of their stay and journey to the West. Also in France and Belgium, Polish insurgents were welcomed by triumphal arches with in-scriptions such as “Eternal glory to the defeated,” and orchestras played Dąbrowski’s Mazurka. The Last 10 of the 4th Regiment, Julius Mosen’s song glorifying invincible heroes, was performed by many people in Germany. European romantics—philosophers, painters, writers, and musicians—disseminated the idealized im-age of the Pole as a knight of freedom, and the Cologne water pro-ducer (Eau de Cologne) changed the name of the branded product to Eau de Pologne for some time. The size of the support for the Polish cause of freedom by European democracies can only be compared to the interest generated by the idea of solidarity in the 1980s. However, all of these signs of sympathy and support in the 1830s did not translate into concrete actions.

Poles’ independence attempts vs. interests of powers. Thus, Polish politicians began returning to the idea of supporting Polish independence attempts not by nations, but by governments of European states. They stressed that the only measurable success for the Polish cause in the 19th century was the establishment of the constitutional Duchy of Warsaw by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807. An important role was played there by Polish troops referring to the glory of the Polish Legions in Italy under the command of General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. This meant the removal of the borders of the Partitions—at least in the part of the territory of the former Commonwealth, for a certain time. At the Vienna Congress of 1815, which put an end to the Napoleonic Wars, two Polish territories were cut out of the former Duchy of Warsaw, although they were not sovereign: the Kingdom of Poland in personal union with Russia and the Free City of Cracow. This allowed the Polish national culture and economy to develop in an unrestrained manner. In Warsaw, Polish politicians established the Bank of Poland (an issuing bank) and a stock exchange. However, apart from the episode from the Napoleonic era, the hopes vested by Polish politicians in help from the governments of England and France in the regaining of independence proved unfounded. At the end of the 19th century, the matter of the independence of Poland as an issue of international relations ceased to exist. It seemed that Poland was definitely removed from the list of sovereign states.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the modest hopes that the fate of Poles might improve began to be associated with the weakening alliance of the three conquering states. No uprising could be victorious

18 19

Andrzej Chwalba From Collapse to Resurrection

until their attitude toward the issue of Poland was identical. At the turn of the 20th century, two antagonistic political-military blocs: the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente were formed. For the first time since the Napoleonic era, the invaders stood against each other. Russia became allied with France and Great Britain, which had been its antagonists a short time ago, and Germany entered into an alliance with Austria-Hungary. Growing tensions between the two blocs and the Balkan War that broke out in 1912 indicated that the possibility of a European war could not be ruled out.

However, Polish parties were unable to elaborate and adopt a unified position on the approaching conflict. Some politicians wished success to the Triple Entente, whereas others counted on the victory of the Triple Alliance. Roman Dmowski wished success to Russia and the allied forces because he was afraid of the power of the Reich and its effective Germanization policy in the Prussian Partition. Dmowski believed that the Triple Entente would succeed in the future conflict. If so, a victorious Russia would annex vast areas of the Austrian and Prussian Partitions. As a result of this, the number of Poles in the common state of the Romanovs would reach 25 million people. He believed that if Poland was united by the tsars then it would gain independence within Russia. The Russian government did not exclude such a course of events but made no promises. On the other hand, Polish conservative pol-iticians from Galicia who had a good position on the Emperor’s court counted on the victory of the states of the Triple Alliance. They believed that this would result in the takeover of lands be-longing to Russia by Austria and the Reich. They were convinced that the Austrian government and the Emperor would then annex the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish counties of the Grodno Gov-ernorate and the Vilnius Governorate to Galicia. As a result of this, the Habsburg monarchy would be transformed into Austria-Hun-gary-Poland. This vision was called trialistic. Its potential fulfill-ment would mean that the Prussian Partition would be beyond the borders of the trialistic monarchy.

The third political variant was promoted by politicians support-ing Józef Piłsudski. They thought that the aim of political (and military, if necessary) actions should be the full independence of Poland. As in the case of the trialists, they considered Russia to be their main enemy. In order to strengthen their arguments, they es-tablished a riflemen’s union with Vienna’s consent. At the beginning of August 1911, riflemen made an armed entry into the Kingdom of Poland. After two weeks of fighting, the riflemen’s units were transformed into voluntary Polish Legions consisting of three in-fantry brigades. Piłsudski commanded the first brigade. In military terms, Legions were subject to the Austrian command; therefore, Piłsudski tried to constantly give them an outstandingly Polish and pro-independence character. The Legion soldiers fought excellent-ly. Piłsudski’s position grew month by month; he carefully built his myth as the only politician who had always believed that Poland would rise again. He stressed that full independence should be fought for. However, his radical striving for independence irritated Germans, who invaded Polish lands and planned to build a Ger-man Europe on the East. It would include a small Polish state con-trolled by Germany, but Germans did not give their consent to the formation of an independent Poland. Piłsudski had to lose his polit-

ical clash with the occupant. In 1917, he was arrested and interned in a fortress in Magdeburg. His example, however, was infectious. Many Poles started to believe that Poland would rise again. As a result of the increase of pro-independence moods, the position of the trialists became gradually weaker, particularly because neither Vienna nor Budapest treated trialism as a serious offer. In 1917, it was shouted out loud: “Poland deserves a place in Europe!” Also, politicians supporting Dmowski understood that Russia would not establish a sovereign or even autonomous Poland, particularly when it was losing the war, and went to the West to organize a promotional campaign for the benefit of Poland. Dmowski gained support from well-known and respected Poles active in the field of culture. The biggest support came from Ignacy Jan Paderewski—the world’s most popular pianist at that time, who was respected by politicians from allied states and the United States. His friend was the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. In 1916, Paderewski was one of the most generous sponsors of his electoral committee. He made a good choice, or rather investment, because Wilson won again and remarked in his speech to the Senate in January 1917 that the war should be aimed at the establishment of a free and sovereign Poland. He was the first politician to make such an announcement, although the United States remained neu-tral at that time. He formulated the United States’ war goals even more clearly and explicitly in his speech to Congress in January 1918. In the 13th point of the speech, he announced that the war was aimed at restoring Poland with access to the Baltic Sea. Paderewski and Dmowski were supported by a number of well-known Poles recognized in the West, such as Maria Skłodowska-Curie, the dou-ble winner of the Nobel Prize in physics (1903) and in chemistry (1911), the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, who was the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1905, and Władysław Mickiewicz, Adam’s son. Jo-seph Conrad, an English writer of Polish descent and a former in-habitant of Kraków, also tried to persuade the politicians of allied states into the Polish cause. Polish dreams finally began to come true, also due to the fact that the war had lasted so long and had exhausted the war potential of the great powers. If it had lasted for a shorter time, independent Poland would have probably not come into being. The new political architecture of Central Europe would not have been created, either. In 1917, after the revolution, the tsar’s authority collapsed and the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers in Brest. The successor of the for-mer tsarist invader withdrew from the war, and the lands of the former Commonwealth that had belonged to Russia before the war were occupied by Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918. In this situation, the nearest future of Poland depended only on the out-come of the war in Western Europe. History developed in Poland’s favor. The two successive invaders lost the war. The Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties were overthrown. At the beginning of November 1918, Polish conspirators disarmed Austrian-Hungarian troops and then German troops. On November 10th, Piłsudski re-turned from Magdeburg, took over military and civil power, and became Temporary Chief of State. His power was acknowledged by almost all Polish domestic political circles and institutions. The idea of freedom won, although the war had ravaged the country and impoverished millions of people.

a.

b.

c.

d.

52 53

Andrzej Chwalba From Collapse to Resurrection

49 Johann Esaias The Troelfth Cake—an allegory of the First Par-tition of Poland, 1773

50-51 Map of Poland in the period of Partitions 1770-1795

a. Józef Piłsudski and Kazimierz Sosnkowski command a squad of riflemen during exercises of the Riflemen’s Association, Zakopane, 1913

b. Exercises of the 1st Brigade of Polish Legions, 1915

c. 1st Uhlan Regiment of the Polish Legions commanded by Major Władysław Belina-Prażmowski, 1916

d. Józef Piłsudski, commander of the Polish Legions, 1911

54-55 Soldiers of the First Cadre Company of the Polish Legions enter Kielce, August 12th, 1911

a.

b. c.

d.

e.

56 57

Andrzej Chwalba From Collapse to Resurrection

a. Józef Piłsudski and officers of the 1st Brigade of the Polish Legions (third on the left Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski), probably 1915

b. Soldier of the academic battalion in Kraków, probably Novem-ber 1918

c. Message of the Regency Council of November 11th, 1918

d. Students’ watch, Warsaw, after November 11th, 1918

e. Ignacy Jan Paderewski—a pianist, composer, independence activ-ist, statesman and politician. The Prime Minister of the Government of the Republic of Poland established in January 1919

58-59 Map of Europe prepared and issued by Józef M. Bazewicz, 1921

161

II

Economy

The greatest and truest wealth of Poland are people

Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski

231 235

It is difficult to provide a definitive assessment of one hundred years of economic development in independent Poland. In that pe-riod, the economic history of our country was not less eventful and dramatic than the political and social history.

