Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge Research in Gender and History) 2020011181, 2020011182, 9780367423230, 9780367823528

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Logic of Gender and Generation(s): Theoretical Approaches
1 Generational and Gendered Memory of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: Methodological Perspectives and Political Challenges
2 Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt: The Bond of Generations in Arendt, Benjamin, Heine, and Freud
Part II: Generations and Gender in Historical Contexts: Comparative Case Studies
3 Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations in the 1930s: The Case of Yugoslavia
4 Communisms, Generations, and Waves: The Cases of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba
5 Generations of Italian Communist Women and the Making of a Women’s Rights Agenda in the Cold War (1945–68): Historiography, Memory, and New Archival Evidence
6 The Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism and Political Generations in the Ruhr, West Germany (1975–90)
Part III: Women’s Biographical Experiences and Communism
7 “Old” Women and “Old” Revolution: The Role of Gender and Generation in Postwar Polish Communist Women’s Biographies
8 Biographical Experience and Knowledge Production: Women Sociologists and Gender Issues in Communist Poland
9 Without Tradition and Without Female Generation? The Case of Czech Artist Ester Krumbachová
Part IV: Aesthetic Representations of Gendered Generations in Communism and Beyond
10 Girls from the Polish Youth Union: (Dis)remembrance of the Generation
11 “We’re Easy to Spot”: Soviet Generation(s) after Soviet Era and the Invention of the Self in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
12 Entering Gray Zones: Questions of Female Identity, Political Commitment, and Personal Choices in Jiřina Šiklová’s Memoir of Life under Socialism and Beyond
13 Gender, Generational Conflict, and Communism: Tonia Lechtman’s Story
Conclusion: From “Communism as Male Generational History” to a More Inclusive Narrative
Note on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated. Anna Artwin´ska is a Junior Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture Studies and Chair of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her main research interests are the memory of communism, postcatastrophic representation of the Shoah, the concept of generation, auto/biographical writing and gender, and postcolonial studies. Agnieszka Mrozik is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) in Warsaw, Poland. She is affiliated with two research teams: The Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Archives of Women. Her main research interests are communism and gender studies, cultural history of women and women’s movement in Central and Eastern Europe, women’s life writing and literature, critical analysis of media discourse and popular culture.

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Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond Edited by Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Artwińska, Anna, editor. | Mrozik, Agnieszka, editor.  Title: Gender, generations, and communism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond / edited by Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in gender and history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011181 (print) | LCCN 2020011182 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367423230 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367823528 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Communism—Europe, Eastern. | Communism—Europe, Central. | Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. | Post-communism—Europe, Central. | Europe, Eastern—Social conditions. | Europe, Central—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HX240.7.A6 G46 2020 (print) | LCC HX240.7.A6 (ebook) | DDC 335.430947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011181 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011182 ISBN: 9780367423230 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367823528 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix



PART I

The Logic of Gender and Generation(s): Theoretical Approaches

7



2 Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt: The Bond of Generations in Arendt, Benjamin, Heine, and Freud

29

SIGR I D W EIGEL

PART II

Generations and Gender in Historical Contexts: Comparative Case Studies



43

vi Contents



PART III

Women’s Biographical Experiences and Communism

123







PART IV

Aesthetic Representations of Gendered Generations in Communism and Beyond



195

Contents  vii





Notes on Contributors Index

289 297

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Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have helped us prepare this book for print. We would like to thank Jennifer Morrow and Max Novick of Routledge for seeing this publication through, Francisca de Haan of Central European University in Budapest and anonymous reviewers for their valuable input that has helped us improve this book, and Maja Jaros for her professional linguistic support. For the financial support for copyediting this volume, we would like to thank the University of Leipzig, the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and transform! europe EUPF, the European network for alternative thinking and political dialogue, which is partially financed through a subsidy from the European Parliament.

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Introduction Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik

The genesis of Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond book project has many strands. The beginning is connected with the activities of the Center for Cultural and Literary Studies on Communism, established in 2011 at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. In the years 2013–18 we participated in a research project at the Center entitled “Communism—History of the Concept in Poland in the Years 1944–1989: Interpretations and Uses: Literature, Culture, Society” sponsored by the National Humanities Development Program in Poland.1 A number of activities aiming to popularize literary and cultural research on communism were taken up as part of this project. The panel “Communism in Family, Family in Communism,” held in Warsaw in December 2013, in which both of us participated, marked the informal commencement of works which are ultimately to establish whether, and to what degree, “generation” may be a useful category in research on communism and vice versa: whether studies of communism can bring anything new to research on generations and the very theory of generations, which today enjoys renewed scholarly interest. We have invited other collaborators at the Center to join us in these reflections: Małgorzata Fidelis from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Anna Zawadzka from the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. One historian, one sociologist, and two literary scholars spent months discussing historical and contemporary social, political, and cultural applications of the category of generation in research on communism, and sometimes also on post- and anticommunism, as well as methodological challenges connected with the employment of this category. The original Polish research field has been expanded to include European and American contexts. Our discussions came to fruition in the form of an issue of Teksty Drugie [Second Texts], a Polish literary bimonthly, which we co-edited. We have invited, among others, Sigrid Weigel and Anja Tipper to help us create it. The resulting publication offered an exploration of the history of the notion of generation, a review of its critical uses in contemporary humanities, as well as

2  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik a proposal for its new application in research on communism: memory, languages, aesthetics of description, and place in the public discourse. The last stage, leading directly up to the publication of this book, had to do with a realization that had haunted us for quite some time: that research on the usefulness or uselessness of the category of generation in research on communism, but also on anti- and postcommunism, cannot be conducted in isolation from other categories such as class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. In choosing gender as one of the main research categories, in addition to generation, we were motivated primarily by content-related issues, that is, we wanted to examine whether, and what, gender studies brings or may bring into the classic Mannheimian theory of generations which, as interestingly argued by Christina Benninghaus, must be considered masculine.2 We were also curious to what extent critical reflection on generations can turn out to be useful in research on the cultural and social history of women and of gender. These considerations resulted in an interdisciplinary conference that we organized in collaboration with sociologist Magdalena Grabowska from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Entitled Gender, Generations, Communism in Central, and Southeastern Europe: Concepts, Discourses, Practices, it was held in Warsaw on November 16–18, 2017. One of its purposes was to enable an intellectual exchange among scholars who have been conducting broad-scale research on the history of women and gender in socialist and postsocialist Central and Southeastern Europe, and who also employ this category in their work (among others Eloisa Betti, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Francisca de Haan, Natalia Jarska, Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Anna Müller, Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz). The results of this research have been published in Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, established in 2007 by Francisca de Haan and edited by her until 2016. The Warsaw conference gathered researchers representing three broadly themed areas: literary, cultural, social, and historical studies on communism, anti- and postcommunism; generational studies; gender, women’s, and feminist studies. This publication, largely based on the conference proceedings, has been designed as an interdisciplinary monograph, containing both theoretical chapters and case studies from disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, philologies, and gender studies. The book is organized into four parts. In the first part, entitled “The Logic of Gender and Generation(s): Theoretical Approaches,” the focus is on methodological issues. The chapter written by literary scholars Agnieszka Mrozik and Anna Artwin´ska expounds upon the history of the concept of “generation” and the specificity of generational memory of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The authors formulate questions about the benefits stemming from combining the generational

Introduction  3 and gender perspectives in research on communism and present potential options for their application. Generation and gender are treated here as fundamental “synchronous factors of shaping the awareness”3 —next to language, religious and worldview beliefs, and class criteria. The chapter also discusses the current research on generations within the area of studies on communism and gender. Intended as an introduction to the issues explored in the volume, this piece corresponds well with the chapter by Sigrid Weigel, a literary scholar and author of pioneering research on the issues of generation and genealogy. Weigel discusses the concept of generation in reference to writings by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud, and thus those Jewish intellectuals from German-speaking countries whose works often considered the question of legitimacy of using generation as a category and the problem of trans-generational memory in cultural and biographical contexts. Weigel focuses on such concepts as “acting,” “memory,” “hope,” and “guilt,” thus distancing herself from the type of research on generations in which, in the sociological spirit of Karl Mannheim, the emphasis is primarily on the identity character of groups or cohorts defined with this term. Within the context of the other chapters contained in this volume, Weigel’s chapter plays an important role as it brings out the semantic contexts of a concept of key significance in the presented work and it sheds light on important European debates concerning inheritance, message, and situation of the subject in time, even though it does not broach the topic of communism directly. The “logic” in the title of part one suggests the constructivist character of the concept of generation, whose meanings change depending on who uses it and in what circumstances. The second part, “Generations and Gender in Historical Contexts: Comparative Case Studies,” features studies depicting the possibility of generational-gender interpretation of history based on specific examples, starting from communism and leftist movements in 1930s Yugoslavia (the chapter by historian Isidora Grubački), through a comparative look at the “wave-like quality” of communist movements in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba (chapter by gender studies scholar Chiara Bonfiglioli) and the role of Italian communist women during the Cold War (chapter by historian Eloisa Betti), to the issue of left feminism of Turkish migrants in West Germany (chapter by historian Sercan Çinar). Such a diversity of themes may raise questions as to whether they are representative. The editors, however, aimed not so much for symmetry of individual case studies, as rather intended to show the full span of the problem. All the studies in this part of the volume confirm the possibility of ordering the history of Europe (and beyond) with the aid of the history of generations, all the while showing the dangers of its reflectionless use. The authors make an important contribution to European historiography, discovering or rewriting the history of European communism and leftist movements, albeit with no ambitions to exhaust the topic.

4  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik The third part, “Women’s Biographical Experiences and Communism,” is dominated by the biographical perspective. Historian Natalia Jarska studies the biographies of the so-called first generation of Polish communist women, who started their (illegal) activity in the interwar period and continued it after World War II, this time within the power structures of the Polish People’s Republic. The existing research often either omitted these women or demonized them, without attempting a critical reflection, free of ideological blindness. Social historians Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz analyze a fragment of post-World War II history of Polish sociology from the perspective of women sociologists. They ask if the female pioneers of Polish sociology interpreted their professional activities using the category of generation, availing themselves of the symbolic capital that this category employs, and whether they problematized their professional situation in relation to traditional gender roles. This part concludes with a chapter by literary scholar Libuše Heczková and film scholar Kateřina Svatoňová, shifting the focus from the Polish onto the Czech perspective. Based on the example of the artistic endeavors of Ester Krumbachová, a screenwriter and costume designer, the authors muse on the boundaries of (women’s) artistic freedom in Czechoslovakia and formulate a thesis on the grotesque transgressions in art on the paradigms of late socialism. In all the chapters in this part, the category of generation is intimately connected with the category of gender: not only because the considerations concern women but also because “femininity” in these texts is approached as an identity element that determines decisions of a political, intellectual, and artistic nature. The last part, “Aesthetic Representations of Gendered Generations in Communism and Beyond,” contains chapters that show how the problem of generations is staged in the medium of literature and what the construction of individual generational narratives involves. Thus, the focus shifts from the area of historiography to the problem of literary representation. Agnieszka Mrozik analyzes the myths accrued in Polish academia around the so-called generation of the Polish Youth Union, and so the first generation of youth that grew up after World War II in a socialist country. Particular attention is given here to women involved in the communist movement, but also to working and peasant youth, both men and women. She discusses how the uncritically applied category of “generation” may become an ideological tool, creating a national community while erasing or appropriating the experiences of gender or class. Anna Artwin´ska demonstrates with the example of Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets novel by the Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich how the category of generation is occasionally utilized by actors of specific political events and by witnesses to history (here: citizens of the former USSR) as an identity formula, and how this fact affects the ways of understanding the Soviet past. Literary scholar Anja Tippner

Introduction  5 explores the biography of Jiřina Šiklová, a Czech dissident and pioneer of gender studies, proposing that her specific choices were each time determined by socio-political coordinates, which made it necessary to function “in between”—in the gray zone that enabled feminist involvement. The chapter by historian Anna Müller concludes this part. Using the life story of Tonia Lechtman, a Polish communist woman of Jewish background, Müller analyzes the reasons for the fascination with the communist movement of Polish Jews born in the early twentieth century. Reading Lechtman’s letters to family members, she discusses the emancipatory meaning of communism for women in the context of interwar political tensions and clashes of conservative and progressive social and cultural currents. In the conclusion, historian and gender studies scholar Francisca de Haan sums up the objectives of the book and asks to which extent the examples it presents are valuable not only for studies on communism but also for broadly understood feminist and gender studies. This volume covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). The chapters collected in the publication refer in different ways to two key categories: generation and gender. In addition to more theoretical studies focused on the history of these concepts and their possible intersections (as complementary research perspectives), the book offers analyses in which both “generation” and “gender” are not problematized at the theoretical level, but used to name specific social and political phenomena as well as discursive practices. Moreover, the volume does not seek symmetry between the leading categories: the chapters put the accents differently, oscillating between gender and generational perspectives.

Notes 1 The project resulted in a volume entitled Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018). Its authors examined the history and uses of the term “communism” in postWorld War II Poland, emphasizing its various meanings: a movement and a party, an idea, a political program, and a party/movement affiliation and thus personal identification, but also “other people’s word,” a “common word,” which in a postsocialist public debate often critically names and even disavows not only the workers’ movement, the post-World War II state socialisms, but also  the Marxist worldview and leftist politics in general. The various meanings of the term “communism” also appear throughout the volume which we are now presenting to our readers. See also our chapter “Generational and Gendered Memory of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: Methodological Perspectives and Political Challenges.”

6  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik



Part I

The Logic of Gender and Generation(s) Theoretical Approaches

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Generational and Gendered Memory of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe Methodological Perspectives and Political Challenges Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik

Introduction “Her ideological choices”—writes Patrycja Bukalska about Julia Brystiger (1902–1975), Polish communist and functionary of the security apparatus in postwar Poland—“were fairly typical choices for a considerable part of the pre-war generation of Polish communists.”1 The author is referring to the fact that many Polish communists born in the early twentieth century, especially those who, like Brystiger, were of Jewish origin, became involved in communism to express their protest against Polish antisemitism. To them, accession to this movement was a manifestation of disapproval of nationalism and xenophobia, as important as condemning disastrous living conditions of the working and peasant classes in Poland. 2 Communism brought hope for changing the world for the better. This hope, in turn, frequently translated into a readiness to pay a high price for the communist revolution, according to the principle that no price is too high to change the status quo. In situating Brystiger’s life and work within the generational context, her biographer attempted to show a certain typicality of her ideological stance, which resulted from the fact that she was born in a certain place and that her socialization had followed a certain path. Bukalska did not define the formative generational experience for this group; she employed the category of generation primarily in order to show their so-called common fate. Of course, such a perspective of the biographies of Polish (and other) communists is not isolated, even if today in many countries of the former “Eastern Bloc” the category of generation is applied mainly for the purpose of distinguishing and legitimizing communities organized around anticommunist opposition. Yet, Patrycja Bukalska’s biographic tale is also interesting for another reason: it shows the role that gender plays in the memory of communism. The author’s findings indicate that the political involvement of Julia Brystiger is judged from the perspective of traditional standards of gender roles and expectations of women’s duties in the public sphere. The heroine of this biography is “called to account” not only for her involvement

10  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik in the communist movement but also for her “unfulfilled” feminine duties: as wife and mother. Thus, Brystiger’s unambiguously bad reputation of a female politician who allegedly brutally interrogated, and even tortured, young male soldiers of the Polish anticommunist underground is not only due to the negative assessment of her communist past. In this case, the stereotype of an ideologically committed and zealous communist is gendered: a communist woman seems to be much more menacing or dangerous than a communist man.3 The aforementioned biography written by Bukalska offers a clear view of how important the categories of generation and gender are in contemporary memory of communism. Following this train of thought, we propose that these categories must be actively applied in analyses of communism in European culture. Although methodological reflection on the category of gender has been present in research on communism in Central and Eastern Europe since at least the 1990s,4 the concept of generation has yet to become a subject of similar deliberation. Indeed, as it serves to categorize certain social groups, the concept of generation is broadly used as a technical term in works concerning the non-immediate, yet recent past of Central and Eastern Europe: we speak almost automatically of the March 1968 generation in Poland (pokolenie Marca) and of Husak’s generation (Husákovy děti) in the Czech Republic, 5 but such applications of the term presume the existence of a kind of “agreement” between those who communicate. According to the principle implied when people use the term “generation,” they usually share the same understanding of its meaning. These uses are, however, primarily of a sociological nature: they accentuate the alleged shared fate and experiences of certain groups of people, born more or less in the same period of time and bound by “common” life events of ideological or historical nature. In these sociological uses, referring to the classical concept of generation advanced by Karl Mannheim in his 1928 essay, generation comes across as a neutral, nearly transparent, category that does not require theoretical reflection.6 While feminist debates held in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe have devoted significant attention to explaining the semantic contexts of such concepts as gender and women—an undertaking certainly furthered by the work of, among others, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Joan Wallach Scott—in generational debates held in relation to communism, the history of this key concept, of the generation itself, does not seem to raise any problems or objections. We would like to take this precisely as our point of departure, as it is virtually impossible to reflect on generation and communism in isolation from the history of the concept of generation. Just as essentialist treatment of gender may become a source of oppression, the automatic application of the category of generation too is—or may be—a practice revealing the problem of the distribution of symbolic power.7 Thus, it seems important to emphasize the constructed character of the concept of generation

Generational and Gendered Memory  11 and its dependence on the legitimization practices of given groups or communities. This chapter attempts to conceptualize Eastern European communisms as social and political phenomena within which various social and political actors—including individuals and groups working within the post-World War II socialist states, as well as representatives of the anticommunist movements—articulated their identities through gender and generation. We argue that when seen through the analytical lenses of “gender” and “generation,” communism may be articulated as a history of individuals and groups of people who defined themselves through certain biological, social, and cultural affiliations. Those articulations encompass identities such as “socialist feminists,” “generation of postwar reconstruction,” “generation 1968,” “women of dissident movements,” and many more. We begin by recalling the history and uses of the term “generation” in the humanities, and, particularly, in the field of Holocaust studies, referring to the discussions about the problematic character of this concept. Next, we analyze how the term “generation”—both as a cohort (peer group) and a genealogy of social, cultural, and political processes in the post-World War II socialist states and in the postsocialist era—functions in contemporary research on communism. Finally, we point out the opportunities and challenges that may arise from the application of the categories of gender and generation in studies of communism, but also post- and anticommunism.

Theoretical Approaches: Generation as a “Traveling Concept” in the Humanities8 In this chapter, the concept of generation is analyzed first from the perspective of research conducted in Western, mainly German, humanities, where it has been utilized for nearly two decades.9 Contemporary German reflection on the category of generation, which is closely connected to the concept of modernity, is unusually multifaceted. In the context of the multitude of interpretations, though, we would like to underline two key tendencies. First, historians Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt recommend caution when using the category of generation in cultural analyses that include, for example, research into lifestyles of groups of people born in the same time. In their opinion, employing the concept of generation makes sense only insofar as it serves to elucidate central historical and political processes. Members of a generation are, from this point of view, those who are characterized by a common agency in the fields of politics and history; the concept of generation, however, is not limited here to a commonality of experiences, but rather has an operational value as a category enabling the examination of social and historical processes. For

12  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik this reason, in analyses devoted to collective experiences (and the identification processes of selected groups or environments resulting from them), which do not translate into an understanding of key events of the era, it seems more appropriate to use terms such as “cohort” or “peer group.”10 Second, in her 2006 seminal book Genea-Logik, literary scholar Sigrid Weigel echoes the concerns regarding the horizontal, sociological concept of generation derived from Mannheim. She criticizes the general and essentialist vision of community advanced by Mannheim as a position susceptible to appropriation by nationalist elements. His excessive focus on the problems of the “group,” “community,” and “unit” leads, according to Weigel, to a narrow understanding of generation that becomes a means for enabling exclusionary processes.11 Therefore, she appeals to expand the generational perspective, emphasizing that the category of generation implies a synchronic and a diachronic dimension in its usage. She argues that the history of the concept of generation should be examined in a genealogical dimension and not only in a social dimension. Aside from the historical angle, it should be remembered that generation is not merely a unit of measure used for the identification of attitudes, beliefs, and views; both horizontal and vertical perspectives are key features of this category. However, today, generations are emerging everywhere where the latest history is interpreted as derivative of a historical turning point, whereas the model of generations is used mainly for the periodization and functions as a “mythical-narrational formula for counting time, besides calendar and historiography.”12 We will now take a closer look at the genealogical dimension of generation, as postulated by Weigel. As she notes, the somewhat forgotten genealogical perspective is coming back as an element of work on memory and theory of memory. One space where it finds significant application is the research on the Holocaust. Psychological and medical studies examining the trauma of Holocaust victims and their families have become an important impulse for investigating the intergenerational transmission of trauma as well as its artistic representations. In the majority of Eastern European literatures in the last decade, a significant number of texts have been published that problematize the “long shadow of the Holocaust,” in reference to the ways in which this catastrophe has affected second and third generations. These postcatastrophic narratives have introduced the concept of retroactivity into the discourse.13 More so than focusing solely on the postmemory of catastrophic events, retroactivity concerns the exceptionally long duration of the Holocaust and of its continuations, manifested precisely in the genealogical dimension: on the literally understood body of the second and third generations. Yet, the problem of heritage and transmission manifests itself not only in relation to the descendants of the victims. Since more or less 2005, German literature has seen an “explosion” of novels written by the

Generational and Gendered Memory  13 “children and grandchildren” of Nazi perpetrators, focusing on traumatic family stories, most often connected to the involvement of parents or grandparents in Nazi politics.14 This development bears witness to, on the one hand, an attempt at textually coming to terms with German past in the so-called second and third generations of the perpetrators, while, on the other hand, it also offers an attempt at constituting private memory as an alternative to the collective one. In the context of this development, there is a need for a more precise distinction between the category of generation understood as a collective category, the belonging to which is determined by a host of historical and social factors, and an alternative understanding of the generation, in which emphasis is placed on generationality within the family, and therewith upon issues of a genealogical nature. Genealogical discourses, which in the humanities revolve around questions connected to beginnings, origins, reproduction, and inheritance, have shaped their own frameworks of rhetorical concepts, figures, metaphors, and narrative patterns, enabling new methods of narrating one’s personal history and of understanding historical processes. These discourses have emerged in intimate connection with such issues as the employment of biopower and medicine as new reproductive technologies, cloning or epigenetics, or perhaps they constitute its humanistic reverse. Thanks to the category of generation, biological categories begin to acquire a cultural meaning—that is, reproduction becomes a culture of transmission.15 Reflections on generationality aim toward a more precise definition of the concept itself, as well as toward the spectrum of its application; interestingly, this discourse finds its place at the intersection between the humanities and the natural sciences. At the same time, theoreticians of generations point out that this is a “slippery concept,” which blurs a host of tensions and conflicts of class, gender, ethnic, or sexual nature within groups that declare themselves as generational communities.16 It also casts a shadow over the interests of those who thematize and describe generations from the outside, including using them in order to identify and distinguish social attitudes. For these reasons, in keeping with Ulrike Jureit’s observations, it is always worth questioning who is and who is not the subject of generational narration; what is and what is not a generation-forming impulse, and who or what determines this; and finally, which generations go down in history according to which concepts, and thanks to whom or when this happens.17 In light of this approach, the generation ceases to be a neutral concept, and generation-forming processes and the rules behind their emergence and distribution lose neutrality as well. In her studies on generations, Jureit also postulates the need for differentiating between generation as an analytical category, a concept applied from the outside in order to analyze sociological phenomena, and the generation as a type of self-thematization.18 We believe that this distinction is particularly important for research on

14  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik communism; yet, at the same time, it is this very research on communism that reveals that both as an analytical category and a formula of identification, generation implies in each of its uses a problem of inclusion versus exclusion, a hierarchical vision of history, a better or worse position owing to one’s time and place of birth. In this context, it is important to remember that generation may also be viewed as a narrative category, which may be examined from a communicative perspective.19 Thus understood, the generational narrative, or perhaps in other terms, the story about a generation or the story of a given generation, occurs not infrequently: primarily, in strategic goals, in the character of an argument; second, as a myth legitimizing the emergence of a given generational project; third, as a “task to be brought to realization,” oriented toward the future; and finally, as a construction demonstrating the ambiguity indicated earlier and the wavering character of the concept of generation. 20 As the authors of the important work Das Konzept der Generation [The Concept of Generation] argue, it is not the existence of generations that is debated in research dedicated to the subject, but rather the manner in which, and in pursuit of what goal, their existence is affirmed. 21 Interestingly, the genealogical perspective, either forgotten or never strongly present in Western European theorization about generation, appears in research on communism conducted over the past three decades in Central and Eastern Europe. Referring only to the Polish example, we may speculate that the contemporary reflection on communism is more likely to use biological rather than social components of the definition of a generation. In opposition to the pre- and post-World War II approaches to conceptualizing generations, which involved synchronic and horizontal dimensions, expressed as a focus on the aspects of youth, beginning, breaking with the tradition of the ancestors, and the shifting of an outlook toward the future22 —which themselves are closely associated with the socialist idea of rejecting succession and inheritance from ancestors, the late- and postsocialist times aspire toward a definition of generation that emphasizes the role of origins, genealogy, and preserving ties to the ancestors; this definition highlights diachronic and vertical aspects of generational structures. 23 Such an understanding of generations as happening one after another without losing connection with the predecessors, or, in fact, being doomed to remain in a relation with them and to continue their work, 24 feeds into the currently prevailing orientation toward the past. 25 References to the past, taking on the form of the “tradition of all dead generations,” which, as Karl Marx wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,”26 are today the most catchy and effective means for legitimizing its presence in the media debate. In postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe, this is a past of a determined kind: oriented toward the nation, traditional family, and religion, a past in which the communist movement and state socialism have no place

Generational and Gendered Memory  15 and are often construed as a negative reference point, in turn, serving as a “glue” for the national community. The Biblical image of relationships between generations as relationships based on guilt has been extensively discussed by Sigrid Weigel.27 In referring to her research, we are signaling the very fact that contemporary Polish discourse has been dominated by a “genealogical obsession,” which eagerly uses the concept of origins, tradition, and “blood ties.”28 This “biological” approach to generations is often marked by a weak or in fact non-existent methodological awareness. The processes of transmission or inheritance are approached as natural processes—“inheriting from the ancestors” happens automatically, so to speak. Appropriate roots, namely, patriotic, intelligent, and Catholic, just the same as “communist guilt” (that is, being a party member, serving in the Security Service or in the communist militia), pass silently from fathers to sons, thus becoming an integral component of the identity of the second and third generations (for example, in Poland the children of communist dignitaries as well as of media and culture elites from the period of state socialism are offensively labeled as “resort children”). 29 Categories such as “origin,” “transmission,” or “heritage,” all of which belong to the repertoire of genealogy, determine the way in which genealogy is mediated in the literature and art, and this needs further research. This is because genealogical forms are never completely ahistorical, and, as such, they should be placed within the “horizon of expectations” of a given culture. Insofar as the genealogical perspective has, in the context of research on the Holocaust, contributed to the establishment of the theory of memory, 30 in research on communist “blood ties” and family related metaphors it is employed somewhat heedlessly—just as the concept of generation is applied in the description of selected social groups. Categories such as “origin,” “transmission,” and “heritage” are taken either literally or metaphorically as cultural phenomena that mirror biological processes. The fact that the very act of storytelling is often augmented with visual aids, such as a family tree and/or description of intergenerational inheritance, speaks volumes about intentions of such a discourse; yet, the fact that these conceptual apparatuses imply a determined vision of the world, unfortunately, has not been the object of analysis. Here we mean mainly discursive practices employed in the political and social dimensions. When used in literary texts, as well as in sagas or family tales, as a method of organizing narration, the “genealogical imagination” is subject to constant deconstruction, questioning, or used outright subversively. Departing from historical and sociocultural constellations, contemporary literary and cultural research frequently defines generation as a type of narrative that fulfills important social and communicative functions. In the medium of generational and genealogical genres, such as the genealogical novel, saga, or autobiography, processes of (re)

16  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik defining individuals and groups and of establishing a vision of history and of the past frequently occur and often clash with other opposing visions and images. Instead of linear tales praising the clan, family, and the “right origins” (that is, origins compliant with the mainstream politics), clad in the pathos of longue durée, many European literatures of the twenty-first century attempt at telling alternative family stories, filled with gaps and cracks, incomplete, and/or lacking. The concept of generation is understood therein as either a model of continuation or a model of conflict and rejection; in both cases, it is significant that one’s own position is articulated in reference to other entities and groups. Family stories, at the same time, are often approached critically and revisionistically, as myths or constructs, and as a space of conflict. Departing from genealogical considerations, literature often emphasizes the disintegration and collapse of the family—it creates tales of cybernetic alternative families and the end of reproduction.31

Generation and Communism: Dangerous Liaisons Exactly how the category of generation in its two dimensions, synchronic and diachronic, is at times used within the context of research on communism requires deeper reflection. To start from generation as a sociological category, it seems that contemporary works concerned with communism use generation mainly as a time unit, serving to periodize history.32 Generation is used to measure time from communism—a historical period with mostly negative connotations, perceived as a “pause in history”—to the arrival of capitalism as a perceived destination point. The biological aspect of generations—the death of one generation and the birth of the next one—also fuels a certain way of thinking about historical transformations. Here this means the unavoidability of the subsequent phases of state socialism leading up to its eventual demise. Family related metaphors, with a conflict of generations at their focal point, support an explanation of the transition from communism to capitalism as a natural one, albeit not devoid of struggle. Such an approach appears, for example, in the works of American historian Marci Shore who—with the aid of the figure of generation, generational change, and the conflict of generations—tries to grasp the dynamics of the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, that is, a shift from feudal structures, through the period of state socialism, to the stage of liberal and free market democracy. Importantly, it is the centrifugal transformations of the communist movement, illustrated by the examples of Poland and Czechoslovakia, that take center stage in Shore’s explorations. In Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968, the first serious crisis of communism in Poland coincides with the end stage of life of the generation enchanted and disappointed with Marxism.33 The project expires when

Generational and Gendered Memory  17 the people who were its “living media” leave—that is, get sick and die. In her Nowoczesność jako źródło cierpień [Modernity and Its Discontents], the historical process of change in Poland and Czechoslovakia is fueled and embodied by the conflict between the “old” and the “young,” communist fathers and their anticommunist sons, which starts in the mid-1950s and gradually mounts with each passing decade, until the final showdown in 1989.34 Interestingly, there is no place for women, mothers and daughters, in this historiographic interpretation.35 Such representations as those proposed by Marci Shore depict not only a specific vision of history but also a specific politics of memory. It is first and foremost the memory of victims, or—better yet—of those who identify with the victims, for whom communism, even if fleetingly attractive, in the end turned out to be a mistake. History seems to always side with those who managed to shake off the “allure of Marxism,” as with those who already within it were busy working out alternative models. A lot of attention is at the same time paid to generations which, having realized their communist “guilt,” rejected the ideals of their youth and stepped over to the “right” side, becoming a part of the generations of resistance movements. Thanks to this, it becomes possible to think of history with the aid of Hegelian dialectics of “overcoming” mistakes and in the categories of natural development and striving to reach “higher” forms. Under these circumstances, the generation has negative connotations as a category: it relates first and foremost to the generations of so-called perpetrators, responsible for the negative course of events taking place. The ensuing generations of communists are not concretely defined nor are they given names; they possess no individual qualifiers (perhaps aside from the so-called first generation36). The meaning of this concept depends on the fact that the generational dynamic is regarded in terms of responsibility for the communism and thus for causing “gaps” or pauses in history. This concept of the natural course, or development of history—one from communism to capitalism—is also propelled by an understanding of generation as a unit of measurement applied in identification and distinction of social attitudes.37 In the works of Polish sociologist Hanna Świda-Ziemba, the history of socialist Poland is told as the history of changing attitudes, expectations, and ambitions of subsequent age cohorts, and it is then fitted into the order of evolution of the system. 38 Changes of attitudes, spread over time, are used to measure the subsequent stages of state socialism and to gradate them: the embodiment of civilizational development is those generations that most emphatically reject the socialist ethos and move closer to what is applauded in liberal Western free market democracies: individualism, difference, and private property. Yet, this is not just a Polish peculiarity, as German sociologist Thomas Ahbe and social historian Rainer Gries have proposed a similar method

18  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik for outlining the generational panorama of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) history in their works.39 The designations they give to subsequent GDR generations: that is, the “generation of the wary patriarchs,” “generation of reconstruction,” “functioning generation,” “integrated generation,” “generation without borders,” and “Wendegeneration,” are intended to organize this period of history, and ultimately serve as a means to make the history of the GDR more coherent and to naturalize the direction of its development: from calcification, closeness, antiquatedness of state socialism, to transformation, openness, and the youthfulness of liberal democracy.40 A salient qualification here is that, in relation to the “Wendegeneration,” the researchers have introduced a significant dichotomy. The first group represents those individuals who spent only the very first years of their lives in the GDR and do not remember the reality of this era very well. This allowed them to quickly adapt to the new political circumstances and to living in reunified Germany. The second group, who lived through their important formative years in the GDR, is presented as a branded group, marked with an ambivalent attitude toward the past; it is an “unadvised” generation, that is, a generation which has not been taught how to pass smoothly from one system to another.41 The difficulties of this generation in finding their own place in a postsocialist reality are treated here as a sort of blemish or burden; the “unadvised” generation is, fortunately, the last one affected by this problem. From such a standpoint, the center of gravity moves from the leaders of the communist project to the so-called “ordinary citizens,” whose relationship to communism was determined most of all by the occasion of their birth. It is not by coincidence that the narration in Ahbe and Gries’ study on “the history of generations in the GDR and Eastern Germany” is augmented with photographs depicting members of the generations in question in everyday situations. And so, along with many portraits of “a grandmother with her granddaughter” or “a widow with her son”42 one may also find “a crew of workers”43 or “a young worker.”44 Using generations to periodize and gradate the history of Central and Eastern Europe, including the history of communism (state socialism/ people’s democracy) and postsocialist transformation, seems particularly trendy today. The literature of the subject has especially focused on the concept of a “generation of the end,” or “the last generation”: of socialism,45 of Stalinism,46 of Yugoslavia,47 or of the GDR (“Wendegeneration”). It is interesting to researchers, mainly social historians and anthropologists, as an object containing the essence of the system just before its collapse: still marked with duration, consent, acceptance of the existing order, and yet, also with the beginnings of movement, dissent, and protest against it. It is this dissent that holds the unique power to afford agency to the “generation of the end” and to transform it into a symbolic “generation of the beginning of a new era,” a generation of

Generational and Gendered Memory  19 passage and reaching the destination, all the way to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” after which, as the Italian historian Enzo Traverso ­ironically noted, the only thing left to do is to immerse oneself in the eternal present (because the future is happening now).48 Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is the title of Alexi Yurchak’s book about “the last Soviet generation.”49 In Polish culture the so-called “generation of transformation” is also a subject of special attention, by virtue of being the first generation to come of age following the collapse of communism, and at the same time, the first generation not able to remember a time without “freedom.”50 We should also note that the concept of “the last generation” has often strong nostalgic features. Even though the shared generational life events involve dissent and protest, the “generation of the end” is interesting as the only embodiment of a certain idea or worldview. For this reason, it is sometimes described (or presents itself) not only in political categories but also in cultural ones. Generational customs and rituals, ways of thinking, forms of leisure, even cuisine or fashion, are the object of much interest. This perspective favors the optic of orientalism. “The last generation” is perceived as a reserve of odd practices and habits, yet at the same time, as an object of perverse nostalgia. It is often visualized with black and white photographs, presenting the signs of a world that is drifting away: the already non-existent school uniforms, socialist sweets or gadgets of the era. Here a transformation of generational memory to a cultural memory can be observed. The experiences of this generation cease to be just visceral experiences, shifting into a cultural experience made accessible with the help of symbolic representations.51 The contesting of state socialism is ultimately viewed as the only effective tool of political action, and also as the victorious stance that guarantees a spot in the generational chain of history, whereas “siding with socialism,” consenting to the socialist order, doom one to be forgotten, if not disgraced (research by Tom Junes on the political activity of Polish students from mid-1950s until the end of the 1980s introduces a distinction into “generations of consent and dissent”).52 This is experienced by the “first generations of socialism,” whose analyses are missing from the literature of the subject, and even when they exist, they come with a host of methodological reservations (which mostly do not accompany descriptions of the “generations of transformation” and “postsocialist generations”).53 The historian Anna Krylova points out that these reservations usually address the alleged lack of agency and empowerment, but also unreliability and/or manipulation of the voices of those who formed and represented those generations.54 The few contemporary publications from the Polish lens to deal with the “generation of the builders of socialism” confirm the diagnosis of Krylova: building generational identity amidst the fight for socialism, and not against it, puts the thus defined participants at risk of suspicion, wariness, if not automatic

20  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik exclusion from the bracket of the shared history—generational, but also national.55 Of course the need for contextualization of the indicated processes and tendencies must be kept in mind. For example, the GDR “generation of reconstruction” (Aufbaugeneration), born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, seems to enjoy greater social prestige, or at least it seems to have a stronger position in the collective German memory than its Polish counterpart—the “generation of the Polish Youth Union”/“generation of the builders of Nowa Huta”—owing not only to the patriotic effort of rebuilding the country following the demise of the Nazi regime and the destruction wrought by the war but also precisely due to the widespread social promotion of the peasants and blue-collar workers that formed part of this generation.56 The right to generational representation is also denied to a certain extent to those activists who joined the communist movement in the interwar period. Especially the biographies of women who belonged to the pre-war communist generation are often perceived as biographies of losers, who wasted their lives in the fight for a misguided cause. We argue that in serving the purpose of “ordering history,” generations give position and value. Therefore, resistance to communism, which comes in a sequence of dates: the 1956 Budapest Uprising, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Polish “Solidarity” movement of 1980, the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is more valued and positioned higher than campaigning in the name of socialism.57 At the same time, generations delineate the frameworks of collective memory and forgetting: while strengthening the mythology of some (contemporary anticommunist opposition), they undermine the mythology of others (fighters for socialism). At this point it needs emphasizing that today anticommunism is part of the mainstream public debate in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe; it is also part of the identity politics of many milieus, groups, and socio-political movements, including women’s movements.58 After the stage of establishing the ties—of spiritual daughterhood or sisterhood—with the so-called “second wave” of Western feminism, which manifested itself in the attempts to fit into the chronology of “waves” of Western feminism, 59 the contemporary women’s movements in this part of the world began to anchor themselves deeper in the national traditions of the countries in which they respectively function.60 Matrilineal family metaphors (grandmothers, mothers, daughters), often employed in feminist narrations, have become a handy tool for the building of legitimate genealogies. These genealogies welcome the advocates for women’s rights from before state socialism, for example, suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as anticommunist activists and participants of national protests such as “women of Solidarity” (kobiety Solidarności) in Poland or the Czech “women in dissent” (ženy v disentu).61 But at the same time women’s

Generational and Gendered Memory  21 organizations from the period of state socialism, radically leftist activists, and female politicians of communist parties are excluded from the history of the women’s movements in the region.62 Their image is often reduced to a series of stereotypical snapshots, and the visual sign or code for anticommunist thinking is usually the image of a socialist female shock worker trying to start the engine of a tractor. The purpose of cutting the communist link out of the chain of generations of politically active women is ultimately to legitimize contemporary feminism within the mainstream public debate, more and more often organized around nationalist populism.63 Yet, as evidenced by the rise of the anti-gender movement in recent years, this strategy does not seem to have brought about the expected results.64

Generations, Communism, and Gender This chapter has been motivated and guided by the question of whether, and if so, to what extent, generation may be useful as a category in research on communism and vice versa—whether studies on communism can bring anything new to research on generations and the very theory of the generation, which today enjoys much renewed scholarly interest. The answer was first formulated in Teksty Drugie [Second Texts], the Polish scholarly bimonthly dedicated to literary and cultural studies, whose guest editors were the authors of this chapter.65 The 2016 publication concluded with an exploration of the history of the notion of generation, a review of its critical uses in contemporary humanities, as well as a proposal for its new application in research on communism: its memory, languages, and aesthetics of description. The authors emphasized that research on the usefulness or uselessness of the category of generation in research on communism, but also anti- and postcommunism, cannot be conducted in isolation from other categories such as class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. Gender seems a particularly promising analytical category in this field of research, since it adds new questions to the classic Mannheimian theory of generations that, as Christina Benninghaus and Sigrid Weigel have shown, must be considered masculine.66 On the other hand, such critical reflection on generations appears particularly useful for research on the cultural and social history of women and of gender, which, for example, has already been demonstrated by the authors of analyses published under the auspices of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, dedicated, among others, to the history of women and gender in socialist and postsocialist regions of Europe. This chapter stems from that recognition, but also the belief that studies on communism, state socialism, people’s democracies open up a unique opportunity for generational and gender analyses to step

22  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik outside national boundaries and to explore the discussed phenomena in an inter- and transnational perspective. Such analyses, nowadays conducted primarily in relation to the “generation 1968,”67 may be successfully conducted also in reference to internationalist leftist movements of the early twentieth century—characterized by a strong presence of women and addressing the postulate of women’s emancipation in their agendas—but also in reference to interwar and contemporary anticommunist movements. Following in the footsteps of philosopher Boris Groys, it seems greatly important for us to take a closer look at postcommunist anticommunism as a generational (or perhaps even transgenerational) project, transcending state and cultural boundaries.68 The masculine, military, and traditional aspects of this project also deserve some attention here. Questions concerning the place of women and minorities within its framework should inexorably be brought to bear. The purpose of this chapter is, first and foremost, to sharpen our awareness of the category of generation. We have intended that, similarly to the category of gender, it is applied with awareness of its complex history and diverse semantic contexts. Even though a “slippery” category, generation is at the same time a central and inescapable category in the contemporary humanities. The generational perspective, alongside— among others—postcolonial and discourse-theory perspectives, is something more than just an important “trend” in the humanities of the recent decades.69 Its significance and methodological attractiveness are that it allows for the problematization of historical, social, and cultural changes simultaneously in individual and collective, synchronic and diachronic perspectives. We depart from the assumption that combining the categories of generation and gender will make it possible to cast a fresh look on communism, whose subjects, thanks to such a double angle, will gain more differentiating features, becoming more distinctive, and, in effect, will complicate the image of communism enforced by mainstream media and historiography. With regard to women’s movements, we are interested in questions about methods of constructing generational identities and relations among women in general: is the basis here those processes and phenomena which only concern women (such as gaining the right to vote), or are “generations of women” simply a part of broader, involving both women and men, generational units? Furthermore, can women count on their own intra- and intergenerational representations and voices, so that they can articulate their own experiences, attribute significance to them, and thus become part of collective memory and shared history? In relation to literary texts or cultural artifacts, generation is becoming, similarly to gender, a type of convention, that is, a way of recording and storing experiences. Within literature, the concept of generation has created its own aesthetics and a chain of rhetorical figures: we therefore advocate for generational aesthetics to be combined with gender aesthetics, and, by using this combined approach

Generational and Gendered Memory  23 for analysis, we discover that literature and art may say something about communism that cannot be heard elsewhere.

