Memory in Pieces: The Symbolism of the Ruin in Warsaw after 1944

Abstract

Memory in Pieces: The Symbolism of the Ruin in Warsaw after 1944

In this essay I explore the political symbolism of the ruin in the Polish capital from 1944 to the present. The question of what a war ruin might represent was deeply problematic for the communist authorities, not least because fragments of buildings and streets could be used to remember prohibited and unsanctioned aspects of Warsaw's history. Viewed in this light, the reconstruction of the historic fabric of the city, most notably in the case of the Royal Castle in the 1970s, can be interpreted as an attempt to fix and ultimately to narrow the meanings attached to places in the popular imagination. Reconstruction could be a kind of forgetting. At much the same time, the anti-communist opposition was drawn to the ruin as a powerful symbol of conflict with illegitimate authority. Today, ruins feature highly in the veins of retrospection which run through political culture in Poland. The Left and Right enter into conflict over the fate of the few lingering ruins in the city, symbolic conflicts over ownership of the past. Ruins, it seems, are deeply desired, even acquiring a kind of perverse glamour.