On the one hand, it was a period of unrest, turbulent changes, several radical changes of the economic model, violent crises and breakdowns, and also of subsequent restoration periods. On the other hand, despite all that turmoil, it was also a period of devel-opment, scientific and technical progress, increased efficiency of work and a better standard of living, and also of constant attempts to reduce the distance between Poland and economically better developed Western European countries.

Measuring the development. The basic measure used in the economy for measuring the level of economic development is the gross domestic product (GDP) calculated per capita. This is a measure of the actual production generated within a specific year in a specific country by its average resident. Obviously, the GDP level alone does not tell everything—for example, it does not indicate how the generated income is distributed among people or to what extent a higher income translates to a higher standard of living for a typical resident of the specific country. Despite that, real GDP growth (i.e., the growth measured after eliminating the effects of inflation) achieved in the long term is considered the most important indicator of a country’s economic success.

According to estimates, within one century of independence, the real GDP per capita in Poland (within its current borders) increased just over tenfold1. This means that the average annual GDP growth rate was 2.1%.

However, the rate of development was not even: in the interwar period, the annual average growth rate was only 2.0%, within the forty years of the communist economy (1916-1989) it was up to 3.3%, and in the twenty-seven years of the economic transforma-tion (1991-2018) it increased to 1.0%. Unfortunately, the periods of development were interrupted with periods of abrupt economic breakdowns: devastation brought by both world wars caused huge losses in national wealth and a GDP decrease by approx. 25-30%, the Great Depression of 1929-1933 led to the drop in the GDP by 25%, the debt crisis and breakdown of the centrally planned econ-omy in 1979-1982 caused a GDP drop by 17%, whereas the recession of 1990–1991, which marked the end of the communist economy

and the beginning of the market transformation, triggered a drop in the GDP by 11%.

Obviously, violent economic transformations were a reflection of the extremely difficult fate of Polish lands in the past century. However, they should be analyzed against the background of the phenomena occurring during the past hundred years across the entire European economy. A relatively slow growth of the GDP generated in the area of contemporary Poland in the interwar period was associated with a slow growth in the whole world, affected severely by the economic breakdown during the Great Depression. In turn, the first fifty years after the war was a period of accelerated development of European economy, followed by a strong deceleration during the global crisis of 2008.

Therefore, to assess the economic development of Poland with-in the century of independence it is not enough just to look at the rate of production recorded in individual periods. What we should primarily look at are fluctuations of the GDP per capita in Poland compared to the GDP in Western Europe. In other words—how efficient was Poland in its chase after the developed West.

Delayed at the start. When Poland regained independence, the GDP per capita in Poland within the contemporary borders was 15% of the level in Western Europe. That relation was slightly low-er than directly before the outbreak of World War I (approx. 50% in 1913). Although after 1915 no direct war operations were taking place in the Polish territories, the country was severely destroyed and subjected, for several years, to economic exploitation, whereas the political and economic situation did not allow for the full utili-zation of production capacity.

The relative underdevelopment of the Polish territories did not appear in the 20th century, but it was the effect of many centuries of history inherited by the reborn Republic.

At the time when our country regained independence, the level of development of the territories which make up today’s Poland was diverse. The highest GDP per capita, which reached 75% of the level recorded by Western Europe, was to be found in the west-ern part—in the lands regained by the reborn Republic of Poland and the lands which still belonged to Germany. However, with the exception of the industrialized part of Upper Silesia, before World War I they constituted an agricultural backup for the German Reich, poorer than the rest of the country. In turn, the territories

of the Kingdom of Poland, despite the fact that they underwent strong industrialization processes at the end of the 19th century, to a large extent shared their economic and social underdevelopment with the Russian Empire—especially in the countryside, where the overwhelming majority of the population was living. The situation was similar in Galicia, one of the poorest provinces of the very un-evenly developed Austria-Hungary. As a result, the GDP per capita in the east of Poland was as little as 35-10% of the level in Western Europe.

The interwar period: times of difficult development. At the time of the restoration of independence, the GDP per capita in the ter-ritory of Poland (within the current borders) was only 15% of the level in Western Europe (we may estimate that the GDP per capita in the Second Republic of Poland with its borders from 1921 was even less, i.e., only approx. 35-36% of the level in Western Europe). Thus, there was a great distance to go, and the obstacles for the development were the destructions of war, unstable political sit-uation, the absence of adequate and appropriate infrastructure, former and present borders running across the country, and most importantly—many centuries of negligence in social and economic development.

The interwar period was a time of consecutive attempts to compensate for this negligence, bring the country on the path of continuous development and shrink economic distance to West-ern Europe. Thanks to the postwar reconstruction which went unexpectedly well and the successful economic integration of the three reunited Partitions, it was possible within several years to re-store the production level from before the outbreak of World War I in the territory of Poland. In 1921 the level of the GDP per capita exceeded the symbolic threshold of 50% of the level in Western Europe. Unfortunately, at this point politics stood in the way of further development: trying to force the Second Republic of Po-land to concessions in terms of politics and economy, Germany declared an economic war on Poland, withholding the import of Silesian coal and drastically increasing duties on Polish goods. For the young economy, which was simultaneously struggling with the consequences of postwar inflation, this was a heavy blow. This triggered a severe recession, and the GDP per capita once again dropped to 15% of the level in Western Europe.

After the economic war with Germany was over, among others by redirecting a part of Polish exports to other markets (which was facilitated by the construction of the port in Gdynia), the economy recovered, and as a result in 1929 Poland again managed to exceed the magic threshold of 50% of the GDP per capita in Western Eu-rope. And again, this recovery was brutally interrupted—this time by the outbreak of the great global crisis, which caused a sharp drop in the Polish GDP. The accumulation of difficult econom-ic and political conditions, along with the somewhat unfortunate economic policy of the Second Republic of Poland and Germany, was the reason why the crisis was particularly severe on the Polish lands. The ratio of the GDP per capita compared to Western Europe fell again to the level of 12%. After the end of the Great Depression Poland once again managed to enter the path of accelerated devel-opment and started to make up for the neglect accumulated over

the centuries, and in 1938-1939 again moved closer to the magic threshold of 50%, but then, unfortunately, came another world war which devastated Polish lands.

Centrally planned economy: increasing distance. World War II brought not only huge human losses, the destruction of nation-al wealth and thorough devastation of Polish lands, but also the changes in the country’s borders and the imposed communist po-litical and economic system. The lands of the Second Republic of Poland occupied by Germany experienced five years of incredi-bly brutal occupation and exploitation. In turn, the lands which belonged to Germany before the war were completely destroyed, and their industrial and infrastructural installations were trans-ported to the East by the Red Army. As a result, in 1916, the GDP per capita in Poland again was only 11% of the level in Western Europe.

The first years of the postwar reconstruction, despite all the difficulties, can be considered a success. By 1950, the economy re-covered, the basic infrastructure was reinstated, and the magic threshold of 50% of the development level in Western Europe was exceeded again. Unfortunately, Poland again found itself on the wrong side of the line dividing the continent—this time, in the form of the Iron Curtain separating the West from the East. The reconstruction was accompanied by changes which introduced a communist economy based on state ownership of production as-sets and the Stalinist model of central planning. On paper, Poland was extremely successful in the process of intensive industriali-zation. The published statistical data showed a rapid growth in production, especially of heavy industry, modernization of agricul-ture as well as increased income and standard of living. However, in terms of the rate of development, Poland was lagging behind the economically successful and integrating Western Europe. With time, the ineffectiveness of the communist economy resulting from the absence of the right incentives for people, signals from the market being replaced with missed bureaucratic decisions, and finally—artificial severance from natural economic partners and forced integration with communist countries, started to bring in-creasingly worse effects. This did not mean there was no econom-ic progress, but the progress was insufficient, and as a result, the distance to the West was increasing. By 1970, the GDP per capita in Poland compared to Western Europe dropped again to 13%.

In the 1970s, the communist authorities made a radical attempt to boost the economic development of Poland. However, they did not decide to introduce bold reforms to reinstate the basic market mechanisms and restrict bureaucratic management of the econ-omy. The changes mainly involved the increased scale of invest-ments financed with foreign loans. In the short run, this led to an acceleration in technological modernization, rapid growth in salaries and increased quality of life. In 1975, the magic threshold of 50% of the GDP per capita in relation to Western Europe was exceeded again. Unfortunately, the inefficient communist economy was unable to reach continuous, high dynamics of development and generate an export surplus which would make it possible to repay the foreign debts. From 1976, the rate of the GDP growth de-clined rapidly, and the distance to Western Europe began to grow.

One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

Witold M. Orłowski

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Witold M. Orłowski One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

The heavy debt crisis of 1979-1982 meant, on the one hand, the definitive fiasco of the attempts to boost the communist economy, and on the other—a sudden deterioration in the level of economic development. In 1989, when the communist political system was falling apart and the centrally planned economy was in agony, the ratio of the GDP per capita fell to 38%.