Notes

24  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik of a lost generation. This is extremely suspicious to me when someone is talking about “us” or “generation.” Everyone dies alone. Gerrit Bartels, “Ich sehe mich als Individualisten,” taz. die tageszeitung, June 21, 2006, https://taz.de/!415860/, accessed November 28, 2019.





12 Ibid., 108.

19 Bohnenkamp, Manning, and Silies, Generation als Erzählung, 10. 20 Ibid., 10–12.

Generational and Gendered Memory  25 22 See Józef Chałasiński, Młode pokolenie chłopów (Warszawa: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza “Pomoc Oświatowa,” 1938); Bohdan Czeszko, Pokolenie (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1951); Leon Kruczkowski, “Wzdłuż, nie w poprzek dziejów,” in Literatura i polityka, vol. 1: W klimacie dyktatury 1927–1939 (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1971). 23 See Bohdan Cywiński, Rodowody niepokornych (Warszawa: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy “Znak,” 1971); Adam Michnik, “Cienie zapomnianych przodków,” Kultura 332, no. 5 (1975): 3–21; Roman Wapiński, Pokolenia Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1991). 24 Aleida Assmann, “Verkörperte Geschichte—zur Dynamik der Generationen,” in Geschichte im Gedächtnis. Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (München: C. H. Beck, 2007), 31–69. 25 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 26 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10. 27 Sigrid Weigel, “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 77, no. 4 (2002): 264–77. 28 Interestingly, cultural studies scholar Christina von Braun has recently drawn attention to the fact that only in the eighteenth century (and, therefore, at the time when the concept of generation itself emerged) the European culture found that not only property but also physical traits could be inherited. The idea of the “blood relationship” morphed quickly into a vision of “communities related by blood” in a collective sense, and thereby relation by blood became the keystone for the concept of the nation state. See Christina von Braun, Blutsbande. Verwandtschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: Aufbau, 2018), 310–15. 29 See Dorota Kania, Maciej Marosz, and Jerzy Targalski, Resortowe dzieci. Media (Warszawa: Fronda, 2013); Dorota Kania, Maciej Marosz, and Jerzy Targalski, Resortowe dzieci. Służby (Warszawa: Fronda, 2015); Dorota Kania, Maciej Marosz, and Jerzy Targalski, Resortowe dzieci. Politycy (Warszawa: Fronda, 2016). 30 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 31 See Parnes, Vedder, and Willer, Das Konzept der Generation, 314–16. 32 Sigrid Weigel, “Generation, Genealogie, Geschlecht. Zur Geschichte des Generationskonzepts und seiner wissenschaftlichen Konzeptualisierung seit Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Kulturwissenschaften. Forschung— Praxis—Positionen, eds. Lutz Musner and Gotthart Wunberg (Wien: WUV, 2002), 161–90. 33 Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 34 Marci Shore, Nowoczesność jako źródło cierpień, trans. Michał Sutowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2012). 35 Agnieszka Mrozik, “Communism as a Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women,” History of Communism in Europe 8 (2017): 261–84. 36 For example, certain ideological features are attributed to the first generation of Polish communists, or rather Stalinists. From an outside perspective, this generation, born at the turn of the twentieth century, is presented as the

26  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik

37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

first and last to “blindly” believe in the power of the communist project; in turn, their self-narratives accentuate most of all emancipatory and modernizing aspects that decided about their own engagement. Members of the first generation are either ethnic Poles or Jews of Polish origin, something made saliently evident in stereotypes about the “Jewish Bolsheviks.” We will return to the category of this “first generation” later in the course of the chapter. See also Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Dziadek (nie) był komunistą.’ Między/transgeneracyjna pamięć o komunizmie w polskich (auto)biografiach rodzinnych po 1989 roku,” Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 46–67. Weigel, “Generation, Genealogie, Geschlecht.” Hanna Świda-Ziemba, Młodzież PRL. Portrety pokoleń w kontekście historii (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010). Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries, “Gesellschaftsgeschichte als Generationengeschichte. Theoretische und methodologische Überlegungen am Beispiel DDR,” in Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive. Eine Inventur, eds. Thomas Ahbe, Rainer Gries, and Annegret Schüle (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 475–571; Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries, Geschichte der Generationen in der DDR und in Ostdeutschland. Ein Panorama (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007). “Wendegeneration” describes the generation of East Germans born between 1973 and 1984, while “die Wende” is a German term used to describe the process of transformation from the rule of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, SED) to the revival of parliamentary democracy and market economy in the German Democratic Republic around 1989 and 1990. “Die Wende” is also commonly used in German-language discourse to signify the collapse of communism in both the German Democratic Republic and other socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe in the years 1989–91. Bernd Lindner, “Die Generation der Unberatenen. Zur Generationenfolge in der DDR und ihren strukturellen Konsequenzen für die Nachwendezeit,” in Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive. Eine Inventur, 93–113. Ahbe and Gries, Geschichte der Generationen in der DDR und in Ostdeutschland, 12. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 22. Alexei Yurchak, Everything War Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Ljubica Spaskovska, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18; Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia. The example of the USSR/Russia is an interesting one, as it lays bare the heterogeneous nature of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, against the common thesis on the ubiquitous presence of the “Soviet model of communism” throughout the entire “Eastern Bloc.” As demonstrated by Yurchak, the distinction of generations and ascribing meanings to them is not only a function of the involvement of subsequent age groups in the anticommunist resistance but also of their attitude toward the changing sociocultural reality of the socialist state, and also toward the situation within the socialist and capitalist blocs, as they were intimately codependent.

Generational and Gendered Memory  27













28  Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik

63

64 65 66

67 68

69

“Bits of Freedom: Demystifying Women’s Activism under State Socialism in Poland and Georgia,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 1 (2017): 141–68. Michaela Köttig, Renate Bitzan, and Andrea Petö, eds., Gender and Far Right Politics in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For an excellent example of how feminist organizations interact with the nationalist authorities on a grassroots level, one may look at the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of granting suffrage to women, which were performed in Poland in 2018 simultaneously with the hundredth anniversary of the country’s regaining independence. Conferences, exhibitions, walks in the footsteps of “great Polish women,” commemoration of women in the naming of streets, all planned and brought to fruition by the efforts of feminist activists and scholars, melded ideally with ceremonies in honor of Poland’s independence that were organized by the authorities and the opposition. The issue of women and national affairs melded into one, and this unity was made possible by the general, prevailing anticommunist sentiment. The period of Polish People’s Republic and the activism of women’s organizations under state socialism were excluded from the Polish history, and also from the history of the women’s movement in Poland, for not conforming with the reigning definition of the fight for women’s rights as entwined with the fight for the nation’s freedom. Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality (New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017). Anna Artwi ń ska et al., “Poż ytki z ‘pokolenia.’ Dyskusja o ‘pokoleniu’ jako kategorii analitycznej,” Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 347–66. Christina Benninghaus, “Das Geschlecht der Generation. Zum Zusammenhang von Generationalität und Männlichkeit um 1930,” in Generationen. Zur Semantik eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, eds. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005), 127–58; Weigel, Genea-Logik. Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters, eds., Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010). Boris Groys, “Die postkommunistische Situation,” in Zurück aus der Zukunft. Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, eds. Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden, and Peter Weibel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 36–49. Ute Daniel, “Generationengeschichte,” in Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter, ed. Ute Daniel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 330–45.

2

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt The Bond of Generations in Arendt, Benjamin, Heine, and Freud Sigrid Weigel

Generation 1968, the postwar generation, the selfie generation, Generation Z, and the like: the current discourse on generation is dominated by the notion of a certain age group or social group sharing similar experiences or habits. In this way, the ambiguous meaning of generation with its characteristic double-semantics of a genealogical and synchronic dimension tends to be reduced to an identity concept. The notion of generation defined as a collective, formed by a common background or fate, be it cultural, social, or historical, and therefore, sharing a similar consciousness or custom is a product of modernity. It emerged around 1900 and received its theoretical formulation after World War I in Karl Mannheim’s sociological approach, namely, the generation as a synchronic group. Thus, the preceding genealogical semantic of generation that, for a very long time, referred primarily to figures of heritage, transfer, or transmission within historical time or cultural history has been increasingly overshadowed. Even the widespread custom to count generations—namely, the talk of second or third generation—has turned into an identity concept, although it literally functions within a genealogical relation of generations where one generation follows the former, as the ubiquitous phrase “generation by generation” puts it. As a result, the genealogical dimension tends to become a symptom of a cultural unconscious.1 Against the backdrop of this development, my chapter brings to mind the transgenerational bond of generations. It discusses different but related figures of transgenerational heritage by four authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All four of them, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt, all with a Jewish background, approach the dialectics of secularization in a subtle manner and refer to the afterlife of religious ideas within modernity. In what follows, I will develop the common ground of their understanding the way the generations are related: a sort of interpretative pattern based on a theory of history and/or memory conceptualized as a bond of generations that refers back to the Biblical origin of the idea of “heritage.”

30  Sigrid Weigel

Acting and Natality—Hannah Arendt In her book The Human Condition (1958), published eight years after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), Hannah Arendt developed the foundations of her political theory. What is special—and still politically charged—about this theory is that it comes in the form of political anthropology, in which acting—as the genuine human activity—is closely tied to “natality.” This positioning of action and natality is remarkable, because Arendt does not situate the event of birth in a generational succession, neither in a biological genealogy nor in the formula “from generation to generation,” that is the way which determines modern historical thought since the French Revolution. Rather, she interprets natality as a figure of a new beginning and as the condition of possibility of action: [T]he new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. 2 While the last sentence of this passage formulates the most explicit dissociation from Heidegger’s metaphysical philosophy based on the “certainty of death,” Arendt’s concept of natality occupies an even more fundamental position: as the very beginning it is valuated as the precondition of human interaction as such. This key role of natality is more emphasized in the German version of the book that she translated herself, with the title Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (1960); there she translates “central political category” with the formulation entscheidendes, Kategorien-bildendes Faktum [decisive, category-constituting fact] of political thought.3 This meaning of natality is underpinned even more by the fact that it is acting made possible by natality which guarantees the continuity of generations. In the German Vita Activa, Arendt adds this aspect to the effects of action, as they were described in Human Condition. There one reads: “Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.”4 As a result, action now (in the German translation) provides the condition für eine Kontinuität der Generationen, für Erinnerung und damit für Geschichte [for a continuity of generations, for remembrance, and, hence, for history].5 Thus, action is now responsible for securing genealogy, while natality, the precondition of acting, always makes a new beginning possible. When, in this context, Arendt refers to those who are newly born as “newcomers” or Neuankömmlinge and “strangers” or Fremdlinge, one can interpret this as a sign of how strongly her political anthropology

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  31 is based on the historical and her subjective experiences of the previous decades. The fact that Arendt undertook to re-think the “political” from scratch can be read as a response to the observations of the fundamental breach in the concept of the “human being,” as expressed in her article “We Refugees” that appeared in 1943, not quite two years after the Jewish-German philosopher had managed to escape from Europe during the war and arrived in the United States as an exile. Against the backdrop of the death of millions in war, of totalitarianism, the Nazi system of mass-extermination, and the radical experience of refugees and stateless people, Arendt’s reconsideration of the conditio humana leads her to an anthropologically grounded reconceptualization of the political. Yet, it is important to emphasize that she does not derive it from natural history or natural philosophy, but rather argues beyond all metaphysics. She thus explicitly rejects the question concerning the “essence” or “nature” of the human being and replaces it with the question of conditionality: [I]f the human condition consists in man’s being a conditioned being for whom everything, given or man-made, immediately becomes a condition of his further existence, then man “adjusted” himself to an environment of machines the moment he designed them. They certainly have become as inalienable a condition of our existence as tools and implements were in all previous ages.6 The Human Condition begins by delimiting what is specific to the human, in contrast to God and animal alike, based on the fact that man is an acting being, whereby action is defined as an activity that is only possible in a world alongside others. Arendt thus arrives at her concept of the political through a reflection on what it means for human beings to live together. Acting is one of three types of activities that are considered by Arendt as the “basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”7 In distinction from the activity of labor (germ. Arbeit) that serves the necessities for the life of the human organism, in other words, reproduction, and in distinction from work (germ. Herstellen), the production of a world of things and the worldliness of the human existence, action (germ. Handeln) forms the third type of activity: namely, the activity that plays itself out directly between human beings. Its basic condition is the fact of plurality, “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”8 Whereas the first type of activity is defined as the world of animal laborans and the second as that of homo faber, it is remarkable that no species is ascribed to this third sphere, because action, in contrast to production, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action and speech . . . are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men.9

32  Sigrid Weigel Only within this space between individual human beings can something emerge that, according to Arendt, deserves the title of the political. In this light, life appears as inter-esse, being among humans, and the interstitial space is described as a web of relations of human affairs. Although Arendt regards all three activities as anchored in “the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality,”10 she establishes a particular link between natality and action, because natality implies the repeatedly given possibility of a new beginning—and hence represents a crucial condition of possibility for action. Thus, natality does not presume a so-called nature. Rather, the contingent diversity of every individual given by natality vouches for a plurality, which bears the given original alterity of human beings. To this extent, natality is for Arendt a fact upon which one may build categories of political thought. As regards the inter- and transgenerational constellation, The Human Condition analyzes a dialectic of action and natality: while human action guarantees continuity, the possibility of a plurality of the new beginning is inscribed in it as its precondition.

The “Weak Messianic Energy”—Walter Benjamin In Walter Benjamin’s theory of history, a similar notion appears in the figure of a “weak messianic energy” (schwache[n] messiansche[n] Kraft), given to every generation (Geschlecht), as he writes in the second thesis of “On the Concept of History” (1940)—emphasizing the word “weak” by placing it in italics. While this “weak messianic energy” stems from the expectation that “previous generations” (gewesene Geschlechter) place on “us,” the descendants, it is also connected to a claim of the past on “us”—a claim which, Benjamin says, cannot be settled cheaply.11 In this way, the historical action of each living generation is determined by a claim of the past that is grounded in the expectations of those who lived before. But what role does the messianic play in this intergenerational view of history? It is the notion of happiness that provides the link between the messianic and the concept of history in this text. It appears as a type of resonance of the religious notion of redemption, yet transformed according to the scale of human history: In other words, in the idea of happiness, there resonates indissolubly the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which history takes as its concern. The past carries with it a hidden (heimlich) index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded those who lived earlier caress us as well? . . . If so, then there is a secret (geheim) agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  33 have been endowed with a weak messianic energy, on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply.12 If the German original refers to gewesene Geschlechter and not “generation,” then we have to understand Benjamin’s reflections on the historical relationship of the generations in clear opposition to the synchronic, sociological concept of generation that had become prominent in the first decades of the twentieth century: namely, a cohort or “unity of a generation,” as Karl Mannheim conceived it in 1928 in his theory of generation. According to Mannheim, this “unity of a generation” is underlain, first, by a “generation stratification” (Generationslagerung), that is, the “natural factors of generational change,” which “suggest specific types of experience and thought to the individuals affected by them,”13 and, second, by a “generational context,” that is, the real connection among these individuals that is founded on the basis of a concrete and definite historical-social living space. In contrast to this sociological understanding of the generational group as shaped by temporally conditioned circumstances, Benjamin is concerned with the relationships between those who were and those who are alive in history. Like Arendt, he does not derive this relationship from a biological genealogy; rather, he conceives it as a relationship between historical subjects who are driven by the notion of happiness—or by those “fine and spiritual” things, which are the topic of the fourth thesis of his text: The class struggle, to which the historian schooled in Marx is always oriented, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless are these latter things present in class struggle, not as a spoil that falls to the victor, but in a different way. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, as courage, as humor, as artifice, and they have effects that reach far back into the remoteness of time.14 The aspects of human life mentioned in this passage—confidence, courage, humor, and artifice—come into view because Benjamin’s theory of history underscores the perspective of the human historical subject. This has nothing to do with relativism; instead, it rejects the abstract viewpoint from above or outside of history as the position from which to produce historiographical knowledge, and replaces it with the relation between human beings in history, that is to say, between generations and their desires, attitudes, and features. In order to understand the way how this concept of history involves the idea of the messianic, it is worth going back to his Theological-Political Fragment from the early 1920s, a reflection that Benjamin defines as a “lesson on the philosophy of history.” In this short fragment, he discusses

34  Sigrid Weigel the correlation of the messianic and the historical in a significant way. Since the idea of redemption in messianism is connected to the fulfillment and the end of history—of any history as such—he argues: Therefore, nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamis, it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the aim, but the end.15 However, these considerations on the fundamental, uncircumventable difference of the “messianic” and the “historical” do not mean that the messianic lacks a role in history. In contrast, Benjamin shifts the argument from the conceptual distinction to the perspective of the historical actors, that is to say, to the question as to which role the messianic idea plays within the actions of men on the stage of history. In this view, the pursuit of happiness can be interpreted as the mundane human equivalent of the messianic idea of redemption, which this time does not appear at the termination of history but operates within history. In other words Benjamin interprets the pursuit of happiness as the worldly echo of the Biblical notion of redemption. One could say that he regards the idea of happiness as a kind of redemption of a minor, namely human, scale. The way the messianic operates within history is thus regarded as intensity; it gets inscribed into the profane world as a rhythm. Thus, Benjamin talks here of a “messianic intensity” and the “dynamis of the profane” to form a counter-striving constellation, which he describes by forming the image of two arrows pointing in different directions; though opposed to one another, they nevertheless propel each other forward. This mode of illuminating the complex relationship between Biblical ideas, or ideas originating from religious thought, and profane or secular concepts, and this way of analyzing the often hidden, unconscious dependence of the latter on the former, forms one of the leitmotivs of Benjamin’s thoughts and writings. The clear distinction between the mundane register and the extra-mundane, superhuman register of ideas, that is, the awareness of the ineluctable difference between phenomena of the profane, man-made world and ideas that belong to a supra-mundane or divine sphere, provides the central and basic methodological prerequisite in Benjamin’s thought. Yet, it is only through this distinction that one may question the way in which human institutions, ideas, and virtues are influenced and tinged by the superhuman ideas they descend from. The clear differentiation forms the horizon against which we can examine the way both registers interact. However, Benjamin’s illumination of key concepts of human life is neither theological nor entirely secular, because it does not adhere to the illusion of an entirely secular or autonomous rational thinking free from referring to any preceding ideas. And the latter are, for the most part, ideas from a culture of cult or religion.16

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  35 Benjamin’s discussion of a weak messianic energy, given to us by previous generations because we were expected on the earth, does not have anything to do, however, with the topos of the “liberated grandchildren” for whom the struggle is worth, an ideal that remains necessarily abstract. Benjamin makes this unambiguously clear in the twelfth thesis of “On the Concept of History,” in which he thematizes the contemporary development of Marxism. Social democracy, he says, has succeeded over the course of three decades to cut through the “tendon of the best force” of the struggling class who gets nourished “by the image of the enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.”17 What is important here is that he interprets the opposition between “enslaved ancestors” and “liberated grandchildren” as an opposition between an image and an ideal. In this sense, the vivid memory image of the past stands in contrast to an empty ideal that could thereby be instrumentalized as an ideologeme. In contrast, Benjamin’s “weak messianic energy,” which is given to each living generation, is an energy that writes from the past, from the concrete image of past generations, and the desires and hopes with which they acted as historical subjects. In this way, Benjamin presents in the framework of his theory of history a reconceptualization of the idea of inheritance developed in reference to messianism, respectively the Biblical notion of redemption. It is not material wealth, not money and property, which is given to descendants by ancestors, but their desires and wishes. They are related not by a “contract between the generations,” as it is presently debated, but by “a hidden bond between the generations.”

The Solidarity of Generations—Heinrich Heine Heinrich Heine already had a similar notion of a bond between the generations. It is nurtured by the Biblical idea of inheritance, too, but bears the title “solidarity of generations.” Yet, his elaborations focus less on happiness, but rather on the flipside in the life of previous generations— namely, debt. In a scene of his posthumously published Memoirs, he describes the hereditary relationship of the generations as a dialectics of guilt/blame and debts: two concepts whose relatedness appears in the German language as Schuld and Schulden. In the scene of Heine’s Memoirs, the narrator reflects on the afterlife of that “dream time” in which he still lived in the writings that remained from one of his ancestors, a great-uncle whom, due to his vast travels, the family called the Morgenländer, the “Oriental.”18 At the beginning of the passage, the possibility of dealing in a relaxed manner with the relation between guilt and debt profits from the word play concerning their linguistic connection and metaphorical meaning, which induces a chain of associations: from “on another person’s account” via “to demand the debts of a credit note” up to “debt and guilt.” In this context,

36  Sigrid Weigel the narrator tells us that he was used to counting certain of his own baffling mistakes “on account of” his oriental double. He explains this hypothesis to his father in order to gloss over one of his own failures. The roguish answer of his father is that he “hopes that my grand-uncle has not signed bonds which I would one day have to pay for.” By taking the phrase “on account of” literally, and by translating this phrase into the monetary equivalent of an account from the past, that is, a bond, the father transfers his son’s attempt at getting rid of blame (Schuld) back into the possibility of debts (Schulden). Through the detour of the witty transformation of guilt into debts, the word play has turned into a serious reflection, leading to the quotation of a Biblical sense of guilt. Heine notes: But there are certainly worse debts than debts of money, which our ancestors leave us to settle and discharge. Each generation is the continuation of the preceding one and is responsible for its deeds. The Bible says: the fathers have eaten unripe grapes, and the children’s teeth will be set on edge.19 Through this reference to Jeremiah 31:28 the transformation of guilt into debts by the son has been transferred back by the father, with the result that we end up again with guilt, however, this time in a reverse perspective: There is a solidarity of the generations which follow one another, yes even the peoples which follow each other upon history’s stage take over such a solidarity, and in the end all of humankind liquidates the great bequest of the past. In the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the Great Registry of Debts will be destroyed. Or maybe beforehand by a universal bankruptcy. 20 Inheritance here means taking over the responsibility for the past. And the life of the descendants is described as an action, interpretable as a kind of coming to terms with a generational heritage and the responsibility for that heritage. Inheritance, in this sense, is not suitable for a process of individual relief of blame, as often used today in explanations based on folk psychology where the influence of parents or ancestors in childhood is used as an explanation and excuse for certain misbehavior. Rather, Heine’s notion of inheritance entails a bond with the preceding generations. However, the burden of responsibility for guilt is not placed on the shoulders of the individual as moral guilt, but rather shapes the law of action in history. The acceptance of responsibility here is not a voluntary act derived from a universal morality. Rather, it springs from what Heine calls the “solidarity of the generations,” or put more simply, from genealogy, that is, the fact that history is also manifested as a bond

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  37 of generations following one another. This means acting in the wake of the debt registry handed down from the past. When Heine mentions the two quite different solutions for the liquidation of the “great registry of debts”—either its destruction in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, that is, at the Last Judgment, or a universal bankruptcy—he hints at the simultaneous correspondence and contrast between the messianic idea of salvation at the end of any history, on the one hand, and the equivalent of a terminated history within political ideas, on the other hand. Here, the universal bankruptcy stands for the idea of an entire rejection of the heritage and the responsibility for what the ancestors left behind, that is to say, for the will to cut through the bond with past generations and what remains from their activity—in other words, a revolution. If we read this image of universal bankruptcy as an allusion to revolution, 21 then the connection between money and other debts introduced by Heine suggests that we should understand the desire for a radical break with existing conditions through revolution as a refusal of the heritage. To this extent, Heine’s recourse to a Biblical notion of the relationships among generations counters a historical development in which economic and cultural inheritance have increasingly fallen apart. As a consequence, the rules of inheritance are primarily dominated by the concept of intergenerational transmission that solely pertains to property, resulting in the contemporary society of heirs.

The Archaic Heritage—Sigmund Freud It was precisely in this sense that Sigmund Freud, who was greatly attracted to Heine’s literature, 22 developed his concept of phylogenesis in his book Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (the English edition is entitled Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays). Here he articulates the idea of an “archaic heritage” passed on as it were in the unconscious over many generations, which generates in this way memory that goes beyond individual remembrance and the boundary of one generation: memory traces of what the preceding generations experienced, conceptualized as memory traces of the past in the unconscious. This theoretical treatise on memory is grounded in an understanding of tradition as a non-economic transfer between the generations. With respect to the generation concept, Freud’s book, written in 1934 in Vienna and continued in 1938 in London, marks an antithesis to the sociological concept as developed by Mannheim in his essay “The Problem of Generations,” published only a few years earlier. For Freud has only the genealogical dimension of the generational relationship in sight, the phylogenesis. In his Moses book, he analyzes memories from the life of the ancestors, which have not been handed down by written sources. Those inexplicit memories include both knowledge heard by the ancestors, that is “conscious memories of oral communications which people

38  Sigrid Weigel then living had received from their ancestors only two or three generations back who had themselves been participants and eye-witnesses of the events in question,”23 and the unconscious traces of memory—that is, the forgotten and repressed, which previous generations bequeathed to their descendants as unprocessed heritage, or better: as a heritage of the unprocessed, that is, experiences they had not managed to come to terms with. The question about the “inheritance of acquired attributes” stemming from biology is thus reformulated by Freud to the extent that he relocates it in the sphere of memory and knowledge, and in this way answers the question from a cultural-historical perspective. Freud himself speaks of something “tangible”: The same thing is not in question, indeed, in the two cases: in the one it is a matter of acquired characters which are hard to grasp, in the other of memory-traces of external events—something tangible, as it were. But it may well be that at bottom we cannot imagine one without the other. 24 In the theoretical résumé of an excursion, under the heading of “Difficulties,” Freud introduces the hypothesis “that what may be operative in an individual’s psychic life may include not only what he has experienced himself but also things that were innately present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin—an archaic heritage.”25 This inheritance is distinguished from the “inheritance of a thought disposition” mediated by the symbolic system of language especially by the fact that the study of trauma comes into play. Also in the “reactions to early traumas,” Freud observes that they are not strictly limited to what the subject himself has really experienced but diverge from it in a way which fits in much better with the model of a phylogenetic event and, in general, can only be explained by such an influence. 26 The study of cases that “only become intelligible phylogenetically—by their connection with the experience of earlier generations” constitutes the background against which Freud develops his argument: [T]he archaic heritage of human beings comprises not only dispositions but also subject-matter—memory-traces of the experience of earlier generations. . . . the inheritance of memory-traces of the experiences of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example . . . 27 This type of inheritance becomes especially potent when the unconscious memory traces from the life of previous generations are actualized

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  39 through recent repetitions. Against the backdrop of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, we would, in fact, need to sharpen his conclusion that the “archaic heritage” comes into being “independent of direct communication” and rather say that it comes into being not only independent of but even beyond and in part contrary to direct communication, as far as the transfer between generations takes place in the medium of a language of the unconscious. Since the unconscious transfer of what has been experienced and repressed among the generations is in the foreground of Freud’s theory of archaic heritage, his interpretation of the relationship among generations has taken on a particular relevance in the wake of World War II, the Shoah, and the innumerous cases of man-made catastrophes since then. It took some time until psychoanalysts came to realize that the children of survivors, as well as the descendants of perpetrators, had to deal with phenomena which could only be interpreted as the aftereffects of an event in which the affected persons had not participated themselves. These events involve rather the experiences of their parents or ancestors, which is why they are interpreted as symptoms of a “transgenerational traumatization” today. The concept of the “transgenerational”28 follows from Freud’s theory of “archaic heritage”; with reference to numerous case studies, it is now possible to specify his reflections as they pertain to the question of which ways the transfer takes place in the unconscious: psychoanalysts describe the mode of unconscious transfer through topoi such as “telescoping” or “transposition.”29 Following this body of research, a variant of the historiography of generations has developed which—vis-à-vis the emphasis on synchrony and unity of mentality in the reigning discourse of the generation—has placed the genealogical perspective or the function of generativity in the foreground.

Conclusion None of the four authors discussed here regards history as the history of events or as some other variety of academic historiography. Instead, they all see it as something that acquires its specific shape in the concrete relationship between human actors as being the historical subjects: in the bond between the generations as well as in the action within each community of the living—whereby aspects of human actors, such as affect, desire, anxiety, repression, and the like, come into play that had long been excluded from historiography as ahistorical elements. The four authors’ views on inheritance and tradition refer to notions that trace back to meanings preceding the conflation of biological, economic, and familial heritage that shapes the modern concept of inheritance arisen around 1800. And their ideas about a bond between the generations lead us also back behind the modern sociological concept of the generation as cohort established around 1900 and instead emphasize references to notions with Biblical or religious provenance.

40  Sigrid Weigel In the process, Heine and Benjamin discover the idea of redemption in the motives, which bring about the historical action of human beings, whether in the idea of revolution as a radical break with history as generational transfer, or in the motives of class struggle. Heine’s reflections on debt/guilt (Schuld/Schulden) and Benjamin’s reflections on the idea of happiness are in this respect two sides of the same coin. And while Freud, not coincidentally after World War I and during the rise of Nazism, discovers the unconscious transmission of memory traces as an “archaic heritage” of the past, Arendt seeks—after National Socialism and World War II—to regain, in the space between human beings, action as the space of the political and to inscribe natality into it as the condition of possibility of a new beginning. The future, according to their insight, will not be created in abstract images or produced by means of a program or blueprints. It literally will come into being by way of the current actions of the living and their treatment of the past, that is to say what remains or has been handed down from those who lived before.

Notes 1 My chapter is based on extended work on the epistemology and history of the concepts of generation, genealogy, and heritage in culture, literature, and science. See, e.g., Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik. Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (München: Fink, 2006); “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945,” The Germanic Review 77, no. 4 (2002): 264–77; “Télescopage im Unbewußten. Zum Verhältnis von Trauma, Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur,” in Trauma—Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster, eds. Elisabeth Bronfen, Birgit Erdle, and Sigrid Weigel (Köln: Böhlau 1999), 51–76; “Families, Phantoms and the Discourse of ‘Generations’ as a Politics of the Past: Problems of Provenance/Rejecting and Longing for Origins,” in Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, eds. Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 133–50. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9. 3 Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper, 1967), 16. Because of significant differences between the English and the German version, the latter translated by Arendt herself into her “mother tongue,” I quote from both versions. As for the fascinating, creative way of Arendt’s self-translations, see Sigrid Weigel, “Sounding Through— Poetic Difference—Self-translation: Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts and Writings Between Different Languages, Cultures, and Fields,” in “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933, eds. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 55–79. 4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8–9. 5 Arendt, Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben, 15. 6 Arendt, The Human Condition, 147. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 188.

Acting and Memory, Hope and Guilt  41





















42  Sigrid Weigel

26

27 28

29

sein mögen, Stücke von phylogenetischer Herkunft, eine archaische Erbschaft.” Freud, “Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion,” 545. Ibid., 96. In German: “daß sie sich nicht strenge an das wirklich selbst Erlebte halten., sondern sich in einer Weise von ihm entfernen, die weit besser zum Vorbild eines phylogenetischen Ereignisses paßt und ganz allgemein nur durch dessen Einfluß erklärt werden kann.” Freud, “Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion,” 546. Ibid., 99. See, e.g., Werner Bohleber, “Das Fortwirken des Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten und dritten Generation nach Auschwitz,” Babylon 7 (1990): 70–83; Anita Eckstaedt, Nationalsozialismus in der “zweiten Generation.” Psychoanalyse von Hörigkeitsverhältnissen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992); Weigel, “Télescopage im Unbewußten.” Haydée Faimberg, “Die Ineinanderrückung (telescoping) der Generationen. Zur Genealogie gewisser Identifizierungen,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 10 (1987): 114–42; Judith Kestenberg, “Neue Gedanken zur Transposition. Klinische, therapeutische und entwicklungsbedingte Betrachtungen,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 24 (1989): 163–89. See the contributions to the journal Psyche 2 (1990) with the thematic focus “Ererbte Traumata,” Psychoanalytische Blätter 2 (1995).

Part II

Generations and Gender in Historical Contexts Comparative Case Studies

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylorandfrancis.com

3

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations in the 1930s The Case of Yugoslavia1 Isidora Grubački

Introduction In the fall of 1935, young communist women joined the organization Ženski pokret [Women’s Movement] in Belgrade and formed the youth section of this first self-proclaimed feminist organization in the interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, established in 1919. 2 Omladinska sekcija Ženskog pokreta [The Women’s Movement’s Youth Section] was a part of the Popular Front strategy through which the Communist Party, illegal in Yugoslavia since December 1920, tried to broaden its influence through its legal organizations. In November 1936, the members of the Youth Section started publishing the periodical Žena danas (1936–40) [Woman Today] through which they communicated with and educated women across Yugoslavia.3 The forming of Ženski pokret’s Youth Section in Belgrade was by no means an isolated event; Ženski pokret’s Youth Sections were formed in Zagreb (from 1934 to 1937), Sarajevo (from 1935 to 1936), and many other smaller towns in the Yugoslav Kingdom.4 As I will demonstrate below, these events in Yugoslavia were connected to broader political developments. Owing to the rich historiographical sources from socialist Yugoslavia, 5 Ženski pokret’s Youth Section’s connection with the Communist Party has been long recognized, unlike in some historiographical traditions where historians only relatively recently began to explore the participation of women in the 1930s communist movement.6 As the first part of this chapter demonstrates, most historians of the women’s movement in interwar Yugoslavia used, but to certain extent also challenged, the binary division between communist/proletarian and “bourgeois” feminist women’s movements to discuss different interwar women’s organizations. In order to further overcome this binary division, which I maintain is not analytically useful and in many cases untenable, I will use the term “left feminism” in the examination of the Youth Section and Žena danas. In the second part of the chapter, I put Ženski pokret’s Youth Section and Žena danas into the context of the transnational movement, which rose globally in the first half of the 1930s, with the establishment of the Women’s World

46  Isidora Grubački Committee Against War and Fascism (WWCAWF) initiated in Paris in 1934 by Gabrielle Duchêne (1870–1954),7 and then proceed to explore the generational aspect of the emergence of organized left feminism in the Yugoslav case. In 1935, the Communist Party issued a directive that women should enter the existing women’s organizations. Rather than focusing on the party and its directive, however, what interests me is exploring who the women were that entered Ženski pokret in 1935, what kind of ideas they had, and what their relationship was with the established feminist movement in Yugoslavia. As I argue, the concept of “political generation” is useful for analyzing this particular group of politically engaged women. Žena danas was a youth journal, and the women who established the Ženski pokret’s Youth Section in 1935 had already been active for years within napredna omladina—self-claimed “progressive youth” who from the beginning of the 1930s organized a strong anti-regime, pacifist, and antifascist student movement in Yugoslavia. It will become clear from my analysis that the group of young communist women involved in the Youth Section belonged to the political generation of women for whom the progressive student movement in the 1930s was a formative and common political experience, and who responded to the economic and political European and global crisis of their time by conceptualizing a new, left-feminist platform, with the aim of gathering a large number of women. My use of the concept of generation in this analysis is compatible with that of Karl Mannheim, for whom generations are, as summarized by Sofia Aboim and Pedro Vasconcelos, “cultural constructs that involve historical participation guided by individuals’ self-awareness.”8 Following Mannheim, Ženski pokret’s Youth Section can be understood as a generation unit, that is, a group “within the same actual generation which work[s] up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways.”9 This generation unit’s activism was based on their specific experience as women, and therefore it differed from the activism of their male comrades. Furthermore, I find Aboim and Vasconcelos’s approach to generations useful for the analysis of Žena danas, as the two authors argue that “more than historical locations, generations are discursive categories used for social differentiation and conflict.”10 Although my focus on the Youth Section is somewhat limited to the intellectually and politically engaged youth, I read Žena danas as a generational discourse and a common cultural—and political—subjectivity, through which the women from the Youth Section assembled young women from different social and national backgrounds across the country.11 Taking the concept of political generation, therefore, to analyze Žena danas’s texts, the third part of this chapter explores how the generational divide between Ženski pokret and its Youth Section influenced each group’s understanding of feminism, while the fourth part demonstrates, with

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  47 the example of the new conceptualization of marriage and youth solidarity, how Žena danas’s “new feminism” sought to influence young women across Yugoslavia. More broadly, the chapter argues that looking at the left-feminist women of the 1930s as a political generation can be applied “to an understanding of the growth and transformation of the women’s movement.”12 Bearing in mind that historians have already hinted at a generational shift in 1930s feminism,13 exploring the case of Žena danas raises the question of the generational aspect of left feminism in the 1930s transnationally, and, moreover, allows for a further rethinking of the periodization of women’s movements and feminisms in the twentieth century.