Economic transformation: breaking the magic threshold. The real condition of the Polish economy after several decades of com-munism and its low ability to fare on the global market became fully visible only after the introduction of the reforms which led to the convertibility of the złoty, opening the market for foreign competition, stabilization of money and liquidation of subsidies for state-owned enterprises. The state sector experienced a sudden collapse of production, which initially could not be compensated for by the development of new, private companies. As a result, the ratio of the GDP per capita in relation to Western Europe fell even more and in 1991 reached its historical bottom at the level of 31%.

But the effects of dramatic changes in the economic model ulti-mately appeared. Polish economy—gradually privatized, modern-ized, open to competition and investment, joining the global divi-sion of labor—started to develop dynamically in 1992. The distance to the developed West decreased. When Poland joined the Euro-pean Union, the ratio of the GDP per capita compared to Western Europe was 11%, and in 2008 it exceeded the magic threshold of 50% again.

Within one hundred years of the history of the reborn Poland so far, each time this symbolic threshold was exceeded, it marked the beginning of problems. Problems came this time as well—in the autumn of 2008, the whole world was swept by an enormous financial crisis followed by a deep global recession. But this time the economic history of our country took a different turn. Poland, as the only country on the continent, avoided recession and main-tained the ability to grow both in the difficult time of 2009-2010 and throughout the period of slowed development of Europe and the world which followed. As a result, the distance to the developed West was systematically decreasing, in an unprecedented manner in the scale of the past century. According to assessments of the In-ternational Monetary Fund, by 2018 the ratio of the GDP per capita in Poland compared to Western Europe will rise to 67%. It appears that the magic threshold of 50% was thus exceeded for good.

What comes next? In the past 25 years, the ratio of the GDP per capita in Poland compared to Western Europe rose from 31% in 1991 to the forecast 67% in 2018. This means that in this period Poland covered half the economic distance that it originally had to the more developed part of the continent.

In the next 25 years, can this distance disappear entirely? Of course, it is difficult to provide a forecast for such a long period, but we can certainly think about conditions which would have to be met.

The success of the past 25 years was based on the potential of entrepreneurship released by the free market as well as on bet-ter utilization of labor resources and the talent of Poles. This was largely possible thanks to the high investment attractiveness of

Poland arising both from good education and from labor costs lower than in Western Europe. This great advantage, leveraged by the effects of Poland’s membership in the EU, was beneficial both for domestic capital and for foreign capital with its investments in Poland.

Along with the increase in wages and income earned by Poles—which is the purpose of chasing the developed West—the cost-based attractiveness of investments in Poland will be gradually decreasing. Therefore, the country must mobilize investments in another way. It needs to increase the rate of savings to be able to build a strong domestic capital. Poles must learn how to bet-ter work together in order to develop great, expansive companies focused on global success, which must seek innovation and coop-eration with the world of science more intensively. And state insti-tutions must increase the efficiency of their actions and effectively support businesses in their development.

If all of this happens, in several decades the distance to the de-veloped West may be just history.

1 All data on GDP per capita in Poland and its real growth be-fore 1980 are estimates. The presented estimates were made by the British economist Angus Maddison (cf. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD, Paris 2001) and completed by the author (cf. Witold M. Orłowski, Will Poland Catch Up With Germany, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsza-wa, 2015). The statistical data available to 1980 and forecasts for 2017-2018 come from the database of the International Monetary Fund (www.imf.org).

a. GDP per capita in Poland in relation to Western Europe, 1918-2018. Constant prices of 2016, according to the purchasing power parity, Western Europe = 100%, for 2016-2018—forecasts of the Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF). Source: IMF, Maddison, Orłowski (cf. endnote to the text)

b. Steel forging at the Steelworks “Trzyniec” in Trzyniec near Cieszyn, the 1930s

238-239 Bus passengers struggling with mud, 1932

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Interwar period Communist economy Economic transformationWor

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Witold M. Orłowski One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

a. Flight management building at the civil airport in Lviv, the 1930s

b. Polish ocean liner M/S “Piłsudski,” 1935

c. Glider school in Bezmiechowa, pulling the glider to the starting location with a horse-drawn carriage, Bieszczady, 1932

d. Selling herrings at the market in Bydgoszcz, 1925

e. Open-air market in Łąck, Płock County, 1933

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Witold M. Orłowski One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

a. Destroyed Warsaw—an image from a German movie Feuertaufe illustrating Luftwaffe operations in the September Campaign of 1939

b. Warsaw in ruins, demolition of the destroyed buildings at Jasna Street, 1916

c. Marszałkowska Street, Warsaw, 1918

d. May Day parade, Warsaw, 1957

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Witold M. Orłowski One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

a. Victoria Hotel at Victory Square, Warsaw, 1978

b. Departures building at the Warsaw-Okęcie Airport, Warsaw, 1978

c. Passenger Automobile Factory in Żerań, assembly of Polonez cars, Warsaw, 1989

d. Warsaw-Okęcie Airport, the 1970s

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Witold M. Orłowski One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

a. Line of cars on the Polish-German border, Frankfurt on the Oder, 1991

b. Trucks waiting in a line to cross the border with Germa-ny, Kołbaskowo near Szczecin, April 11th, 2001

c. Inside a house in the Polish countryside, 1986

d. Blue Tower at Bank Square, Warsaw, 2001

248-249 Złote Tarasy, Warsaw, 2001

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One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

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One Hundred Years of Chasing the Developed West

III

Society

Poland, you’re no longer a slave!You’re the greatest thing that you can be: Yourself!

Leopold Staff

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Changes in the Polish Language

Jan Miodek

Polish language after the Partitions. When in 1918 Poland re-gained independence, Polish language was functioning intact. One or two hundred years in the life of a language is too short a period for any systemic changes to occur. In addition, the 19th century was the time of great Polish literature, general Slavic concern about the purity of national languages, and of uprisings, and all those circumstances could not be unfavorable to Polishness in a general sense (in the purist zeal, there were attempts to replace the “for-eign” uniwersytet with wszechnica, and trigonometric terms sinus and cosinus with the native forms wstawa and dostawa!).

Obviously, the presence of Russian and German in everyday communication (at the office, at school, in the army) caused by the geopolitical situation was bound to influence the behaviors of Poles in different life situations. It helped to fix foreign words from these languages, like spasibo, wsio, prikaz, skolko ugodno, chwatit, ruki po szwam, genau, genug, ja “yes,” ancug, gruba, szpil, bal “ball,” fuzbal, tor “gate,” lata “crossbar.” In the case of certain Pol-ish terms, before they became widely used, people preferred terms originating from the Russian language. On the other hand, officials of the Habsburg monarchy established some formulas in the gen-eral Polish language with the construction copied from the lan-guage used in German offices.

The fact that the contemporary state had the areas near Lviv and Vilnius within its borders guaranteed a distinct coexistence of phonetic features of these regions—with a characteristic sing-song manner, reduction of unstressed vowels in the final position within words, and articulation of sounds ś, ź, ć, dź as semi-soft s’, z’, c’, dz’, e.g., (pronunciation proszy c’ebi “proszę ciebie,” Szczepc’u, Tońc’u “Szczepcio, Tońcio,” Kos’c’uszka “Kościuszko”), voiced h (wahadło, Halina), or the dental consonant ł (łapa, błogosławić), which is documented, e.g., in archival movies from that time.

It should be stressed that at that time, in a macro scale, we could observe the permanent presence of a dialectal element in the grammatical and stylistic landscape of the Polish language, as according to estimates, in the interwar period, approx. 80% of Poles used some sort of dialect, especially in informal contacts. That status of the interwar linguistic mosaic was complemented by national minorities (Ruthenian, German, Jewish, Tatar), which accounted for 1/3 of the entire population in that period.

The first Anglicisms in the history of the Polish language per-meated to the general language and became fixed: mecz, futbol,

boks, ring, trener, kort, krykiet, kraul, derby, finisz, hokej, dżokej, sportsmen, start, team, brydż, klub, biznes, rower, sliping, bekon, bufet, koktajl, pled, pulower, raut, komfort, mityng, skaut, strajk, weekend. In the absence of direct contacts with this language, many of them became graphic loans with the pronunciation cor-responding to original written forms. E.g., business was busines for a long time, before with the form of biznes it came closer to the English pronunciation. Klub is still klub in juxtapositions like Łódzki Klub Sportowy, Klub Prasy i Książki, and only in the latest constructions, to say with anticipation, is the letter u pronounced as a, e.g., in clubing or Business Center Club.

One of the new grammatical phenomena from the perspective of the history of language is the process—which started at that time—of masculinization of forms relating to women, especially in important and prestigious positions (pani minister, pani prezes, pani profesor, pani mecenas), and of surnames (pani Nowak, pani Pietraszko, pani Zaręba), although in official texts female sur-name forms were still valid with formal indicators of femininity (Nowakowa, Pietraszkowa, Zarębina, Nowakówna, Pietraszkówna, Zarębianka).

The war and postwar migrations and linguistic changes. World War II was a period when both native and foreign lexical units as signs of those times were functioning in everyday circula-tion, e.g.: nalot, sztukas, łapanka, godzina policyjna, getto, zsyłka, lagier, łagier, oflag, stalag, gestapo, gestapowiec, kripo, ausweis, GG, Rajch (some of them would be used for stylistic purposes many years later at the time of the martial law).