“Bourgeois” Feminism and “Proletarian” Women’s Movements: Overcoming the Binary In 1991, writing about the American historian Eleanor Flexner, Ellen C. DuBois used the term “left feminism” to describe a “perspective which fuses a recognition of the systematic oppression of women with an appreciation of other structures of power,” as well as an “understanding that the attainment of genuine equality for women—all women—requires a radical challenge to American society, the mobilization of masses of people, and fundamental social change.”14 For several reasons, I find the term “left feminism” analytically useful for describing the specific feminist discourse the women from the Youth Section created in Žena danas. First, the term “left feminism” denotes a broader definition of feminism, and is useful, as summarized by Francisca de Haan, for transcending the notion that “(real) feminism was and is a single-issue (gender-only), rather than a multi-issue concern.”15 Moreover, the term points to the connection between the 1930s (in my view, left-feminist) movement, which gathered formally through Gabrielle Duchêne’s initiative in 1934 to form WWCAWF, and the post-1945 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), and further allows us to analyze Žena danas in the context of this movement.16 Finally, the concept is useful for overcoming the binary division between “bourgeois” and “proletarian,” as well as “feminist” and “communist” movements, which, as the historiographical review in this section will show, often frames the discussions on communist women’s movements in both Western and Yugoslav historiographies.17 In the introduction to A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms, the 2006 collection of 150 biographies of women and a few men who actively participated in different forms of the struggle for the emancipation of women in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, the editors stated that there was a “certain hesitancy among scholars about including socialist or communist feminists” into the dictionary, largely because socialist and communist women have “made

48  Isidora Grubački explicit their aversion to ‘feminism’” by denouncing it as “bourgeois.”18 It is well-known that Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), and other socialist and communist women did denounce “feminism” as bourgeois and advocated against any collaboration between “bourgeois feminists” and proletarian women, even on common issues.19 However, Marilyn J. Boxer recently argued that historians often uncritically accept the distinction between “bourgeois” feminism and “proletarian” women’s movements. 20 As she showed, the term “bourgeois” has always been a contested and not a clearly defined one, and she suggested that this distinction often depended on the political situation and the relationship among the political parties.21 This uncritical acceptance of the bourgeois feminism/proletarian women’s movements binary and the distinction between communism and feminism often results in the exclusion of communist women from transnational histories of women’s movements and feminisms. 22 Historians, therefore, need to question and carefully historicize—and not a priori assume—the binary division between “bourgeois” feminism and the “proletarian” women’s movements. A closer look at the Yugoslav historiography of women’s organizing indicates that the exclusion of communist women from the histories of women’s movements is not the case in some non-Western historiographies. Namely, unlike in Western-centered historiography, historians of women’s history in socialist Yugoslavia have undoubtedly privileged communist women, rather than erasing them from the historiography. Writing against this trend, Thomas A. Emmert argued in his 1999 text about Ženski pokret that the contributions of some of the “nonsocialist” women’s organizations should not be overlooked.23 Emmert criticized Jovanka Kecman’s feminist/proletarian binary division in her 1978 monograph on the history of women’s organizing in Yugoslavia, 24 but neglected to look at other aspects of Kecman’s research and in this way reinforced the idea that the distinction between “bourgeois” feminism and “proletarian” women’s movements has been crucial in framing the approaches to women’s history in Yugoslav historiography like it was in Western-centered historiography. It is true that Kecman made a clear distinction between “bourgeois-feminist” and “proletarian” types of organizations. However, as she did not exclude the “bourgeois” women’s organizations of interwar Yugoslavia from her overview, it is also worthwhile looking at how historians in socialist Yugoslavia more or less explicitly challenged this binary. The way Kecman explained her interest in women’s history and the focus on “bourgeois” women’s organizations is an interesting example of negotiation with a still patriarchal academic community and the generally accepted bourgeois/proletarian binary in the 1970s. 25 Although her opening sentence claimed that the book studied women in the Yugoslav

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  49 workers’ movement, already in the second sentence she emphasized that “women were not disempowered only as workers, but also as women,” which, in Kecman’s words, “justifies separate research” on women, as well as an inclusion of the “bourgeois” women’s organizations.26 Rather than a tension in reconciling “feminism” with “communism,” what I see in Kecman’s approach is the tension in the a priori division between the two in a socialist context. 27 One of the reasons why it is easy to “fall into the trap” of the feminism/communism binary when writing about the Yugoslav case is the well-known fact that in 1940, at the Fifth Land Conference of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and after cooperation between Ženski pokret and its Youth Section ended, delegate Vida Tomšič (1913–1998)28 denounced feminism as “right wing opportunist help to the bourgeois (građanski) women’s movement in spreading the illusions that some reforms can allegedly solve the woman question in the context of a class society.”29 A careful historical interpretation, however, allowed Yugoslav feminist historians Ljubinka Ćirić-Bogetić in 1979 and Lydia Sklevicky in 1984 to recognize the—to a large extent—shared agenda of bourgeois and communist women, as the Communist Party’s program in 1940 kept all the demands of the Yugoslav “bourgeois” feminist movement. In this way, Ćirić-Bogetić and Sklevicky more explicitly challenged this binary division.30 At the same time, the fact that communist women in Žena danas in 1936 conceptualized their program as “new feminism” is often overlooked. An important exception is Neda Božinović, who in her 1996 book on “the woman question” in Serbia mentioned the young communist women as those who managed to “connect the feminist movement with the movement against fascism” through their “new feminism” platform.31 These examples of Yugoslav historiography show that historians in socialist Yugoslavia to a large extent challenged the bourgeois/ proletarian binary, even though they privileged communist women in their research on women’s history. Ćirić-Bogetić characterized the “liberal-bourgeois” conception of feminism as “narrow,”32 and opposed it to the communist women’s conceptualization of “the woman question” both as a separate, specific question connected to specific women’s problems, and a part of a wider platform of the struggle of the proletariat. 33 This differentiation strongly resembles the distinction between what in Western historiography has been called “gender- only” and “multi-issue,” or “left feminism.” In order to bridge the gap between socialist Yugoslav and recent historiographical traditions when it comes to writing about the communist women’s organizing from the 1930s and afterwards, I suggest using the term “left feminism” to explore Ženski pokret’s Youth Section and Žena danas, which I see as an attempt to “reconcile” feminism and communism, and, simultaneously,

50  Isidora Grubački an attempt by a new generation of women to reconceptualize the previous generations’ understanding of feminism.

Contextualizing the Left-Feminist Platform of Žena danas On a transnational level, the key event for the creation of what I call an organized left-feminist movement was the WWCAWF initiated in August 1934 in Paris by Gabrielle Duchêne. According to historian Mercedes Yusta, in the early phases of the antifascist mobilization in 1933–34, an alliance between feminism and antifascism was “not only possible, but also desirable.”34 Moreover, by making a connection between the WWCAWF and WIDF, Yusta emphasized the continuity between the 1930s women’s movement and that of the post-1945 period.35 In the Yugoslav case, the connection is quite obvious, not least because after World War II Youth Section’s Žena danas became the official journal of the socialist Yugoslav women’s organization the Antifascist Women’s Front (Antifašistički Front Žena, AFŽ), which became a member of the WIDF in 1945.36 Besides Yusta’s analysis of the differences and similarities of the French and Spanish Popular Front journals Les Femmes and Mujeres, the growing scholarship on women and antifascism which draws on sources such as the US Communist Party’s Woman Today and British Woman To-day, but also the Chilean La Mujer Nueva, 37 further confirms the emergence of a transnational left-feminist network of women in the 1930s. These periodicals represent valuable sources for comparative research of what might be called the global left-feminist 1930s, and could additionally enhance our understanding of the similarities and differences of left-feminist struggles in the 1930s in different locations. The Yugoslav Communist Party sent delegates to the 1934 WWCAWF founding congress in Paris, 38 and when a year later the party issued a directive that women should enter the existing women’s organizations, Ženski pokret’s Youth Section started working in accordance with the WWCAWF.39 This is primarily evident from the fact that in 1936 Gabrielle Duchêne wrote the introductory text in Žena danas’s first issue, in which she invited all the women of Yugoslavia to join the cause for peace and freedom.40 Žena danas visually resembled the French periodical Les Femmes dans l’action mondial, published from 1934 to 1939 in Paris by the French Committee against War and Fascism.41 Although in certain ways comparable to Les Femmes,42 Žena danas was shaped in the specific Yugoslav context, and therefore it offers a view into the left-feminist intellectual and activist circles and networks of 1930s Yugoslavia, as well as onto the generational aspect of this progressive left-feminist movement. And while the WWCAWF in Paris and the Yugoslav Communist Party’s directives should not be overlooked, it is also important to situate the young communist

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  51 women within the political generation of young women and men who belonged to the progressive student movement. In order to understand the rise of the left-wing student movement in the 1930s, as well as women’s participation in it, it is important to be familiar with the general political situation in Yugoslavia. Established after World War I, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was a conjuncture of different and unevenly developed political, economic, and legal entities.43 With its core in Belgrade and led by the Serbian royal family Karađorđević, the Kingdom was from the start challenged by politicians with different nation- and state-building agendas, and regularly experienced social unrest.44 As in many other countries, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was banned—in the case of Yugoslavia it was in December 1920, shortly after it had gained significant support in the national parliamentary elections. Women in Yugoslavia were denied many political and economic rights, including the right to vote, although the legal position of women was not equally bad across the Kingdom due to the diverse policies inherited from the various pre-1918 legal systems.45 This was the context in which the first selfidentified feminist organizations, including the Belgrade-based Ženski pokret, were formed in the new country. Toward the end of the 1920s, the Kingdom saw economic stabilization, while the ongoing political instability was temporarily interrupted by a royal dictatorship in 1929, and followed by the Great Depression. The political life in what was now called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was further radicalized with the rise of ultra-nationalism in Europe and the advent of Nazism in Germany. The political radicalization of students in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana began as a reaction to the authoritarian regime in 1931, while in later years student unrest increased and slowly transformed into broader antifascist demonstrations. During the 1930s, the government suspended the work of the University of Belgrade several times and continuously attempted to restrict its autonomy. In 1935, the government created a prison in Višegrad to which fifty-one students were sent, and in 1935 and 1936 two students, Mirko Srzentić and Žarko Marinović, were killed by the police.46 In this increasingly radical period, a new generation of young women started reacting publicly to the political situation in the country within the student movement, including Mitra Mitrović (1912–2001)47 and Dobrila Karapandžić, the two women delegated by the Communist Party to form Ženski pokret’s Youth Section in Belgrade in 1935, as well as Dušica Stefanović, Milica Šuvaković (1912–1942), Boba Đorđević, and Jelisaveta Beška-Bembasa, all of whom later became members of the Žena danas editorial board.48 According to Mitra Mitrović, by 1931 there was a circle of communist students who started to gather and exchange social and Marxist literature and thoughts about the causes of the difficult situation they felt they were in.49 The circles, in which students read Karl Marx, August Bebel, Maxim Gorky, and the Belgrade

52  Isidora Grubački publishing house Nolit’s editions, 50 preceded the forming of Ženski pokret’s Youth Section. Shifting the focus from the Communist Party directives to the generational experience of the women from the Youth Section grants us a better understanding of who the women were that formed the Youth Section. While they belonged to the progressive student movement, their public activism was based on their experiences as young women, and so they expressed specific women’s demands within the wider progressive students’ platform. A noteworthy example of this particular form of women’s student activism was the Female Students’ Association (Udruženje studentkinja). In the words of student Natalija Bajić, a separate organization of female students was necessary because “our position is worse than our colleagues’ position, and because through our organization we gain success in many ways.”51 The Association’s greatest accomplishment was building and establishing the first Female Students’ Dorm in Belgrade in 1936, 52 at the time when the president of Association was a member of the Youth Section Leposava Opi-Mihajlović.53 As I argue, while in the 1930s young communist women’s response to social and political changes, as based on their experience as women, differed from that of the progressive youth movement’s male members, it also differed from that of women from Ženski pokret. The analysis of the generational aspect of the Youth Section and Žena danas in the following part will show how the young women’s “new feminist” program at the same time continued and challenged the previous generation’s feminism.

“Feminism Takes a Stand”: The 1930s Left-Feminist Generation In the first issue of Žena danas, the authors reconceptualized the notion of feminism by presenting the platform they called “new feminism”: Recently a strong movement can be noticed among women. It can be said that women are massively entering into the already established feminist organizations, and continue creating new ones. While for decades women’s organizations were the object of ridicule and tasteless jokes, today they represent a significant factor in public life. Although the program has not changed so much, feminism itself has gone through great changes. The changes were influenced by the external circumstances, and the program has gained a special, deeper meaning. Pre-WWI feminism, based on the assertion that it was neutral and that it would not choose sides, now . . . had to take a stand.54 In this programmatic text, the editors sent a message that feminism should not be only for educated, elite women any more, but that it

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  53 should represent and aim to inclusively gather “all working and progressive women,” which pre-World War I feminism did not succeed in doing. The feminist movement, they argued, gained particular importance due to the rise of fascism, which directly opposed the rights women had been championing for years; therefore, they maintained, the feminist program became the core movement for the defense of democracy and had to “take a stand” against fascism.55 Although the text explicitly mentioned only pre-World War I feminism, the “new feminist” agenda was, in fact, the Youth Section’s implicit critique of Ženski pokret. The cooperation between Ženski pokret and its Youth Section lasted from 1935 to early 1940, and the conflicts between them can help us understand the differences between the “old”—elitist and supposedly politically neutral— and the “new”—inclusive and political—conceptions of feminism. It also points to the fact that this cooperation was a cooperation not (only) of two ideological camps but also of two generations of women. According to the scarce available sources, the conflict between the two groups was centered on the issue of political neutrality versus the politicization of the women’s movement, and this seems to have been the final reason for the split between the two groups in January 1940. After the massive suffrage demonstration that the left feminists organized in November 1939, the young women accused Ženski pokret’s leaders of depoliticizing the movement and left the organization, whereas members of Ženski pokret accused their Youth Section of “bringing a certain kind of politics into the organization.”56 Apart from the suffrage campaign, I consider other events important for understanding this conflict. The split happened shortly after the party had organized the largest student and workers’ demonstrations; they started on December 14, 1939, when the police brutally killed four students, including the Female Students’ Dorm tenant Bosa Milićević. After these demonstrations, the university was closed for a month.57 More generally, the increased unrests certainly had to do with the shift in the Communist Party’s agenda after Germany and Soviet Russia signed the non-aggression pact in August 1939, 58 but also with the official beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939. While this topic needs more in-depth research, so far Ljubinka Ćirić-Bogetić has given the most objective analysis of the split between the two groups, suggesting—importantly—that there was a conflict not only between the Youth Section and Ženski pokret but also among the women in Ženski pokret.59 Despite the conflicts between Ženski pokret and its Youth Section on the issue of politicization, I see it as important to highlight that the two groups had shared goals. In the words of Jelena Starc Jančić, the liberal feminists from Ženski pokret were “far from clericalism, they highlighted the rights women gained in the USSR, and criticized fascism which was taking away those rights from women.”60 Also, despite the split in 1940, the Communist Party and the left-feminist activists

54  Isidora Grubački after 1940 did not abandon the shared demands of Ženski pokret and its communist Youth Section.61 The key difference was that, along with advocating for the feminist demands for “women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, broad social institutions, equal rights of parents within the family, an equal moral standard, divorce relief, and the right to work and earnings,”62 the left feminists insisted that the feminist movement needed to take more forceful action to “take a stand” against fascism.63 This political generation of women perceived fascism as the main threat for women, mainly because they saw it as inherently antifeminist. Žena danas described fascism as an ideology that “considers women as second-rate beings not capable of public work, therefore having to return to domesticity (domaće ognjište).”64 Quite perceptively, Mitra Mitrović and Milica Šuvaković highlighted that the fascist states were banning the feminist movements, and, at the same time, creating women’s movements that were in fact antifeminist.65 So, although both groups of women were against fascism, it is the way the left feminists aimed to “take a stand against fascism” that challenged what can be described as the old ways of feminist activism. Apart from ideological differences—for which a far more detailed analysis of the intellectual history of interwar feminism would be needed—differences between the two groups’ activism framed in generational terms were particularly significant. As is evident from various sources, the students saw the engagement of women from Ženski pokret as fruitless and ineffective, and called them “older women,”66 “madams” (gospođe),67 or, more pejoratively, “grandmas” (babe).68 Herta Haas, who was active in the Zagreb Youth Section, directly contrasted the older women’s activism with their own: “They did not have what we, the young ones, had, the forcefulness, it was more a cabinet society, they would meet, act appalled, but nothing more than that. While we, the young, were different.”69 In a letter from October 26, 1935 about the forming of the Belgrade Youth Section, Leposava Mihailović-Opi described that before the young women had joined Ženski pokret, a number of its members were satisfied with meeting once a week and holding public lectures from time to time. According to her, because “the madams” were not supportive of the young women’s form of activism (for example, creating surveys among apprentices, publishing wall newspapers), the conflicts between the two camps quickly evolved.70 As I already emphasized with the example of the Female Students’ Association, another novelty that the “new feminist” agenda brought was the way the left feminists in the 1930s argued for separate women’s organizing, by which they challenged both the “old” feminist professed political neutrality and those who were against the idea of separate women’s organizing within the party.71 In Žena danas, Milica Šuvaković and Mitra Mitrović argued that the problem with the women’s movement was not in separate organizing, but in failing to contextualize “the woman

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  55 question” as a part of the “general question of all women and gathering of all forces for the . . . struggle for a better and a more human world.”72 The second novelty was that although “new feminism” was a platform for progressive women’s separate organizing, it also tried to include men in the feminist struggle. According to Herta Haas, the Youth Section often organized parties to which they invited their male colleagues, so that they would not “become isolated as the women’s society.”73 Žena danas was advertised as a journal to which men subscribed as well, and this, according to the editors, indicated that “feminism is not a question that interests women only.”74 The left feminists stressed that women should not be isolated from men and—more broadly—from general political movements.

Gender, Generation, and Communism in Žena danas: The Issue of Marriage In their texts and speeches, the left feminists argued about the need for women to organize separately within a broader (in this case progressive student) movement, and emphasized the double vulnerability of young women; in the words of student Natalija Bajić, because the female students were threatened both as women and as youth, they had taken up the task of “confronting the tradition and the past” and “creating the conditions for a nicer future.”75 Žena danas aimed to be “the publication of female consciousness,”76 which would confront the tradition and influence young women, first by identifying problems in the lives of contemporary young women, and then by offering possible solutions. In order to further elaborate on the generational aspect of left feminism in 1930s Yugoslavia, I will now analyze a number of articles from Žena danas as examples of a generational discourse; they expressed a shared generational subjectivity and were produced by the mobilizations of difference between young progressive women and their mothers’ generation.77 The way Žena danas reconceptualized marriage is probably the best example of the left-feminist understanding of gender and generation. According to Žena danas, one of the young women’s problems was that mothers usually mystified marriage and avoided talking about sexuality, thus leaving their children to learn about sexuality (and marriage in general) in often incorrect ways.78 This is one of the reasons Žena danas opened a survey about marriage called “Why aren’t you married yet? Are you happily married?”79 in which young women often wrote about their mothers’ unfortunate experiences in marriage. The young women’s letters portrayed their mothers as women who spent their lives as “slaves” to their husbands and their children, as women who were abandoned by men who made them pregnant out of wedlock, or those who suffered greatly for their children.80 The mothers advised their daughters to get married for protection, because marriage was a

56  Isidora Grubački “necessary evil” and because it was considered disgraceful to become an “old maid.”81 The young women wrote about conflicts with their mothers, not wanting to make the same mistake and suffer in marriage; as one young woman asked: “Just because she was unhappy, should I burry my youth as well, pretending that my happiness is what she thinks it is, and sacrifice myself just so she could be seemingly happy?”82 The way the left feminists criticized Mir-Jam (the pen name of writer and journalist Milica Jakovljević, 1887–1952) in the pages of Žena danas also connects to the question of marriage.83 Mir-Jam was a wellknown writer and public persona who in the 1930s had a tremendous influence on young women through her literary and journalist work in the weekly journal Nedeljne ilustracije [Weekly Illustrations], in which she also answered letters from young women, advising them about marriage. The left feminists fiercely criticized Mir-Jam. According to the Žena danas’s text “Emancipovana porodica” [The Emancipated Family],84 while the young people were wandering and seeking for ways to get out of the “unbearable” situation they found themselves in, MirJam kept offering solutions which the author(s) of the text described as the most superficial.85 More specifically, the authors of Žena danas disagreed with Mir-Jam’s advice on calculated marriage, a double moral standard for men and women, the claim that nationality could be an obstacle for marrying, the idea of women’s place being in the kitchen, and so on.86 Žena danas fiercely protested Mir-Jam’s claim that the advice of young men should always be accepted because, in Mir-Jam’s words: “The merchant needs to bring goods that the customer would like, in order to sell the goods. The girl is like goods, which needs to suit the man—the customer.”87 By contesting Mir-Jam’s influence, and by criticizing what they framed as their mothers’ generation’s views on marriage, the left feminists in Žena danas challenged the opinion that marriage was the only true way to liberate young women from their difficult position. Žena danas did not reject marriage per se, but reconceptualized its meaning by offering a different model for young women in the 1930s. For example, in marriage a woman had to work in order to “feel like a human being, and not just like a woman who lives with a man”88; even when without a job she should “spend her time usefully, work on her education and upbringing, read and learn,” as well as participate in social work.89 Instead of marrying someone their mother “heard was a nice man,” women should marry only “a conscious friend (comrade)” who shared their ideas,90 and someone with whom they could “work together and fight for the common good and against common evil.”91 However, in case she did not meet such a man, a woman should live the life of a “free woman, capable of earning and taking care of herself.”92 Finally, divorce was also an option, although the left feminists pointed out that divorce was a privilege for those who could afford it.93

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  57 As we see, there was a revolutionary element in marriage as well. Yet, apart from marriage, Žena danas offered an entirely different path for young women: it was the path of women’s activism, learning, and generational solidarity. Romantic ideas of getting married were contrasted not only with the realities of their mothers’ marriages but also with other models of relationships such as female and intra-generational friendships. Rather than reading sentimental novels (for example, Mir-Jam’s), Žena danas advised young women to lead a “healthy youthful life,” and to spend time with other men and women of their generation who “work on a healthier upbringing of young women and youth in general.”94 In one of the letters published in Žena danas, a woman wrote about how she overcame feelings of loneliness after she gained a female friend and after she started reading Žena danas.95 With the aim of encouraging another lonely young woman (whose letter had been published in the previous issue), the author further wrote: I invite you, my colleague . . . get rid of your sad, unrealistic dreams, I invite you to accept reality as it is, and to help us, with joined forces and rolled-up sleeves, make this reality nicer, more tolerable, and better.96 This sentence indicates how the young communist women in the 1930s, through the Youth Section and Žena danas, created a discourse that took into account how gender and generation intersected in women’s experiences. This generational discourse invited young women to organize within a political women’s movement and become active in the communist struggle for a better future.

Conclusion By analyzing the case of Ženski pokret’s Youth Section in Belgrade and their periodical Žena danas, I argued in this chapter that the concept of political generation is crucial for understanding the emergence of organized left feminism in Yugoslavia. In order to explain why I consider “left feminism” a useful analytical term for framing the discussion about the Youth Section and Žena danas, I first demonstrated that there are significant similarities between the recent Western historiography that focuses on WIDF and left feminism, and socialist Yugoslav historiography. I maintained that left feminism can bridge the gap between these two different historiographical traditions, and allow us to further overcome the feminist/communist binary discussions still prevalent regarding communist women’s activism in Yugoslav and Western historiographies. As I explained, the term can also be useful for acknowledging the continuity between 1930s and post-1945 left feminism, and for emphasizing how young communist women attempted to reconcile communism and

58  Isidora Grubački feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. The latter case is often overlooked because the Yugoslav communist women rejected the term “feminism” after the final conflict between Ženski pokret and its Youth Section in early 1940. As the analysis showed, the left feminists active in Ženski pokret’s Youth Section between 1935 and 1940 belonged to a political generation of women who shared the experience of participating in the progressive student movement in the 1930s, which emerged as a reaction to the Great Depression and the royal dictatorship in 1931, and then from 1933, further developed into a student movement with a strong antifascist, anti-regime, pacifist, and left-wing platform. As the examples show, the activists of the Youth Section defined themselves in terms of a generation—“part of today’s youth”—and in terms of gender—“as women.” Thus, as their auto-identification was based on their specific experience as young women, the members of the Youth Section represented a separate generational unit that responded to the social and political changes of the 1930s differently from both the male members of the progressive youth movement and the women from Ženski pokret. Through their activism in Ženski pokret’s Youth Sections, the 1930s generation of women took it upon themselves to organize and lead a massive political women’s movement that wanted to expand the previous generations’ feminist demands and mobilize all women in the struggle against fascism. The young communist women conceptualized a platform which in a programmatic text in Žena danas they named “new feminism,” through which they challenged the “old” feminist claim of political neutrality as well as what they perceived was an ineffective way of women’s organizing. This meant that they framed the “woman question” as a part of the more general question of the struggle for a better world, and in particular the struggle against fascism, which they interpreted as inherently antifeminist. The Youth Section’s left feminism was political, and inclusive of all women, but also was open to conscious and progressive men. Yet, although they insisted that feminism should also interest men and that women should not be isolated from wider political movements, left feminists explicitly argued for progressive women’s separate organizing. By analyzing how marriage was discussed in Žena danas, this chapter’s fourth part emphasized the way Žena danas offered young women across Yugoslavia a framework for interpreting their difficult position, as well as a model for finding a way out of this position. This model was framed in generational terms. The articles in Žena danas sent a message that the young women in the 1930s should not suffer in unhappy marriages like their mothers. Unlike the marriages of their mothers’ generation, the new model of marriage was that of a girl with a comrade who shared her (communist and feminist) ideas. In marriage—as outside of

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  59 marriage—a woman should be and feel independent, she should work, learn, and participate in public life. Besides marriage, however, Žena danas also offered a model of generational solidarity and women’s activism, and suggested that female friendship and activism in youth organizations were powerful and constructive alternative to the difficult realities of the whole generation. More generally, by indicating the connection of Žena danas with the WWCAWF, as well as with the French periodical Les Femmes and other Popular Front women’s periodicals (US Woman Today, British Woman Today, and Chilean La Mujer Nueva), the chapter suggested that events in Yugoslavia were neither isolated nor unique. Rather, a global leftfeminist movement emerged in the 1930s and the Yugoslav women were its part. By pointing out the continuity between the 1930s and post-1945 left feminism, the chapter further problematized the Western- centered metaphor of the feminist “waves.” Francisca de Haan has argued that the postwar years cannot be characterized as “doldrums,” because rather than in the 1970s, a global left-feminist women’s movement developed already in the 1940s with the left-feminist Women’s International Democratic Federation.97 The case of Ženski pokret’s Youth Section and Žena danas in Yugoslavia shows that organized left feminism emerged already in the 1930s, and that in the Yugoslav case it had a significant generational dimension. This new, and as I argued, left-feminist generation of women reconceptualized feminism by establishing a platform of “new feminism” which kept the political demands of the earlier liberal feminist movement, but additionally insisted that in the changed circumstances of the rise of fascism in Germany and Europe, standing up to fascism, and making the feminist cause understandable and accessible for all women, had to be the core of the feminist movement.

Notes

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60  Isidora Grubački





Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  61

14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21 22

International Democratic Federation (1945),” in Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present, eds. Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clímaco (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 46. Also Siân Reynolds, “The Lost Generation of French Feminists? Anti-fascist Women in the 1930s,” Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 6 (2000) : 679–88; Christine Bard, “La crise du féminisme en France dans les années trente,” Les cahiers du CEDREF 4–5 (1995): 13–27. Writing about the French context, Bard pointed to the crisis of traditional feminism in the 1930s, but also to a new kind of involvement— global and responsive to the radicalized political situation—which was appealing to younger generations of women. Ellen C. DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender and History 3, no. 1 (1991): 84. Francisca de Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones: Rethinking Transnational Feminism and International Politics,” Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (2013): 174–89, particularly 182. In line with the work of, for example, Cheryl Johnson Odim, Audrey Lord, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, De Haan problematized the “gender-only” approach to feminism and suggested that historians need to rethink the approaches to researching international women’s organizations, first by including socialist and left-feminist organizations into their research, and second by using a broader definition of feminism. Regarding the difference between “gender-only” and “multi issue” feminism, some of the relevant literature includes: Cheryl Johnson Odim, “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 314–27; Audrey Lord, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 138. Kimberlé Crenshaw talks about the single-axis framework in her “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139. For a characterization of WIDF as “left-feminist,” and for a point about the connection between WWCAWF and WIDF, see Francisca de Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991,” http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/ help/view_the_womens_international_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991, accessed March 1, 2019. For a discussion about feminism and communism, see Francisca de Haan, ed., “Forum: Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 102–68. Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 8. Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’” The American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 131–58. Ibid., 131–32. Ibid., 135–36. This issue is particularly raised by historians researching WIDF, the organization which, despite its tremendous influence in the period after 1945, is largely missing from the historiography of transnational women’s

62  Isidora Grubački

23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40

movements. See De Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones,” particularly 175. Emmert, “Ženski pokret,” 34. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije. This was, of course, not specific to Yugoslav historiography. For an example of how the New Left resisted focusing on women’s history, see Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction,” 147. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, 1. Here, my interpretation differs from Thomas A. Emmert’s argument, who criticized Jovanka Kecman’s “feminist/proletarian” division, arguing that the contributions of some of the “nonsocialist” women’s organizations should not be overlooked. Cf. Emmert, “Ženski pokret,” 34. Mateja Jeraj, “TOMŠIČ, Vida (born Bernot) (1913–1998),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms, 575–79. Vida Tomšič, “V. Konferencija KPJ održana studenog 1940. u Zagrebu o radu sa ženama,” in Žene hrvatske u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi, ed. Marija Šoljan (Zagreb: Izdanje glavnog odbora saveznih ženskih društava Hrvatske, 1955), 2–8. Ćirić-Bogetić, “Odluke Pete zemaljske konferencije KPJ”; Lydia Sklevicky, “More Horses Than Women: On the Difficulties of Founding Women’s History in Yugoslavia,” Gender & History 1, no. 1 (1989): 72; Lydia Sklevicky, “Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u Jugoslaviji,” Polja 308 (1984): 415–17, and Polja 309 (1984): 454–56. Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji, 124. Ćirić-Bogetić, “Odluke Pete zemaljske konferencije KPJ,” 91. Ibid., 77. Yusta, “The Strained Courtship,” 168. This continuity was further demonstrated in: Mercedes Yusta and Adriana Valobra, eds., Queridas camaradas. Historias iberoamericanas de mujeres comunistas (Buenos Aires: Mino y Davila, 2017). See also Jelena Batinić, Women and the Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), particularly the second chapter; Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms, and the Yugoslav-Soviet Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia,” in Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present, eds. Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, and Krassimira Daskalova (London: Routledge, 2013), 59–76. Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Katherine M. Marino, “Marta Vergara, Popular-Front Pan-American Feminism and the Transnational Struggle for Working Women’s Rights in the 1930s,” Gender & History 26, no. 3 (2014): 642–60. Sent by the Communist Party, Mira Panić (pseudonym of Jelena Nikolić), a delegate from Zagreb, was among the women who attended this congress of women against war and fascism. AJ, Fond Communist I nternational— KPJ Section (790/1 KI), 1934/178, “Izveštaj sa svj. kongresa žena u Parizu.” ­Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, 388. Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, 325. Gabriela Dišen, “Novo polje rada za žene,” Žena danas 1 (November 1936): 2.

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  63





















64  Isidora Grubački

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Alliance of Women’s Movements]. For an overview of this conflict, see also Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji, 126–31. Starc Jančić, “Preface,” 19. See note 30. “Novi feminizam,” 4. Ibid. Ibid. Mitra Mitrović and Milica Šuvaković, “Knjiga g-đe Milice Đurić-Topalović, ‘Žena kroz vekove,’” Žena danas 23 (July 1939): 8–10. This is quoted from the interview Herta Haas gave to historian Ivana Pantelić on February 6, 2008. See “Apendiks II, Herta Haas,” in Ivana Pantelić, Partizanke kao građanke. Društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji 1945–1953 (Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, Evoluta, 2011), 171–82. AJ, Fond Progressive Student Movement (720, Napredni studentski pokret, NSP), 679/1936, “Pismo Leposave Mihailović Opike sestri Boginji.” AJ, 790/1 KI, 1935/323, “Naš rad u ženskom pokretu.” “Apendiks II, Herta Haas,” 173. AJ, 720 NSP, 679/1936, “Pismo Leposave Mihailović Opike sestri Boginji.” According to a 1934 document, there was a conflict within the party as to whether women in Yugoslavia should form a separate massive organization or not. AJ, 790/1 KI, 1934/385, “Izveštaj beogradskog MK.” Mitrović and Šuvaković, “Knjiga g-đe Milice Đurić-Topalović,” 8–10. In this article, Mitrović and Šuvaković argued against older generation socialist Milica Đurić Topalović’s—obviously resonating with Clara Zetkin’s— rejection of the feminist movement and her claims that women’s organizations intentionally separate women and men, thus creating further problems. For a useful overview of women-only organizations in the communist movement, see Sandra Prlenda, “Posebne ženske organizacije u komunističkom pokretu i socijalističkim zemljama—povijesni pregled,” Treća 1–2 (2015): 129–44. “Apendiks II, Herta Haas,” 173. “Dragi naši čitaoci,” Žena danas 19 (January–February 1939): 3. In her speech, Natalija Bajić said: “We, the women students, as a part of today’s whole youth, and as women, are working and fighting by confronting the tradition and the past, we are creating conditions for a nicer future, and we are getting ready to achieve our assignments and to help the people (narod) from whom we came.” See note 51. “Dragi naši čitaoci,” 3. Aboim and Vasconcelos, “From Political to Social Generations,” 179. “Pismo majkama—od jedne ćerke,” Žena danas 3 (January 1937): 8–9. “Zašto se još niste udale? Jeste li srećne u braku?,” Žena danas 10 (February 1938): 11. “Odgovor iz Zagreba,” Žena danas 13 (May 1938): 17; “Odgovor iz Bosne,” Žena danas 13 (May 1938): 17; “Odgovor iz Splita,” Žena danas 13 (May 1938): 18. “Odgovor iz Bosne,” 17; “Odgovor iz Zagreba,” 17. “Odgovor iz Splita,” 18. Grupa mladih intelektualki, “Mi odgovaramo g-đi Mir-Jam,” Žena danas 8 (1937): 6; “Emancipovana porodica g-đe Mir-Jam,” Žena danas 9 (1938): 17. “Emancipovana porodica g-đe Mir-Jam,” 17. There is no author’s signature below the text. “Mi odgovaramo g-đi Mir-Jam,” 6. Ibid.

Communism, Left Feminism, and Generations  65 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

“Odgovor iz Zagreba,” 17. J. A., “Odgovor iz Beograda,” Žena danas 14 (July 1938): 18. Ibid., 18. A reply: Milica Stanojević, Žena danas 11–12 (March–April 1938): 23. J. S., “Đevđelija,” Žena danas 15 (July 1938): 15. “Odgovor iz Skoplja,” 18; A reply: M. P. from Macedonia, Žena danas 14 (June 1938): 17. A reply from Dubrovnik, Žena danas 14 (June 1938): 17. R. Š., Petrovgrad, “Draga prijateljicе,” Žena danas 19 (January–February 1939): 19. Ibid., 19. De Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones,” 183.