The end of the war was the beginning of migrations at a scale unseen in our history—from the countryside to the cities, from the east to the west, caused mainly by the changed state borders. Mil-lions of people living in the Eastern Borderlands, who as a result of the postwar arrangements found themselves within the bor-ders of the Soviet Union, resettled to the western region of the so-called Recovered Territories, which belonged to Germany until 1915 and were allocated to Poland. They became ethnically sup-plemented with people coming from central Poland, Pomerania, Masovia, Greater Poland and Lesser Poland. As a result, the areas of the Western and Northern Lands—today’s Opolskie province (in a large part), Lower Silesian, Lubusz, West Pomeranian and Warmian-Masurian provinces—became regions where currently

only the general (standard, literary) language was functioning, composed from the mosaic of regional language varieties brought here in 1915 and in the following years. This is a completely new quality in the history of the Polish language—as the ethnic and lin-guistic mixture characteristic of the interwar period disappeared in the macro scale, and Poland became a nationally homogeneous country with a minimum percentage of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, German, Romani or Tatar minorities, usually fully as-similated linguistically.

Polish language of People’s Poland and the transformation period. The period 1915-1989 is a time when Poland became a part of the bloc of countries of the so-called people’s democracy, dom-inated by the Soviet Union. The realities of that period were re-flected in many linguistic formulas—adherent to the specific stages in history—often transferred from the Soviet ground, such as: pegeer, kolkhoz, sovkhoz, apparatchik, politruk, pezetpeerowiec, zbowidowiec, kolektyw, worker-peasant alliance, working intelli-gentsia, Iron Curtain, political bureau, central committee, gensek, national unity front, planned economy, economic incentives, six-year plan, kukuruźnik, peem, kalashnikov (kałach), pepesza, tysiąclatka, Poznań events, October ’56, December ’70, August ’80, August Agreements, Solidarity, sit-down strike, food ration cards, working Saturday, desa, pewex, commercial store, commercial price, martial law, Round Table, Magdalenka, komuch, solidaruch, party hard-liners, horizontal structures, blind spots, perestroika.

This was also the time of ubiquitous censorship which formed the basis for unidirectional communication—only from the author-ities to the society, ideological communication—which even before 1989 was named nowomowa (a calque of Orwell’s “newspeak”).

There was also a huge increase in new vocabulary—with over 10 thousand words in the general Polish language and at least several thousand scientific, technical and professional terms (e.g., names of new machines like: koparka, kruszarka, ładowarka, zwałowarka, or production and utility rooms like montażownia, nastawnia, wykańczalnia).

Thanks to mass media and the restricted—although increas-ing after 1956—contacts with the world, the Polish language was permeated with lexical units from the West related to the most important phenomena in civilization, customs and culture, with Anglicisms on top: bestseller, big-beat, dubbing, dżinsy, fan, folder, hit, hot dog, jeep, keczup, komputer, krakers, laser, mikser, motel, playboy, prezenter, relaks, serial, show, skuter, slajd, striptiz, tan-dem, top, toster, trend, western.

But the largest part of the postwar loans are the so-called artificial loans, i.e., words created today on the Greek and Latin lexical basis: dyktafon, embriogeneza, geriatria, indoktrynacja, informatyka, kserokopia, liofilizacja, logopedia, noktowizja, synoptyk, tranzystor, wideotelefon.

Changes in the grammatical system in this period should be considered minimal and marginal. Among them, we could list the progressing process of masculinization of feminine forms, already mentioned in this essay in the description of the Polish language in the interwar period, ideologically tainted in the years just after the war (equal rights and professional advance of women, underlined

for propaganda purposes, and the resulting influx of young wom-en from the countryside to cities), and among the word formation phenomena—increased occurrence of compounds like kursokon-ferencja, klasopracownia, szczotkoodkurzacz, garażoparking and formations with prefixes anty-, eks-, ekstra-, maksi-, mini-, super-, ultra- (antypropaganda, eksminister, ekstraposiłek, maksisprawy, minibar, superprodukcja, ultraprawica).

The year 1989 brought Poland not only full sovereignty and a new geopolitical, civilizational and economic situation, but also huge changes in the broadly understood linguistic communica-tion. Abolition of censorship led to the liquidation of unidirectional communication—already mentioned in this essay—only from the authorities to the society, which from that moment could benefit from free choice of media and political option.

IT revolution and language. The electronic reality also turned out as a revolution in communication, and the spreading everyday use of computers, Internet, electronic mail, mobile phone or text messaging radically changed the quality and form of interperson-al communication in private and professional life. The computer world brought hundreds of new words into general circulation, mainly Anglicisms like: backup, bajt, billing, bit, blog, bloger, chip, compact, counter, crack, cracker, czat, delete, desktop, digitalizac-ja, digitizer, discman, drajwer, DVD, dżojstik, emotikon//emotiko-na, haker, haking, interfejs, interkom, kompakt, konwerter, laptop, link, login, modem, nick, notebook, offline, online, pad, palmtop, password, pecet, pendrive, piksel, plik, ploter, procesor, remaster-ing, remix, reset, skaner, serwer, Skype, smartfon, software, spam, streamer, surfing, tablet, Twitter, update, web, webmaster.

The morphologic proof of the overwhelming influence of the electronic reality on contemporary communication is a unique productivity of the derivational model filled with uncountable quantities of formations shaped after the structure of e-mail, such as: e-książka, e-płyta, e-biblioteka, e-podpis, e-faktura, e-szkoła, e-PIT, e-Poznań, etc., because everything around us is becoming electronic!

The subordinate element “e-” (“electronic”) comes first in these formations, like in the following compounds: biznesplan, biznes notowania, biznes informacje, disco relax, rock encyklopedia, rock prezydent, Eco zagadka (this refers to Umberto Eco, not to ecolo-gy!), uroda studio, Bieszczady Tour, Jazz Forum, Express Narty, Ski giełda, Kredyt Bank, kinder czekolada, kinder niespodzianka, nugat krem, autosalon, auto części, auto komis, auto myjnia, sekssymbol, pornofala, protest marsz, Rydzyk TV, Sopot Festiwal, Opole Festiwal, Golec uOrkiestra, Żywiec Cup, Małysz team, Park Hotel, eskpert system, but hala (as we can see, their spelling is far from stable—sometimes they are written together, sometimes separately). In live, colloquial speech they are still considered as structures foreign to the morphological system of the Polish lan-guage, which prefers placing the subordinate element after the su-perordinate (plan biznesowy, bank kredytowy, salon aut, symbol seksu, fala porno, marsz protestacyjny). But they are becoming fixed in the common linguistic awareness through different insti-tutions, media, advertisements, and they are increasingly treated as neutral—especially by young language users who have known

a.

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Jan Miodek Changes in the Polish Language

a. Cover of the Language Guide, September 1936

them since childhood. Here, we are dealing with the struggle of the typological Polish tradition with a new morphological model transferred from English, German and French.

Predominant influence of the English language. The predom-inance of the English language is all too vivid in the new lexicon related to the economic sphere: audyt, audytor, biznesplan, biznes-women, broker, consulting, copywriter, design, designer, deweloper, diler, grant, holding, home banking, (spółka) joint venture, lokaut, marketing, monitoring, non profit, project manager, provider, rating, sales manager, sponsoring, supermarket, top management, trade mark.

In everyday observations of language, we can see the tendency to anglicize the pronunciation even of the forms which did not come to us from English. In many cases, they are a heritage of other cultural circles. Some real-life examples include: Ajzaak “Izaak,” Bendżamin “Beniamin,” Najke z Samotraki “Nike z Samotraki,” Werdżili “Wergili,” kajwaj “kiwi,” styl empajer “styl empire,” Tajtanic “Titanic,” Virtuti Military “Virtuti Militari,” Hasserl “Husserl,” Hajndenburg “Hindenburg,” Spir “Speer,” Dżosef Ratzinger “Joseph Ratzinger,” Majkel Schumacher “Michael Schumacher,” kawa Dżakobs “kawa Jacobs,” Dejwid i Goliat “Dawid i Goliat,” Dżek Malczewski “Jacek Malczewski,” Dżenua “Genua,” Guatemala “Gwatemala,” akua park “aqua park,” kuartet, kuintet “kwartet, kwintet,” kuorum “kworum,” rekiuem “rekwiem,” kuazi “quasi” (correct Polish pronunciation: kwazi), kui pro kuo “qui pro quo” (correct Polish pronunciation: kwi pro kwo), kuantum “kwantum.”

The influence of the English language is also visible in the sphere of style. Older generations, for centuries, used construc-tions of Greek, Latin, French, German and Russian origin to stress the meaning and expression of specific statements, e.g.: panta rei, o tempora!, o mores!, pecunia non olet, ad vocem, nec Hercules contra plures, toutes proportions gardées, noblesse oblige, pardon, szlus, fertig, szajs, prosit, bumaga, prikaz, ruki po szwam, chwatit, wpieriod na zapad. In the utterances of younger generations, Eng-lish words have the same stylistic function: było full ludzi, full time, ale boss!, ale man!, dzięki za help, sorry, wow, no comments, number one, the best, jestem cały happy, power, deal, after, afterek, biforek, debeściak, kesz, krejzol, lajcik, lajtowy, lukać.