4

Communisms, Generations, and Waves The Cases of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba Chiara Bonfiglioli

Introduction This chapter presents an exploratory contribution on the relation between gender, generation, and communism, on the basis of the case studies of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. It focuses in particular on the gendered imaginaries of citizenship characteristic of the generation of activists affiliated with women’s mass organizations in the Cold War era. These mass organizations were traditionally connected to the “old left,” namely to post-1945 socialist and communist parties, and they intersected in different ways with the “new left,” which encompassed anti-imperialist, student, and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. This latter period, in fact, is characterized by the simultaneous overlap and conflict between different generational paradigms of women’s and feminist activism, the “emancipation” one mainly based on women’s socio-economic rights and institutional reform, and the “liberation” one mainly based on gender, sexuality, and grassroots activism. These political and generational paradigms are not only national but also transnational, largely shaped by the global developments of left-wing parties and movements, and of women’s and feminist movements worldwide. Through an exploration of different temporalities of women’s and feminist activism in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba, this chapter aims to challenge the long-standing exclusion of Cold War women’s movements, and particularly women’s mass organizations, from the Western feminist canon, as well as the linear conceptualization of “feminist waves,” particularly the second wave. Women’s left-wing internationalism during the Cold War (especially in its earlier stages) has attracted significant scholarly attention in the last decade.1 The internationalization of women’s rights through the establishment of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 1946, and the so-called “cultural Cold War,” namely the extension of Cold War politics to the terrain of culture and soft diplomacy, 2 brought an intense competition between East and West in the field of women’s rights between the late 1940s and 1989.3 Leftwing women’s mass organizations emerged as a specific transnational

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  67 phenomenon in the Cold War era, in parallel with the expansion of international communism and with processes of decolonization.4 These mass organizations in the “First,” “Second,” and “Third” world were federated transnationally through the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), an organization founded in 1945 in Paris and relocated to the German Democratic Republic in 1951, until its dismantlement in 1991. While earlier feminist interpretations treated women’s mass organizations as “transmission belts” of communist ideology, and dismissed their relevance due to their lack of autonomy from party and state institutions, new interpretations have advanced the hypothesis of a 1940s and 1950s “middle wave” or “red wave” of women’s feminist activism centered around women’s citizenship rights, which paved the way for the emergence of the feminist second wave. 5 As I discuss throughout the chapter, however, the concept of feminist “waves” itself has undergone scrutiny due to its linearity and due to its tendency to reproduce a Western- centered, liberal narrative in transnational women’s and feminist history. The field of “transnational feminism” is itself shaped by the idea of different feminist temporalities in the Global South, and among migrant, working class, and ethnic minority women in the Global North.6 In line with such developments, authors working on the WIDF have questioned the liberal bias of Western historiography and the periodization into “waves,” which led to an exclusion of Cold War women’s mass organizations from the canon, due to their “left-feminist, and hence, intersectional,” or “socialist feminist” political agenda.7 The research on Cold War women’s activism is increasingly highlighting EastWest, East-South, and South-South internationalist connections.8 In my earlier work, I advanced the idea of the circulation of socialist gendered imaginaries of citizenship between Western and Eastern Europe, as well as between the so-called developed and developing countries during the Cold War era. The strong emphasis put by both blocs on women’s rights—despite their opposing gender regimes—meant that women’s citizenship emerged as a field of political, social, and cultural activism after 1945. The WIDF was a fundamental site for internationalist and intergenerational encounters.9 In this chapter, I will follow some of the insights of the existing scholarship, and build upon my previous work, to reflect upon gendered imaginaries of citizenship in three contexts: first, Italy, characterized by the strong presence of communist and socialist parties on the oppositional side of the political spectrum, and by the grassroots work of the Union of Italian Women (Unione Donne Italiane, UDI), from 1945 onward; second, Yugoslavia, shaped by the specific form of self-managed market socialism developed after the break with the Soviet Union, and by the presence of institutionalized women’s organizing in the form of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (Konferencija za Društvenost Aktivnost Žena, KDAŽ); third, Cuba, where the establishment of the

68  Chiara Bonfiglioli state-sponsored Federation of Cuban Women (Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, FMC) in 1960, under the direction of Vilma Castro Espín (1930–2007), somehow obscured the memory of the previous work conducted by the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women (Federación Democratica de Mujeres Cubanas, FDMC), founded in 1948 by women belonging to the oppositional Marxist left. All these mass organizations were affiliated to the WIDF in different ways. After being a model branch of the WIDF since 1945, the Yugoslav organizations only partially reintegrated into the WIDF following their expulsion in 1949 due to the Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948; the Italian UDI, similarly, abandoned its earlier enthusiastic affiliation to the WIDF and assumed a critical perspective toward the WIDF from the early 1960s onward, as the former perceived the latter as too strongly politicized. The Cuban women’s organizations, and especially the FMC, instead became a WIDF model branch in the late Cold War and postcolonial political landscape. The relation with feminism was also very different for each of these organizations. In Italy, the UDI was transformed by the very strong student and feminist movements after 1968, and by the generational opposition to the “old left,” to the point that it turned into an NGO in the early 1980s. In Yugoslavia, the KDAŽ strongly opposed the small dissident post-1968 student and feminist initiatives, which also criticized the “red bourgeoisie” at the head of the socialist state; yet, feminist activists could publish within KDAŽ official periodicals. In Cuba, generational and gendered conflicts were clearly at stake in the opposition between the pre-revolutionary Marxist left and the revolutionary movement which took power in 1959. After the revolution, the island became a reference point for anti-imperialist, civil rights, and Black activists from the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world, and also played an important role in second wave feminist imaginaries, despite the institutionalization of its gender politics and despite the FMC’s rejection of the Western radical feminist paradigm.10 In exploring the interrelations between different political generations and different left-wing gendered imaginaries as well as the dialectics between revolutionary and institutional women’s activism, I challenge the conceptualization of communism and feminism as mutually exclusive ideologies, which, as various scholars have argued, is itself a product of Cold War mental mappings. Socialist authorities in Eastern Europe appropriated the theme of women’s social and economic equality, which they identified with women’s full emancipation, and defined liberal feminism as a bourgeois phenomenon far from the interests of the majority of women. Western liberal discourse, conversely, privileged women’s political and civil rights, discrediting women’s demands for social and economic justice as a form of communist propaganda.11 Within women’s and feminist movements, however, demands for political, civil, and socio-economic rights often coexisted. The second wave, notably, was

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  69 more “intersectional” and multiracial than it is usually portrayed in its canonical, hegemonic representations focused on white, middle-class women’s activism.12 While the liberal and radical white feminist paradigm typical of Western Europe and the United States often posited women’s interests as opposed to those of the state, and defined autonomy from party and state institutions as the leading principle of women’s activism, other forms of socialist, antiracist, and anti-colonial feminism—in Western and Eastern Europe but especially in the Global South—drew connections between gender equality, class, and racial equality as well as equality between nation-states, particularly during the United Nations Decade of Women (1975–85).13 In the following sections, I will thematize issues of generation, gender, and temporalities of women’s activism through the chosen case studies, first by focusing on the post-World War II paradigm of women’s emancipation, and then by analyzing the interconnections between different political generations of women, thus expanding and problematizing the representation of the second wave feminist generation of the 1960s and 1970s as fundamentally separate and opposed to the communist generation active in the “red wave” of the 1940s and 1950s.

Generations of Activists between Revolution and Institutionalization The paradigm of women’s emancipation proposed after World War II by the WIDF and its national branches was largely modeled on the Marxist solutions to the “woman question,” namely the idea that women’s inclusion into politics could be achieved through their full participation to productive labor, while women’s duties in the domestic and private sphere could be socialized by the state through public services. Women’s rights as workers and mothers prominently featured alongside WIDF campaigns for peace and against fascism and imperialism.14 The socalled “working mother” gender contract and “social motherhood” as its main tenet circulated across Cold War borders, and became a strong feature of the gender politics proposed by communist parties across Europe as well as globally.15 Another transnational characteristic of postwar women’s activism was the view of women’s organizations as front organizations, mobilized in including the widest possible numbers of women first during the antifascist resistance and then in the postwar period. Often founded during World War II and led by former female partisans and survivors of concentration camps, women’s organizations affiliated to the WIDF did carve out their specific tasks, agendas, and activities, based on their respective communist parties’ mandate to deal with women’s issues, and often confronted male comrades’ reluctance to give up their privileges.16

70  Chiara Bonfiglioli The Marxist paradigm of women’s emancipation, coupled with the “front organization” strategy, meant that organizations such as the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (Antifašistički Front Žena, AFŽ) and the Union of Italian Women—as well as other women’s organizations affiliated to the WIDF—truly reached significant numbers of women across generations, ethnicities, and classes through their sections established in different regions, towns, and neighborhoods. Attempts to involve women in rural areas and to spread literacy and sanitation were especially strong in Yugoslavia, with AFŽ women targeting the most “backward,” post-Ottoman regions17; in Italy, communist and socialist women belonging to the UDI took the task of documenting the living and working conditions of the most downtrodden women in society. Fighting widespread conservatism, the UDI became an “amplifier” of social struggles and defended in particular the most exploited categories of female workers in the agricultural and industrial sector: rice weeders, olive pickers, seasonal laborers, sharecroppers, and home workers.18 The discourse promoted by the WIDF rapidly circulated to the Global South. In Cuba, the FDMC specifically addressed women’s everyday lives, by establishing “Mothers’ Committees” in each town. The FDMC also paid specific attention to the position of rural and working class Black women. While Cuban women praised Soviet childcare services and used the Soviet example to mobilize for similar provisions in their own contexts,19 something similar happened in Italy, with the campaign for the protection of lavoratrici madri [workers-mothers], which established new maternity leave provisions in 1950, and which was focused on the idea of “social motherhood,” namely, state protection for working mothers. 20 The transnational influence of the Marxist “working mother” gender contract, therefore, extended well beyond state socialist regimes and well beyond Central and Eastern Europe. The idea that women’s status was a sign of civilizational and economic progress and modernization affected the language of United Nations expert meetings and committees, as well as the Cold War competition on the terrain of women’s rights (an example is the famous “kitchen debate” between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in 1959, when the two statesmen argued about the superiority of the capitalist and socialist systems on the basis of their benefits for housewives, in front of a kitchen cabinet showcased during the American National Exhibition in Moscow). 21 The empiricist stance of state socialist regimes and Marxist-oriented parties and movements across the world meant that the competition on the terrain on women’s rights was often waged through hard data and statistics, and through the idea of women’s rights and status as being inextricably dependent upon wider social and economic progress. This approach was present even in countries that had departed from the Soviet model, such as Yugoslavia, after being its enthusiastic followers. A leading proponent of this

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  71 approach, in fact, was Slovenian politician Vida Tomšič (1913–1998), a former partisan during World War II, who led Yugoslav gender and welfare politics from 1945 onward, negotiating the international isolation caused by Yugoslav women’s expulsion from the WIDF in 1949, and engaging in soft diplomacy on the terrain of gender within the NonAligned Movement. 22 Tomšič was also among the proponents of the dissolution of the Antifascist Women’s Front in 1953, and of its replacement with decentered women’s “societies” incorporated in the Socialist Alliance under the head of the Union of Women Societies (Savez Ženskih Društava). This institutional transformation followed from the idea that women-only front organizations had to work in cooperation with other political and social bodies in view of a socialist society, while avoiding “feminist” and “sectarian” tendencies which would separate women’s concerns from wider class-based, societal concerns. 23 Such institutional and class-based approaches to gender issues were still firmly in place within transnational Communist Party politics in the 1960s, even among a younger generation of revolutionary leaders who did not take part in the antifascist resistance during World War II. In Cuba, after the revolutionary struggle was successful, the newly established Federation of Cuban Women in 1960, under the direction of young revolutionary Vilma Castro Espín, regrouped and co-opted previous women’s groups belonging to the Marxist Left and to the revolutionary struggle, to bring its focus toward the construction of the new Cuban socialist society. Women’s pre-revolutionary and revolutionary activism, thus, was somehow tamed by the institutionalization of the FMC. 24 The FMC was in charge of a network of Children’s Circles (Circulos Infantiles), which provided extensive childcare, and also attended to the education and training needs of working class women, particularly those who used to work as prostitutes or domestic servants before the revolution, as well as to peasant women. 25 An institutionalized, state-based perspective was also characteristic of women’s organizations in Western Europe, such as the Italian UDI, which nonetheless had assumed a position of relative autonomy from the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties to which its members belonged, and which had also distanced themselves from the WIDF due to its excessive “politicization.” Innovatively, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) and the UDI defined the “woman question” as a national question, which went beyond class, from 1957 onward, on par with the “Southern question,” that is, the long-standing issue of under-development in the Italian South. Its approach to women’s rights, however, firmly rested upon the idea that women’s rights were ultimately to be tackled through institutional reform and women’s social and political participation.26 Even after the process of de-Stalinization started with Stalin’s death in 1953 and continued with the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the gendered imaginaries circulating

72  Chiara Bonfiglioli across borders within left-wing organizations were largely based on the idea of women’s participation in labor, politics, and the welfare state. Political, social, and economic progress was portrayed as the basis for women’s self-realization, as shown in a 1962 piece of reportage published in Noi Donne [We Women], the periodical produced by the Union of Italian Women. A delegation of five Italian female journalists of different political orientations had visited Yugoslavia, as hosts of the local organization, the KDAŽ. In her lengthy entry, Giulietta Ascoli detailed her visits to textile factories, workers’ councils, vocational schools, kindergartens, neighborhood councils, and orphanages, discussing the lives of the Yugoslav women they encountered, and the broader opportunities for self-realization that had been created in the space of a generation through literacy, work, and welfare. A particular emphasis was placed on eighteen-year-old Ljubica, the president of a worker’s council in a textile factory in Macedonia, who had earned a high school diploma, despite the fact that her mother grew up illiterate. Another woman who was given prominence in the report was Joska, a forty-year-old who had agreed to an amicable divorce and who found her life’s purpose in her friendships and social activities. Joska’s ability to build her selfworth as a divorcee seemed especially revolutionary when compared to Italian women’s experiences of overt legal discrimination in the public and private sphere and to the inability to access divorce. Overall, the Italian reporter appeared to be impressed by the socialist organization of politics, welfare, and everyday life in Yugoslavia, which eased women’s inclusion and participation. 27 A similar, positive view of women’s integration within the political sphere and in the sphere of labor in Cuba can be found in early 1960s accounts of US feminists, according to Elizabeth Wolozin’s dissertation on US feminist engagement with the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and their gender politics.28 The Cuban revolution, in particular, was hailed by US feminists in the 1960s as a successful example of women’s integration into the labor force and into political institutions, particularly at a time when US women were fighting against labor discrimination at home. It is only from the 1970s onward, with the emergence of radical feminism, that this generational, state-led paradigm of women’s emancipation became increasingly criticized, often by the very same individuals that had appropriated it earlier, such as US feminist writer Margaret Randall. Feminist critiques of socialist gender politics, as Wolozin argues, “reflected a feeling of alienation from a class-based framework in the intellectual feminist movement in the West and the reorientation of these activists’ and academics’ priorities of analysis.”29 In the following section, I will discuss the ways in which the postwar emancipation paradigm intersected and transformed in its interaction with the new emerging feminist paradigm of women’s liberation in the 1970s, and how this paradigm shift shaped the dominant representation

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  73 of “the other women’s movement,”30 meaning a transnational generation of women engaged in left-wing political parties and state socialist women’s organizations.

Communist Waves and Feminist Waves: Generational Encounters As Dorothy Sue Cobble has argued for the US context, the two-wave framework commonly used in historical periodization “assumes a half-century that was devoid of waves, which flies in the face of the now voluminous literature documenting activism during this fifty-year trough.” She suggests to “add a wave,” or to adjust the periodization and “make a case for a ‘long women’s movement,’ one that had a broad social justice agenda rooted in the postwar era labor and civil rights movements that bears reclaiming.”31 When reflecting critically on the wave metaphor, moreover, scholars have suggested to go beyond a narrative that is rooted in the developments of white, middle class, radical feminism, and to account instead for other forms of working class, socialist, and Black feminist activism simultaneously to the widely acknowledged second wave of radical feminism. A new inclusive framework can allow us to rediscover a number of women who are not usually identified as feminists or as pioneers, and to “invite them back” within the canon of women’s and feminist history.32 In the words of Eileen Boris, “[c]losely tied to the meaning of feminism is the issue of who gets defined as a feminist. Power, in part, shapes our sense of just who is a feminist.”33 The different encounters and activist temporalities present in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba make clear that existing wave-based narratives deserve to be challenged through transnational comparisons between Western and non-Western feminist experiences. In the previous section, I noted that a specific gendered imaginary of citizenship and activism circulated across borders, giving rise to a transnational, institutional paradigm of women’s emancipation associated with the communist and socialist left in places like Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Italy. While pre-existing activism on women’s issues can be seen as paving the way to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, the temporalities of feminist engagement significantly differed within these countries, according to their specific national histories, to the degree of institutionalization of gender politics, and to the degree of oppositional space that was present for newly emerging student and feminist movements after the “global 1968.” In Italy, the partly oppositional character of the communist and socialist parties and the growth of both the student movements and of the extra-parliamentary left pushed UDI members, especially younger ones, to radicalize in a feminist sense, and led to numerous encounters and interconnections between older women engaged in the UDI and feminist activists from the early 1970s onward, especially when it came

74  Chiara Bonfiglioli to societal and feminist struggles to gain divorce and abortion rights.34 Conversely, in Yugoslavia, the more limited political space allowed to social movements, and the institutional critique of feminism waged by the KDAŽ, meant that Yugoslav feminists had a limited space for activism and critique, which they managed nonetheless to carve out thanks to the country’s openness to the West, and through translations of Western feminist texts, but only from the late 1970s onward.35 Finally, when it comes to Cuba, the newly established socialist regime incorporated youth and women’s radicalism in the socialist institutions, so that while the country was an inspiration to second wave anti-imperialist feminists in the West, East, and Global South, feminism in Cuba only emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, at the time of the so-called “third wave.”36 From this comparison we can note that the feminist paradigm had a stronger influence within the old and new left in Western Europe, while it had a limited impact in state socialist regimes where the space of debate on the “woman question” was appropriated by state institutions, and associated with a broader social and anti-imperialist agenda. State socialist women’s organizations’ opposition to feminism—seen as a largely Western, imperial, and bourgeois phenomenon—was evident during the discussions which took place during the 1975 World Conference on Women in Mexico City, when state socialist mass organizations allied with women’s organizations based in the Global South to argue that women’s issues could not be separated from wider demands for a different geopolitical and economic order.37 Despite the emergence of feminist activism at a transnational level, institutional and socialist approaches to the “woman question” continued to have a significant amount of international credit well into the 1980s, until the fall of state socialism in 1989.38 With reference to the interactions between communist and feminist activists, Italy is certainly the place where this intergenerational encounter has been highlighted and documented in more detail. In the past decade, new interpretations of the role of the Union of Italian Women, and new autobiographies written by women belonging to the antifascist and communist generation, have highlighted the importance of postwar and Cold War activism, and the many forms in which it paved the way for the second wave, through advocacy for women’s political, economic, and social rights from 1945 onward. 39 Nonetheless, the dominant representation of the Italian “second wave” as a movement that distanced itself from the “old” and “new” left, and which was primarily focused on gender, the body, and the private sphere did not significantly change. The UDI has often been portrayed by scholars as an “outdated” organization, due to its lack of autonomy from the socialist and communist parties.40 Moreover, one specific strand of Italian feminism, namely radical feminism or “feminism of sexual difference,” has

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  75 been often taken to represent the second wave as a whole within Italian feminist historiography.41 Alternative interpretations have mainly been put forward by scholars based outside of Italy, who emphasized working class women’s “double militancy,” both within and outside the Communist Party, and their contribution to the significance of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.42 An important figure in the encounter between the communist and the feminist generation is Luciana Viviani (1917–2012). Born in a family of the Neapolitan bourgeoisie, she obtained a degree in literature, and engaged in the antifascist resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome together with her former husband, one of the editors of the PCI newspaper l’Unità [The Unity]. In 1945, she was in charge of reorganizing the women’s commissions of the PCI in Milan, and from 1946 she was elected as communist MP for four terms. She was also among the founders of the UDI, and later in life contributed to the restructuring of the Central Archive of the UDI, editing an anthology of analyses and original documents retracing the history of the organization. Since the late 1970s, Viviani took part in the feminist movement, particularly in the movement based in Rome, which advocated for contraception, divorce, and abortion rights, and which established numerous self-help groups among women. In the last thirty years of her life Viviani lived in Rome with her partner, feminist philosopher Rosetta Stella (1951–2016), who was also engaged in the UDI in the early phase of her activism, before she became a theorist of sexual difference and feminist theology. Both Viviani and Stella were engaged in the 1982 UDI Congress, which transformed the organization into a grassroots-based NGO, giving up its nation-wide, hierarchical structure. When I interviewed Luciana Viviani in her Roman home, in 2010, she described the initial encounter between communist and feminist activists. At the beginning, she stated, “they [feminists] looked at us suspiciously.” Feminist activists, allegedly, accused UDI women of wanting what men had: “You want to be the same as men, we want to be different instead.” At the same time, Viviani made it clear that while UDI and feminist activists did not share the same political paradigm, the political context led them to work together to obtain divorce (1974) and abortion rights (1978): Certainly, feminism envisaged a feminine figure that was radically different from the one put forward by the emancipation [paradigm]. . . . Emancipation looked at society as it was, and said, “we want to take part in it, with these same conditions,” while feminism, instead, said, “we do not want to be equal in this kind of society, we fully want to change it.” So, a huge debate ensued. But slowly, slowly . . . the situation led us to an encounter, and to do certain things together.43

76  Chiara Bonfiglioli The encounter between communist and feminist gender politics happened very differently in socialist Yugoslavia, as made evident by Viviani’s visits to the capital of Yugoslavia: Belgrade. Viviani visited Belgrade during the first Congress of the Antifascist Women’s Front in June 1945, and then, thirty-four years later, she attended the first feminist international conference held in Yugoslavia in October 1978, significantly titled “Comrade Woman: The Woman Question: A New Approach?”44 Viviani’s political stance should have been closer, in theory, to the one of the official representatives of the Yugoslav women’s mass organization, the KDAŽ, for she belonged to the generation engaged in the partisan struggle and in the postwar communist politics through the Union of Italian Women. The KDAŽ was especially wary of feminist discourses, and reprimanded second wave feminists for their excessively Western orientation, even if young Yugoslav activists could publish in the KDAŽ newspaper, Žena [Woman], and avail themselves of the public space of the Student Cultural Centre (Studentski Kulturni Centar, SKC) for their conference.45 Luciana Viviani, however, appeared to be more open to the demands of Yugoslav second wave feminists than Yugoslav communist officials themselves. While in 1945 she was very much embedded in communist politics (even if the UDI delegation involved communist, socialist, and Christian-Democrat women), in 1978 she was greatly influenced by the Italian second wave feminist movement and thus responsive to feminist initiatives in Yugoslavia. Simultaneously, due to her communist background, Luciana Viviani appeared to be more aware overall of the diversity of the historical context and temporality of Yugoslav feminism than other Italian radical feminists who did not experience antifascist and communist activism. While notable feminist writers such as Dacia Maraini, Carla Ravaioli, and Manuela Fraire felt at odds with Yugoslav women’s internal critique of the socialist system and found their stances too moderate, Luciana Viviani established parallels between the Yugoslav feminists’ agenda and the agenda of the Union of Italian Women. Writing to conference organizer Dunja Blažević, Viviani argued that the meeting had been particularly significant and helped her to better understand “Yugoslav women’s processes of emancipation and liberation.”46 Viviani also noted that UDI activists encountered similar problems when building a mass-based agenda: Both of us, in fact, are not basing our analyses or choices within the framework of small groups which belong to the social and cultural elite; instead, our field of research touches large sectors of the female population, including its various social, cultural, and geographic articulations.47 She also claimed that mass-based activism meant that women’s “processes of consciousness raising” were necessarily slower and complicated,

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  77 but ultimately more effective in building an “autonomous women’s movement.”48 Even if Viviani perhaps did not fully appreciate the autonomous character of the conference, and thought that Yugoslav feminists benefited from the same institutional support as Italian feminists, her letter combines both the mass-based, institutional paradigm of emancipation, and the new liberation paradigm founded on consciousness-raising and autonomy. In the course of Luciana Viviani’s life, therefore, two different generational paradigms could coexist and complement each other: one founded in women’s participation in the antifascist struggle, and the other founded in the second wave feminist movement. Yet, her extraordinary life trajectory also shows that even the concept of “generation,” similarly to the concept of feminist “wave,” can be reductive if applied in a static way, especially in the presence of intergenerational exchanges and encounters between women engaged in different social movements and organizations. The entanglements between women’s mass organizations and feminist movements in the 1970s and 1980s deserve further exploration from a transnational perspective, in order to fully understand the complexity and multiplicity of women’s activism in the course of the twentieth century.

Conclusion In 1979, Scottish socialist feminist Nicola Murray criticized Cuban gender politics for the lack of grassroots movements and the absence of consciousness-raising groups, which had “impeded women’s awareness of their own oppression.” Women’s limited and segregated participation in the labor market and their traditional double burden were mentioned as factors which hindered women’s liberation in Cuba. Ultimately, the Cuban emancipation paradigm was challenged due to its “commitment to economic development over and above the liberation of women.”49 Murray was not the only one to question Cuban gender politics from a feminist socialist perspective. Margaret Randall, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s, similarly expressed strong disappointment with the failures of the Cuban emancipation model in the 1980s and 1990s.50 Similar critiques toward the emancipation paradigm typical of the Marxist left were expressed in the late 1970s and in the 1980s by second wave feminist activists in Italy and Yugoslavia, both at home and abroad. While Kristen Ghodsee and Kateřina Lišková highlighted the importance of Cold War 1940s and 1950s anticommunist rhetoric in shaping our “common knowledge” of state socialist gender politics, 51 and while Francisca de Haan underlined how the WIDF was systematically undermined and targeted by McCarthyism, 52 second wave feminist critiques, including socialist feminist ones, also appear to be a factor of crucial significance in the construction of communist and socialist women’s

78  Chiara Bonfiglioli organizations as incompatible with the new feminist canon based on women’s autonomy and liberation. The generational and transnational divide between communist and feminist activists, and feminist activists’ disenchantment with the old and new left in the course of the 1970s, played a role in determining who was defined as a feminist and who was included in the feminist canon, even if Cold War politics undoubtedly shaped academic feminism, especially when it came to funding sources.53 In time, these critiques over women’s lack of autonomy and women’s double burden came to crystallize as received ideas. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the socialist bloc further marginalized the legacy of state socialist women’s organizations, which ceased to be represented at the 1995 UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, after having a major role in the UN Women’s Decade between 1975 and 1985.54 East-West feminist encounters in the 1990s also had an impact on transnational feminist narratives, since women in newly democratic Eastern Europe seemed to reject Western style feminism, especially its “cultural feminism” variety.55 The long-standing exclusion of communist and socialist women’s activism from the feminist canon silences the fact that the debate on the “woman question” was non-linear, non-homogeneous, and, most of all, transnational. Socialist and communist gendered imaginaries circulated across borders, including within Western European feminist circles, well into the 1970s and the second wave. On the basis of the cases of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba, this chapter highlighted the interrelations between the lost Cold War “red wave” and the feminist second wave, or, in other words, between the institutional paradigm of women’s emancipation and the grassroots paradigm of women’s liberation. These interrelations deserve further exploration, given that women’s shifting and entangled subjectivities as revolutionaries, institutional leaders, communists, and feminists defy our common knowledge of communisms, generations, and waves.

Notes 1 Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs 41, no. 2 (2016): 305–31; Celia Donert, “Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe: Disentangling Feminist Histories,” Past and Present 218, no. 8 (2013): 180–202; Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19 (2010): 547–73; Kristen Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Womens Organizations: The Committe of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 4 (2012): 49–73; Magdalena Grabowska, “Bits of Freedom: Demystifying Women’s Activism under State Socialism in Poland and Georgia,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 1

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8 9

10 11

(2017): 141–68; Jill Massino and Shana Penn, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009); Katherine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25, no. 6 (2016): 925–44; Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting Fascism and Forging New Political Activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, eds. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 52–72; Adriana Valobra and Mercedes Yusta, eds., Queridas Camaradas. Historias Iberoamericanas de Mujeres Comunistas (Buenos Aires: Rustica, 2017). Giles Scott-Smith et al., eds., Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Helen Laville, “Gender and Women’s Rights in the Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, eds. Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 423–39. Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of World Communism 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Jacqueline Castledine, Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom (Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Brian T. Thorn, “Peace Is the Concern of Every Mother: Communist and Social Democratic Women’s Anti-War Activism in British Columbia, 1948–1960,” Peace and Change 35, no. 4 (2010): 626–57; Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Asha Nadkarni, “Transnational Feminism,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, ed. Eugene O’Brien (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/ obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0006.xml, accessed October 31, 2019. See Francisca de Haan, “La Federación Democrática Internacional de Mujeres (FDIM) y América Latina, de 1945 a los años 70,” in Queridas Camaradas, 17–44; Francisca de Haan, “The Global Left-Feminist 1960s: From Copenhagen to Moscow and New York,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, eds. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 230–42; Wang Zheng, “Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: Women of China (1949–1966),” The China Quarterly 204 (2010): 827–49. Kristen Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Gendered Imaginaries of Citizenship and Transnational Women’s Activism: The Case of the Movie Die Windrose (1957),” in Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective, eds. Anne Epstein and Rachel G. Fuchs (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 166–85. Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Kristen Ghodsee, “Revisiting the United Nations Decade for Women: Brief Reflections on Feminism, Capitalism and Cold War Politics in the Early

80  Chiara Bonfiglioli

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Years of the International Women’s Movement,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33, no. 1 (2010): 3–12. Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 337–55. See also Kathleen A. Laughlin, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1 (2010): 76–135. Chiara Bonfiglioli, “The First UN World Conference on Women (1975) as a Cold War Encounter: Recovering Anti-imperialist, Non-Aligned and Socialist Genealogies,” Filozofija i Društvo 27, no. 3 (2016): 521–41. Donert, “Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe.” Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Gendered Imaginaries of Citizenship.” Chiara Bonfiglioli, Revolutionary Networks: Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia, 1945–1953 (PhD Dissertation, Utrecht University, 2012). Ibid. See also Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of WWII Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Ivan Simić, Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018). Maria Michetti et al., Udi: laboratorio di politica delle donne. Idee e materiali per una storia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998). Michelle Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Molly Tambor, The Lost Wave: Women and Democracy in Post-War Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 211–25. Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Women’s Internationalism and Yugoslav-Indian Connections: From the Non-Aligned Movement to the UN Decade for Women,” forthcoming. Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Women’s Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era: The Case of Yugoslavia,” Aspasia 8 (2014): 1–25. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution. Nicola Murray, “Socialism and Feminism: Women and the Cuban Revolution. Part I,” Feminist Review 2 (1979): 57–73. Bonfiglioli, Revolutionary Networks. Giulietta Ascoli, “Viaggio tra le donne jugoslave,” Noi Donne (September 30, 1962). Elizabeth Wolozin, First World Women, Third World Revolutions: The Nicaragua and Cuban Revolutions as Reflections of the Trajectory of the Feminist Movement in the United States in the late 20th Century (BA Dissertation, Barnard College, 2016). Ibid., 40. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement. Laughlin, Gallagher, Cobble et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship?,” 87–88. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Laughlin, Gallagher, Cobble et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship?,” 101. Judith Adler Hellmann, Journeys among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Feminist Translations in a Socialist Context: The Case of Yugoslavia,” Gender & History 30, no. 1 (2018): 240–54. See also Zsófia Lorand, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Communisms, Generations, and Waves  81 36 Sujatha Fernandes, “Transnationalism and Feminist Activism in Cuba: The Case of Magín,” Politics & Gender 1, no. 3 (2005): 431–52. 37 Bonfiglioli, “The First UN World Conference on Women.” See also Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex. 38 This institutional, state-based paradigm is still present to a certain extent within women’s mass organizations in Cuba and China. The WIDF is formally still in existence, but it is mainly active in Latin America and has not preserved its mass constituency after 1989. 39 Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Red Girls’ Revolutionary Tales: Antifascist Women’s Autobiographies in Italy,” Feminist Review 106 (2014): 60–77. See also Tambor, The Lost Wave. 40 Caterina Liotti et al., eds., Volevamo cambiare il mondo. Memorie e storie delle donne dell’Udi in Emilia Romagna (Rome: Carocci, 2002). 41 For an earlier example, see Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds., Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). 42 Hellman, Journeys among Women; see also Maud Ann Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968–1983 (New York: Routledge, 2014). 43 The interview was conducted at Luciana Viviani’s home in Rome on April 9, 2010. 44 Bonfiglioli, “Feminist Translations”; see also Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Compagna Donna/Drugarica Žena: la conferenza internazionale di Belgrado del 1978,” Genesis 10, no. 2 (2011): 83–104. 45 Bonfiglioli, “Feminist Translations”; see also Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State. 46 Roma, Archivio Centrale Udi, Donne nel Mondo, f. 330, Lettera di Luciana Viviani del 13 Novembre 1978. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Nicola Murray, “Socialism and Feminism: Women and the Cuban Revolution. Part Two,” Feminist Review 3 (1979): 99–108. 50 Wolozin, First World Women, Third World Revolutions. 51 Kristen Ghodsee and Kateřina Lišková, “Bumbling Idiots or Evil Masterminds? Challenging Cold War Stereotypes about Women, Sexuality and State Socialism,” Filozofija i Društvo 27, no. 3 (2016): 489–503. 52 De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms.” 53 Kelly Coogan-Gehr, The Geopolitics of the Cold War and the Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive (New York: Palgrave, 2011). 54 Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex. 55 Kristen Ghodsee, “Feminism-by-Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe,” Signs 29, no. 3 (2004): 727–53.

5

Generations of Italian Communist Women and the Making of a Women’s Rights Agenda in the Cold War (1945–68) Historiography, Memory, and New Archival Evidence Eloisa Betti

Introduction This chapter explores how diverse generations of Italian communist women contributed to creating a women’s rights agenda in the period 1945–68, before the rise of so-called second wave feminism. A women’s rights agenda was clearly implemented in postwar Italy, especially thanks to the role of communist women both within the party, in the Parliament, as well as in the Union of Italian Women (Unione Donne Italiane, UDI) and in the Italian General Confederation of Labor (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, CGIL). Women’s labor rights and welfare services were at the core of the emancipation project promoted by Italian communist women,1 which was part of a larger women’s rights agenda put forward worldwide by international women’s organizations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). 2 As a matter of fact, Italian communist women had frequent contacts with communist women in Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, China. The latter influenced the Italians in establishing their own women’s rights agenda and vice versa, as Italians took part in the elaboration of a women’s rights agenda internationally, especially within, but not only, the WIDF.3 In the first part of the chapter, the existing historiography will be critically discussed, in order to show how Italian communist women were represented in it, and how the historiography addressed the gender and communism nexus according to memorial phases and practices. The category of generation is adopted as a methodological lens to move beyond the Western idea of waves of feminism, which did not consider women’s activism as a multifaceted and diverse phenomenon across the world.4 This category allows for the inclusion of different generations of women’s activists, comparing and contrasting their lives and political

Generations of Italian Communist Women  83 experiences as well as their multiple and diverse demands. The coexistence of a “missed” or “middle” wave in the Italian case has been reviewed by several scholars, 5 who have pointed out the limits of wave periodization mainly based on the American chronology of the women’s movement and related scholarship, which, in its framework, did not include the period analyzed in spite of the high level of women’s activism in Italy and worldwide. The second part addresses how the link between communism and women’s emancipation developed historically in Cold War Italy, by focusing on the roles of both the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) and the UDI in upholding a shared women’s rights agenda influenced by the state-socialist model of equality. The Italian struggle for a women’s rights agenda in the global Cold War is analyzed, by enlightening the role of communist women as well as the crucial place of women’s labor rights in establishing such an agenda at both the national and international levels. The last part takes into consideration communist women’s agency in the making of this agenda, thanks to a biographical approach which reveals to what extent women played a role at local, national, and global levels, being part of a wider, truly international, context. The conclusion provides an overview of the main methodological issues raised by this essay, useful for understanding the relationship between gender, generation, and communism, not only in the Italian context but also elsewhere.

Gender, Generation, and Communism in Cold War Italy: A Critical Reappraisal A proper historiography on gender and communism in the Italian context arose from the 1990s, influenced by geopolitical events, historiographic turn, and new accessible sources. The fall of the Berlin Wall has had a deep impact on Italian history and Italian historiography addressing communism-related issues. In 1989, with the so-called svolta della Bolognina, the Secretary General of the PCI, Achille Occhetto, announced the beginning of a profound change, leading to the official dissolution of the PCI in 1991 and the birth of a new party, named the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS).6 In 1994, the archives related to the activity of the PCI and some of its main leaders (including key figures like Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti) were eventually filed and became accessible to scholars. Among the PCI-related archives preserved by the Gramsci Foundation and described in a proper guide,7 it is worthwhile mentioning the Camilla Ravera Historical Archive, created by the women’s section of the PCI in 1987 and named after this key communist leader.8 Ravera (1889–1988) had a crucial role in keeping the PCI alive during the fascist regime and

84  Eloisa Betti in elaborating the party’s strategy toward women in the interwar period, reinforced after World War II thanks to her writings. The relevance of preserving the memory of women’s emancipation struggle was strongly acknowledged by left-wing and communist women who, since the mid-1980s, have been active in collecting archival documents and in creating proper archives.9 The UDI decided to establish its own archive after its Eleventh Congress (1982). The latter led to a structural reshaping of the UDI’s functioning and a resetting of its hierarchical structure,10 which led to a reduction in the number of UDI local branches across the country. Aware of the risk of losing part of their memory, a specific group of key UDI leaders was set up to supervise the establishment of the national archive that opened its doors at the end of the 1980s.11 In addition to the central archive, local and regional archives were founded from the 1990s onward, also giving rise to specific networks.12 Before 1989, the role of communist women as politicians, unionists, and leaders of female association—the UDI—had been popularized by publications written by left-wing (female) intellectuals as well as by the first strand of autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries authored by key communist leaders such as Teresa Noce (1900–1980) and Camilla Ravera in the 1970s.13 At the end of the decade, two collections of interviews were used to assemble exemplary life stories of communist women, investigating the relationship between the private and the public, as well as the complex intersection between communism and feminism.14 Both were informed by the influence of second wave feminism and their socio-cultural practices and methods, testifying to the new relevance attributed to biographies and life stories even in the communist milieu. Italian communist women had been involved in writing their own history since post-World War II, analyzing the role of communism, and the PCI in particular, in the struggle for women’s emancipation. They contributed to creating a proper politics of memory, aimed at providing fragments of exemplary communist life stories and a comprehensive understanding of the “woman question.” The “brief Clara Zetkin course,” dated back to the early 1950s, and organized by key communist women, including Camilla Ravera, contained historical lessons on the women’s emancipation struggle informed by the Marxist-Leninist tradition.15 The achievements of Italian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were included in a larger ideological framework, reaffirming the superiority of socialist societies and the Soviet one in particular. Since the course was meant to be the basic training for PCI (female) officials and activists, its historical interpretation had quite an impact. During the 1960s and 1970s, several additional attempts to create a historical path to interpret the PCI politics toward women were made by communist women themselves.16 The key communist leader Camilla Ravera was on the frontline, co-authoring her first book in 1951 and a second one in 1978; the latter also examined women’s struggle over the

Generations of Italian Communist Women  85 previous thirty years.17 Such books are worthwhile being considered for several reasons. On the one hand, they represent the main (and only) historical canon regarding communist women’s activism in the pre-1989 period, and on the other hand, they provide basic information on major events and writings, which have characterized communist women’s activity and political elaboration. It is worthwhile mentioning that until 1970s, only two female professional historians, that is, Franca Pieroni Bortolotti and Paola Gaiotti De Biase, conducted research connected to the women’s political movement (socialist and Catholic, respectively)18; neither of them addressed the post-World War II period but they jointly provided an innovative contribution to the study of women’s activism in the 1919–48 period.19 In the 1970s, under the influence of second wave feminism, an entire book series was devoted to the “woman question” by Editori Riuniti (a publisher close to the PCI); among almost forty books published within a decade some covered the history of the women’s movement and the figure of key communist women like Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952). 20 One of them was written by the previously mentioned historian Franca Pieroni Bortolotti. 21 The 1980s were crucial, not only in Italy, for the establishment of women’s history as a proper field of study and the circulation of Joan Scott’s conceptualization of gender as a “useful category of historical analysis.”22 A series named “Quaderni di storia delle donne comuniste” [History Notebook of Communist Women] was launched after the establishment of the Camilla Ravera Historical Archive. The series, published from a cycle of seminars organized by the very same archive, reconstructed specific aspects of communist women’s history in the period between the 1920s and 1970s. Both historians and political activists took part in the events, testifying to an attempt to create a new historical writing with a specific focus on the biographies. 23 The 1990s historical studies are clearly informed by the new approaches produced by the first strand of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy and abroad. An important role was played by the new biographical method in Italy, which became more and more important for unveiling women’s roles in different political, social, and economic fields. In the 1990s, a renewed interest in the relationship between women and politics also emerged, thanks to the visible increase in female participation in local and national political bodies. Patrizia Gabrielli is a pioneer in the study of communist women’s biographies, correspondence, and autobiographical sources, probably also thanks to the first-hand experience of the 1980s encounter between historians and communist activists, promoted under the Camilla Ravera Historical Archive project. 24 In her monograph on communist women belonging to the antifascist movement, she clearly stressed the difficulty of putting forward the historical memory of communist women, something already pointed out by one of the first professional historians dealing with the topic, Annarita Buttafuoco. 25

86  Eloisa Betti The post-1989 historiography on gender and communism has explored different sub-topics, namely communism, sexuality and morals, the communist family, communist women’s memoirs and correspondence, and communist women and antifascist activities. While Sandro Bellassai focuses on communist morals, enlightening the ambiguity of communist emancipation project which was not always shared by activists, Maria Casalini emphasizes the gender role in communist family, putting forward previous research on communism, gender, and sexuality. 26 Casalini investigates the more general communist emancipation project by analyzing the complex role of left-wing women in the aftermath of World War II. 27 Patrizia Gabrielli puts forward her previous research on communist women, taking into consideration their action within the UDI more in depth, attempting to draw a first history of the association in the years following World War II.28 Communist romances and love affairs are, in turn, at the center of the book by Anna Tonelli, who analyzed the so-called “irregular” communist couples and the scandals they created in post-World War II Italy.29 Tonelli emphasized the heavy price paid by communist women in the patriarchal postwar political system. The political career of Teresa Noce, for instance, was negatively affected by the scandal related to the annulment of her marriage, obtained without her knowledge or permission but with the agreement of the central committee of the PCI. Her husband, Luigi Longo, suffered no negative repercussions, becoming the Secretary General of the PCI in the 1960s. In post-1989 historiography, several representations of Italian communist women have been provided. Some authors described them as “puppets” in men’s hands; others addressed them as “not feminist” erasing communist women from any possible feminist genealogy, mainly because of their belonging to political parties and mixed organizations. Other labels and identities have been attached to communist women such as “mothers of the Republic,” “partisan fighters,” “members of Parliament,” “unionists,” “officials of the Union of Italian Women.” This stream of historiography, developed between the 1990s and the 2000s, shows a limited understanding of the importance of the role of Italian communist women in improving citizens’ and women’s rights. The individual role of female MPs, within the ranks of the PCI, was often recognized in promoting specific bills of law,30 but not usually as a part of a more general struggle for women’s equality. Lina Merlin (1887–1979) is best remembered for the law ending the public regulation of prostitution, whereas she was at first involved in the drafting of the Constitution itself. Teresa Noce has been associated with the law on behalf of working mothers, while she was also involved in the drafting of the Constitution and became the main champion of equal pay for women.31 Scholars like Molly Tambor, Penelope Morris, and Chiara Bonfiglioli have recently pointed out how the role of women active in Cold War Italy up to 1968 has generally been underestimated and neglected by

Generations of Italian Communist Women  87 historiography, terming those generations of women as the “lost wave” or “middle wave” of women activists.32 The role of the UDI, for instance, has in fact been lessened until recently by Italian women’s historiography, 33 as it was considered a women’s organization lacking an autonomous political strategy, in spite of the numerous and various campaigns it promoted with limited (or no) support from left-wing parties such as the Communist Party.34 This was not a peculiarity of the Italian context, as shown by scholars addressing women’s organizations in communist China or Poland.35 The transnational anticommunist prejudice, already analyzed by Francisca de Haan, 36 also had an impact in Italy, where an entire generation of scholars did not take into consideration the relevance of women belonging to the PCI or the UDI simply because they were considered to be too attached to the communist (or socialist) milieu.37 It is worth bearing in mind that this approach has been put forward by a generation of scholars directly involved in second wave feminism that had fiercely criticized the PCI and UDI’s emancipation strategy in the early 1970s. If the present is informed by the past,38 it is not by chance that a new generation of scholars is paying renewed attention to the history of left-wing women (especially communist), producing a growing number of studies discussing UDI’s political strategy and its modernizing character.39 Adopting the generation category is particularly fruitful in understanding continuities and changes in communist women’s activism; in fact, three generations can be taken into consideration in the 1945–68 period: the antifascist (born between 1880 and 1910), partisan fighters (born in the early 1920s), and post-1945 activists (born in the early 1930s). The life of communist women was characterized by their belonging to a specific “political generation,” influenced by turning points which actually shaped their biographies and connections to other members of the same generation.40 Antifascists, such as Teresa Noce and Camilla Ravera, were influenced first of all by the rise of the fascist regime and its repressive emigration policies. Partisan fighters, such as Nilde Iotti (1920–1999) and Marisa Rodano (b. 1921), were forged by their participation in the underground movement in which communists played a crucial role. The post-1945 activists, such as Adriana Lodi (b. 1933) and Donatella Turtura (1933–1997), were influenced by the bipolar political order and the traumas related to 1956, in particular the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union Communist Party and, to a lesser extent, the Hungarian Revolution.41

Communism and Women’s Emancipation: The Union of Italian Women and the Italian Communist Party The first phase of the Cold War was marked by imaginaries and models strongly affected by bipolar equilibriums, which for the communists were translated into a particular attachment to the Soviet bloc and an

88  Eloisa Betti idealization of the USSR.42 The training political courses organized by the PCI in post-World War II Italy were named after the revolutionary Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), explicitly adopting the concept of “women’s emancipation” as the main keyword. The very same course promoted an advanced and idealized idea of Soviet women, like more in general women in socialist countries. Among the pantheon of heroines of the international women’s movement proposed at the end of the booklet with brief biographical notes, we can list the French Louise Michel  (1830–1905), the Germans Clara Zetkin and Emma Ihrer (1857–1911), the Polish-Jewish Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), the Russian Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), the Russian-Italian Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925), the Spanish Dolores Ibárruri (1895–1989), the French Eugénie Cotton (1881–1967), and the Korean Pak Den-ai (1907–1967).43 Foreign cultural models and practices, exchanges and networks with the East44 were, in fact, crucial to advance a modern idea of woman in postwar Italy, based on emancipation through paid work and equality of rights. Women were witnesses and promoters of such a narrative, which they reproduced both publicly and privately. At the same time, they embraced the imaginary of equality and the models of emancipation of real socialism,45 reasserted in Italy by the Communist Party, the UDI, and to some extent the CGIL. These were renegotiated in the light of the tradition of agency and social conflict proper to each region, given the wide heterogeneity of the Italian context. The model of the working mother, the main reference of the claims of left-wing women, in contact with the ideal of communist/Soviet woman, was reinforced and acquired political legitimation. Communist women used these international models to carry forth their local claims and the advancement of rights in the working and social sphere. But it was also the direct encounter, through the exchange of delegations and trips, that corroborated these very models and imaginaries, bearing witness to the permeability of the Iron Curtain and the frequent political-cultural contacts between East and West,46 something that Christian Democrat governments and polices forces were unable to prevent. In post-World War II Italy, the women’s emancipation project was put forward by communist women at different levels and within different organizations. Most left-wing women experienced “double” or even “triple” political belonging, being activists, even leaders, of political parties such as the PCI, left-wing women’s associations such as the UDI, and trade unions like the CGIL.47 In reconstructing their own history, communist women included not only the political events and strategies proposed directly by the national and local women’s sections of the Communist Party but also by the UDI and the CGIL.48 Paid work was at the core of the women’s emancipation project foreseen by the communists; the latter could have been achieved through the inclusion

Generations of Italian Communist Women  89 of women in the ranks of the working class. UDI was at the forefront in re-negotiating a foreign model of emancipation coming especially from the East. Decades before the rise of second wave feminism, the association played a crucial role in shaping a new idea of modern society, based on women’s contributions.49 The action of the UDI in promoting women’s emancipation through work, equal opportunities, and a more gendered welfare state has not yet been analyzed in depth, notwithstanding the modernizing role it has played for both Italian women’s lives and Italian society in itself. Following Francisca de Haan’s argument, 50 according to which work had been the “motor/engine of modern life” for Western and Eastern European women in the Cold War era, UDI’s radical role in advancing women’s right to work, women’s labor rights, and equal pay since the 1950s, even before the countries countenanced a more progressive stance on gender equality matters, may also be interesting from a comparative perspective. UDI’s political strategy on labor rights and welfare policies should be analyzed at the intersection of foreign influences and the home-spun model of women’s emancipation. As a matter of fact, UDI was inspired by the Soviet emancipation model, especially in the so-called “red regions” such as Emilia-Romagna, locally governed by the Communist Party. In the early Cold War years, communist propaganda in communistled Bologna officially promoted an idealized image of the Soviet family and the Soviet woman, 51 although more traditional models also existed among Italian communists.52 Soviet women were seen as emancipated women, who could balance their working and family life thanks to the social services provided by the state.53 The communist press and the leftwing women’s press, with publications such as Noi Donne [We Women], served as dedicated channels for promoting such models, by publishing articles with pictures (photographs as well as drawings) describing the Soviet Union as the “promised land” for workers and their families.54 Many of them were about a decent standard of living of the Soviets, technological progress of their factories, progressive culture, the achievements of Soviet workers, and general well-being enjoyed by Soviet children.55 Nevertheless, in a Catholic country like Italy, the Soviet model had to be reshaped, preserving the crucial role of the family and incorporating the comforting model of the working mother as women’s main model, without subverting the basis of Italian culture and morality.56 The link existing between the UDI (Italian) elaboration and the WIDF (international) one emerged in 1953 for instance, when a “Declaration of Women’s Rights” was launched both in Italy and globally.57 The UDI document was ratified in 1953 at the association’s national congress, on the grounds of the results of local congresses taking place across Italy and well attended by women. Local charters were drafted, showing how important the definition of some key rights for women in

90  Eloisa Betti the early 1950s was considered. The issue of paid work was once again at the heart of the Italian and International “Declaration of Women’s Rights.”58 The connection between the national and international level was relevant not only in the drafting of the document(s) but also in its worldwide promotion. Communist women such as Teresa Noce, Member of Parliament, General Secretary of the Italian Federation of Textile Workers, and President of the International Union of Textile and Clothing Workers, were asked to publicly support the international document which the WIDF was trying to popularize. UDI also played a major role in defining a national, and to some extent, global agenda for women’s rights, thanks to its affiliation with the WIDF.59 It was a key member of the Federation itself and several UDI women served as officials in its ranks. Maria Maddalena Rossi (1906–1995), Member of Parliament in the rank of the PCI and President of the UDI, became Vice-President of the WIDF in 1957. Carmen Zanti (1923–1979), an official in the ranks of the UDI, served as Secretary General of the WIDF between 1957 and 1964.60 UDI’s approach was more radical than left-wing trade unions and political parties in promoting campaigns for women’s labor rights. In spite of the enlightened declarations of leaders like Giuseppe di Vittorio and Palmiro Togliatti supporting women’s work, the socio-cultural model, which still prevailed in the 1950s, even in left-wing organizations, was that of male breadwinner to which UDI opposed the model of working woman and wage-earning mother. For instance, in the 1956 UDI Congress, the “right to work” was voiced by Italian women through the “referendum on women’s rights,”61 launched by the association in preparation for the congress in order to better understand women’s working and living conditions.62 Other demands related to women’s work emerged such as equal pay for female farm-workers, access to every job position (also in the judiciary, still forbidden in the late 1950s Italy), the safeguarding of maternity and women’s health, the struggle against the dismissal of married women, unemployment and health insurance for every woman, and, last but not least, pension entitlements for housewives. Indeed, female workers were not always a priority in the political strategies of the left-wing organizations, a fact which emerged from the equal pay battle. This debate was conducted almost exclusively by female politicians, trade unionists, and UDI leaders with low-key support from the socialist and communist parties and the CGIL until the second half of the 1950s. The timid commitment of male communists was something openly discussed by unionists like Adele Bei (1904–1976) and Teresa Noce, who in 1950 wrote to the General Secretary of CGIL to push for stronger support for the equal pay struggle.63 It was also mentioned in a critical way in the herstory advanced by communist women in the 1960s.64

Generations of Italian Communist Women  91 Nevertheless, some major events promoted by the Communist Party itself, namely the Communist Women’s Conference (Conferenze delle donne comuniste) deserve to be mentioned, as they represented opportunities to put forward a shared women’s rights agenda and the so-called women’s emancipation project. Those conferences were also considered crucial in the historical narratives promoted by communist women as sites of elaboration of the party’s strategy toward women.65 In the period 1945–68, four national conferences were organized: in 1945, 1955, 1962, 1965, respectively. Since 1945, the political elaboration of Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary General of the PCI, had a deep impact on the strategy adopted by the communists toward the so-called “woman question.”66 His speech at the 1945 communist women’s conference was reprinted and disseminated among activists and officials, becoming the basis for the already mentioned Clara Zetkin training course on women’s emancipation, as well as for the official policy of the party toward women. Togliatti emphasized women’s crucial role in the fledgling Italian democracy and their activities in the social, political, and cultural fields. In all the three following conferences, women’s right to work and women’s equality rights were at the center of the discussion and were explicitly stated in the final political resolution. At the second communist women’s conference (1955), the existence of a common women’s right agenda and the importance of the role of the UDI, CGIL, and cooperative movement was stated as a pillar of a possible women’s emancipation project.67 If women workers were the main target of the PCI’s strategy, housewives were also explicitly mentioned, as in the second half of the 1950s the campaign “pensions for housewives” was launched. In the third communist women’s conference (1962), which occurred in the years of great industrial expansion dubbed the “economic miracle” and saw an important growth in female employment, women’s work was one of the main topics discussed and many women workers attended the conference.68 Women’s professional training, as well as social services, first and foremost nursery schools, was mentioned in the conclusion of the conference as a relevant goal toward creating a more woman-friendly society. In addition to Togliatti, other important male communist leaders seriously addressed the women’s emancipation project, among them Pietro Ingrao and Enrico Berlinguer, Secretary General of the PCI from 1972 to 1984. Also, UDI leader Marisa Rodano and CGIL high-ranking official Donatella Turtura, both members of the Central Committee of the PCI, attended the conference, taking the point of view of their respective organizations there. In the fourth communist women’s conference (1965), a special session was dedicated to the celebration of communist women’s contribution to the resistance movement in the twentieth anniversary of the ending of World War II.69 Paid work was again at the heart of the debate as female employment had suffered a setback, right after the

92  Eloisa Betti end of the economic boom (1963). A special resolution on the “question of female employment” was approved by the conference; the attack on female labor was considered by communist women as a step back in the overall female emancipation project.70 In the period considered, two other relevant conferences should also be mentioned: the National Conference of Women’s Workers (1954, 1962), promoted by the CGIL.71 As Camilla Ravera and Nadia Spano and Fiamma Camarlinghi’s books show, CGIL events, like those of UDI, were included in the official herstory created by the communist women as a part of the struggle for women’s emancipation.72 The main focus of such events was, once again, women’s labor rights, which were at the core of a shared women’s rights agenda.73

Italian Communist Women in the Making of a Women’s Rights Agenda: A Biographical Approach As underlined by Chiara Bonfiglioli, Italian communist women’s life stories have been understudied and rarely have they been studied in a systematic way.74 In the postsocialist era, their memory has been marginalized and erased from the political discourse, because of the shifting cultural background of the Left and the rising anticommunist discourse in the Second Italian Republic.75 Nevertheless, since the second half of the twentieth century an important tradition of left-wing women’s writing has developed in Italy, thanks to the publication of a growing number of diaries and autobiographies written by former antifascist partisans like Joyce Lussu (1912–1998), Ada Gobetti (1902–1968), Marina Sereni (1906–1952), and Giovanna Zangrandi (1910–1988), and important female communist leaders like Camilla Ravera, Guidetti Serra (1919–2014), and Teresa Noce.76 In the new millennium, a new strand of autobiographies written by key communist women born in the 1920s and early 1930s has emerged. Furthermore, within the Italian context increasing attention has been addressed to ordinary people’s writing, including that of the working class, ever since the creation of the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano in 1984.77 The following biographies are relevant to understand the major role played by communist women in establishing a women’s rights agenda in Cold War Italy and also the relevant institutional recognition they obtained. Camilla Ravera,78 born in Acqui Terme (Alessandria), got a high school diploma as a teacher. Living in Turin, she took part in the 1917 antiwar protests, formally joining the Socialist Party in 1918. Right after World War I she was a member of Ordine Nuovo run by Antonio Gramsci. She joined the Communist Party of Italy right after its foundation, becoming responsible for the “Women’s Tribune” of the journal Ordine Nuovo. In the latter she published the article “Our Feminism,” which became the manifesto of the Italian communist strategy toward

Generations of Italian Communist Women  93 women in the interwar period. The article stressed women’s right to achieve economic independence while also placing emphasis on women’s reproductive functions related to maternity and care duties.79 In the 1920s, she went underground after her ban from teaching for being communist. After Gramsci’s arrest, she became the highest ranked official in the party, but she had to go into exile in the late 1920s, traveling between Paris and Moscow. She was offered a chance to be a part of the international female secretariat by Clara Zetkin, but refused to come back to Italy and instead rebuilt the communist clandestine organization. She was arrested in 1930 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison; in 1936, she was relocated to the south of Italy, in the Matera area, with other PCI leaders on the islands of Ponza and Ventotene. She was temporarily expelled from the party for having criticized the position adopted by the Third International during the war. In post-World War II period, she was elected to the Central Committee of the PCI of Turin, in the Directive Committee of the UDI, and in the Executive Committee of the WIDF. Elected as MP in the ranks of the PCI, she contributed to the drafting of laws regarding working mothers, equal pay, and equality rights. She contributed to the activities of the PCI toward women, with her 1951 and 1978 books becoming points of reference in putting forward the historical memory of the (communist) women’s movement.80 In the 1970s, she penned a diary on her antifascist commitment, a short interview was included in Scroppo’s 1979 book, and in 1985 a full-length interview was published in a book form.81 In 1982, Camilla Ravera was named “lifelong senator” (senatore a vita) by the President of the Italian Republic Sandro Pertini. She was the first woman to be awarded this prestigious recognition, given for great achievement in the social, scientific, artistic, or literary fields. Teresa Noce, born in Turin, Italy, into a very poor family, took part in her first strike when she was just eleven years old.82 Employed first as a seamstress, later she worked at the Turin Fiat factory on the production line (as a blue-collar worker). At first active in the Socialist Party, after the founding of the Communist Party of Italy (1921), she became a leader of the Italian Communist Youth. During fascism, she went into exile, living in the USSR, Switzerland, and France. With her husband, the communist leader Luigi Longo, she was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where she worked as a journalist. After Franco’s victory in the Civil War, she moved to France, where she became active in the French resistance movement against Nazism. Arrested by the French police, she was deported by the Gestapo and survived the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Holleischen. In the aftermath of World War II, Noce became a PCI Member of Parliament (1946–58). She was one of five women who drafted the 1948 Italian Constitution, along with Nilde Iotti (PCI), Maria Federici (Christian Democracy), Angela Gotelli (Christian Democracy), and Lina

94  Eloisa Betti Merlin (Italian Socialist Party).83 In the early 1950s, she also served as General Secretary of the Italian Federation of Textile Workers (1947–55) and as President of the International Union of Textile and Clothing Workers (1949–58). Noce is particularly relevant for understanding the role of women, Italian in this case, as geopolitical actors. Being a politician and a trade unionist involved in national and global union from the late 1940s, Noce was a vociferous promoter of equal pay at the local, national, and international levels. In Italy, she was on the front-line in presenting bills in the Italian Parliament aimed at enforcing the principle of equal pay enshrined in the 1948 Italian Constitution and supported by ILO with its 1951 Convention.84 In the early 1950s, Noce managed to mobilize thousands of textile workers across Italy to support her bills, which were informed by the ILO Convention itself. At the international level, Noce stressed the need to defend women’s right to work and to set fair rates of pay for them during the WIDF Second Congress held in Budapest in 1948. Beyond the leftist milieu, she presented an agenda at the Sixth Session of the UN Women’s Committee (1952), calling for the application of the equal pay principle. Noce’s career was badly affected by the scandal related to the annulment of her marriage, which she recollected as being traumatic. After 1958, she no longer served in the Parliament nor did she hold any important posts in the PCI, withdrawing from political life afterward. She wrote extensively about her political experience in the form of an autobiography (1974),85 where she recollected her political and personal life including the difficult end to her marriage. In her writing, a close nexus clearly emerged in communist women’s experience between a public and a private life, which in the 1970s was no longer seen as something that had to be hidden from public view. She also wrote non-fiction books, related to her experience in the Spanish Civil War, as well as in the concentration camps where she was imprisoned.86 She also wrote a science-fiction book called Le avventure di Layka, cagnetta spaziale (1960) [The Adventure of Laika, the Space Dog], published soon after the titular Soviet dog orbited the Earth.87 Teresa Noce and Camilla Ravera belonged to the same generation of communist women, the first who joined the Communist Party right after its foundation. They had both a key role in the interwar period, in the Italian (Ravera) and European context (Noce). They both experienced imprisonment and exile for being communists and were directly involved in antifascist activities. Teresa Noce was also a leading CGIL trade unionist, becoming well-known in Italy and in the international arena thanks to her role in the international federation of textile workers. Both Noce and Ravera struggled to get important bills on women workers’ rights passed in the Parliament, although Noce was more critical toward male communist leaders and unionists who failed to support her commitment enough. Both Noce and Ravera wrote about their

Generations of Italian Communist Women  95 political life in the 1970s and were engaged in preserving the memory of communist women. Nevertheless, while Ravera was also central to establishing a historical canon related to the Italian left-wing women’s movement and her role was well recognized by the Party, Noce was almost forgotten after the 1950s.

Conclusion The chapter has shown the crucial role of communist and left-wing women in implementing a shared women’s rights agenda in Cold War Italy, revealing the importance of women’s activism before the rise of the so-called second wave feminist movement. For this very same reason, it has contributed to the recent scholarship questioning the periodization of “waves” in women’s activism, which has been challenged in the last few decades by an increasing number of studies. In the Italian case, such a periodization in particular diminished the role of communist and leftwing women, blamed for being involved in the allegedly “male” politics promoted by political parties such as the PCI. The concept of “generations” has proven to be pivotal in order to move beyond the theoretical framework of “waves,” revealing the existence of relevant female genealogies among communist leaders (and activists) in post-1945 Italy. By taking into consideration generations of communist women, we can see more clearly the role they played in subsequent phases of Italian political history, often sharing the same goals (e.g. equal pay, women’s right to work). Generations of communist women were fully influenced by major political events they experienced such as the rise of fascism, World War II, the resistance movement, and the trauma related to 1956. The chapter has underlined the relevance of biographies in the making of a women’s rights agenda at the crossroads of East-West cultural exchanges. Communist women belonging to the PCI, the UDI, or the CGIL managed to advocate for women’s rights in diverse situations and at different levels of scale (local, national, international). The complexity of the role of communist women within the party and other organizations has emerged as an aspect to be investigated further; women’s party allegiance did not in fact avoid friction and a full-blown struggle against the male-dominated mind-set, as the case of equal pay struggle shows. The shifting subjectivity of communist women, according to the generational membership (e.g. antifascist, partisan fighters, post-1945 activists) and turning points experienced (e.g. 1922–26; 1943–45; 1956), did play a crucial role in creating a more and more radical political agenda on women’s rights across time, starting from women’s right to paid work, paid maternity leave and public social services, equal pay and access to all careers. Communist women’s double or triple belonging was

96  Eloisa Betti useful to reinforce the struggle for women’s rights that characterized the action of left-wing organizations. Going beyond the enduring anticommunist bias in women’s history, researching left-wing women’s archives (UDI), political parties (PCI), and trade union archives (CGIL) will contribute to understanding the relevance, specificity, and limits of left-wing and communist women’s activism in the Cold War. Moreover, the inclusion of communist, but also Catholic, women in post-World War II political history will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the advances and the setbacks which occurred in this period in Italy and worldwide. Although Italian Catholic women had a different attitude toward women’s work and women’s place in society, they supported women’s important demands such as equal pay, the protection of working mothers, and the banning of dismissals for married women.88 The Christian Democrat Tina Anselmi (1927–2016), the first woman to be appointed Minister of Labor in Italy, played a pivotal role in establishing the 1977 law that guaranteed complete equality between women and men in the employment field.89

Notes 2 Francisca de Haan, “Women as the ‘Motor of Modern Life’: Women’s Work in Europe West and East since 1945,” in Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union, eds. Joanna Regulska and Bonnie G. Smith (London: Routledge, 2012), 87–103. 4 On the conceptualization of feminism in a larger perspective, see for instance Francisca de Haan, ed., “Forum: Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 102–68.

6 Aldo Agosti, Storia del Partito comunista italiano 1921–1991 (Roma: Laterza, 1999). 8 On Camilla Ravera Archive and activities, see Patrizia Gabrielli, “La storia, le donne e il PCI. Una iniziativa dell’Archivio ‘Camilla Ravera,’” IG Informazioni. Trimestrale a cura della Fondazione Istituto Gramsci di Roma 3 (1990): 47–54.

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memoria e assenza di storia. L’Unione donne italiane,” Italia contemporanea 232 (2003): 507–24. Eloisa Betti and Marta Magrinelli, “Genere, fotografia e storia negli archivi del secondo Novecento: il Fondo fotografico dell’Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) di Bologna,” Clionet. Per un senso del tempo e dei luoghi 2 (2018), http://rivista.clionet.it/vol2/dossier/fotografia_storia_e_archivi/bettimagrinelli-genere-fotografia-e-storia-negli-archivi-del-secondo-novecento, accessed October 18, 2019. Maria Michetti, Margherita Repetto, and Luciana Viviani, Udi: laboratorio di politica delle donne (Roma: Cooperativa libera stampa, 1984). Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali-Direzione Generale per gli Archivi, Guida agli Archivi dell’Unione Donne Italiane (Roma: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2002). Teresa Noce, Rivoluzionaria professionale (Milano: La Pietra, 1974). Chiara Valentini and Laura Lilli, Care compagne. Il femminismo nel PCI e nelle organizzazioni di massa (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1979); Erica Scroppo, ed., Donna, privato e politico. Storie personali di 21 donne del PCI (Milano: Mazzotta, 1979). PCI, eds., Breve corso Zetkin sulla lotta per l’emancipazione della donna (Roma: La sfera, 1953). Nadia Spano and Fiamma Camarlinghi, La questione femminile nella politica del PCI: 1921–1963 (Roma: Donne e Politica, 1976); Aida Tiso, I comunisti e la questione femminile (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1976). Camilla Ravera, La donna italiana dal primo al secondo Risorgimento (Roma: Edizioni di Cultura sociale, 1951); Camilla Ravera, Breve storia del movimento femminile in Italia (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1978). Maria Pia Casalena, Le italiane e la storia. Un percorso di genere nella cultura contemporanea (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2016). Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Le donne della Resistenza antifascista e la questione femminile in Emilia (1943–1945) (Milano: Vangelista, 1978); Paola Giotti De Biase, La donna nella vita sociale e politica della Repubblica (1945–1948) (Milano: Vangelista, 1978). Chiara Fracassi, Aleksandra Kollontaj e la rivoluzione sessuale. Il dibattito sul rapporto uomo-donna nell’URSS degli anni venti (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977). Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Femminismo e partiti politici in Italia: 1919–1926 (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1978). Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75. Under the series “Quaderni di storia delle donne comuniste” the following seven issues were published up to 1991: 1. La passione della democrazia. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti e il movimento femminile dale origini al 1900; 2. Riflessioni su una donna comunista: Giuliana Ferri (1923–1975); 3. Donne comuniste a Roma. Testimonianze su Caterina Cicetto, Licia Battio, Lidia De Angelis; 4. Da una donna la forza delle donne: Anita Mezzalira (1886–1962); 5. Una donna nell’impegno intellettuale e politico: Carmen Pasapieri (1938–1984); 6. Le donne comuniste dal primo al terzo congresso (1921–1926); 7. Le donne comuniste dal terzo al quinto congresso del PCI (1926–1945). Patrizia Gabrielli, “Percorsi biografici e itinerari politici: l’esperienza delle comuniste italiane,” Agenda 8 (1993): 19–36; Patrizia Gabrielli, “Biografie femminili e storia politica delle donne,” Italia contemporanea 200 (1995): 493–509; Patrizia Gabrielli, Mondi di carta. Lettere, autobiografie, memorie (Siena: Protagon, 2000).

98  Eloisa Betti 25 Patrizia Gabrielli, Fenicotteri in volo. Donne comuniste nel ventennio fascista (Roma: Carocci, 1999); Annarita Buttafuoco, “Cittadine italiane al voto,” Passato e Presente 40 (1997): 10. 26 Sandro Bellassai, La morale comunista. Pubblico e privato nella rappresentazione del PCI (1947–1956) (Roma: Carocci, 2000); Maria Casalini, “The Family, Sexual Morality and Gender Identity in the Communist Tradition in Italy (1921–1956),” Modern Italy 18, no. 3 (2013): 229–44. 27 Maria Casalini, Le donne della sinistra (1944–1948) (Roma: Carocci, 2005). 28 Patrizia Gabrielli, La pace e la mimosa. L’Unione donne italiane e la costruzione politica della memoria (1944–1955) (Roma: Donzelli, 2005). 29 Anna Tonelli, Gli irregolari. Amori comunisti al tempo della guerra fredda (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 2014). 30 Tambor, The Lost Wave. 31 See also Giuliana Bertagnoni, “Le donne nel PCI alla vigilia del ‘miracolo economico,’” in Il PCI in Emilia Romagna. Propaganda, sociabilità, identità dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico, eds. Alberto De Bernardi, Alberto Preti, and Fiorenza Tarozzi (Bologna: Clueb, 2004), 41–58; Patrizia Gabrielli, “Diritti, modelli, rappresentazioni: le associazioni politiche delle donne,” in Madri della Repubblica. Storie, immagini, memorie, eds. Patrizia Gabrielli, Luisa Cicognetti, and Marina Zancan (Roma: Carocci, 2007), 9–86. 32 Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Red Girls’ Revolutionary Tales: Antifascist Women’s Autobiographies in Italy,” Feminist Review 106 (2014): 60–77; Penelope Morris, “Introduction,” in Women in Italy 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study, ed. Penelope Morris (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 1–20; Tambor, The Lost Wave. 33 Elda Guerra, Storia e cultura politica delle donne (Bologna: Archetipolibri, 2008); Emma Fattorini and Luisa Giampietro, “Un padre ingombrante. UDI e PCI negli anni cinquanta,” DWF 44 (1999): 50–68. 34 Betti, “Gli archivi dell’UDI come fonti per la storia del lavoro femminile.” 35 See e.g. Magdalena Grabowska, “Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (2012): 385–411; Zheng Wang, “‘State Feminism’? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies 31 (2005): 519–51. 36 Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19 (2010): 547–73. 37 See for instance Maria Casalini, “Il dilemma delle comuniste. politiche di genere della sinistra nel secondo dopoguerra,” in Una democrazia incompiuta. Donne e politica dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostril, eds. Nadia M. Filippini and Anna Scattigno (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2007), 131–53. 38 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–97. 39 See among others Chiara Bonfiglioli, Revolutionary Networks: Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945–1957) (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2012); Cristina Renzoni, “Una città su misura. Servizi sociali e assetto urbano nella pubblicistica e nei congressi dell’Unione donne italiane (1960–1964),” TRIA 6, no. 10 (2013): 121–34; Tiziana Pironi, “Il contributo dell’Unione Donne Italiane alla riforma sulla scuola media unica,” Nuovo Bollettino CIRSE 1 (2013): 33–42; Molly Tambor, “Red Saints: Gendering the Cold War, Italy 1943–1953,” Cold War History

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48 49 50 51

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10, no. 3 (2010): 429–56; Debora Migliucci, La politica come vita. Storia di Giuseppina Re, “deputato” al Parlamento italiano (1913–2007) (Milano: Unicopli, 2008); Betti, “Gli archivi dell’UDI come fonti per la storia del lavoro femminile”; Tambor, The Lost Wave. In addition to Gabrielli’s “Biografie femminili e storia politica delle donne” and Mondi di carta, see also Società italiana delle storiche, Generazioni. Trasmissione della storia e tradizione delle donne (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1993); Mariuccia Salvati, Passaggi. Italiani dal fascismo alla Repubblica (Roma: Carocci, 2016). On 1956 as a trauma see for instance Alessandro Iandolo, “Unforgettable 1956? The PCI and the Crisis of Communism in Italy,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 259–82; Eloisa Betti, “Bologna in the Cold War: Perspectives of Memories from a Communist City in the West,” in Cold War Cities: History, Culture and Memory, eds. Katia Pizzi and Marjetta Hietala (London: Peter Lang, 2016), 171–201. Donald Sassoon, “Italian Images of Russia,” in Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–1958, eds. Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1995), 189–202; Marco Fincardi, C’era una volta il mondo nuovo. La metafora sovietica nello sviluppo emiliano (Roma: Carocci, 2007); Franco Andreucci, Falce e martello. Identità e linguaggi dei comunisti italiani fra stalinismo e guerra fredda (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2005); Alberto De Bernardi, Alberto Preti, and Fiorenza Tarozzi, eds., Il PCI in Emilia Romagna. Propaganda, sociabilità, identità dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico (Bologna: Clueb, 2004). PCI, ed., Breve corso Zetkin sulla lotta per l’emancipazione della donna (Roma: La sfera, 1953). On the network and exchange in the Cold War, see Melanie Ilic, “Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, eds. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 157–74; Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Brendan Humphreys, eds., Winter Kept Us Warm: Cold War Interactions Reconsidered (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2010); Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (Arlington: Texas A & M University Press, 2014). Françoise Navailh, “The Soviet Model,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. 5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 226–54. Betti, “Bologna in the Cold War.” See for instance Eloisa Betti, “Donne, cultura del lavoro e azione politica in Emilia-Romagna: il primo ventennio della Repubblica (1950–1970),” in Differenza Emilia Teoria e pratiche politiche delle donne nella costruzione del “modello emiliano,” ed. Caterina Liotti (Roma: BraDyPus, 2019), 129–54. Spano and Camarlinghi, La questione femminile nella politica del PCI: 1921–1963. Betti, “Gli archivi dell’UDI come fonti per la storia del lavoro femminile.” De Haan, “Women as the ‘Motor of Modern Life.’” On Soviet women and family see Ilic, “Soviet Women”; Navailh, “The Soviet Model”; Alain Blum, “Socialist Families?,” in Family Life in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, eds. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 198–237. Casalini, “The Family, Sexual Morality and Gender Identity”; Bellassai, La morale comunista.

100  Eloisa Betti





















Generations of Italian Communist Women  101



























6

The Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism and Political Generations in the Ruhr, West Germany (1975–90) Sercan Çınar

Introduction This chapter attempts to shed light on the histories of Turkish leftfeminist migrant women’s organizations in West Germany, particularly focusing on the history of the Women’s Union in the Ruhr- Gelsenkirchen (Gelsenkirchen-Ruhr Bölgesi Kadınlar Birliği, GKB) that was established on March 8, 1975 by Turkish socialist and progressive migrant women and remained active until the beginning of the 1990s.1 Through this particular case study, I contribute to several fields of research that may at first seem dissimilar or unrelated: the historiography of left-feminist women’s movements, studies on transnational migration and migrant transnationalism, and historical research on Turkish women’s migration to Western Europe. In her 2010 study on Cold War legacies in Western historiography of transnational women’s organizations, Francisca de Haan argues that there is “a state of ‘not knowing’ about the WIDF [Women’s International Democratic Federation]” within the Western historiography of transnational women’s organizations, although the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was “the biggest post-1945 international women’s organization.”2 According to her, this lack of knowledge is based on Cold War assumptions on communist women who have been framed as a homogenous category located in the Second World, “the Soviet bloc,” or an “oppressed Eastern Bloc,” and assumed to be characterized by the lack of agency, thus lacking the possibility of becoming autonomous subjects according to the Western liberal framework.3 Similar to de Haan’s point about the WIDF, I argue that there is also “a state of ‘not knowing’” about Turkish migrant leftfeminist women’s organizations in Western Europe in various relevant bodies of literature, such as the historiography of women’s movements and historical research on migration.4 By recovering the history of Turkish migrant left feminism in West Germany, this chapter also aims to contribute to our understanding of transnational migrant activism and left-wing women’s movement in Europe and in Turkey in the Cold War context, which goes beyond

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  103 the limitations of national boundaries. By adopting an intersectional and transnational perspective on the migration experience, which overcomes the binary between migrant women’s emancipation and subordination, this chapter also moves beyond the essentialized, ethnicized, and gendered category of migrant women by looking into the political processes that Turkish migrant women were involved in. Since the mid-1980s, attempts to make feminist scholarship less Western-centric have included the development of studies on the history of Third World women and of feminisms in Third World contexts. 5 Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of Third World women still largely constitutes its subject as women strictly located in the Third World, with the notion of the “Third World” reduced to a geographical location. Such an approach creates geographical and ideological binarisms and overlooks the subjectivities of Third World women who were located in the First World as migrants and activists.6 In most of the scholarly works published on migrants’ transnational activism, migrant women’s activism and gender as an organizing principle of social relationships still goes unnoticed.7 A few scholars, especially Liza Mügge, Carla De Tona, and Ronit Lentin, do address the significance of gender in migrants’ transnational activism in their works.8 Two of these are Mügge’s 2011 book and 2013 article, the latter showing that “migrant men’s and women’s involvement in social networks and transnationalism takes different forms.”9 Against this background, I try to answer the following questions while discussing the making of Turkish migrant left feminism in the Federal Republic of Germany: how and why did Turkish migrant women get organized, and what political standpoints and subjectivities did leftfeminist Turkish migrant women develop? In what ways did these women’s generational experiences of migration and activism influence their understandings of themselves in terms of gender and feminist politics? My historical analysis of Turkish migrant feminism and the generational experience of migration and activism are framed by the concept of “political generations.” Choosing this concept allows me to identify two generations of Turkish migrant left feminists: the first generation of women arrived in Germany before 1980 as part of the guest worker regime and family reunion policies; the second generation of women were left-feminist activists in Turkey in the 1970s who became asylum seekers in Germany after the 1980 military coup d’état in Turkey. In defining different political generations of Turkish migrant women, I adopt “generation” as an analytical category that does not essentially rest on fixed entities such as age; instead, I use generation as a historical concept that corresponds to the effects of wider social, cultural, and political processes on the political organizing of Turkish migrant women in the European Cold War context. Located within the field of feminist historiography, this chapter is based on archival materials and printed

104  Sercan Çınar primary sources from Turkish and international archives, and on oral history interviews that I have conducted with former members and followers of GKB.

Historical Background: Turkish Migration to West Germany and the Ruhr Migration from Turkey to European countries began in the late 1950s, but a larger migratory wave from Turkey to Europe, notably to West Germany, took place from 1961 to 1972 on the basis of bilateral agreements between Turkish and West German governments.10 The early 1960s saw the beginning of a wave of “labor migration to Europe” through these agreements, which “institutionalized and expanded the extent of the movement of labor from Turkey” to Western Europe.11 The aftermath of World War II, which marks the beginning of the Cold War, had a major transformative impact on Turkey on various levels: socially, economically, and politically. The country sided with the “Western bloc” and the United States against the Soviet Union and “the communist threat.” This shift accelerated Turkey’s integration with the capitalist market economy, and the country was designated as a “buffer zone” protecting the political and economic interests of “the Free World” in the Middle East against the Soviet Union. After the signing of the Economic Assistance Act under the Marshall Plan in 1948, Turkey’s economy was restructured in accordance with international political economy and Turkey received financial aid from the United States to fulfill its duties against “a Soviet invasion.”12 In addition to the economic restructuring, anticommunism started to occupy a central place in cultural, ideological, and political fields in Turkey, which culminated in the brutal suppression of the socialist movement with a military coup in September 1980. Kemal Kirisci, a prominent migration scholar in Turkey, explains the causes behind the 1960s migration wave to West Germany with demographic factors linked to structural changes in the Turkish economy.13 According to him, there were three important factors that caused this migration. The first factor was the new Turkish constitution of 1961 which liberalized the complicated and strict regulations on traveling abroad. The second factor was the Turkish government’s plans for transition to a state-planned economy and import-substitution industrialization during the early 1960s which “envisaged the ‘export of labor’ as a goal” a way to facilitate the acquisition of technical skills from Western Europe.14 The export of labor was conceived as a source of foreign currency too, “of which the country [Turkey] suffered a shortage.”15 The third factor was the shortage of low-skilled workers in Western Europe, particularly West Germany, which resulted from rebuilding of industry in the post-World War II era and the economic boom due to these efforts.