The young and language. Young Polish-language speakers em-brace electronic reality much more than older people, they move about it more skillfully, use it more boldly when it comes to stylis-tic ideas. For example, the term megabajt (computer memory unit), characteristic for IT language, popularized the particle mega (Greek megas “great”), very productive in the language of the youth: mega-wypas, megawypasik – “something described as extremely positive,” megastrzała “pretty girl,” megaściema “big lie,” megamózg “capable student.” Another computer term, reset, resetowanie, has already become a lexical variant of resting, relax, regeneration, regaining strength, regaining the full ability for functioning, correcting some-thing (e.g., policy), and dilejtowanie—of deleting. The latter, thanks to computers and computer games, has a record-breaking popularity, for example in sports language, where along with masakrowanie it replaced the traditional winning, defeating, fouling or a brutal play.

The striking vividness and expansiveness of the language of the youngest generations is, in general, one of the most characteristic hallmarks of the Polish language after 1989, which was building two linguistic worlds—of the young and of the old, not able to keep up with the dramatic increase in the youth’s lexicon and to under-stand words like: lol, banglać, bauns, flow, herka, plonk, wtopa or zmulant.

From the perspective of morphology, the most notable feature of the youth slang are cut-offs, such as: komp “komputer,” pen “pendrive,” siema “jak się masz, jak się macie,” dozo “do zobaczenia,” nara “na razie,” spoko “spokojnie, OK,” cze “cześć,” Wro, Wroc “Wrocław,” impra “impreza,” es “SMS,” bro “browar—beer,” koment “komentarz—mainly on Internet forums,” kom “telefon komórkowy,” zbok “zboczeniec,” spontan “coś spontanicznego,” bulwers “coś bulwersującego,” fryz “fryzura,” haluny “halucyna-cje,” hasz “haszysz,” hera “heroina,” katol “katolik—mainly in reference to fundamentalists with conservative views,” info “informacja, informacje,” egzam “egzamin,” koło “kolokwium,” eko “ekonomia,” fona “fonetyka,” informa “informatyka,” admina “prawo administracyjne.”

Brutalization of language. Here, we must note the linguistic and stylistic phenomenon which is generally considered as the most important and provides a source of intergenerational conflicts, namely the progressing colloquialization, brutalization and vul-garization of everyday communication behaviors, promoted even in the media, especially television (a fashion for being cool).

Colloquialization is reflected by the increasing persistence of the following forms in official texts: ciężki, ciężko, ograć, strasznie, niesamowicie, fajny, fajnie, szajba, jaja, kibel, facet, dobra, dzięki.

Brutalization of the language may be observed, e.g., in sports texts, where—as mentioned above—the traditional expressions for winning, defeating, fouling or a brutal play are replaced with stronger forms, kasowanie, masakrowanie; the defeated are more readily called the “executed” or “guillotined,” whereas the victori-ous “felt the blood” and were their “executioners,” “killers,” while an accidental hitting somebody’s head with a ball may be called a “headshot.”

Vulgarity, the lexical manifestation of which is provided by the ubiquitous k-, p-, j-, ch-words, has become, unfortunately, a dis-tinguishing mark of Poles in Europe. All social groups use swear-words—men and women, boys and girls, and the desire to justify this kind of behavior leads to specific social myths like, for exam-ple, that the form zajebisty, which used to be vulgar, has already become entirely neutral.

Changes in language as the sign of the times. What should also be treated in the categories of a specific social myth is the increas-ingly widespread conviction that it is justified not to decline sur-names, especially in official texts: Janowi Pietraszko, dla Jerzego Widera, Antoniemu Nowak—instead of Janowi Pietraszce, dla Jerzego Widery, Antoniemu Nowakowi—similarly, the tradition-al morphological structures (państwo) Pietraszkowie, (państwo) Widerowie, (państwo) Nowakowie are being replaced with the forms państwo Pietraszko, państwo Widera, państwo Nowak.

Polite expressions with surnames are becoming history, e.g., pani Widera, panie Nowak, pani Jaśkiewicz, replaced with the name-based model, promoted especially by companies, banks, service agencies, but functioning also in pre-schools and elementa-ry schools: panie Janie, pani Mario, panie Marcinie, pani Zofio—regardless of the age differences between the interlocutors.

Calling somebody by name—without pani or pan—is also prac-ticed in so-called licensed TV programs, and the vocative form of these names identical as the nominative is becoming prevalent, even in official texts: żegnaj, Gerard; dziękujemy, Adam; gratulujemy, Justyna.

The name-based model transferred from American and West-ern European habits is beginning to appear even in the relation-ship between parents and children, parents-in-law and daughters-in-law or sons-in-law. Likewise, old expressions to address family members are becoming obsolete, e.g., proszę babci, niech mama zobaczy, niech tato powie, czy wujek przyjdzie?, macie, tato, weźcie, mamo, replaced with the already common second person: chodź, babciu, zobacz, mamo, powiedz, tato, przyjdziesz, wujku?, masz, tato, weź, mamo.

All those phenomena constitute the grammatical and stylistic sign of the times of our new geopolitical, social, economic, civiliza-tional and cultural realities formed within the several past decades of the history of the Polish language.

d.

e.

a.

b.

c.

256 257

Jan Miodek Changes in the Polish Language

a. Advertising poster, 1938

b. Advertising poster, the 1930s

c. Polfamix advertisement, the 1970s

d. Display window of a poultry store, Warsaw, the 1930s

e. Inscription at the entrance to the restaurant “Morskie Oko” in Zakopane, 1933

a.

b.

c.

d.

258 259

Jan Miodek Changes in the Polish Language

a. Car station, Szczawnica, the 1930s

b. Advertisement for the exhibition of Polmozbyt, Warsaw, 1976

c. Hala Koszyki, Warsaw, 1969

d. Propaganda slogan from the second half of the 1910s

d.

e.

a.

b.

c.

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Jan Miodek Changes in the Polish Language

a.-e. Examples of the influence of foreign languages on the Polish language

117

Countryside—Transformations in Peasant Mentality and Awareness

IV

Science and

Technology

Science is the technical vanguard of the working mankind, a forge of new forms of purposeful action

Stanisław Brzozowski

168 169

Technical Achievements—for Poland and the World

Bolesław Orłowski, Krzysztof Michalski

Technical thought under the Partitions and on emigration. During the Partitions, many Poles worked abroad—from 1832, as part of the patriotic Great Emigration, and from the 1880s, in much greater numbers, looking for bread and a better life. As a result, our engineers or inventors pursued their careers in various countries. Even more of them studied at Russian universities and worked throughout the entire Russian Empire, building railroads and bridges. They were an important part of Russian leaders in different fields of technology and technical sciences.

A chance for development in the Second Republic of Poland. When Poland regained independence in 1918, many Polish scien-tists, inventors and engineers returned to their homeland from Russia torn by civil war. They also returned from other countries, leaving important positions and well-paid jobs. As a result, the Second Republic of Poland had a much higher level of scientif-ic and technical personnel than one could expect of a peripheral state of that size. Never in our history have we been so close to the world’s leaders in so many disciplines.

One of the Polish specialties in the interwar period became the aviation industry, developed without the base provided by the automotive industry everywhere else. At that time, the front run-ners in this area were France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy. We belonged to the second four, alongside the United States, the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia. We had successes in the produc-tion of combat planes. From 1935, we were the first to have fighter planes (PZL.P.11) made entirely of metal, and our bomber PZL.37 Łoś was in many respects an outstanding construction on a global scale. We also had a leading position in the production of sports aircrafts. In that category, our flagship machines were the RWDs. They were designed by the team of constructors created in 1927 and composed of Stanisław Rogalski, Stanisław Wigura and Jerzy Drzewiecki.

Stanisław Skarżyński, an aviation enthusiast who became a fly-ing ace despite wounds he suffered in 1920, used their RWD-5bis plane to fly over the Atlantic from French West Africa to Brazil at night on May 7th/8th, 1933. He flew the distance of 3,582 km solo in a cabin comparable to the interior of a British Mini, without a para-chute, rescue boat, radio or sextant, establishing a world record in the category of sports aircrafts to 150 kg, for which, in 1936, he was decorated with the Blériot medal by the Fédération Aéronautique

Internationale—as the only Pole until now. Later, he celebrated that success in the main Polish expatriate centers in Brazil and Argen-tina. From 1938, he was President of the Polish Aero Club. After the end of the September Campaign, he was in Great Britain, where he participated in the 305 Polish Bomber Squadron combat flights over Germany. In the thousand-bomber raid over Bremen on June 26th, 1912, his Wellington was hit, and Skarżyński, after a water landing on the English Channel, was washed out to the sea by the wing and drowned.