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  105 This wave of migration to West Germany was framed by “guest worker regimes” that were significant outcomes of the formal policies of labor recruitment in Europe in the 1960s.16 Therefore, the term Gastarbeiter [guest worker] was coined and circulated by the official German discourse in calling Turkish workers, who were supposed to rotate with others, in order to signify and highlight their “temporal” status and displacement.17 About 805,000 people were sent to Western Europe through the Turkish Employment Service (IIBK) between 1961 and 1975.18 IIBK was the main actor and institution in the administrative process of selecting and registering Turkish migrants in accordance with the criteria provided by the host countries. The bureaucratic criteria in this process were based on gendered stereotypes in which the guest worker was imagined as “a family man” who was capable of leaving his home, facing a new life, and was expected at a certain point to return to his country where his family was waiting for him.19 This gendered image of the guest worker also influenced studies on migration from Turkey to Western Europe, which treat the migrant woman as a “dependent” and “passive” category within the process of migration.20 From the mid1960s, and in the years following the economic recession of 1966–67 in West Germany, many Turkish women came as workers since that was the least complicated way to enter the country before the German government adopted a family reunion policy.21 Between the years 1961 and 1973, IIKB recruited 139,528 women from Turkey to West Germany comprising 29.3 percent of the total recruitment from Turkey, and the number of Turkish women who migrated to West Germany as guest workers gradually increased until 1973. 22 Therefore, due to the shortage of female labor in West Germany, it has to be noted that authorities tolerated women who used unofficial ways of entering the country through direct invitation by their husbands or traveling on a visa. 23 With the end of the migrant labor recruitment policies in 1973, family reunion became the only possible and legal option for Turkish migrant women to enter West Germany. 24 However, migrant women who came to the country through family reunification were not allowed to enter the labor market.25 As Rita Chin has shown, West Germans “remained largely untroubled” by the guest worker regime during the early phase of active recruitment policy. 26 The public’s mild reaction to migration largely resulted from the common perception that guest workers “would inevitably return home.”27 However, the economic and demographic changes that took place in the first quarter of the 1970s negatively changed West Germany’s reactions to the guest worker regime. The government halted foreign labor recruitment right after the oil crisis in 1973; yet, this measure did not suspend the increase in the number of migrants.28 Instead, male guest workers, who were assumed to return home, brought their spouses and children. In 1979, the government of West Germany decided to

106  Sercan Çınar recognize guest workers as long-term residents. 29 Another major wave of Turkish migration to West Germany took place in the years following the 1980 military coup d’état in Turkey, with the drastic increase in asylum requests which were processed owing to the growing oppression of oppositional movement there.30 The Ruhr in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) was one of the major destinations of the guest worker migration to West Germany since it has been a region with a large industrial sector; the region needed labor in multiple industries such as mining, the steel and iron industry, and the automotive, chemical, electronic, and mechanical industries. Thus, in the years 1961–73, NRW was hosting twenty-five percent of all Turkish migrants who arrived in West Germany.31 Meanwhile, the Turkish migrant community in NRW has become the largest of the Turkish communities settled in the German federal states.32

The Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism in the Ruhr in North Rhine-Westphalia In the second half of the 1960s, Turkish migrants started to join German trade unions such as German Confederation of Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB) and metalworkers’ union IG Metall. Later on, they set up Turkish migrant organizations corresponding to the needs of Turkish migrant workers and their growing interest in the rise of working class struggle in Turkey in the 1960s.33 The distinctive feature of these migrant organizations was their strong focus on the ongoing political tensions in Turkey from an oppositional, critical perspective. The Federation of Turkish Socialists in Europe (Avrupa Türk Toplumcular Federasyonu, ATTF) was the umbrella organization of Turkish progressive migrant organizations in Europe, founded on October 27, 1968 in Cologne with the participation of ten local Turkish migrant organizations across West Germany, which identified with socialist politics of the Workers’ Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi, TİP). In its founding declaration, ATTF described itself as the organization of Turkish migrants in Europe who were the victims of the US imperialism forcing Turks to leave their motherland due to the state of its underdevelopment resulting from the international division of labor and the imperialist control of the world.34 In that regard, ATTF articulated a vision that highlighted the relationship between imperialism, underdevelopment (Third World poverty) dependency, and the Turkish labor migration to West Germany. Such a vision was accompanied by a political agenda which combined migrant activism aiming to raise class consciousness among Turkish workers in West Germany, mobilizing support for the ongoing struggles in Turkey to end exploitation, and building an independent, democratic, and socialist state in the motherland.35 Yet, the ATTF vision was limited to formulate emancipatory action in relation to the idea of return,

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  107 and this connected migrant activism to the achievements in Turkey that would end their victim status in West Germany as guest workers. The Communist Party of Turkey’s (Türkiye Komünist Partisi, TKP) purposive intentions to influence Turkish progressive migrant activism in West Germany materialized in the late 1960s, especially during the second congress of ATTF in December 1968 in West Berlin.36 According to Metin Gür, who was a prominent TKP member in the 1970s in West Germany, ATTF’s political orientation came under increasing influence of TKP; yet, it is unclear to what extent ATTF acted under TKP control.37 Therefore, with the Communist Party members active involvement in Turkish progressive migrant activism in West Germany, the party’s agenda concerned recruitment into its structures. In the early 1970s in the Ruhr, many women started to organize within their migrant communities by joining Turkish migrant workers’ organizations that were mainly established at the initiative of early Turkish migrants who had been previously involved with progressive and leftwing political activism in Turkey, and some of them had ties to TKP. The Union of Turkish Workers’ in Herne/Wanne Eickel (Herne/WanneEickel İşçi Birliği) and the Union of Turkish Workers’ in Gelsenkirchen and Districts (Gelsenkirchen ve Çevresi Türk İşçi Derneği, GE-TID) were at the forefront of Turkish migrant activism in the Ruhr. Turkish migrant women who were previously active in Turkish progressive migrant circles in the late 1960s and early 1970s came up with the idea of establishing an organization in the Ruhr. Such an organization would specifically focus on Turkish migrant women’s problems in West Germany, and particularly on problems of Turkish women who were permitted to live in the Ruhr based on family reunification. In the words of Beyhan Çolak, who was among the founders of the GKB, there were two factors that formed the motivation of Turkish migrant women to establish a separate women’s organization:38 first, to respond to specific needs of Turkish women who were dispossessed due to their social and cultural background as most of them were uneducated and could not either speak German or read or write in Turkish, and were thus bound to household spaces.39 Therefore, the vast majority of women settled in the Ruhr under family reunification were expected to live up to traditional gender norms existing within Turkish migrant communities, and such patriarchal codes hindered their political participation in the masculine dominated migrant activist circles. Against this background, Turkish migrant women in the Ruhr were not able to bring their issues to the forefront of migrant politics, and the founders of GKB aimed to create a social and political space where women could become active in defining and solving problems which they faced.40 Second, Çolak highlights influence of left feminism and women’s movements that scaled up globally in the 1970s in the making of Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr. In December 1972, the United Nations General

108  Sercan Çınar Assembly designated 1975 as International Women’s Year (IWY) at the initiative of the WIDF.41 The most significant effect of IWY was on international women’s movements, which gained momentum on a global scale.42 The first United Nations World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City in 1975, and it was the biggest gathering until then in which participants, representatives of governments and NGOs, focused on women’s rights.43 They adopted the World Plan of Action and recommended that the UN designate 1976–85 as a Decade for Women, which it did.44 During the Decade, there were two more UN World Conferences on Women, in Copenhagen (1980) and in Nairobi (1985), at which women from “the First, Second, and Third Worlds” came together, and which opened up “an unexpected new front in the ongoing Cold War.”45 These conferences and debates on women’s issues within transnational bodies during the UN Decade for Women reflected persistent effects of Cold War politics and struggles between different power blocs that informed the formation of political agendas and transnational women’s movements.46 In that regard, the idea for establishing women’s organizations had already been suggested by the TKP in its publications, where the “woman question” had started to occupy a central place from 1973 with the proclamation of 1975 as IWY.47 According to Emel Akal, who has published one of the few works on the history of left feminism in Turkey, IWY also played a central role in the making of Turkish left feminism such as in the founding of the Progressive Women’s Association (İlerici Kadınlar Derneği, IKD).48 The IKD was founded on June 3, 1975 in Istanbul at the initiative of a group of women active in socialist politics, particularly in the TKP. The proclamation of 1975 as IWY “led to an increase in publications about women and an interest in the woman question”49 and provided a space for socialist women in Turkey to promote a women’s rights agenda informed by IWY and transnational women’s movements. Already in its founding declaration, the IKD identified itself as an ally of the transnational left-wing women’s movement and a follower of the agenda of pro-women’s rights, pro-peace, and antifascism promoted by WIDF.50 The IKD remained active until April 1979 when the military governor of Istanbul closed it under martial law which had been declared in December 1978. Interestingly, the IKD was the first organization which was shut down in this way, suggesting that the military authorities considered this specific women’s organization a primary “threat to public order.”51 However, the IKD and its members continued their activities until the military coup of September 12, 1980. Some members of the IKD were imprisoned by the military regime and others fled Turkey and became political refugees in Western European countries. Throughout its existence, the IKD engaged in left-wing women’s activism all around Turkey with its 15,000 members in thirty-three regional and thirty-five local branches, making it the largest women’s organization in the history of Turkey.52

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  109 All the developments which bound together the rise of Turkish progressive migrant activism in West Germany under the influence of TKP, IWY, the UN Decade for Women, the Cold War, and transnational women’s movements historically shaped the making of Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr. Eventually, GKB was founded on March 8, 1975 in Gelsenkirchen, and remained active until the early 1990s.53 One of the distinctive features of Turkish migrant women’s activism is that most of the members and participants of GKB would not have defined themselves as “feminists.” Their attitude toward “feminism” was informed by the 1970s and 1980s Cold War disputes in which Western feminist scholars and women’s rights activists imposed a definition of the term as “gender-only,” “with its focus on equality between women and men.”54 Based on these disputes, Turkish migrant women coined a political agenda that focused on migrant women’s rights and was conceptually and politically different from “gender-only feminism”: it was strongly attached to the left-wing politics and “other politics . . . challenging inequalities rather than those between women and men.”55 So, in order to go beyond the limited definition of “feminism” that was embedded in Cold War politics, I have broaden my working definition of that term, sharing similar ground with Valerie Sperling, Myra Marx Ferree, and Barbara Risman, whose article defines feminist action “as that in which the participants explicitly place value on challenging gender hierarchy and changing women’s social status, whether they adopt or reject the feminist label.”56 For that reason, my key conceptualization of Turkish migrant women’s activism is that of migrant left feminism. To build up this concept, I start with Ellen C. DuBois’s definition of “left feminism”: [A] perspective which fuses a recognition of the systematic oppression of women with an appreciation of other structures of power underlying . . . society (what we now most often call “the intersections of race, class and gender”). Therefore, by left feminism, I also mean an understanding that the attainment of genuine equality for women—all women—requires a radical challenge to . . . society, the mobilization of masses of people, and fundamental social change.57 Such an analytical intervention broadens the frame of the concept of feminism by allowing the inclusion of migrant, socialist, and working class women. Therefore, the term “left feminism” is useful for Turkish migrant women who got involved in political activism in which women’s rights were front and center, yet not fully separate from workers’ and migrant rights. Here, I want to note that I do not use this term as a synonym of socialist feminism. Socialist feminist is a theoretical-political position within feminist theory which critically engages with a Marxist framework in terms of shifting its focus to women’s unpaid domestic labor as the material basis for women’s subordination. While reassessing

110  Sercan Çınar the political economy of women’s oppression, socialist feminism proposes a materialist-feminist framework in order to go beyond the limitations of both classical Marxist theory and radical feminism.58 GKB cooperated and was closely linked to global left feminism on different levels. First, the TKP was one of the central forces which connected Turkish migrant left feminists in GKB and transnational left-feminist movement around the world in terms of networking their ideological orientation and their views on gender. Second, Turkish migrant left feminists in the Ruhr regarded themselves as counterparts of IKD, which was the mass left-feminist organization that existed in Turkey between 1975 and 1980. Third, Turkish migrant left feminists and GKB became involved in transnational processes of communication and political exchange with other left-feminist women’s organizations, initially by forming the Federation of Turkish Women in Europe (ATKF) in October 1975 in Frankfurt (and it was the umbrella organization of Turkish left-feminist women’s organizations in Europe), and then by following the political agenda offered by WIDF, which was a “global coalition of women of the anti-fascist, pro-Communist left,” and actively supporting WIDF campaigns and attending international meetings the WIDF had organized.59 GKB published leaflets and booklets both in Turkish and German.60 They opened literacy and language courses and vocational trainings for migrant women in the Ruhr. In addition, they were acting in tandem with feminist and left-wing groups in both their host country and Turkey. Their political agenda ranged from organizing campaigns for promoting migrant women’s rights to initiating solidarity campaigns with socialist groups and political prisoners in Turkey. Therefore, as a member of the Committee for Peace and Freedom in Turkey (Türkiye Barış ve Özgürlük Komitesi, ABÖK–TBÖK) GKB was at the forefront of Turkish diaspora politics which prioritized mobilizing popular support in the Ruhr to their affiliates in Turkey “fighting for democracy, freedom, and socialism.”61

Community Feminism and Reconsidering Generation as a Political Category Along with GKB’s involvement in migrant political activism that was framed by an agenda of international socialist politics, and an emphasis on the mobilization of people and fundamental social change, one of the defining features of Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr was its community focus. In that respect, my definition of migrant left feminism is also informed by Ula Y. Taylor’s concept of community feminism, developed in her study of black feminist activism in Harlem during the 1920s.62 This concept helps me to overcome the liberal individualist approach and to bring in the community focus of Turkish migrant left

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  111 feminism. Taylor’s definition of “community feminists” is important to consider in this light: [W]omen who focus their activism on assisting both the men and women in their lives—whether sisters or husbands, mothers or fathers, sons or daughters—along with initiating and participating in activities to uplift their communities. Despite this “helpmate” focus, community feminists are undeniably feminist, in that their activism reveals an acknowledgement of oppressive power relations, shatters masculinist claims of women as intellectually inferior, and seeks to empower women by expanding their roles and options.63 The concept of community feminism is significant in analyzing the cartographies in which Turkish women’s experiences of migration and activism influenced their understanding of themselves in terms of gender and feminist politics in relation to the formation of Turkish migrant communities. Besides, the concept of community feminism is crucial in locating the shift in Turkish migrant left feminism in the 1980s that can only be seen through employing generation as an analytical and political category in my study. As previously mentioned, one of the central motivations of Turkish migrant left feminists to organize themselves separately was to create a social and political space where Turkish migrant women could become active “in defining and solving the problems they faced.”64 Therefore, one of the first GKB initiatives was opening literacy courses for Turkish women who could not read or write, and launching a local literacy campaign in February 1976 with the assistance of Turkish teachers in the region.65 Semra Teber, another prominent name among the founders of GKB, highlights the urgency of such a campaign since it was striking to her that when she encountered Turkish women who could not read the letters they received from their families living in Turkey nor respond to them, they asked her to read these letters to them.66 Thus, opening literacy courses seemed the most immediate task in order to raise the quality of life for Turkish migrants in the Ruhr who faced serious difficulties every day, and this brings “the problem of integration” to the fore. The very motivation of GKB activists to uplift the Turkish migrant community in the Ruhr hints at a certain degree of diversity among Turkish migrant women based on their background. Women who initiated the establishment of GKB were likely to be well-educated and in the official German discourse they were expected to adapt better in comparison to those women who were claimed to be inferior in the migration process under family reunification. Despite the diversity of experiences of migration among Turkish women in the Ruhr, the mainstream literature on migration tends to identify both groups of women under the category of “first generation” based on their kinship descent

112  Sercan Çınar and age. This literature draws from the integrationist paradigm that accommodates “assimilationist assumptions” in the research on migration in which various categories such as race, ethnicity, and gender have been employed in order to classify and govern the subjectivities and experiences of migrants as national containers.67 In this vein, generation is formulated as one of key concepts in analyzing experiences of migration in relation to the process of adaptation that is presumed as a “straight-line, that is, unidirectional” process, especially in the studies in the United States informed by the “US adaptation ideal.”68 In the past two decades, transnationalism has emerged as a major research paradigm challenging the aforementioned integrationist approach by transcending the static binary between host and home country in the course of movement and mobility of migrants. Yet, integration remains one of key themes in the scholarship on migration along the “transnationalism and integration nexus” which derives from a political discourse skeptical of the rise of migrant transnationalism as an undermining force for integration in the host country.69 In this framework, the category of generation— principally first and second generations—is formulated once again with a particular focus on the changing degrees of transnationalism among different generations as one of the relevant factors for integration. Discussing the ways in which the category of generation is formulated and studied in the field of migration studies, one should be aware that approaches to this category are predominantly informed by the classical sociological accounts on “the problem of generations,” originally formulated by Karl Mannheim in his 1928 essay.70 In the field of studies on migration, generation has been analyzed as a sociological phenomenon, representing a social location without any self-conscious agency that involves historical participation, which is contrary to Mannheim’s culturalist view, but rather a location “ultimately based on the biological rhythm of birth and death.”71 In this vein, generation is employed as a concept that is mainly related to biological factors such as kinship descent and age, in which the notions of “first, second, and third generations” occupy a central place in the discussions on homeland and host-land understandings of different generations.72 Therefore, the notions of first and second generations are central to the debates on integration/assimilation whereas children born or raised in the host country are expected to adapt better than their parents. Yet, it simultaneously ends up in the homogenization of the experiences of migration within each generation of migrants, which results from the level of expectations of integration. This particular use of the category of generation in the analyses of migration experiences tends to overlook pre-migration experiences which are key in understanding the extent of homeland ties, migrants’ transnational engagement, and their conditions in the host society based on their statuses that modify their abilities “to engage in homeland and host-society political, economic, and social life.”73 In that

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  113 regard, generation operates as a category possessing “a characteristic type of historically relevant action,”74 such as adaptation to a host country, where the sociological significance of the abovementioned biological factors is discovered. Consequently, such a perspective is limited as it fails to comprehend the complexity of the experiences and expectations of migrants regarding their understandings of homeland and host-land that is central to the making of migrant politics. Transnational migrant politics raises fundamental questions about the prevailing notions of oppression and agency that are hegemonic within the Western imaginaries of migrant women. In that regard, migrant women and their assumed victim position come to operate as an overdetermined signifier of patriarchal relations within the migrant community. However, considering the “diverse modes of thinking, knowing, and behaving”75 among the members of migrant community, especially among migrant women, multiple categories and cartographies have to be addressed to allow us to capture the ways in which migrant women struggle inside a matrix of domination. In the context of Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr, GKB set up its community feminist agenda around the idea of integration, which seemed to them the most fundamental element in the making of a left-feminist political space that would uplift Turkish migrant women in the Ruhr. Therefore, the main core of GKB’s founding cadres was using their high profile to help other Turkish migrant women better integrate into new communities in the host country. Today, however, both groups of women, high profile feminist activists in GKB and Turkish migrant women with precarious status who were seeking for assistance during integration, are labeled under the homogenous category of first generation. Against the homogenizing effects of the category of first generation, we need a more nuanced perspective in defining a diversity among Turkish migrant women in analyzing intra-generational dynamics and integration that goes beyond the categories of age and ethnicity. Mannheim’s formulation of the problem of generations contributes to our historical understanding of generation by offering a categorical distinction between “generation” as “actuality” and “generation unit.”76 According to Mannheim, “we shall therefore speak of a generation of actuality only where a concrete bond is created between members of generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of de-stabilization.”77 In this formulation, “generation units” appear as horizontal differentials that correspond to multiplicity of historical experiences between members of the generation. In that regard, I suggest the concept of “political generation” that acknowledges such horizontal differentials in which multiple trajectories and political imaginations are mobilized within migrant politics by different generation units in various levels. My formulation of the concept of political generation stems

114  Sercan Çınar from an analytical concern that can be seen as an attempt to transcend the dichotomy between intellectual and social understandings of generations as proposed by Sofia Aboim and Pedro Vascolenes in their influential work on Mannheim’s classical approach.78 As a critical reappraisal of Mannheim’s theorization, Aboim and Vascolenes define generation as a discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense which goes beyond a hierarchical composition of subjectivities within a specific generation and acknowledges differences and “contradictory statements”79 in the generational processes. Yet, my approach differs from Aboim and Vascolenes’ preference for social generations over political generations in the construction of a generational perspective. First of all, I use political generations as a concept that is informed by Mannheim’s approach, but I do not fully accept his understanding of political generations that rests on intellectual formations of the self (and consciousness) as the pre- condition of the making of a generation. In my view, the concept of political generations does not necessarily imply an autonomous location which is excessively limited to ideological and intellectual formations but rather entangled with enlarged social and cultural settings that make the discourses on generations intelligible for individuals. Second, in terms of migration, it is not possible to separate generational locations from migrant regimes in which migrant subjectivities are politicized in relation to mobility, the regulation of migration, and discourses on migration. Thus, the concept of political generations is more applicable, particularly in the case of Turkish migrant left-feminist activism in the Ruhr, in terms of capturing the extent of transnational migrant politics which encompass social and cultural understanding of generations. In the 1970s, the left-feminist agenda of GKB articulated a specific vision of equality based on communist ideals; yet, community activism was still occupying a central place in their program. This community focus was problematized and criticized by the higher ranks of the TKP in the late 1970s. In November 1978, H. Erdal, a Politburo member of TKP, published an article, in which he called community activism “a right-wing deviation and an opportunist tactics.”80 In his view, the party members in West Germany were attracted to a specific form of activism that prioritized achieving limited improvements in the living conditions of Turkish migrant community rather than mobilizing migrant workers in the struggle for a systemic change in Turkey.81 This article, published in the TKP’s monthly, triggered a conflict between the party organizations in West Germany and Turkey, which was escalated in the years following the military coup in September 1980, when party members in Turkey had become political refugees in West Germany.82 Those party members who migrated to the Ruhr after the military coup had already developed a negative attitude toward the party members there since they were informed about the intensity of “opportunistic tactics” used by Turkish communists in West Germany.83 Such a negative

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  115 attitude, reinforced by the Politburo, was the main source of the making of a generation unit among Turkish progressive migrants, who built their identity in the opposition to the community activism of “the first generation” of Turkish left feminists in GKB. Based on this conflict, most Turkish communist women who became political refugees in the Ruhr avoided joining community activism initiated by GKB. In the years following 1981, TKP prioritized political campaigns that were launched against the military rule in Turkey, and it instructed progressive migrant organizations such as the Federation of Turkish Workers in West Germany (Federal Almanya İşçi Dernekleri Federasyonu, FIDEF), the umbrella organization of Turkish progressive migrant activism in West Germany as the successor of ATTF, to act on this basis, which resulted in the decline of community activism in the Ruhr. In 1983, the board of GKB decided to write a letter complaining about FIDEF in which they criticized the organization’s negative attitude toward community activism and neglect of women’s issues.84 They asked for an explanation of the reasons of this negligence since they did not hear from the board of FIDEF for a while.85 Although GKB insisted on sustaining their political agenda on community feminism, FIDEF was actively refusing this form of activism based on the priorities set by the Communist Party. Fatma Çelik, who was among the founders of GKB and a longtime left feminist in the Ruhr, made it clear in her account that FIDEF had a destructive impact on Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr. “They ruined us!,”86 she said. Therefore, in the historical narratives on GKB articulated by its founders, reflections on Turkish migrant left feminism are often accompanied by positive sentiments and a sort of nostalgia for the achievements made through their activism such as improving the quality of Turkish migrant women’s lives and increasing their participation in the social and political spheres through the community education in the Ruhr.87 Besides, this very subjective experience of nostalgia in the narratives of the first generation of Turkish migrant left feminists is strongly connected to their frustration with the remarks depreciating their activism were widespread within Turkish progressive circles in the Ruhr.

Conclusion Sharing a similar ground with the postcolonial feminist critique of Western feminist scholarship on Third World women regarding the reductive analysis of agency based on the liberal conception of individual emancipation, so-called feminist revisionist scholarship focuses on rethinking the political organizing and agency of socialist women, arguing that our knowledge of these women and their organizations has been negatively influenced by Cold War paradigms. In challenging these paradigms and the homogenization of women who took part in left-wing women’s

116  Sercan Çınar movements, I appeal to the perspective offered by feminist-revisionist scholarship, incorporating a different approach on left-wing women’s movements and reconsidering the relationship between communism and feminism: [T]he existence of communist women, Party members or not, who dedicated themselves (in some cases their whole lives) to the fight for social justice, including women’s liberation or emancipation (both terms were used) for which they believed communism was the best route (even when they also knew of, or had gained ample experience with, male communists’ resistance to women’s liberation, or when their relationship with the Communist Party changed over time).88 In this vein, feminist-revisionist scholarship’s efforts to expand the definition of “feminism” by going beyond the liberal political goal of individual emancipation contribute a great deal to the definition of migrant left feminism that articulates an agency by acting to promote a specific vision of equality based on communist ideals. In this respect, the active opposition of the first generation of Turkish left feminists in the Ruhr against the party’s attempts for deprioritizing and discrediting community feminism indicates the existence of divergent cartographies of migration and political experiences corresponding to two different visions of emancipation between two different political generations of Turkish migrant women. Both groups of Turkish migrant women, the ones who arrived in the Ruhr before 1980 as a part of labor migration, and the ones who arrived as political refugees after the military coup in 1980, are labeled under the same category of “first generation.” However, on the one hand, the first group articulated a communist vision on equality in which their migration experience was central; thus, community feminism and integration seemed substantial in achieving equality within the host state. On the other hand, the second group tended to deprioritize community activism as they were more likely to follow the party politics promoting a vision merely focused on the political processes in Turkey in 1980. Therefore, the second group, who were political refugees in the Ruhr, tended to view their activism as a continuation of the political struggle waged in Turkey in the 1970s; thus, the idea of return was central in the making of their migration experiences. In that regard, the diversity of political backgrounds and migration experiences among Turkish communist women created two different political generations in Turkish migrant left feminism in the Ruhr, corresponding to varied modes of articulating their visions of equality on the same communist ideals within the same political party. Therefore, the acknowledgment of different cartographies and locations of the formation of migrant feminisms needs a more nuanced analysis of transnational migrant politics in order to reconsider the dynamic relationships between

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  117 “homeland”-directed practices and women’s political participation within the host country and migrant community.

Notes 1 “Ruhr Bölgesi (Gelsenkirchen) Kadınlar Birliği Tüzüğü, Eski Tüzük,” n.d., Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV); “Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği Tüzüğü,” n.d., Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV). During its early years, the union was known as Türkischer Frauenverein in Gelsenkirchen (Ruhrgebiet) [The Women’s Union in the Ruhr-Gelsenkirchen]. But, in the 1970s, the Union removed “the Ruhr” from its name and changed the name itself to Türkischer Fraunverein in Gelsenkirchen e.V. [The Women’s Union in Gelsenkirchen] after updating its legal status as eingetragener Verein (e.V.), which stands for registered voluntary association under German federal law. 2 Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547–48. 3 Ibid., 556. 4 Ibid., 547. Ece Öztan and Liza Mügge’s works on Hollanda Türkiyeli Kadınlar Birliği [The Union of Turkish Women in the Netherlands-HTKB], GKB’s counterpart in the Netherlands, are among the few studies that analyze Turkish migrant women’s activism in Western Europe. See Ece Öztan, “Türkiye Kökenli Göçmen Kadınların Hollanda’daki Örgütlenme Deneyimleri ve Feminist Siyaset,” Alternatif Politika 5, no. 3 (2013): 214–41; Liza Mügge, “Women in Transnational Migrant Activism: Supporting Social Justice Claims of Homeland Political Organizations,” Studies in Social Justice 7, no. 1 (2013): 65–81. 5 Francisca de Haan, “Writing Inter/Transnational History: The Case of Women’s Movements and Feminisms,” in Internationale Geschichte in Theorie und Praxis. Traditionen und Perspektiven/International History in Theory and Practice: Traditions and Perspectives, eds. Barbara HaiderWilson, Wolfgang Mueller, and William D. Godsey (Vienna: Historical Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2016), 551. 6 For attempts to move away from misleading geographical and ideological binarisms mentioned above, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2003): 506. 7 For examples of this omission, see Laurie A. Brand, Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Milton J. Esman, Diasporas in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany (London: Routledge, 2003); Floris Vermeulen, The Immigrant Organising Process: Turkish Organisations in Amsterdam and Berlin and Surinamese Organisations in Amsterdam, 1960–2000 (IMISCoe Dissertations: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 8 Mügge, “Women in Transnational Migrant Activism”; Carla De Tona and Ronit Lentin, “Networking Sisterhood, from the Informal to the Global: AkiDwA, the African and Migrant Women’s Network, Ireland,” Global Networks 11, no. 2 (2011): 242–61.

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Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  119 23 Monika Mattes,“Gastarbeiterinnen” in der Bundesrepublik. Anwerbepolitik, Migration und Geschlecht in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2005), 67–68. 24 Kofman, Gender and International Migration in Europe, 51. 25 Ibid. 26 Rita Chin, “Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference,” Public Culture 22, no. 3 (2010): 559. 27 Ibid., 559. 28 Ibid., 560. 29 Ibid., 561. 30 Abadan-Unat, “Turkish Migration to Europe,” 280. 31 Ulusoy, “From Guest Worker Migration to Transmigration,” 81. 32 Ibid. 33 The period between 1960 and 1980 was the golden age of socialist-leftist militancy in Turkey with a considerable oppression coming from both the state and militants of the far-right. For a brief analysis of the period, see Ahmet Samim (Murat Belge), “The Tragedy of the Turkish Left,” New Left Review 126 (1981): 60–85. 34 “Avrupa Türk Toplumcular Federasyonu Kuruldu!,” İşçi Postası (December 1968). 35 Ibid. The Communist Party of Turkey was established in September 1920 in Baku, 36 and it had been outlawed by the Turkish state since its establishment until 1988 when it merged into Türkiye Birleşik Komünist Partisi [The United Communist Party of Turkey, TBKP]. The political agenda of the party was representing pro-Soviet political and a Moscow-oriented, orthodox version of Marxism-Leninism. For more details, see Vehbi Ersan, 1970’lerde Türkiye solu (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2013). 37 Metin Gür, Diyardan Diyara TKP’nin Avrupa Yılları (İstanbul: Günizi Yayıncılık, 2002). 38 For a short biography of Beyhan Çolak, see Susanne Abeck, “Beyhan Colak,” frauen/ruhr/geschichte (blog), February 2013, www.frauenruhrgeschichte.de/frg_biografie/beyhan-colak/, accessed December 10, 2019. 39 Mehmet Ayas, Interview with Semra, Beyhan and Fulya (Gelsenkirchen, n.d.). Ibid. 40 41 De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” 548; Kristen Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (2012): 51. 42 Martha Alter Chen, “Engendering World Conferences: The International Women’s Movement and the United Nations,” Third World Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1995): 478. 43 Kristen Ghodsee, “Revisiting the United Nations Decade for Women: Brief Reflections on Feminism, Capitalism and Cold War Politics in the Early Years of the International Women’s Movement,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33, no. 1 (2010): 5. 44 Chen, “Engendering World Conferences,” 479. 45 Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations,” 49. 46 Chiara Bonfiglioli, “The First UN World Conference on Women (1975) as a Cold War Encounter: Recovering Anti-Imperialist, Non-Aligned and Socialist Genealogies,” Filozofija i Društvo 27, no. 3 (2016): 524. 47 Katarina Mendes, “Gerçek Hak Eşitliğinin Gerçek Yolu-1975 Dünya Kadınlar Yılı,” Yeni Çağ (November 1974); “İlerici Kadınlar Derneği,” Atılım (January 1975).

120  Sercan Çınar 48 Emel Akal, Women and Socialism in Turkey: The Case of Progressive Women’s Organisation (Ilerici Kadınlar Derneği) (Ankara: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 1996), 91. 49 Ibid., 91. 50 “İlerici Kadınlar Derneği Kuruldu,” Kadınların Sesi (August 1975). 51 Saadet Arikan and İlerici Kadınlar Derneği, Ve hep birlikte koştuk (İstanbul: Açı Yayıncılık, 1996), 63. 52 Ibid., 11. 53 “Kadın—GKB Dergisi Sayı 1,” March 1985, 2, Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV). 54 Francisca de Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-Ae, and Claudia Jones: Rethinking Transnational Feminism and International Politics,” Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (2013): 175. 55 Susan Zimmermann, “Equality of Women’s Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging During the Interwar Period,” The International History Review 41, no. 1 (2017): 13–14. 56 Valerie Sperling, Myra Marx Ferree, and Barbara Risman, “Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women’s Activism,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1158, emphasis in original. 57 Ellen C. DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender & History 3, no. 1 (1991): 84. Francisca de Haan first applied this concept to the WIDF in her 2009 article. See Francisca de Haan, “Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt. Die frühen Jahre der internationalen demokratischen Frauenföderation (IDFF/WIDF) (1945–1950),” Feministische Studien 27, no. 2 (2009): 241–57. 58 See Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women towards a Unitary Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 1–33. 59 “Avrupa Türkiyeli Kadınlar Federasyonu Kuruldu,” İşçinin Sesi, October 9, 1975; De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” 548; Chen, “Engendering World Conferences,” 478. 60 Their publications include the first translations of the life stories of prominent communist women such as Jenny Marx and Clara Zetkin into Turkish, and reports on the condition of women in Turkey that were prepared in order to inform German speaking audience. See L. Dayddov and C. Serebriakova, Clara Zetkin’in Kısa Yaşam Öyküsü (Gelsenkirchen: Ruhr Bölgesi- Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği, 1977); Über die Frauen in der Türkei (Gelsenkirchen: Ruhrkomitee der Frauen aus der Türkei, 1978); Semra Teber, ed., Jenny Marx’ın Kısa Yaşam Öyküsü (Gelsenkirchen: Ruhr Bölgesi-Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği, 1984); 8 Mart Dünya Kadınlar Günü (Gelsenkirchen: Ruhr Bölgesi-Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği, 1984). 61 “ABÖK Temsilciler Kurulu Raporu,” March 1976, Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV). 62 Ula Y. Taylor, “Archival Thinking and the Wives of Marcus Garvey,” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 125–34. 63 Ibid., 128. 64 “Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliğ i Tüzüğ ü,” n.d., Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV).

Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism  121 65 “Ruhr Bölgesi (Gelsenkirchen) Kadınlar Birliği Aralık-Ocak Ayları Çalışma Raporu,” 1976, Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV). 66 Ayas, Interview with Semra, Beyhan and Fulya. 67 Kevin Dunn, “Embodied Transnationalism: Bodies in Transnational Spaces,” Population, Space and Place 16, no. 1 (2010): 3. 68 Mette Louise Berg and Susan Eckstein, “Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 18, no. 1 (2009): 3. 69 Liza Mügge, “Transnationalism as a Research Paradigm and Its Relevance for Integration,” in Integration Processes and Policies in Europe: Contexts, Levels and Actors, eds. Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas and Rinus Penninx (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 110. 70 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: Collected Works, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 276–320. 71 Ibid., 290. 72 See: Irvin L. Child, Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Institute of Human Relations, 1943); Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–96; Abadan-Unat, “Turkish Migration to Europe”; Vivian Louie, “Second-Generation Pessimism and Optimism: How Chinese and Dominicans Understand Education and Mobility through Ethnic and Transnational Orientations,” International Migration Review 40, no. 3 (2006): 537–72. 73 Berg and Eckstein, “Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations,” 7. 74 Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” 291. 75 Amalia Sa’ar, “Postcolonial Feminism, the Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain,” Gender and Society 19, no. 5 (2005): 682. 76 Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” 303. Ibid. 77 78 Sofia Aboim and Pedro Vasconcelos, “From Political to Social Generations: A Critical Reappraisal of Mannheim’s Classical Approach,” European Journal of Social Theory 17, no. 2 (2014): 165–83. 79 Ibid., 177. 80 H. Erdal, “Türkiye’de Kitle Hareketlerinin Bazı Sorunları,” Ürün Sosyalist Dergi (November 1978). 81 Ibid. 82 Nabi Yağcı, Elele Özgürlüğe. Zarlar Atıldı Geri Dönüş Yok (İstanbul: Belge Yayınları, 2018), 349. 83 Feridun Gürgöz, Saat Geri Dönmüyor (İstanbul: TÜSTAV, 2007), 79. 84 “GKB Tarafından FİDEF’e Gönderilmiş Mektup,” October 10, 1983, Gelsenkirchen Kadınlar Birliği (GKB) Arşiv Fonu, Türkiye Sosyal Tarih Araştırma Vakfı (TÜSTAV). 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Ayas, Interview with Semra, Beyhan and Fulya; Fatma Çelik, GKB Üzerine, March 22, 2018. 88 Francisca de Haan, ed., “Forum: Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 104.

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Part III

Women’s Biographical Experiences and Communism

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7

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution The Role of Gender and Generation in Postwar Polish Communist Women’s Political Biographies Natalia Jarska

Generation, Gender, and Communist Elites in Postwar Poland In the years 1945–65 women played a significant role in the ruling party of Poland, even as only a few of them were considered important figures. They were assigned senior positions both in the structures of the Central Committee (CC) and state institutions especially before 1956. Most of them belonged to the interwar generation of communist activists, only a few were socialists, and a few more belonged to the generation that turned communist during World War II or after. Although women were a minority in the interwar communist movement, they were visible, including in leadership positions. The interwar communist movement in Poland saw greater gender equality than the postwar one, as women were assigned similar tasks as their male comrades.1 In the postwar period, even while women continued to be central, they mostly operated in specific political spheres. Some of them were clearly dominated by women, namely those involving party control and cadres, schooling, and the history of the party, while others, for example, those dealing with economic matters, remained nearly exclusively run by men. How can we explain these divisions? Was this distribution of tasks purely a coincidence? Or was it related to a particular meaning assigned to women (or women communists)? This chapter explores women’s positions among the postwar Communist Party elites in Poland through the categories of gender and generation. I argue that women in postwar communist parties, that is Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR; 1942–48) and Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR; 1948–90), were of key importance as preservers of the communist revolutionary past and ideological orthodoxy, and as guardians of the party’s identity and purity. This role corresponded with how they were perceived within the party as women and long-serving (and merited)

126  Natalia Jarska party members. This perception was enforced by the fact that these women—mostly born between the late-1890s and 1910s—were gradually becoming older. There were young men achieving higher positions in the party but not women. Being a woman and a long-serving party member affected their political careers and defined their place among the postwar elites. As analytical categories, both generation and gender may be understood in many different ways, but what is significant for both of them is their constructivist character.2 In my analysis, I look at how these categories are understood in the studies on the communist movement, narrowed here to the Polish example. According to Matthias Neumann, “[Karl] Mannheim’s concept of generation put clear emphasis on the collective experience of historical events in a specific biographical phase and the way a collective arranges its experience.”3 Sigrid Weigel proposes understanding generation “as a symbolic form, that is, as a cultural pattern for constructing history.”4 From this perspective, “[t]he study of ‘generation’ . . . also includes the implicit significance of gender relations for the construction of history and cultural memory.”5 In the case of Polish communists, the formative experiences were, among others, those of underground activity and imprisonment in the interwar period, when the Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) was illegal starting from early 1919. These experiences differentiated these women from those who joined the movement later. As Padraic Kenney argues, for Polish communists, prison experience was an important element of becoming a communist: “the months and years many had spent together scribbling in notebooks and delivering practice speeches in prison cells surely shaped the future of Polish communism.”6 Interwar Polish communism lived through different stages and events, and experienced a changing political context (from democracy to dictatorship in Poland). All these factors could interplay at the moment someone joined the movement, creating a complex generational picture. However, in the postwar period these divisions were blurred. Pre-war communists constituted a minority that, nevertheless, dominated among the political elites, at least until 1956. Generation is a category that is shaped by external or internal discourses, and therefore functions as a definition or self-definition.7 I argue that, in the case of Polish communists, it is useful to combine both perspectives, which, in fact, are difficult to separate. Historians who study generational changes in the postwar Communist Party (and ruling) elites usually speak about the KPP generation (pre-war) and PPR generation (postwar). They argue that the biggest generational change happened in 1968, when internal purges in the party as well as in the state apparatus ultimately eliminated pre-war communists and especially those of Jewish origin, and that the political crisis of 1968 was generated (among other reasons) by the pressure from younger generations to take up

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  127 power in the party and in the state.8 These analyses combine a biological definition of generation with the importance of generational struggle within the communist movement, and thus the importance of generational self-identification. In this chapter, I draw on historical literature on generations in the Communist Party elite but with a focus on the role of generation (and generational experience) within the movement: the “we” which built internal hierarchies, even if not always explicitly. I  also show that applying the category of gender to historical analysis may modify the usual argument about generational change. When we look at the political careers of female ex-KPP members, we see that the careers of most of them ended earlier than 1968 (mostly in 1956–57, or even before the end of Stalinism). Although I agree that generation is an important category to explain the history of communism (combined with other categories such as class, ethnicity, or gender), we should remember that generational divisions are subjective and blurred.9 If we understand generation as a construct, based on a subjective evaluation of experiences, we have to first recognize the diversity of those experiences and the possibility of multiple generational identities. Second, for the generation of communist women discussed here, date of birth—some of them were born in the 1890s, or even 1880s, while others around 1917—was not so important. However, it conditioned possible experiences. What was far more important was the moment they joined the communist movement and their experiences that followed. Being part of a clandestine community and experiencing repression shaped both the identities of the members of the generation and internal hierarchies within the Communist Party. The heroic struggle legitimized the movement and its members as trustworthy. We should stress the importance of the past for communists in the postwar period. There is no doubt that they cared about the past: both the past of the movement and its members. Looking into the future and shaping it, they relied on experienced activists and built up their own legend.10 The pre-war generation (called the KPP generation), which took up power in Poland in 1944 and 1945, re-interpreted the history in the light of Marxist theory and established the history and memory of communist struggle, that is their own. After 1948, the CC’s Department of Party History employed as many as eighty-six people who carried out archival and publishing work.11 Among others, they elaborated on individual histories of the members of the party: their social background and political history, that is, whether they belonged to the socialist or communist movement and when they joined it. Long party membership, together with interpersonal connections between old activists, was meaningful for advancement in the party hierarchy. The group of ex-KPP members was rather small in percentage and thus easy to examine.12 Party membership statistics always divided members into categories according to the period when they joined the movement. Members wrote

128  Natalia Jarska detailed autobiographies in which they presented themselves as heroes and heroines of past revolutionary struggles. The past could be shaped, but it also had great relevance for contemporaneous internal policies. The research on women in communist parties in postwar Central and Eastern Europe tends to argue that in most cases, with a few exceptions,13 women did not play an important political role. The party elites were mainly male, the leadership—exclusively male, and women’s status among political elites tended to decline.14 The statistical picture of women’s participation in the ruling elite shows that only a small number of them were assigned important positions. The problem is that the standard definition of the ruling political elite that, in the Polish case, takes into account members of the Politburo, and/or the Secretariat, members of the CC, and sometimes heads of the CC departments, leaves many women outside the scope, which considerably limits our understanding of the role of women.15 If we take into consideration a broader definition of a ruling elite, namely members of all central party’s collective bodies (Politburo, Secretariat, CC, Central Party Control Commission (Centralna Komisja Kontroli Partyjnej, CKKP), and Central Revision Commission, as well as institutions (such as party schools), and political workers of the CC, it turns out that, in the period 1945–56, women’s presence in leading political positions was significant. Women comprised up to twenty percent of the higher ranks of the CC,16 although only one woman belonged to the Secretariat. Similarly, they were present in all the main collective bodies, except the Politburo. Among the so-called political workers of the CC women comprised twenty-six percent in 1953.17 Although these estimates take into account mostly formal criteria, we know from many sources that women who were active and shaped postwar policies were not only the proverbial exceptions which “proved the rule.” Nevertheless, as I demonstrate in this chapter, women’s activity in the party concentrated in realms such as schooling, history of the party, and party control, which confirms that the political work was gendered. To explain this state of affairs, I analyze the ways postwar communist parties in Poland understood and used the past. My research shows how the peculiar role of the past connected with gender and therefore contributed to the gender division of political work. This chapter answers the following research questions: what kind of tasks were women assigned in their postwar political activity? Did women’s political activity correspond with their training, experience, or education? How can we explain women’s position through the lens of gender? How does a generational approach help us understand it? My findings are based on the analysis of forty biographical trajectories of women who were postwar members of the party elite.18 My research uses various kinds of historical sources, preserved in the Archive of Modern Records, in the collection of the CC: party documentation—mainly personal files, selected protocols of meetings, as well as published and

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  129 unpublished memoirs. The latter were mostly collected in the 1960s when the KPP history was re-written again. Female communists left a considerable body of autobiographical literature, and this fact is significant in their political trajectories, which has been analyzed by Agnieszka Mrozik as both an act of constructing pre-war history and a critical stand on postwar state socialism.19

Women’s Place If, from the political history perspective, communist women are hidden, where can we find them? First of all, they usually belonged to what we can call the second circle of the elite. Women held the position of deputy head rather than head of a department in the CC more frequently than men. Only one woman in the period in question belonged to the Secretariat, that is, one of the two upper executive bodies where key decisions were made. 20 It was Helena Kozłowska (1910–1967) who, as the head of the Department of Propaganda in 1945–46, had access to the Secretariat meetings. 21 If we would like to measure the importance of different categories of political workers, we can also look at their salaries. 22 In the bureaucracy of the CC, women at the highest levels usually belonged to the second group of salaries. In line with the general gender division of labor both in pre- and postwar Poland, women were more frequently responsible for administrative tasks within the expanding party bureaucracy. The only women who regularly participated in the meetings of the Politburo were the recorders; however, they had no right to take part in the discussions. They were highly trusted and merited activists who were assigned the role of chief secretary: they organized the work of the Secretariat and Politburo. One of them was Felicja Kalicka (1904–1999), who—after returning from the USSR when the war ended—met one of the key male figures in the party elites, Roman Zambrowski, and agreed to be his secretary. 23 In her memoirs, she recalled that her motivation was to be “close to serious matters.” Her work consisted in reading and segregating Zambrowski’s mail and attending the Secretariat’s meetings. In 1948, she was substituted by Maria Rutkiewicz (1917–2007), one of the communists transported to the occupied Poland from the USSR to establish a new Communist Party, then captured by the Nazis. 24 Working for the Secretariat provided access to first-hand information and Secretaries—top leaders of the party. In the structures of the CC, women administrated the Letters and Inspections Bureau, Archives, and Central Files which held party members’ records.25 Given the importance of these sections for internal personnel policies and information (letters from the citizens were elaborated so as to inform the ruling elite about current public opinion), women’s positions involved exercising power. Nevertheless, sections that managed state policies, such as economic or social policies, were usually male-dominated.26

130  Natalia Jarska Women’s role is also visible in the realm of culture and science. Communist writers Wanda Markowska (1912–1999) and Jadwiga Siekierska (1903–1984) headed sections that organized culture and—during a short period—science. 27 These were, in general, dominated by women who comprised more than fifty percent of “political workers.”28 The Department of Education, headed by Pelagia Lewińska (1907–2004), should be also added to the list of traditionally “women’s fields” of political work, in contrast to departments that dealt with economy, agriculture, industry, or the state’s administration. 29 Zofia Zemankowa (1914–1987) worked as the deputy director of the Department of Science, in which women comprised about thirty percent.30 Last but not least, women comprised hundred percent of members of the Women’s Department, which existed in the years 1946–53. Nevertheless, women’s participation and activity in the party headquarters were not reduced to realms that can be labeled as an extension of traditionally women’s tasks. The gender division of political labor in the postwar Communist Party was more complicated. Analyzing the political careers of the female members of the communist elite, we can observe four further realms marked by the presence and activity of women. In terms of internal party logic at that time, they can be easily linked one to another, shaping a meaningful map of women’s political work. Those areas were: party control, party history, party schooling, and party cadres. All those areas dealt with the party’s internal matters. The CKKP was one of the bodies elected by the general Party Congress held every four or five years (next to the CC and Central Revision Commission). It focused on persecuting political enemies and—in times of increasing “political vigilance”—its position was comparable to that of the Politburo and Secretariat of the CC, since the control apparatus played a key role in “building a totalitarian state” in 1949–55.31 The Commission’s main task was to assure the purity of the “party ranks” and to “educate” party members through proceedings and punishments: “to take care of party ranks’ ideological purity, and the revolutionary rule of law.”32 As Maria Pieczyńska (1886–1967), the Commission member, stated at one of the meetings: “the task is also to educate people.”33 An important element of inquiries was the interwar period, as the party searched for real and imagined “traitors” of the movement—agents of the interwar Polish police, “Trotskyists,” or informers.34 The Commission employed female activists with long and important careers in the movement. In the early 1950s among thirty-four members, there were eleven women in the CKKP.35 Ludwika Jankowska (1901–1978) became a CKKP member in 1945 and in 1948–56 its vice-chairperson.36 Among the women in postwar party elites, she had one of the most outstanding political records in the interwar communist movement. Known as Luba Kowieńska, Jankowska was active in the Women’s Section and headed the Secretariat of the Communist Party of

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  131 West Byelorussia (Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Białorusi, KPZB), a branch of KPP that operated in Byelorussian lands in eastern Poland. In 1926, as a KPP member, she was arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment. The Commission employed other significant female figures who were very active. One of them was Maria Kamińska (1897–1983), first active in the Polish Socialist Party-Left (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna-Lewica, PPS-Lewica), then in the communist movement since the 1920s, including membership in the Secretariat, sentenced to eight years of imprisonment by the Polish authorities.37 Julia Brystiger (1902–1975), head of two departments in the Ministry of Public Security (1945–54), was very influential during the Stalinist period, and also worked in the Control Commission.38 Ideological and political awareness and bonds with the revolutionary past manifested themselves in the party control structures. Another field in which women played an important role was examining and writing history of the party. Regina Kobryńska (1908–1978) headed the Department of Party History until 1947, when she emigrated to the USSR.39 Three women served as deputy directors, Helena Kamińska (1905–1998) in 1949–57, among them.40 Women, especially former KPP activists, dominated the department, comprising more than fifty percent of its workers. It was the second most feminized department, after the Women’s Department. Moreover, during the Stalinist period, key figures in the circles of communist historians were female—Żanna Kormanowa (1900–1988) and Celina Bobińska (1913–1997), among others; presently they are remembered as responsible for imposing a Stalinist version of historical materialism on Polish historiography.41 Interestingly, some other important female figures joined the history field after abandoning other positions in the party apparatus. It was, for example, Felicja Kalicka, and—very similarly—Maria Kowalewska-Krychowa, who was the secretary of Władysław Gomułka in Lublin (1944), and who worked first in schooling, then in the area of the history of the party. Women’s participation in documenting and writing history of the leftist movements is also interesting as an example of a non-traditional gender and professional role, as at that time, like in the interwar period, historiography was dominated by men. Writing the party’s history was not simply a task of documenting history of the workers’ movement. The past was problematic due to the dissolution of KPP by Stalin in 1938. Yet, it remained an important point of reference, a “glue” linking the party elites. The past was better controlled while (re)written by the actors directly involved, as were the women communists who survived purges and war. Moreover, during the postwar years, when a search for the alleged internal enemies in the party developed, documents investigated by the members of the Department could serve as a basis for accusations toward communists, when they were suspected of being the Polish interwar police’s secret agents.

132  Natalia Jarska In such cases members of the Department supplied control and security structures with relevant evidence.42 A large area of women’s activity took place in the party schools. Those schools, already established in 1945, were meant to train new activists at every level. In light of the general cadre’s shortages, it was of crucial importance. Women were present in the party schooling at all levels of organization, including the central one. Two important activists—Celina Budzyńska (1907–1993) and Romana Granas (1906–1987)—headed the two most crucial party schools, namely Central Party School and Party School, that educated political workers at the highest levels, since 1948 and 1950, respectively.43 Other female activists who were later assigned other tasks—that is, Siekierska and Kobryńska (deputy director of the Central Party School first in Łódź and later in Warsaw)—greatly contributed to the establishment and first programs of these schools. The Department of Party Schooling was ruled by one of the most important female figures of the elite—Helena Kozłowska.44 Apart from the leadership, women comprised about fifty percent of the lecturers in central schools at the beginning of the 1950s. Here their political experience and knowledge could serve in the task of shaping the party elites. Schools were the place where new party activists should acquire knowledge on ideology as well as become familiar with how the party operated. Women transferred their knowledge to the “new” communists, and therefore linked them with the “communist traditions” represented by old KPP members. Furthermore, school directors wrote characteristics (charakterystyki) of students that affected their future careers. Granas herself recommended students for tasks she thought were adequate for them.45 While looking at women’s roles among the party elites, the question arises: to what extent did they shape the personal careers of activists? As it has already been pointed out, they influenced the careers of activists graduating from the party schools; they examined cases of misconduct of party members (in the CKKP); they took an active role in persecutions of the alleged internal enemies. They could, and did, denounce other comrades. In addition, women shaped the sections directly responsible for assigning jobs in the CC, even though the decisions were taken by the Secretariat. The Department of Personnel and later the Department of Cadres were the structures responsible for the cadres and yet another area connected to ideological purity and the control of members. In the immediate postwar period, Zofia Gomułka (1902– 1986), formally only an instructor in the former department, was indeed responsible for the distribution of positions. In both departments, at least four meritorious female communists found their place, among them Magdalena Treblińska (1902–1994), deputy director of the Department of Cadres in years 1948–52.46 Her task was to “take care of the loyalty and morality of the members.”47

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  133 These four areas engaged half of the activists from the group of forty I have chosen for my research. Many of them actually served the party in more than one area. It was quite usual for members of the party elite to change jobs within the party and state apparatus; women did change them, too. However, most of them commuted between the areas mentioned earlier: from schooling to history of the party, for example. It is not to say that men were absent from the abovementioned areas, or that there were no female activists in other, male-dominated spheres, but gender division of political work existed, confirmed by women’s greater visibility in certain fields. All the spheres I revealed as feminized can be labeled as guardians of the party’s identity and integrity. Party schools trained new activists and political workers, out of which eightyfive to ninety percent were male, explained Marxism and communist policies to usually unaware party members. School directors wrote opinions about students in which they evaluated their ideological “maturity.” Structures of control severely examined cases of betrayal and carefully watched purity in the party ranks. The history of the party was an important element of building an identity of the movement. All these areas shared, therefore, a few common characteristics: they were related to internal affairs, ideological purity, and identity that was rooted in the past: the 1917 revolution and the heroic struggle of the communist movement in the interwar period. Women were appointed and, in some cases, chose the role of representatives of the ideological and political formation, which was shaped by difficult conditions of pre-war revolutionary struggles.

Gendering Political Activism Why were women so visible in the abovementioned areas? We could think that postwar divisions were simply a continuation of the pre-war ones. However, it is clear that women’s interwar positions in the communist movement did not determine their postwar activity. Only in a few cases we may observe continuity in terms of held positions and areas of political work. Some women were assigned certain jobs in the party apparatus because of their professional background and interests. Jadwiga Siekierska and other communist intellectuals can serve as an example here. Siekierska’s qualifications helped her to hold the position as head of the Philosophy Department of the Institute for Education of Research Staff (Instytut Kształcenia Kadr Naukowych, IKKN); in 1951, she was about to be dismissed because of being a “bad organizer,” but finally remained in her position because of her competences acquired, among others, in the Philosophy Department of the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow.48 Were communist women different from communist men and if so, in what ways? In general, the group of female activists shared many

134  Natalia Jarska sociological characteristics with male elites in the party.49 About fifty percent had some higher education in line with the overall statistics. 50 About half of the members of the party elites were ex-middle or higherrank functionaries of KPP.51 They were of very similar age; party elites mostly included activists born between late nineteenth century and 1910. They constituted seventy percent. However, male elites in the postwar period quickly absorbed younger generations, born after 1920. As early as in 1954 some of those new prominent male communists were nearly at the top—the so-called “young secretaries.” The female elite remained the same, with maybe one or two exceptions. This means that women quickly started to be perceived as older, also in the opinion of new male members of the elite. For example, one of them, Mieczysław Rakowski (1926–2008), wrote in his diary about Romana Granas: “ideological, but already tired.”52 Among the party elite, especially on the central level analyzed here, most men and women belonged to the pre-war communist movement, namely to the KPP. They shared important generational experiences: they were comrades from interwar conspiracy, prison communes or political training in the Soviet Union. However, among activists that held upper positions in the CC, women had a considerably longer history of membership in the communist movement than their male colleagues. Generally, former KPP members constituted seventy percent of members of the CC after the first PZPR congress in December 1948, and sixty percent on the highest positions—heads and deputies of the departments—in 1953. Among women, about eighty-four percent belonged to the KPP in the interwar period; a few exceptions were four socialists and three youngest activists who became communists shortly before, or during, World War II. Therefore, female members of the party elite were slightly older and had greater experience in the communist movement than male members. These characteristics could contribute to their image as mature and more attached to the interwar communist movement. Nevertheless, they do not seem to be enough to explain women’s specific role as preservers of the past. An analysis of how female activists were portrayed leads to a conclusion about their “usefulness” for specific kinds of political work in the postwar period. According to both memoirs and other sources, women were perceived, and perceived themselves, as resistant, passionate, radical, uncompromising, devoted to the party, strict, and principled. There is a considerable amount of evidence of these qualities being associated with women in particular. In their memoirs, published in the late-1950s, 1960s, and again in the 1980s, communist women referred nearly exclusively to the prewar years, accentuating periods of imprisonment and conspiracy. These memoirs, as well as those unpublished in the archives of the CC, along with other documents from the interwar period, give an insight into

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  135 how they shaped their identities as women and communists. A certain nostalgia for interwar struggles, and a tendency to present the past in heroic terms, combines with a focus on old comrades, mainly female, which builds a female genealogy of communism, “revolutionary ethos,” as well as recognition of women’s activity in the movement.53 Many female characters mentioned in the memoirs lost their lives either as victims of Stalinist purges or under the Nazi occupation. Activists such as Małgorzata Fornalska (1902–1944), one of the founders of the Polish Worker’s Party in 1942, murdered by the Nazis in July 1944, became a true symbol of communist struggle during the war. However, women also invoked comrades whose names were not broadly known: members of prison communes or colleagues who formed organizations. In the memoirs, female protagonists often shared the same characteristics. They were described as passionate and uncompromising. For example, Edwarda Orłowska (1906–1977), head of the Women’s Department in 1946–53, wrote about Regina Kobryńska that she worked with “passion and endless zeal.”54 Kobryńska was portrayed as a model female communist also by Siekierska who remembered that during her work in the Central Party School in Łódź Kobryńska “instilled into listeners a deep attachment to the party, to communism,” and that she was “of a socialist revolutionary spirit” and “a personification of devotion to the party.”55 Celina Budzyńska recalled that Rega Budzyńska (1897–1937), a lecturer in the Communist University of Western National Minorities in Moscow, “had a logical mind, sharp opinions, and was uncompromising.”56 Jadwiga Ludwińska (1907–1998), a KPP member before the war, employed in the Personnel Department of the CC of the PZPR in 1949, recalled her interwar struggles and female comrades met in prison and, among the idealizing and affirmative veterans’ stories, she included the remark that “their excessively emotional attitude toward the communist cause, toward the party had signs of religious feelings. In discussions, they presented dogmatism and detachment from reality.”57 She reflected on the causes of such phenomenon: women resisted “horrible torture” and did not give up, “so much did they sacrifice for the cause that it turned to be their love, passion.”58 Maria Kamińska—in the eyes of her comrades—was principled, 59 just as Maria Koszutska (1876–1939), a key female figure of the interwar communism in Poland, member of the CC, and victim of the Stalinist purges.60  Maria Pieczyńska, one of the oldest female activists and a member of the CKKP, was described by Ludwińska as a “professional revolutionary” who possessed a “deep idealism and revolutionary endurance, political mind, and experience, as well as Leninist methods of analysis and ability of collective management.”61 Memoirs are not the only source that build this gendered image of women communists. In the opinions about female activists, which included also recommendations for a specific position, the qualities related to long party membership and devotion were often stressed.

136  Natalia Jarska For example, Wanda Markowska was judged as “an old party member” who “has both political and professional preparation.”62 One of the male members of the party elite wrote about Teodora Feder (1900– 1987), a KPP member in the interwar period and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, deputy head of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the CC, head of the Main Party Training Center, deputy head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CC: “her life trajectory is a trajectory of a communist entirely devoted to our cause.”63 Pieczyńska was described as a person who “brings party values and vigilance.”64 Siekierska was valued because “she is able to express uncompromising criticism,” although “she lacks moderation and is impetuous.”65 Stefania Romaniuk (1908–1996), an interwar activist who organized a party school in Wrocław in 1949 and later worked as an instructor in the Organizational Department of the CC, knew how to “defend her point in a very principled way.”66 Many characteristics underlined that women’s merits were rooted in long membership in the movement. Józef Światło (1915–1994), a high public security official who defected to the West in December 1953, portrayed women, “old” communists, as powerful, adding about one of them: “she was an old, staunch, and idealistic communist.”67 An aura of exceptional faithfulness and radicalism contributed to the creation of negative and misogynistic images of “fanatic” and irrational communist women,68 but the radical and uncompromising way of thinking and acting was perceived as an important feature of a communist. These characteristics, which were rooted in the past in the sense that the interwar period shaped them, also made women suitable for an important mission of being guardians of the party and its purity. According to memoirs and archival sources of the interwar period, women’s identities as political and communist activists were influenced, to a great extent, by (generational) experiences of operating illegally and, above all, being political prisoners. Being devoted, resistant and able to transgress traditional femininity in many ways helped them to both survive and pursue political activity in highly unfavorable conditions.69 Being “tough” and resistant was part of a longer revolutionary tradition, as earlier female radicals had lived similar experiences, which we learn from Barbara Evans Clements, who analyzed the notion of tverdost [toughness] of Bolshevik women in revolutionary Russia.70 The party saw its female activists as well-trained, trustful, and “good revolutionaries.” Interestingly, some women from the examined group were dismissed from their positions in the party apparatus, for example, in regional committees, under the accusation of “sectarianism.” “Sectarianism” was a negative term that referred to radical leftist and exclusive opinions and attitudes that—some communists believed—could endanger more inclusive policies.71 One of the accused was Regina Kobryńska, in January 1946 removed from the position as deputy head of the Central Party

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  137 School in Łódź.72 “Sectarianism,” in fact, meant being orthodox and not ready to compromise. Last but not least, a notion of “aunts of the revolution” (ciotki rewolucji)—a negative term coined to name women involved in politics, especially in communism—should be invoked here. It refers to old women—in fact, older than the revolution itself. “They were ladies of middle age, but not yet old, although crones who could remember Lenin could be found among them; not particularly handsome on the whole,” recalled Tadeusz Konwicki (1926–2015), a Polish writer who in the 1950s was a young devoted communist.73 He wrote about “lady comrades” characterized by “doctrinaire spirit, clarion voice, sweeping gestures, and magnificent aptitude in the use of quotations.”74 His portrayal pointed to at least three elements: communist orthodoxy, being unfeminine, and being old, and emphasized that the communist women’s radicalism entwined with their asceticism. But it was not only Konwicki who much later used the term “aunts of the revolution” in reference to communist women: committed to the party and the cause, “true believers,” ridiculous in their “fanaticism.” This negative stereotype functioned already in the 1950s and influenced the perception of these women throughout the state socialist period, as the figure of the “unfeminine” “aunt of the revolution” became popular among younger generations of communist men.75

Conclusion Women’s activity often went beyond assigned tasks. Female communists took part in internal discussions and struggles throughout the whole period of their activity. Apart from doing their work, they engaged in many additional tasks and actions.76 They belonged to different circles and groups. For example, some of them (Budzyńska, Kozłowska, Granas) supported the de-Stalinization process in 1956, while others (Jankowska, Brystiger) came under attack and definitively ended their careers.77 They advanced or lost their political position for many reasons, including ethnicity (waves of antisemitism in the 1950s and 1960s), political opinions (for example, accusations of “sectarianism” in the 1940s, or attitudes toward de-Stalinization), personal conflicts and connections. Women’s activity cannot be reduced to the spheres that have been analyzed in this chapter. Explaining individual trajectories of each member of this group needs further research. As I have already mentioned, the decline of women’s power took place mostly around 1956–57 and was related to de-Stalinization. Some of women officials and politicians were completely excluded as responsible for Stalinism and became scapegoats of political purges within the elite. For example, Julia Brystiger barely avoided trial. Many remained in the party, but were assigned to less important or lower positions,

138  Natalia Jarska being still influential informally. Others, mainly supporters of liberalization (Kozłowska, Feder), still held important positions, by 1963–64, when conflict with Gomułka, First Secretary of the CC of the PZPR in the years 1956–70, affected more liberal circles of “old” communists. Finally, growing antisemitic rhetoric within the party, with its peak in 1968, ended more careers. Interestingly, a few women whose careers declined after 1956 engaged in historical research and published on the history of KPP in the 1960s and 1970s. This analysis has shown that most of the women whom we may consider members of the Communist Party elite in the postwar period worked for the party in specific areas. Some were placed in positions traditionally assigned to women, such as secretaries, even though their power went usually beyond purely bureaucratic tasks. Most of them circulated between the realms of schooling, party control, history of the party, and cadres. I have argued that to explain this phenomenon, we may use the analytical categories of gender and generation. They intersect in a particular way, shaping certain perceptions of women communists. The category of generation is important on two levels. First, it helps to notice the subjective and relative “getting old” of women communists in the postwar period. While male elites absorbed younger activists, female elites remained greatly dominated by the pre-war members of the communist movement. The process of “getting old” can also be seen as gendered: only women’s age was noticed and given significance. Second, it helps us to recognize how women were associated with the past as symbols of heroic struggle that belonged to the past. This association played well with the perception of female activists as uncompromising, zealous, and strict. Also, it explains why in the postwar period women served best to function as guardians of the past and of the party’s identity and purity. However, it is also important to emphasize that this image of radical and committed female activists, which we can find both in the memoirs and in other documents, stereotypical but not necessarily intentionally negative, was used to create an evocative notion of an “aunt of the revolution,” which ridiculed women’s communist idealism or their political involvement.

Notes



“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  139





140  Natalia Jarska



















“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  141 26 Jarska, “Kobiety w elitach centralnych i lokalnych PPR i PZPR w latach 1944–1956.” 27 Wanda Markowska was an author and translator; member of the Communist Party of Poland in the 1930s; head of the Scientific Section in the Central Party School in Łódź, 1945–47; head of the Publishing Section in the Central Council of Trade Unions (Centralna Rada Związków Zawodowych, CRZZ), 1949–50; head of the Literary Section in the Party School, 1951– 54; head of the Theatre Section in the Department of Culture of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1954; head of the Department of Culture (later: Culture and Science) of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1955–56. Jadwiga Siekierska was a member of the Communist Party of Poland; in 1921 trained in Moscow, then worked in the Polish sector of the Communist University of Western National Minorities; in 1925–29 studied in the Institute of Red Professors; in 1929–31 worked in Minsk; from 1932 taught in the International Leninist School, and worked as a journalist; in 1937, arrested and sentenced to eight years of labor camp. After the war, she was deputy director of the Central Party School in Łódź, 1945–48; deputy head of the Department of Culture of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1948–51; deputy head and head of the Philosophy Department of the Institute for Education of Research Staff in Warsaw, 1951–56. 28 Jarska, “Kobiety w elitach centralnych i lokalnych PPR i PZPR w latach 1944–1956.” 29 Pelagia Lewińska joined the Polish Workers’ Party under German occupation; in 1946 worked in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party; in 1946, appointed secretary of the Polish Scouting Association; from 1950 in the Department of Education of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party; its deputy head, 1953–56. 30 Zofia Zemankowa was a member of the Communist Party of Poland before World War II; joined the Polish Workers’ Party in 1942; first secretary of the County Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party in Nowy Sącz, 1945– 46; in 1947 director of regional party school in Krakow, then head of the Propaganda Department in Krakow; secretary of propaganda in Krakow, 1949–50; deputy head and head of the Department of Science of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1950–56. 31 Piotr Osęka, “Sumienie partii. Rola i znaczenie Centralnej Komisji Kontroli Partyjnej,” in PZPR jako machina w ładzy, 88. 32 AAN, KC PZPR, 237/VI-2, Protocol of the meeting in April 1956. 33 AAN, KC PZPR, 237/ VI-21, Protocol of the meeting of the CKKP. Maria Pieczyńska-Heryng belonged to the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS), took part in the 1905 revolution, arrested, activist of the Communist Party; 1932—arrested; during World War II in France, member of the Resistance; after World War II member of the Central Party Control Commission, worked in the Department of Agriculture of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, retired in 1957. 34 Osęka, “Sumienie partii.” 35 Władysława Ciempiel, Józef Jakubowski, and Jan Szczeblewski, eds., PZPR. Zjazdy, posiedzenia plenarne KC, władze naczelne i sekretarze komitetów wojewódzkich (Warszawa: Centralne Archiwum KC PZPR, 1983). 36 Ludwika Jankowska was a member of communist parties from 1920 (Communist Workers’ Party of Poland/Communist Party of Poland); head of the Women’s Section and of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of West Byelorussia; studied in the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow; in 1937 sentenced to eight years of labor camp in the USSR; member of the Central

142  Natalia Jarska

37

38

39

40

41 42 43

Party Control Commission from 1945, vice-president of the Commission, 1948–56; in 1959 elected a member of the Commission again. Imprisonment probably allowed her to survive the Stalinist purges that severely affected the KPP elites in 1937–38 when forty-six members and twenty-four deputy members of the Central Committee of the KPP were murdered. Maria Kamińska came from a rich bourgeois Jewish family; as a student she was active in the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party, then in the Communist Party (1920–38), worked in the Central Committee on high positions, member of the Secretariat; in 1928–30 trained in Moscow; in the interwar period imprisoned several times; spent war in the USSR, political officer in the Polish army; from 1944 in the Polish Workers’ Party; first secretary in Katowice and Poznań, 1945–47, then head of the Training Department in the Ministry of Public Security; member of the Central Party Control Commission, 1948–59. Patrycja Bukalska, Krwawa Luna (Warszawa: Wielka Litera, 2017); Agnieszka Mrozik, “Beasts, Demons, and Cold Bitches: Memories of Communist Women in Contemporary Poland,” Baltic Worlds, no. 4 (2017): 54–7. After October 1956, when de-Stalinization begun in Poland, Brystiger was considered one of a group responsible for the Stalinist terror, she lost her position but avoided trial. Although there is no evidence of her particular cruelty toward people she interrogated, she is still demonized in the anticommunist narratives as the dark female character: deviant and brutal. Regina Kobryńska (neé Kapłan) during World War I emigrated to Russia with her family; in 1931 sent to the Communist Party of West Byelorussia school in Minsk; secretary of the Communist Party of West Byelorussia in Vilnius, 1931; in 1933 arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in the so-called Kobryń trial (that is, an ad hoc trial of communist activists who had participated in a peasants’ uprising in 1932); in 1939 left prison, joined Red Army, later Polish Army; deputy director of the Central Party School in Łódź, 1944–46; head of the Department of Party History of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party, 1946–47; in late 1947 emigrated to the USSR. Kochański, “Obsada personalna kierownictw wydziałów KC PZPR 1948–1990.” Helena Kamińska was a member of the Communist Party of Poland before World War II, in 1925–27 imprisoned; in the 1930s trained in Moscow, worked in the Polish Section of the Comintern; party functionary in Silesia, 1937; during the war in the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR; head of the Party Schooling and Propaganda Departments in Gdańsk, 1945–47; deputy head of the Department of Party History of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1949–57, later inspector in the same department; retired in 1968. Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski, Nauki historyczne w Polsce 1944–1970. Zagadnienia polityczne i organizacyjne (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2007). Osęka, “Sumienie partii.” Romana Granas was a member of the Communist Union of Polish Youth (Komunistyczny Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, KZMP) since 1921 and of the Communist Party of Poland since 1923; funk (functionary, party official), 1928–38; first worked in a district committee in Łódź, in the Women’s Section; in 1928 worked in the mid-level district committee; in the Women’s Section of the Central Committee; left for political training in Moscow in 1932 (International Leninist School); later a middle ranking party official; imprisoned twice; war spent in the USSR; editor of Czerwony Sztandar [Red Banner] in Lviv; in postwar period: Central Party School in Łódź—deputy

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  143

44 45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54

director, 1945; second secretary of the Łódź Committee, 1944–48; instructor in the Organizational Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1948–50; Party School director, 1950–57; substitute member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1949–64. Celina Budzyńska was in the Communist Union of Polish Youth since 1924, then in the Communist Party of Poland; from 1927 in the USSR where she attended the Communist University of Western National Minorities in Moscow; in 1937 sentenced to eight years of labor lamp (as a “family member of a traitor to the homeland”); from 1945 in the Central Party School, first in Łódź and later in Warsaw; Party School’s director, 1948–57; her career in the party apparatus ended in 1967; later she edited a biographical dictionary of the activists of the Polish workers’ movement. Kochański, “Obsada personalna kierownictw wydziałów KC PZPR 1948–1990.” AAN, Archiwum Szkół Partyjnych [Archive of Party Schools]. Kochański, “Obsada personalna kierownictw wydziałów KC PZPR 1948– 1990.” Magdalena Treblińska was a member of the Communist Youth Union (Związek Młodzieży Komunistycznej, ZMK) and the Communist Party of Poland between 1924 and 1938; first secretary of the Warsaw Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party, 1945; deputy head of the Department of Cadres of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1948–52; head of the Cadres Inspection, 1953–54. Zbigniew Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło. Za kulisami bezpieki i partii 1940–1955 (Wydawnictwo LTW, 2012), 93. AAN, Teczki osobowe [personal files], 10415, secret opinion about Jadwiga Siekierska, 1951. Statistical data about women come from my analysis of biographical information available in their personal files as well as from biographical notes published in Słownik biograficzny działaczy polskiego ruchu robotniczego and Informator o strukturze i obsadzie personalnej centralnego aparatu PZPR 1948–1990. Szumiło, “I sekretarze Komitetów Wojewódzkich PPR (1944–1948)— portret zbiorowy.” Ibid. Mieczysław Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1958–1962 (Warszawa: Iskry, 1998). Mrozik, “Prządki porewolucyjnej rzeczywistości”; Agnieszka Mrozik, “Communism as a Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women,” History of Communism in Europe 8 (2017): 261–84. See also Anna Artwińska, “A Communist Woman in the Gulag: Gender, Ideology, and Limit-Experience in Ginzburg and Budzyńska,” Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective, eds. Anja Tippner and Anna Artwińska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 231–51. Edwarda Orłowska, “Zaczynaliśmy w Białymstoku,” in Takie były początki, eds. Władysław Góra, Helena Kamińska, and Józef Paszta (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1965), 362–76. Edwarda Orłowska (born as Estera Mirer) was a member of the Communist Party of Poland and the Communist Party of West Byelorussia in 1926–38; in 1934 sentenced to five years in prison; in 1944 in the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR; first secretary of the Provincial Committee in Białystok, 1944–46; deputy head of the Self-Government Department of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party, 1946; head of the Women’s Department of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party/Polish United Workers’ Party,

144  Natalia Jarska

55

56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

1946–53; substitute member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1948–54; member of the Central Revision Commission, 1954–64. AAN, Teczki personalne działaczy [personal files of the activists], 10415, Jadwiga Siekierska, memoir on the Central Party School. Siekierska’s description of Regina Kobryńska was censored (or just shortened) in the published version of this memoir. Jadwiga Siekierska, “Niezapomniane lata, niezapomniana szkoła,” in Takie były początki, 318–55. Celina Budzyńska, Strzępy rodzinnej sagi (Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1997). Jadwiga Ludwińska, Życie nielegalne (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1988), 125. Jadwiga Ludwińska (born as Szyfra Goldszlak) was a blue-collar worker, functionary of the Communist Party of Poland, three times imprisoned for communist activity in the interwar period; in 1942–45 in the communist partisan movement; in 1945–49 in the Provincial Committee in Katowice where she headed the Personnel Department; secretary and member of the executive; from 1949 worked in the Personnel (Cadres) Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Ibid. Jadwiga Ludwińska, “Na VI Zjeździe,” in Komuniści. Wspomnienia o Komunistycznej Partii Polski, ed. Leonard Borkowicz (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1969), 340–53. Janina Kasprzakowa, Maria Koszutska (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1988); Jerzy Myśliński, “Kobiety w polskich ugrupowaniach lewicowych 1918–1939,” in Równe prawa i nierówne szanse. Kobiety w Polsce międzywojennej, eds. Anna Żarnowska and Andrzej Szwarc (Warszawa: DiG, 2000), 61–76. Ludwińska, Życie nielegalne. AAN, CK PZPR, XX/10522, application for approval of a candidate for a post, September 3, 1954. AAN, personal files of activists of the workers’ movement, statement by Tadeusz Daniszewski. AAN, KC PZPR, Biuro Spraw Kadrowych, 237/XXIII–428, opinion about Maria Heryngowa (Pieczyńska). AAN, Centralna Kartoteka PZPR [PZPR Central File], 1378, secret opinion of comrade Jadwiga Siekierska (by Adam Schaff). AAN, CK PZPR, 4982, opinion about Stefania Romaniuk, April 27, 1960. Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło. Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Wanda, co wolała Rusa.’ Wytwarzanie (biografii) komunistki—wytwarzanie (tożsamości) narodu,” in PRL—życie po życiu, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013), 47–89. Natalia Jarska, “Women, Communism, and Repression in Interwar Poland (1918–1939),” in Anti-Communist Persecutions, eds. Christian Gerlach and Clemens Six (forthcoming). Clements, Bolshevik Women. Szumiło, “I sekretarze Komitetów Wojewódzkich PPR (1944–1948)— portret zbiorowy.” Aleksander Kochański, ed., Protokoły posiedzeń Sekretariatu KC PPR 1945–1946 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo ISP PAN and Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna w Pułtusku, 2001). Tadeusz Konwicki, New World Avenue and Vicinity, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 108–9.