When at the end of 1930s, the threat of war increased, the Sec-ond Republic of Poland was trying to meet the challenges of the arms race by initiating, in 1937, the development of the Central Industrial Region (COP). Its originator was the then minister of the treasury and deputy prime minister for economic affairs, the chemist technologist Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski. In the so-called “tri-angle of security” formed by the Vistula River, the San and the Dunajec, an area covering 15% of Polish territory and 18% of the population was earmarked for 100 modern industrial facilities to reinforce the defenses and provide the supply base for the army in wartime from its own resources. It had good development and employment perspectives for the local population.

The works were carried out at a dizzying pace called “Ameri-can” at that time. This is best illustrated by the example of Stalowa Wola. In March 1937, the construction of the Southern Facilities was started—a conglomerate composed of a steel plant, rolling mill, ironworks, press shop and mechanical workshops manufac-turing, among others, artillery equipment—and in December that year the first machine tool and the first cannon for the army was produced. Those facilities were ultra-modern, representing the highest global standards; the first in Europe to use natural gas as fuel in open-hearth and heating furnaces.

Their construction was completed in the spring of 1939. From 1938, they also produced stainless steel (with a planned production of 80,000 tons a year), and they were preparing for the production of turbines, steam hammers, pneumatic drills and heavy machine tools for steelworks. In 1938, the construction of the combined heat and power plant was started, and at the same time, a large worker town was forming (before that, the village of Pławo with rafting traditions was located there).

By the time the war broke out, the COP had over 100 mod-ern plants—built and running. The most important of them were

established in Dębica (tires and Polish artificial KER rubber) Mielec (airplanes), Rzeszów (aircraft engines), Sanok (machine guns), Niedomice near Tarnów (cellulose), Lublin (truck assem-bly plant), Poniatowa (communication equipment) and Tarnów (copper refining plant). The hydroelectric power plant was under construction in Myczkowce as well as the oil pipeline from the Boryslav and Drohobych basin. Thanks to those investments the Polish interwar industry deservedly enjoyed an excellent reputa-tion. Quantitatively, it was modest but in terms of quality, it could match the best.

A difficult exam in wartime. The COP was not able to save the Second Republic of Poland. But it was during World War II that its technical staff showed what it was capable of, as many of its mem-bers successfully contributed to enhancing equipment useful for military purposes. According to the records as of January 1st, 1911, there were 5,592 Polish inventors, scientists and engineers working in the West—mainly in Great Britain—for the victory of the Allied nations, 1,019 of whom were in the armed forces. Their achieve-ments helped to reduce the coalition’s losses, gain advantage and shorten the time of the war probably more than the participation of the Polish armed forces in the war operations.

One of the disciplines where they were most successful was communication. Janusz Groszkowski, one of the pioneers of ra-dar before the war, had followers active from 1910. Some of their achievements are described below.

Wacław Struszyński, employed at Admiralty Signal and Radar Establishment in Haslemere, constructed a short-wave goniomet-ric locating antenna, which allowed detecting German submarines when they radioed their base after emerging. It was mass manufac-tured and installed in destroyers escorting convoys, thus helping to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Struszyński applied for a patent for an antenna using a radiolocation system at the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland in 1938. In 1913, he obtained the relevant patent (No. 32112) from . . . the Patent Office of the General Government. Juliusz Hupert, who worked at the same institution as Struszyński, invented, among others, a frequency stabilizer for ship radio trans-mitters (the first was installed on the British battleship HMS Anson). Zygmunt Jelonek, who worked at the Signal Research and Develop-ment Establishment in Christchurch, led the team which designed the innovative eight-channel duplex radio connection WS No. 10 operating in the microwave signal band 1 GHz with a pulse width modulation (which was one of the first so-called radio lines). It was used during the invasion of Normandy (June 6th, 1911) for commu-nication of the operation’s command with the troops fighting on the beaches. The main constructor at the Polish Military Wireless Unit in Stanmore was the talented and inventive Tadeusz Heftman, who from 1928 produced miniaturized transmitter-and-receiver devices (known as “Peepshtocks”) for the army. Improved and increasingly miniaturized radio stations of this type were produced there for the resistance movement in the occupied countries. In 1912, the British gave the unit allocations of components, so the production increased to 513 in 1913 and to 1000 in 1911.

Henryk Magnuski, employed at Galvin (from 1917, Motorola) in Chicago obtained three patents related to the construction of the

first portable radio station (walkie-talkie) SCR-300 FM, widely used by the American army in Europe (from the invasion in Italy in 1913) and on the Pacific.

Postwar inventions of scientists in Poland and abroad. An over-whelming majority of Polish scientists and engineers who con-tributed to the victory of the Allied nations never returned to the post-Yalta Poland. Their role and subsequent careers in the West were never mentioned by the censored mass media in People’s Poland. The British were not eager either to highlight the achieve-ments of the abandoned ally. It is only now that we are unearthing the glorious achievements of those epigones of the Second Repub-lic of Poland.

After the war, one of the most outstanding Polish technicians who enjoyed success outside the country was Stefan Kudelski, who—working from 1913 in Switzerland—developed the first port-able tape recorder Nagra with a unique speed stabilization system. His device was used by radio and television reporters, and also by film studios around the world for many years. In the 1990s, Kudelski wanted to transfer the production of the recorders to Po-land, but neither the Polish authorities nor the industry expressed interest.

Even in Poland, despite unfavorable political and economic conditions, solutions of global importance emerged. The most re-nowned of them include an original method of producing crank-shafts developed by Tadeusz Rut, and also an industrial press with a sway matrix constructed by Zdzisław Marciniak. An unused opportunity of the Polish industry was the unique K-202 minicom-puter developed in 1970 by engineer Jacek Karpiński, which was ahead of the American solutions by several years.

In the last decade of the 20th century, many interesting and im-portant solutions in the field of technical sciences were developed in Poland, usually by young scientists born in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them, after completing studies in Poland, found placements in the West to conduct research in leading research facilities.

One of the most outstanding Polish scientists of the young gener-ation is Maciej Wojtkowski. After several years abroad, leading the team he created within the Medical Physics Group at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Toruń, he developed and imple-mented in ophthalmological practice the method of Spectral Opti-cal Coherence Tomography (SOCT)—a new, non-invasive method of imaging the interior of the eyeball, 100 times faster than the ex-isting methods of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). Thanks to the increased speed of measurement, it allows observing the eye structures in real time. Wojtkowski presented the concept of the spectral optical coherence tomography instrument in 1999, and then, together with his associates, he designed and constructed the instrument for examination of the eye retina, which allows performing a non-invasive and contactless examination of the or-gan. Soon, the achievements of the NCU scientists attracted the at-tention of commercial companies. As a result of negotiations con-ducted by Andrzej Kowalczyk—head of the NCU Medical Physics Group, in March 2005, an agreement was concluded to provide the know-how to the company OPTOPOL from Zawiercie. In Septem-ber 2005, an industrial prototype was presented, and in the spring

a. b.

c.

170 171

Bolesław Orłowski, Krzysztof Michalski Technical Achievements—for Poland and the World

a. Constructors of the RWD aircraft, Jerzy Drzewiecki (left) and Stanisław Rogalski, Warsaw, ca. 1930

b. RWD-5bis aircraft used by Captain Stanisław Skarżyński to fly over the South Atlantic in 1933

c. PZL-37 “Łoś” aircraft at the airport, 1939

of 2006, the series production of the tomography instrument, under the name of SOCT Copernicus, was launched. This was the first tomography instrument in the world for the examination of the eye fundus in spectral technology. In the next two years, other ver-sions were developed: Copernicus HR and Anterius (for the front part of the eye), whereas the instrument SOCT Copernicus Revo is already available on the market.

One of the most renowned Polish achievements in engineering in recent years is the original method of graphene production de-veloped by Włodzimierz Strupiński from the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (ITME) in Warsaw. Graphene is a recently discovered (2001) unique material (an allotrope of carbon—it con-sists of a single layer of atoms) with unusual mechanical, electronic and thermal properties, which allow creating electronic compo-nents much faster than the silicon-based elements. Strupiński start-ed work on graphene production technology in 2006. Four years later, he applied to the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland with a method of producing large-format graphene through embedding carbon atoms in a layer of one C atom on silicon carbide (SiC) plates, applying the classic technique of epitaxy (deposition of monocrys-talline layer on a crystalline substrate). This method made ITME world-famous, and the discoverers of graphene and subsequent Nobel Prize winners (Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov) asked the Polish inventor to make the Polish graphene available for their research.

Developing the methods of epitaxial graphene production, Strupiński with his team also prepared the technology of graphene production on copper substrates and the technology of grow-ing high-quality graphene on germanium. Polish graphene from ITME is notable for excellent electronic parameters unattainable by other scientists, and that is why it is used in works on advanced new-generation electronic instruments (High Frequency Elec-tronics and Spintronics). The invention of the Polish engineer has already obtained patents in the United States, Japan and Korea. In 2012, the Polish scientist and ITME were invited to the largest European research program, Graphene Flagship Project, and four years later ITME was entrusted with the organization of the most important conference in the world dedicated to the research of graphene—Graphene Week 2016.

a.

b. c.

d.

e.

f.

172 173

Bolesław Orłowski, Krzysztof Michalski Technical Achievements—for Poland and the World

a. Steelworks Huta Stalowa Wola in the Central Industrial Region, 1939

b. Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, deputy prime minister and minister of industry and trade in 1926-1930, minister of the treasury in 1935-1939

c. Cellulose plant in Niedomice, Central Industrial Region, 1937

d. Hydroelectric power plant on the San River, Myczkowce in the Central Industrial Region, dam under construction, 1937

e. Nagra tape recorder constructed by Stefan Kudelski, ca. 1960

f. Stefan Kudelski, a Polish electronics engineer and inventor liv-ing and working in Lausanne in Switzerland, creator of the Nagra series of professional tape recorders

a.

b.

c.

d.

171 175

Bolesław Orłowski, Krzysztof Michalski Technical Achievements—for Poland and the World

a. Jacek Karpiński, an electronic engineer and computer engineer, designer of the first Polish minicomputer K-202

b. Doctor of Engineering Włodzimierz Strupiński from the In-stitute of Electronic Materials Technology in Warsaw showing a plate covered with graphene, Warsaw, January 29th, 2013

c. Retinal imaging using optical tomography OCT: a. Sectional image of the retina along the line connecting the macula lutea with the cen-tral part of the optic disc (colors correspond to the intensity of scat-tered light—red being the most intensive and blue the least); b. Re-construction of the three-dimensional structure of the retina near the optic disc; c. Sectional image of the macula lutea with the described layers of the retina visible in the OCT imaging

d. Maciej Wojtkowski, a Polish physicist specializing in applied op-tics, experimental and medical physics, at the inauguration of the campaign of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education entitled “Being a Professional Scientist,” Warsaw, October 10th, 2011

476-477 Mars rover “#next” built by the students of the Scientific Association of Robotics Engineers at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Bialystok University of Technology, which took fourth place in the international competition University Ro-ver Challenge in the United States in 2015; vehicles constructed by students of this university were also successful in this prestigious competition in 2011, 2013 and 2011

179179

V

Culture

Fortunate is the nation that has a poetAnd in its toil does not walk in silence

Czesław Miłosz

521 525

Cinema—The Dizzying Career of the 10th Muse

Tadeusz Lubelski

By 1918, world cinema had established its position as the most ef-fective recorder of the world, as well as an institutional organizer of shows aimed not only at entertainment, but also propaganda and education. The fact that Poland was only regaining independ-ence at that time inevitably delayed the development of this branch of culture in our country, particularly in the role of documenting the times. As a matter of fact, important events were filmed in Po-land—from Stanisław Wyspiański’s funeral recorded in Kraków (on the initiative of the city mayor!) in December 1907, to the ac-tions of the Polish Legion soldiers in 1911-1917. However, for various reasons—the poor respect of former cinema owners for their films and also the miseries of the last war in which kilometers of tapes were set on fire—most of these moving pictures did not survive and we do not have them in our collective memory. Nevertheless, the custom of watching films in cinemas—often in such elegant places as the Apollo theater which has existed in Poznań since 1908 (today known as the Muza, the oldest of the Polish cinemas functioning till now), Kraków’s Uciecha and Wanda (both func-tioning since 1912), or Warsaw’s Colosseum (opened in 1918 with more than 2,000 seats)—was common in our cities one hundred years ago. This means that our audience had been accustomed to Polish films for years.

The popularity of cinema in the interwar period. We did not have to wait long for the first hit of our national cinema. The pre-miere of Miracle at the Vistula directed by Ryszard Bolesławski (who soon made it in Hollywood), held in March 1921—only seven months after the prototypical event— confirmed that films could have a great impact on the patriotic awareness of the audience. The leading female role was played by Jadwiga Smosarska—the most beloved star of Polish cinema in the interwar period, who was the perfect embodiment of various types of Polish feminini-ty—from innocent girls from a manor house (Iwonka, 1925) to “lib-erated women” (Is Lucyna a Girl?, 1931, where the title heroine was returning to the country in a convertible after graduating from a technical university in Paris) and queens (Barbara Radziwiłłów-na, 1936). In the 1930s, along with the development of Polish vari-eties of genre cinema, the practice of Poland’s favorite actors and actresses repeating their “type” in successive films intensified. The magnitude of adoration in those days allows us to treat the film roles of prewar Polish cinema stars as Poles’ idealized perceptions

of themselves. Such a function was fulfilled by the king of the com-edy, Adolf Dymsza, who refined his character of the eccentric but high-minded Dodek, as well as the master of the melodrama Ka-zimierz Junosza-Stępowski—the performer of the title role in The Medicine Man (1937) by Michał Waszyński—and the audience’s favorite actress, Mieczysława Ćwiklińska, who combined both of these genres, specializing in roles of elegant matriarchs. The same goes for a large group of lovers, including Elżbieta Barszczewska, Ina Benita, Eugeniusz Bodo and Jerzy Pichelski. In their films, which only seem trivial, we can still recognize the problems of contemporary Poles, particularly in ambitious social dramas by Józef Lejtes: Girls of Nowolipki (1937) and The Frontier (1938) or in Scarecrows (1938) by Eugeniusz Cękalski and Karol Szołowski—a film produced by the Cooperative of Film Authors (SAF). The founders of the SAF, who had been members of the Society of Artistic Film Lovers START in 1930-1935, formed the leftist oppo-sition of the professional film industry. A notable phenomenon at the end of the 1930s was the brilliant development of Jewish films in Yiddish which were produced in Warsaw (their best-known representative was Waszyński’s Dybuk, 1937), but were tragically interrupted by the outbreak of the war.

When the People’s Poland was the producer. The postwar restoration of the film industry after the destruction of the war involved the changing of its status, which was forced by the new political system. Filmmaking was monopolized by the state-owned producer (Film Polski, established at the end of 1915), which made production easier but, on the other hand, imposed ideological re-strictions upon filmmakers. As early as the middle of the 1910s, precursory pictures of Nazi concentration camps were made: the documentary Majdanek Death Camp—The Cemetery of Europe (1911) by Aleksander Ford, and the feature film The Last Stage (1917) by Wanda Jakubowska, which is still an irreplaceable testi-mony of the atmosphere of the lager. The tradition of prewar en-tertainment cinema was continued by Leonard Buczkowski’s films Forbidden Songs (1916) and The Treasure (1918), which both suc-cessfully consoled the audience, soothed their pain, and featured the first star of the new times—Danuta Szaflarska. Unfortunately, the proclamation of social realism as the only acceptable artistic method at the congress in Wisła in 1919 froze artistic freedoms for a few years and isolated the audience from Western cinema.

The decisive rise of cinema began during the October 1956 break-through period, thanks to a new generation of filmmakers who had been taught—as in the case of Andrzej Munk, Andrzej Wajda, Ka-zimierz Kutz, Stanisław Lenartowicz and Janusz Morgenstern, and operators: Jerzy Lipman, Kurt Weber and Jerzy Wójcik—by the old masters in the Film School founded in Łódź in 1918, or who had acquired professional qualifications in a different way but also after the war—as in the case of Wojciech Jerzy Has, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Stanisław Różewicz and screenwriter Jerzy Ste-fan Stawiński. Unlike their prewar predecessors, they established an emotional dialog with the audience by avoiding taboo issues imposed by censorship and bringing up the most dramatic prob-lems of recent history—e.g., the futile sacrifice of the nation during Nazi occupation and the Warsaw Uprising which did not prevent submission to the Soviets—with the use of innovative film language. A series of works produced at that time built the phenomenon of the Polish film school, which added a new, previously unknown quality to domestic cinema and brought it international renown as confirmed by festival awards not previously received. A pair of in-surgents from Wajda’s Kanal (1956) stopped by a grating, the hero of the first story of Munk’s Eroica (1957) who seems to care only about his own comfort but then joins the uprising, and two accidental passengers in a sleeping compartment who fail to encounter their real needs in Night Train (1959) by Kawalerowicz—these pictures defined the Polish state of mind in this era. The culminating mo-ment of the Polish film school was the reception of Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (the premiere was in October 1958), when all Poles wore dark glasses for a while as a sign of their identification with Zbigniew Cybulski—the main character of the film, who expressed the tragedy of the collective fate like no other.

The revolutionary scale of this phenomenon surpassed the expectations of the authorities, who prevented the continuation of the Polish film school by adopting a secret Resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the PZPR on the Film Industry in June 1960. However, once triggered, the development of Polish cinema could not be slowed down by censors’ prohibitions. The main trend of artistic cinema manifested itself in new areas in the 1960s: in documentary films created independently by Kazimierz Karabasz, Władysław Ślesicki, Jan Łomnicki and Irena Kamieńska; in perverse animated films by Jan Lenica, Witold Giersz, Mirosław Kijowicz and Daniel Szczechura; in such unexpected forms as huge costume shows—initially complying with the classic rules of a historical show (Knights of the Teutonic Cross by Aleksander Ford, 1960), but then shocking the audience with their narrative unpredictability (The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1961) or with political revision (Ashes by Andrzej Wajda based on Stefan Żeromski’s novel, 1965) and, finally, on popular cinema shows which created heroes of mass imagination, such as the brave intelligence agent Captain Kloss (Stanisław Mikulski) from the TV series More Than Life at Stake (1965-1968) by Janusz Morgenstern and Andrzej Konic, or two quarrelling but paradoxically inseparable neighbors—Pawlak and Kargul from Sylwester Chęciński’s comedy Our Folks (1967). Finally, although with a delay, we were also affected by echoes of the world modernization of cinema. Jerzy Skolimowski’s tetralogy

initiated by the debut work of Identification Marks: None, which was released in 1965 (and followed by Walkover, 1965; Barrier, 1966; and a film that was blocked by censorship for many years: Hands Up!, 1967) meant the creative adoption of the new wave poetics. A series of outstanding achievements by more recent creators of the Polish film school—from Wajda’s Everything for Sale (1968), to Kutz’s Salt of the Earth (1969) and Konwicki’s autobiographical How Far Away, How Near (1971), Has’s The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973) and The Third Part of the Night (1971) by their successor and follower Andrzej Żuławski—confirmed an original approach to cinema. The start of the post-March 1968 generation, which was expressed by debuts—both serious, like Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Structure of Crystals (1969), as well as ironic, like Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970)— reinforced the social ambitions of the film industry. Its professionalism was proven by big productions created in the middle of the new decade: Jerzy Hoffman’s The Deluge (1971), Wajda’s The Promised Land (1971) and Jerzy Antczak’s Nights and Days (1975).

This professional film industry—in its entirety, from TV cycles produced in Tor and X film production units, to Stanisław Bareja’s comedies, particularly the famous Teddy Bear (1980)—was united in an opposition protest against the rotten system of Edward Gierek’s rule in its last years. The signal was given by Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976), based on the screenplay by Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, with a plot based on an analogy between the anti-system rebellion of a model worker from the Stalinist period (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz) and the contemporary, uncompromising attitude of a student studying to be a filmmaker who bases her diploma film on him (Krystyna Janda). Screenings of the Man of Marble reinforced the rebellious attitude of the audience and undoubtedly heralded the effective protest of Gdańsk shipyard workers in August 1980, which became the main topic of the sequel Man of Iron (1981)—the flagship work of the “Solidarity” season. Films made during the five years in between those two works by Wajda, comprising a trend called the cinema of moral anxiety, had an interventional function. However, the authors of the most important works managed to find universal dramatic forms that gave them a more permanent value, not just as a period piece. Such was the case in the famous clash of attitudes of an associate professor and a young scientist in Zanussi’s Camouflage (1976), the futile protest of the protagonist of Agnieszka Holland’s Provincial Actors (1978), the demoralization of the main character of Top Dog (1977) by Feliks Falk and, to the contrary, the development of civic awareness in the hero of Camera Buff (1979) by Krzysztof Kieślowski. The protagonist of the first of these four films—Zbigniew Zapasiewicz in the role of the associate professor— and Jerzy Stuhr who played the main roles in the last two films became the faces of this trend. European popularity was also gained by other leading actors, particularly those known from Wajda’s films, such as Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Seweryn—a trio of friends from The Promised Land—as well as Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak, who played the main role in Janusz Morgenstern’s To Kill This Love (1972). Ten years later she won the Best Actress award in Cannes for her role in the Hungarian film Another Way.

The introduction of martial law halted the progress of the Pol-ish film industry for many years, hindering its development and

a.

b. c.

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Tadeusz Lubelski Cinema—The Dizzying Career of the 10th Muse

a. Montage works for one of the last Polish silent films A Strong Man, director Henryk Szaro in the middle, 1929

b. Eugeniusz Bodo (left) and Jadwiga Smosarska in the film Is Lucyna a Girl?, 1931

c. Pola Negri (real name Apolonia Chałupiec), a stage and film ac-tress, an international silent cinema star, the 1920s

528-529 Film Uhlans, Uhlans, the Painted Boys, in the foreground from the left: Adolf Dymsza as Felek, Kazimierz Krukowski as Lopek, Władysław Walter as Wachtmeister, 1932

postponing the distribution of a number of important films, such as Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981, premiere in 1987) which en-couraged Poles to reach an agreement transcending divisions, Janusz Zaorski’s The Mother of Kings (1982, premiere in 1987) and Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation (1982, premiere in 1989), which both explored the Stalinist period. The audience found consolation in laughter, hence the success of comedies: Sexmission (1983) by Juliusz Machulski and H.M. Deserters (1985) by Janusz Majewski. The most important achievement of this decade is, however, the morality cycle of Kieślowski’s ten TV films, Dekalog (1988-1989), which proposed a new reflection on human ethical obligations. Two cinematic versions of the best episodes of the cycle—A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love (both in 1988)—marked the beginning of the director’s huge international popu-larity. For a few seasons before his premature death, he became a guru of European artistic cinema.

Liberty cinema. Having been privatized again and liberated from the limitations (but also facilitations) of the state-owned producer, the film industry sought an effective method of functioning in the new political situation after 1989. It filled thematic gaps by creating images of the Holocaust in Wajda’s Korczak (1990) and Roman Polański’s The Pianist (2002), which won the Golden Palm in Cannes and an Academy Award (10 years earlier Polański’s debut Knife in the Water, 1961, was the first Polish film nominated for an Academy Award), Soviet occupation in Robert Gliński’s All That Really Matters (1992) and by settling accounts with the period of the People’s Poland—either straightforwardly as in Kazimierz Kutz’s Death Like a Slice of Bread (1991) or metaphorically in Woj ciech Marczewski’s Escape from the “Liberty” Cinema (1990) and Jan Jakub Kolski’s Jańcio Wodnik (1993). Eventually, it also portrayed the pain of the new times: in Marcel Łoziński’s documentary 89 mm from Europe (1992) and Anything Can Happen (1995), in Krzysztof Krauze’s The Debt (1999) and Marek Koterski’s Day of the Wacko (2002). But the former rapport between filmmakers and the intellectual audience disappeared, and one of the biggest hits of the new epoch was Władysław Pasikowski’s Dogs (1992), which imitated the rules of American popular cinema.

The adaptation of the Polish film industry to internationally accepted standards soon began to bear fruit. The Polish film artists who contributed to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993)—cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, production designer Allan Starski and set decorator Ewa Braun—all received Academy Awards. Earlier, in 1983, another Polish winner of an Oscar was Zbigniew Rybczyński for his animated short film Tango. In 2000, Andrzej Wajda won an Academy Award for his lifetime achievements. International recognition was gained by a large group of Polish cinematographers: Witold Sobociński and his son Piotr, Sławomir Idziak, Edward Kłosiński, Andrzej Bartkowiak, Paweł Edelman, and Wojciech Staroń. We can even talk about the existence of a Polish cinematographer school. The festival laurels were won by animators: Piotr Dumała (Franz Kafka, 1991) and Jerzy Kucia (Tuning the Instruments, 2000) and by Tomasz Bagiński due to his innovative use of computer effects (The Cathedral, 2002).

Festivals held in Poland, such as the Kraków Film Festival, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camer-image (first held in Toruń, then in Łódź and Bydgoszcz), the War-saw Film Festival and the New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocław which educates the younger generation, are recognized worldwide.

The adoption of the modern Film Industry Act in 2005, which led to the establishment of the Polish Film Institute which is managed by filmmakers, prepares programs and raises funds for the support of domestic filmmakers, closed the period of adapting the cinema industry to the new system. The institute fulfilled its task to a large extent: Polish films again manage to attract a mass audience and win international recognition. The latter refers to, among others, Andrzej Wajda’s Sweet Rush (2009), Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing (2010), Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (2010) and, in particular, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013)—the first Polish winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. New Polish films not only supplement the collective consciousness with facts and char-acters that had been displaced from it—e.g., Wajda’s Katyn (2007), Bugajski’s General Nil (2009) and Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012) which refers to the Jedwabne massacre—but they also offer an attractive way of talking about the latest history—Borys Lankosz’s Reverse (2009), Wojciech Smarzowski’s The Dark House (2009), Rose (2011) and Volhynia (2016), as well as Jan Komasa’s City 44 (2011) and Łukasz Palkowski’s Gods (2011)—and the changing contemporary times—Xawery Żuławski’s Polish-Russian War (2009), Małgorzata Szumow ska’s Body (2015) which deals with existential dilemmas, and Jan P. Matuszyński’s The Last Family (2016). This bodes well for the future and proves that filmmakers are able to take advantage of the artistic independence that has been afforded to them.

d.

e.

a. b.

c.

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Tadeusz Lubelski

a. Beata Tyszkiewicz in the film Password: Korn, 1968

b. Andrzej Seweryn, Daniel Olbrychski and Wojciech Pszoniak in The Promised Land directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1971

c. Marek Kondrat in Day of the Wacko directed by Marek Koterski, 2002

d. Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz in Man of Marble directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1976

e. Jerzy Stuhr in Camera Buff directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1979

532 Andrzej Wajda with an honorary Oscar for lifetime achieve-ment, 2000

533 Paweł Pawlikowski with an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film—Ida, 2015

Cinema—The Dizzying Career of the 10th Muse