“Old” Women and “Old” Revolution  145







8

Biographical Experience and Knowledge Production Women Sociologists and Gender Issues in Communist Poland1 Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz

Introduction In the late 1950s and early 1960s, women-related topics became increasingly popular in Polish academic sociology. Women’s leisure, their family chores, and barriers to professional and educational advancement were the focus of the published research. The term “double burden” entered the vocabulary of opinion journalism, and journalists often quoted sociological analyses in their articles. Simultaneously, there was a noticeable rise in the percentage of women sociologists. Obviously, it was not only women who tackled women-related issues. Some studies were initiated by men as well, but we believe that there is a correlation between the expansion of this research area of Polish sociology and the growth of women’s academic careers. In this chapter, we focus on a group of female sociologists whose careers began in the second half of the 1950s at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), 2 including Magdalena Sokołowska (1922–1989), Barbara Tryfan (1928–2012), Barbara Łobodzińska (1930–2018), and Maria Jarosz (1931–2016).3 We selected these four influential figures from a larger group of sociologists due to their interest in women’s issues as well as the importance of their work for modern historiography and gender history.4 For some of them, the studying of women-related issues was the focal point, while for others these issues were marginal. The question about the relationship between female researchers’ individual experiences and their initiatives and efforts to develop sociological knowledge on women’s issues is at the very center of our analysis. In a broader context, it is a question about the paths of emancipation in the academy. The female scholars whom we examine in this chapter completed their studies after World War II and benefited from the communist project of women’s emancipation, while developing their academic careers. Regardless of their subsequent shifts, state policies toward women’s

Biographical Experience  147 empowerment resulted in significant educational advancement of Polish women.5 The female sociologists of this generation followed certain patterns in their postwar career. Their scholarly biographies included similar turning points, and similar mechanisms shaped the course of their professional life. Their careers as scholars were determined, on the one hand, by formal criteria such as publications, foreign trips, administrative functions, and, on the other hand, by their position in the academic milieu and in scientific networks, including international ones.6 Taking into consideration the complexity of the category of generation, we reflect on its applicability in the study on a selected group of Polish female scholars.7 Born at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s in intelligentsia families, they belonged to the first post-World War II cohort of women sociologists interested in gender issues.8 However, they never regarded themselves as members of a particular generation: they never created a group that shared memory of common experiences, not even as women. Nevertheless, in our analysis, we use a general understanding of generation as a community of historical, political, and social experiences to broadly frame our interpretations. We focus on intellectual experiences and influences to explain the emergence of women’s issues in Polish sociology, instead of analyzing individual biographies of women. Apart from Maria Jarosz, who left a memoir intended for publication,9 we build our narrative about women sociologists examined in this chapter upon their scattered legacies. The degree of preservation of their work in the institutional archives varies,10 which inevitably complicates comparing the details of the biographical experiences. Therefore, in our work, we draw from the “culturological biographical” analysis inspired by Antonina Kłoskowska’s scheme of “three cultural systems”; Kłoskowska emphasizes the role of non-institutionalized contacts such as the family, then institutionalized contacts (e.g. at a university, academic association), and finally, impersonal circulation of symbols such as books and art pieces.11 “Culturological biographical” analysis extracts external factors conditioning the trajectories of an individual’s life, and as such it can be used to indicate common or similar factors, also those conditioned by generational experiences.12 Accordingly, reconstructing individual biographies, we search for common features, analogies, similar trajectories that shaped the academic careers of our protagonists. We are primarily interested in higher education, which they received after World War II, when newly established universities like the University of Łódź and the Gdańsk Medical Academy created a challenging intellectual environment. With the involvement of prominent professors from the pre-war universities (e.g. former employees of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius were hired at the Gdańsk Medical Academy), they gave young people, including women, an opportunity for a quick advancement in the academy, which was part of the socialist state’s policy to create new academic cadres.13

148  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz As we attempt to reconstruct the beginnings of academic careers of female sociologists, we trace the titles of their theses and names of their research supervisors. We also track their academic records: scholarships abroad, cooperation with foreign researchers, and their domestic scholarly networks. Although in some cases the issues studied were similar, the scholars we focus on did not form a tight scientific environment and their potential contacts cannot be characterized as a continuous cooperation. However, since their interest in new topics tackled by sociology at the time was shared, we consider the validity of applying Ludwik Fleck’s concept of the thought collective in our analysis.14 Defined as a community of researchers who interact collectively toward knowledge production, namely use a shared framework of cultural customs and knowledge acquisition as well as shared language to formulate research questions, the thought collective may be considered as related to the category of generation. Regardless of whether or not personal contacts between our protagonists did exist, we argue that their generational experiences have influenced their academic careers in such a way that we can speak of a type of a thought collective being formed.

Biographical Experience and Intellectual Choices Female sociologists selected due to their importance for the development of gender studies in Poland did not belong to a single academic community. In some cases, they never met. Mainly because of their choices of different subdisciplines of sociology, their career paths led them to different supervisors and research institutions. The most prominent of the four, Magdalena Sokołowska, initiated the development of the Polish sociology of medicine and public health15; Barbara Tryfan developed Polish studies on rural sociology and introduced a new analysis on the social experience of old age16; Barbara Łobodzińska represented a well-established research trend on family studies17; Maria Jarosz became an unquestionable authority in the field of research concerning pathologies of social life, although she herself would probably also mention her contribution to the studies on industrialization.18 It would be a stretch to say that they were connected by one system of values, one vision of sociology as a discipline, or one view on the development of Polish society. Nevertheless, we can indicate some experiences that could have indirectly influenced their intellectual choices, including the choice of women-related topics and the use of theoretical approaches to reflect on them. As mentioned earlier, nearly all female scholars discussed in this chapter belonged to the generation born in the late 1920s and early 1930s who survived World War II as children. Only Magdalena Sokołowska, born in 1922, experienced both the war and the postwar political change as an adult. Sokołowska graduated from high school before the war and

Biographical Experience  149 began her studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. The war radically changed her educational path, directing her toward medicine. It was determined by the opportunities for legal education in the Naziruled General Government. Sokołowska graduated from the Polish Red Cross School of Nursing in Warsaw, which was sanctioned by the occupational authorities, obtaining a nursing diploma in 1942. At the same time, she was a student at the authorized two-year Private Vocational School for Assistant Sanitary Personnel, which was a front for the secret Department of Medicine. As a qualified nurse, she went to Vienna with her husband, Stefan Sokołowski, where both were hired as care assistants at a psychiatric department. Immediately after the war, from 1945 to 1946, she participated in a one-year course at the Department of Medicine, and in 1947 she returned to Poland. The experiences of other scholars were radically different. The war left its greatest mark on Maria Jarosz, who was born in Łódź to an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in 1931. She was a child of the Holocaust who survived the Łódź and Warsaw ghettos. Her memoirs, published in 2009, give readers insight into the traumatic experiences that made the fourteen-year-old girl mature and independent by 1945. We know very little about Barbara Łobodzińska’s experience of the war. In her resume held in the archives of the University of Warsaw, she casually remarked that she was born in May 1930 and began studying at the Łódź high school in 1949.19 However, we do know that she was born in Warsaw, and it is likely that she only left the city after the 1944 Uprising and arrived in Łódź as a refugee. Barbara Tryfan did not reflect on her wartime experiences. Three of these scholars began studying after 1945; only Sokołowska, as mentioned earlier, received an education during the occupation. Some of them began studying at newly established universities. New free public universities opened a wider “horizon of possibilities” for the less privileged, including women, facilitating their social advancement. Sokołowska (graduate of the Gdańsk Medical Academy) and Jarosz (student of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Łódź) were beneficiaries of the postwar change in the academic education. The same applies to Tryfan, who graduated from the University of Warsaw in the second half of the 1940s, and Łobodzińska, a student in 1949/50–56, who perhaps passed Jarosz in the halls of the University of Łódź. 20 As analyzed by sociologist Agata Zysiak, this university played a crucial role in the process of formation of new academic cadres in postwar Poland. 21 Its project— egalitarian in the spirit—was conceptualized, discussed, and put into action by prominent sociologists themselves, like Stanisław Ossowski, 22 Józef Chałasiński, 23 and Nina Assorodobraj- Kula, 24 all active before 1939 and whose research focused on the processes of social change.

150  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz Postwar political fluctuations impacted the course of academic careers of our female sociologists in various ways. As a consequence of her work as an industrial physician at the women’s textile plant in Łódź in the Stalinist era, Magdalena Sokołowska became interested in the issues of women’s work, their leisure, and the division of gender roles in the family. In her 1976 article “The Woman Image in the Awareness of Contemporary Polish Society,” she recalled: After 1945 it appeared to some people (including myself, who during the Six Year Plan [1950–55] was one of the founders of the industrial health service in Poland) that because our women traditionally occupied a prominent position in the family, they would automatically play leading roles in the new occupational-professional and political structures. 25 The concept of gender equality as part of a modern socialist family established an important context for her research conducted in the 1960s. In the next decade, the health care policy of Edward Gierek’s government26 prompted her to get involved in the work of the Experience and Future Seminar (Konwersatorium Doświadczenie i Przyszłość, DiP)—an informal debate club active in the years 1978–82, which brought together independent intelligentsia and reformist party members. 27 Sokołowska was very active in the health committee, organized by DiP in the fall of 1980, which included the most influential and talented physicians of that period. The critical report on the condition of the Polish health care system, prepared by the committee and officially published in the press, tackled the communist government’s promise to implement public health care for the entire society.28 The document criticized the lack of funding for health care, but did not negate the very idea of its socialization; this gesture placed the committee’s report in the “gray zone” between open opposition and a recognition of the socialist state’s policies. Like several other members of the committee, Sokołowska joined the voices criticizing Edward Gierek’s government; however, she remained a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party. In the 1980s, she declared that she wanted to join “Solidarity,” and her interests oscillated around the issues of the organization of health care. As she wrote in her 1982 article “Health as an Issue in the Workers’ Campaign,” she walked the line from being committed to the implementation of the health and social policies of a socialist state to criticizing its shortcomings. 29 The most radical and, compared to Sokołowska, inverse impact of the political situation in Poland on the career and scientific interests can be observed in the case of Maria Jarosz. Starting research on women’s issues—the topic that was long marginalized in the mainstream sociological knowledge—was strictly related to her personal experience of exclusion and social marginalization. Her studies and the beginning of her

Biographical Experience  151 academic career took place in the early 1950s. After defending her MA thesis in 1955, she became an assistant at the Department of Historical Materialism of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. As she wrote years later, her affinity for Marxist ideas was primarily due to her wartime experience: I, too, found myself quite easily attracted to some communist ideas. I was alive. No one was out to get me; I no longer had to run away from anyone. Fear, hunger, and humiliation were far behind me. I accepted a system that made our life normal, and I believed in the socialist utopia, although with time I noticed more and more flaws and internal inconsistencies.30 Post-Stalinist renewal brought the shutdown of the Department of Historical Materialism in September 1957, which cost Jarosz her job at the university. The opinion of a reliable, talented, and original researcher enabled her to find a place in the newly established Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the PAS, with which she had previously cooperated. According to professor Julian Hochfeld (1911–1966), one of the most influential Polish Marxist sociologists, a socialist, and a scholar of socialist politics and theory, Jarosz’s removal from the university was justified by the “reorganization of the departments” and the fact that she would have been “unable to find support for her scientific interests here.”31 At the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Jarosz mainly focused on workers’ self-management, later also in Yugoslavia, where she frequently traveled. It is highly probable that workers and workplaces would have remained the center of her attention, were it not the events of 1968.32 Her first interest in women’s issues should be strictly linked with the antisemitic shift in the party’s policies after 1968; at that point, her previous research on workers’ self-management lost meaning. She was advised to begin “another job,” unsuccessfully appealed the decision, and consequently stopped working at the PAS. During the period of 1969–73, she faced forced unemployment and only occasionally worked at the Institute of Work, Cooperative Research Institute, or the Center of Praxeology of the PAS. Contrary to her expectations, employment at the Central Statistical Office (Główny Urząd Statystyczny, GUS) in 1973 finally brought her stability, but also a shift in her career, which began to oscillate around the topic of social pathologies: “This initially unwanted GUS episode in my professional life turned out to be extremely important. It opened the way to my further career as a researcher,” she recalled years later.33 It was between 1973 and 1989 that she published some of her most important studies on the condition of single mothers and divorced women.34 Barbara Tryfan began her professional career as a rural teacher. She graduated from the University of Warsaw, where she studied Roman

152  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz languages (1945–49) and obtained a doctoral scholarship from the French Institute to study French youth literature.35 As in the case of Jarosz, the shift in her career substantially impacted her research interests; she returned to the academy years later, this time at the PAS, to write a doctoral dissertation on women in rural industrialized areas.36 Here we can find similarities with the experiences of Magdalena Sokołowska. In both cases it was not simply an “intellectual infatuation,” but social activism—of a physician (Sokołowska) and a journalist (Tryfan)—that determined their research dedicated to women’s issues. In the 1960s, Tryfan became a journalist specializing in the broadly defined issues of the Polish countryside. She wrote for Nowa Wieś [New Countryside], initiated in the second half of the 1930s and reactivated in 1956 as part of de-Stalinization, which had circulation as high as 300,000 copies, and for Wieś Współczesna [Modern Countryside].37 Despite differing profiles, both magazines jointly co-constructed the trend of socialist modernization of the Polish countryside. Tryfan’s articles were also printed in Polityka [Politics], a leading political weekly established in 1957. She wrote many articles together with journalist and social activist Józef Grabowicz (1930–2007), with whom she also published a collection of reportages entitled Poletko Matki Boskiej (1964) [A Field of God’s Mother].38 Tryfan’s articles were based on the dichotomous image of rural reality characterized by a clash of the forces of modernity and tradition; the latter was stereotypically interpreted in terms of backwardness. The experience of reportage travels and interviews with rural women must have influenced her scientific sensitivity. Sociologist Sylwia Michalska, who met Tryfan as a young scholar, emphasizes that it was her trademark: Due to her sensitivity to the women’s issues and the ability to establish contact with the interviewees (the professor did the majority of field studies personally, valuing the possibility of a direct contact with respondents), we saw in her texts actual people and their problems, and not just dryly described cases.39 In the 1950s, Tryfan combined professional duties with parental ones (she married in 1952 and gave birth to three children), which, according to her colleagues, also impacted her research on the condition of women in the Polish People’s Republic. However, in the 1994 interview for German Neues Deutschland, she admitted that her situation was unique in terms of the gendered division of household duties, as it was mostly her husband and the hired housekeeper who took care of the children. On the other hand, for a long time she was the only woman in her academic workplace.40 All women scholars discussed in this chapter operated in certain scientific milieus and, as noted earlier, they did not form a coherent group.

Biographical Experience  153 Despite similar patterns of academic careers and research interests, as sociologists they found different intellectual inspirations. Initially associated with social medicine, Sokołowska contacted the community of Polish sociologists during her stay in the United States in the late 1950s.41 Her contacts with the Ford Foundation scholarship holders resulted in a shift toward sociology: “I met a group of Polish sociologists who were in the United States on a Ford Foundation Grant. These were: Maria Ossowska, Andrzej Malewski, Stefan and Irena Nowak, and Adam Podgórecki. Contact with them exerted a great influence on my personal and professional life,” she recalled years later.42 Contacts with Stefan Nowak and Adam Podgórecki had a particularly strong impact on Sokołowska. Inspired by Nowak, she decided to apply for a job at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the PAS after she returned from the United States. Inspired by Adam Podgórecki’s concept of five functions of sociology as science, she finished the treatise Zastosowania socjologii w medycynie [Applications of Sociology in Medicine] in 1968. In general, she looked for inspiration in medical practice and sociological theory. For example, she referred to Florian Znaniecki’s works (especially to his 1934 Ludzie teraźniejsi a cywilizacja przyszłości [Contemporary People and the Civilization of the Future]), examining the issue of correlation between biological and social aspects of human nature. After a period of elaborating on women’s issues in the 1960s, her research interests shifted to medical sociology in 1970s. By combining two academic disciplines, Sokołowska became a mentor for the new generation of Polish medical sociologists (including Włodzimierz Piątkowski) as well as inspired scholars of health, illness, and old age working in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the PAS such as Anna Titkow and Antonina Ostrowska.43 Like Magdalena Sokołowska, Maria Jarosz listed Adam Podgórecki among scholars whose role was crucial for her initiating research on social inequalities and pathologies. Nevertheless, she assigned her years as a student a special role in her intellectual development, even though they were, as she called them, “a time when the Stalinist period was at its worst”: At the time, social sciences were part of the canon of MarxismLeninism. However, the University of Łódź was distinct in that it had many professors who cultivated the prewar academic ethos. Social sciences were taught in an unconventional manner there. Of course, teaching modern sociology was out of the question, because it was considered a bourgeoisie science. Still, what we were taught was far from the rigid ideological canon. I was lucky when it came to my teachers. My professors, included Jan Szczepański (who later became rector of the University of Łódź), who taught classical sociology, and Jan Mujżel, who taught me economics. In fact, none of

154  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz my teachers was an orthodox Marxist. The Faculty of Social Sciences was far from communist indoctrination. Of course, a leftist emphasis prevailed, but it was consistent with the good old tradition of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), a tradition that strongly differed from the orthodox communist approach. I acquired my leftist views at university through literature and contacts with friends and topcaliber teachers such as Jan Mujżel, Leszek Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, and Bronisław Baczko.44 In 1954 or 1955, Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) was Jarosz’s instructor in Warsaw, where she also met Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) and Jerzy Wiatr (b. 1931), who began studying a year earlier. However, the most important figures on her intellectual paths were Julian Hochfeld and Jan Szczepański (1913–2004), a senior assistant of Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958) before World War II. It is noteworthy that Jarosz does not list any woman as someone she admired and by whom she was inspired. Just like Tryfan, she was one of the few women in her academic workplace and intellectual community. Interestingly, Zygmunt Bauman became the supervisor of Barbara Łobodzińska in 1964. Like Jarosz, Łobodzińska first studied in Łódź and moved to Warsaw in 1958, where she began working as an assistant at the PAS Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. At the PAS Center for Sociological Studies, she handled, for example, the issues of disorganization and pathologies of social relations, such as alcoholism and family and marital conflicts, which became crucial for her subsequent doctoral studies. While working on her doctoral dissertation about family problems, she also attended two seminars at the Department of Urban Sociology at the PAS Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, and at the Department of General Sociology of the University of Warsaw, conducted by Stefan Nowakowski (1912–1989), an expert in urban studies, and Zygmunt Bauman. In his official evaluation from 1964, Bauman wrote that Łobodzińska was “sensitive to modern problems, enamored with field studies, and she [was] a good speaker as well.”45 Having given up her doctoral studies in 1949, Barbara Tryfan returned to doing research only in the second half of the 1960s, supervised by Dyzma Gałaj (1915–2000), a sociologist focused on the problems of rural areas. Between 1956 and 1964, he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly Wieś Współczesna, where Tryfan published her articles on rural issues. Sokołowska was already a role model for her, having written important studies on the condition of women, primarily Kobieta pracująca (1963) [Working Woman] and Kobieta współczesna (1966) [Modern Woman]. She was also influenced by (male) sociologists who wrote on women’s work such as Jerzy Piotrowski (1907–1983) and Adam Kurzynowski (b. 1934).46 She owed to the public opinion’s increased

Biographical Experience  155 interest in the women’s issues, to which she herself had contributed as a journalist. In her academic work, she drew inspirations both from Polish rural sociologists and French sociologists; being fluent in French, she was able to read their texts in the original.47

Sociology in the Polish People’s Republic and the Attempts to Conceptualize Gender Barbara Łobodzińska, who emigrated permanently to the United States in the 1970s, in Poland was unambiguously associated with the sociology of family.48 Her studies on intelligentsia families were undoubtedly her greatest achievement; however, her obituary prepared by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology, where she was employed, emphasized her accomplishments in the field of research on women’s work, in addition to the studies on marriage and family.49 In fact, a thorough analysis of her works shows an interesting evolution toward reflection on Polish sociology through the lens of gender studies. In her texts published subsequently in Humanity and Society (1998) and in Women’s Studies International Forum (2000), Łobodzińska critically analyzed Polish postwar sociology from a feminist perspective, which was her primary research approach beginning with the 1980s50: The official party line, backed by the Polish Constitution, was that men and women were equal in all spheres of life. Although Polish people generally resisted party doctrine, there was widespread agreement regarding the existence of gender equality. Excluding the gender variable in research and statistical analysis was a typical, “justified” and widespread practice. For instance, an author of a study on social mobility stated: “Because . . . inter- and intra-mobility barriers in a population fit closely the patterns for men, I will not discuss women separately on the assumption that what we found for men represents the structure of basic social divisions overall.”51 From her perspective, the situation for Polish women did not improve under state socialism: Problems of Polish women’s unequal opportunities and positions in the economy were mostly kept secret in the pre-1989 period. . . . There was propaganda of success related to socialist ideology and legislation, claiming “equality for all” and contradictory information that would undermine the government’s enthusiastic slogan was not tolerated. As a result, except for selected specialists studying those topics professionally, most of the Polish population took it for granted that equal opportunities existed for both sexes.52

156  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz Łobodzińska’s critical opinion about Polish sociologists’ ignoring the problem of gender inequality under state socialism was deeply rooted in the debates of the 1990s when gender slowly became an important analytical category for sociology. However, as emphasized by Katarzyna Leszczyńska, the global sociology of the 1960s and 1970s also neglected gender issues and, in contrast to other social sciences, treated them with distrust. Even though the feminist thought often played a critical role in the public debates of that time in France and in the United States, gender remained marginal as a category of analysis in sociology until the 1980s.53 In that sense, the situation in Poland was not much different, despite the unique condition of sociology in the postwar period. After being banned as a “bourgeois pseudoscience” under Stalinism, Polish sociology opened itself to the flow of knowledge from Europe and from the United States thanks to the mediation of the Ford Foundation, which began with the 1958 visit by Paul Lazarsfeld, an American sociologist and consultant for the Foundation.54 Consequently, de-Stalinization meant a real turning point, or even revolution, for Polish sociologists: Whereas pre-war sociologists were often cosmopolitan by virtue of the fact that they were educated or worked abroad, and had to read and publish in foreign languages, after 1956 Polish sociology was becoming one of the most internationalized and free-minded sciences in the Eastern Bloc with virtually no reference to these notso-ancient network relations, which had vanished under Stalinism.55 Despite this visible internationalization of the discipline, gender issues remained marginalized in Polish sociology until the 1980s. A cursory reading of articles published between 1956 and 1979 in top sociological journals, such as Przegląd Socjologiczny [Sociological Review] or Studia Socjologiczne [Sociological Studies], shows that publications dedicated exclusively to women’s issues appeared once every few years or so and constituted only a small portion of studies dedicated to more general topics. This is also what Michael Voříšek claims when summarizing the state of sociological research in the countries of the socalled Eastern Bloc: studies on women’s issues did not function as a subdiscipline there. 56 Sociology was dominated by research on industry, urban–rural relationships, and social research methods, and these overlapped with women’s issues. Even the sociologists we discuss in this chapter, including Barbara Łobodzińska in the first, Polish period of her career, handled gender issues as marginal in relation to other grand themes of Polish postwar sociology. However, we do not suggest that Polish sociology prior to 1989 neglected women and gender completely. Rather, as in the Western European countries and in the United States, it did not recognize gender as a significant category of analysis.

Biographical Experience  157 However, a closer analysis of Polish sociological research of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that concepts in line with feminist agenda started to appear, at least in the works of Magdalena Sokołowska and Barbara Tryfan, even if the authors did not use the term “feminism.” This contradicts the thesis that the issue of gender inequality in Poland was ignored. In the 1960s, Sokołowska conducted research on women’s professional work and its impact on the family. In 1966, she described discrepancies between popular images of Polish women as mothers and wives only and women’s actual functions and social roles. She diagnosed the phenomenon currently known as the “glass ceiling.” She argued that despite the official discourse about gender equality, gender stereotypes, which were strong in Polish society, and the unequal division of domestic chores prevented women from developing a professional career. 57 In the early 1970s, she analyzed shifting patterns of femininity and masculinity, emphasizing the social and cultural dimension of gender. Similarly, she used two separate terms, “biological maternity” and “social maternity,” to mark the difference between the “biological reality” and the system of social norms, perceptions, and expectations imposed on women. She argued that social and cultural factors played a more important role in shaping social relationships between the sexes than biology.58 In her aforementioned article, “The Woman Image in the Awareness of Contemporary Polish Society,” written in English, she described mechanisms due to which women had limited access to the public sphere, even in a socialist society that was officially equal. She blamed this on Polish tradition, which glorified domestic and maternal roles of women: “‘Serving people’ leaves women outside the centers of government, decision-making and planning.”59 She claimed that changes in the sphere of beliefs about female and male roles in the family and society occur much slower than in the sphere of politics and the economy.60 Thanks to her medical education, Sokołowska was attached to the biological and physiological concept of sex, but her analyses of Polish socialist society triggered her attempts to conceptualize the social dimension of sex that she called the “social sex.” Drawing from studies on biological and social aspects of the human nature, by scholars such as Florian Znaniecki, Stefan Nowak, and Adam Podgórecki,61 she diagnosed discrepancies between gender equality discourse in the postwar Poland and actual (traditional) views on social roles of women and men: The socialist countries have demonstrated what deep changes can be effected in women’s social position by transforming the social macrostructure. . . . Further progress depends on changes transpiring in the social microstructure: in inter-personal and inner family relations, in the traditional conceptions of the wife-mother

158  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz and husband-father roles. Human awareness in these spheres too, changes more slowly than do political or economic institutions.62 In her journalistic articles as well as academic papers, focused on the problems of Polish countryside, Barbara Tryfan did not hide her attachment to the ideals of the emancipation movement and her deep faith that restructuring social relations will improve the living standards of rural women. She often referred to Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874–1941)—physician, pre-war social activist, an advocate of women’s rights, publicist, and translator from French63 —and built her works on strong hypotheses that strengthened their rhetorical message. Her linking of scientific reflection with emancipatory ideas fully justifies defining her early works as feminist. Her doctoral dissertation, Pozycja społeczna kobiety wiejskiej [Social Condition of a Rural Woman], defended at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in 1968 and published the same year, included an epigraph from The Subjection of Women (1869) by John Stuart Mill: “Elevation or debasement [of women] [is] the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age.”64 The starting point for her analysis was the perception of a double impairment for rural women: as a social actor and as a subject of social studies. The rural woman does not exist as an independent object of knowledge, but appears on the margin, enters the audience as if through a kitchen door. . . . But the question of women in general and the question of women in the countryside are two completely separate issues. Although, in relation to urban women, the problem concerns emancipation in the field of professional and intellectual equality, for the rural woman it often means a fight to break free from traditional barriers of prejudices and norms, aiming to extract herself from sometimes feudal systems of dependencies.65 Building her analytical toolbox, Tryfan referred to Polish social sciences, but primarily emphasized the need to link the achievements of French sociologists and their studies on farms with the Anglo-American emancipatory thought.66 Her objective was to analyze the paradoxes of social advancement of rural women, and to promote an equality-based model of life in the context of growing feminization of the profession of farmer in the Polish countryside. Her works often tackled the issue of the double burden of women, which was further discussed in Dylematy emancypacji [Dilemmas of Emancipation], published at the threshold of a new era, in 1989.67 Tryfan remained faithful to women’s issues throughout her professional life: beginning with the first press articles and ending with her last texts from the 2000s, when she wrote about the rural family in the context of the system transformation after 1989.

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Conclusion Our analysis of intellectual biographies of Barbara Łobodzińska, Barbara Tryfan, Magdalena Sokołowska, and Maria Jarosz demonstrates similar patterns in the life stories and career trajectories of the first generation of women sociologists raised in the postwar period. Born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they made first educational and professional steps during Stalinism. State socialism affected them as women and scholars, both in terms of the opportunities given and limitations posed. Interestingly, women’s issues were not their first research choice, but rather a result of social activism, through which they discovered gender inequalities (Tryfan as a journalist, Sokołowska as a physician), or (sometimes simultaneously) of radical detours in their professional life (Łobodzińska’s emigration to the United States, Jarosz’s social exclusion on the basis of her Jewish background). As researchers, they marginalized the role of their personal experiences as women, which may be read as an intentional strategy to strengthen their position within a highly male-dominated sociological environment of that era. Our analysis demonstrates that intellectual genealogies of four female sociologists discussed in this chapter are somewhat similar. They were linked through academic institutions they graduated from or worked for. The sociological environments of the University of Łódź and the PAS in Warsaw played a key role in their professional development. All of them met influential Marxist sociologists on their educational career like Zygmunt Bauman or Julian Hochfeld. Their colleagues and mentors represented a leftist tradition, both in terms of intellectual inspirations with Marxism and social activism inaugurated in the pre-war period and continued after the war. We believe that this paradigm sparked their interest in the women’s issues in the 1960s. This interest resulted from the critical sociological reflection on the situation of women in the officially gender equal and, in fact, increasingly unequal Polish society, which had undergone profound transformations in terms of gender roles, family models. Although the majority of sociologists we studied later abandoned women’s issues, they became an inspiration for new generations of female scholars.

Notes 1 The research for this chapter has been carried out as part of the National Science Center (Poland) grant no. 2015/17/B/HS3/00105 “Gender History as a Subject of Knowledge: Theoretical Frames and Research Practice of Studies on Women’s Past in Poland in the International Context.” 2 During the 1970s and 1980s other outstanding women researchers appeared in the group, e.g. Danuta Graniewska (b. 1927), Helena Strzemińska (b. 1931), and Renata Siemieńska (b. 1939). 3 The research on the academic careers of women in Poland is at the preliminary stage, referred to as a “supplementation.” It already includes, however,

160  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz works dedicated to some female scholars examined here, particularly, Magdalena Sokołowska. See Socjologia z medycyną. W kręgu myśli naukowej Magdaleny Sokołowskiej, ed. Włodzimierz Piątkowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2010); Włodzimierz Piątkowski, “Socjologia zdrowia, choroby i medycyny—refleksje na temat przedmiotu badań. Wkład Magdaleny Sokołowskiej,” in Zdrowie i choroba w kontekście psychospołecznym, eds. Kazimierz Popielski, Michał Skrzypek, and Ewa Albińska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2010), 195–212.

5 See e.g. Małgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Magdalena Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy (Warszawa: Scholar, 2018); Natalia Jarska, Kobiety z marmuru. Robotnice w Polsce 1945–1960 (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2015); Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Bo dziewczyna to ludzie.’ Projekty i polityki emancypacji kobiet w powojennej Polsce,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018), 185–224. 7 See the debate on the generation as an analytical category: Ulrike Jureit, “Generation, Generationality, Generational Research,” Docupedia, August 9, 2017, http://docupedia.de/zg/jureit_generation_v2_en_2017, accessed December 16, 2019; and Anna Artwińska et al., “Pożytki z ‘pokolenia.’ Dyskusja o ‘pokoleniu’ jako kategorii analitycznej,” Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 347–66.

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We position our research on the group of Polish female sociologists within the field of intellectual history. However, we do not intend to narrow the perception of sociology to a purely intellectual area and we also examine it as a space of social activism. Maria Jarosz’s explicitly autobiographical account could be classified as a testimony of a generation of children of the Holocaust or a testimony of a generation that survived antisemitic purges in 1968, rather than a testimony of a fate shared with other postwar female sociologists. See Maria Jarosz, Obyś żył w ciekawych czasach. Fakty, wydarzenia, anegdoty (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo ISP PAN, 2009). In this chapter, we refer to the English edition of Jarosz’s memoirs: Maria Jarosz, Bearing Witness: A Personal Perspective on Sixty Years of Polish History, trans. Steven Stoltenberg and Grzegorz Siwicki (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2015). We mean the archive of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the archive of the University of Warsaw. See Antonina Kłoskowska, “Kulturologiczna analiza biograficzna,” in Metoda biograficzna w socjologii, eds. Jan Włodarek and Marek Ziółkowski (Warszawa and Poznań: Nomos, 1990), 171–95. There is a great body of literature on memory and autobiographical writing, from which we draw in our work, e.g. James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden, eds., Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010). Our use of the “culturological biographical” analysis is inspired by the work of historian Daniel Wicenty. See Daniel Wicenty, “Wokół projektu biografii Adama Podgóreckiego. Wyzwania koncepcyjne, metodologiczne i społeczne,” Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej 9, no. 4 (2013): 90–91. For the biographical method in history and in social sciences, see respectively Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Kaja Kaźmierska, “Badania biograficzne w naukach społecznych,” Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej 9 (2013): 6–13. Agata Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście (Kraków: Nomos, 2016). Ludwik Fleck, Psychosocjologia poznania naukowego. Powstanie i rozwój faktu naukowego oraz inne pisma z filozofii poznania, eds. Zdzisław Cackowski and Stefan Symotiuk (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2006). See also English edition: Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Frederick Bradley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See e.g. Magdalena Sokołowska, Kobieta pracująca. Socjomedyczna charakterystyka pracy kobiet (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna, 1963); Magdalena Sokolowska, Frauenemanzipation und Sozialismus. Das Beispiel der Volksrepublik Polen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973); Magdalena Sokołowska, Granice medycyny (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna, 1980); Magdalena Sokołowska, Socjologia medycyny (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Lekarskie PZWL, 1986). See e.g. Barbara Tryfan, O równy start (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1974); Barbara Tryfan, Rola kobiety wiejskiej (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Rolnicze i Leśne, 1976); Barbara Tryfan, Rodzina wiejska (Warszawa: Zakład Wydawnictw CZSR, 1977); Barbara Tryfan,

162 Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz

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18

19 20 21 22

23 24

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Socjologia rodziny wiejskiej w Polsce (Warszawa: Wydaw. SGGW-AR, 1985). See e.g. Barbara Łobodzińska, Manowce małżeństwa i rodziny. Szkice obyczajowe (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna, 1963); Barbara Łobodzińska, Małżeństwo w mieście (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970); Barbara Łobodzińska, Rodzina w Polsce (Warszawa: “Interpress,” 1974); Barbara Łobodzińska, Młodość, miłość, małżeństwo (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna, 1975). See e.g. Maria Jarosz, Problemy dezorganizacji rodziny. Determinanty i społeczne skutki (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979); Maria Jarosz, “Samotne matki we współczesnym społeczeństwie polskim,” in Polityka społeczna. Uwarunkowania demograficzne. Zadania, eds. Mikołaj Latuch and Maria Namysłowska (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1980), 298–390; Maria Jarosz, Samozniszczenie. Samobójstwo, alkoholizm, narkomania (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1980); Maria Jarosz, “Status społeczno-ekonomiczny samotnych matek w ich samoocenie i opinii publicznej,” in Opinia publiczna i środki masowego przekazu a ujemne zjawiska społeczne, ed. Brunon Hołyst (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, 1981), 169–84; Maria Jarosz, “Rodziny dysfunkcjonalne,” in Rodzina polska lat siedemdziesiątych, ed. Maria Jarosz (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1982), 153–96; Maria Jarosz, Dezorganizacja w rodzinie i społeczeństwie (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Ekonomiczne, 1987). Archives of the University of Warsaw, Personal files of Barbara Łobodzińska K 5741, 1964–68, Resume of Barbara Łobodzińska, MSc, November 9, 1964. Archives of the University of Warsaw, Personal files of Barbara Łobodzińska K 5741, “Report from years 1964–68.” Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie. Stanisław Ossowski (1897–1963) was one of the most influential Polish sociologists, professor at the University of Łódź (1945–47), and at the University of Warsaw (1947–63), founding member and later vice-president of the International Sociological Association. Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979) was a sociologist and rector of the University of Łódź (1949–54), co-founder of the autobiographical method in Polish sociology. Nina Assorodobraj-Kula (1908–1999) was a sociologist, professor at the University of Warsaw (1935–77), between 1945 and 1948 professor at the University of Łódź, an active member of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party till 1968; she focused on social memory and history of Polish social thought. Magdalena Sokołowska, “The Woman Image in the Awareness of Contemporary Polish Society,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin 3 (1976): 43–44. The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Edward Gierek, was known for opening Poland to the West. His 1971 reform of the health care system included the incorporation of private farmers in the system of free public health care, an increase in state funds for the health services, the reorganization of health services into integrated units called Teams of Health Care (Zakłady Opieki Zdrowotnej, ZOZ), the liquidation of small local pharmaceutical enterprises in favor of huge specialized chemical consortia, an increase in the number of physicians per 10,000 people, and the utilization of their expertise more efficiently. Sokołowska, “The Woman Image in the Awareness of Contemporary Polish Society,” 43.

Biographical Experience  163 28 “Stan zdrowia i ochrony zdrowia ludności Polski,” Życie i Nowoczesność (April 2, 1981). 29 Magdalena Sokolowska, “Health as an Issue in the Workers’ Campaign,” Sisyphus, Sociological Studies 3 (1982): 91–106. See also Magdalena Sokolowska and Bożena Moskalewicz, “Health Sector Structures: The Case of Poland,” Social Science & Medicine 24, no. 9 (1987): 763–75. 30 Jarosz, Bearing Witness, 54. 31 The opinion of Professor Julian Hochfeld (April 16, 1957), Maria Jarosz, personal files, archives of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. 32 Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967–1968 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo ISP PAN, 2000); Dariusz Stola, “The Hate Campaign of March 1968: How Did It Become Anti-Jewish?,” Polin 21 (2009): 16–36. 33 Jarosz, Bearing Witness, 97. 34 See note 18. 35 Sylwia Michalska, “Kobiety w socjologii wsi—badane i badaczki,” in Waleczny duch kobiety. Społeczno-ekonomiczne aspekty ról kobiecych, eds. Kinga Lendzion and Olga Kotowska–Wójcik (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo UKSW, 2015), 174. 36 Pozycja społeczna kobiety wiejskiej w rodzinie i środowisku, doctoral dissertation defended at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Economic and Agricultural Department, March 26, 1968, supervisor: doc. dr Dyzma Gałaj. 37 Cf. e.g. Barbara Tryfan, “Cyfry alarmują: kobiety muszą żyć lepiej,” Nowa Wieś 9 (1961): 2, 3; Barbara Tryfan and Józef Grabowicz, “Intercyzy odchodzą do lamusa,” Polityka 41 (1961): 2–3; Barbara Tryfan and Józef Grabowicz, “Na wsi rozwody [stabilność chłopskiej rodziny],” Polityka 44 (1962): 2. 38 Józef Grabowicz and Barbara Tryfan, Poletko Matki Boskiej (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1964). 39 Michalska, “Kobiety w socjologii wsi—badane i badaczki,” 176. [Interview with Prof. Dr. Barbara Tyfran], www.neues-deutschland.de/ 40 artikel/511332.ohne-beziehungen-gibt-s-keine-karriere.html, accessed December 16, 2019. 41 In 1958, Magdalena Sokołowska went to the United States for family business and stayed there for two years; she obtained the Master of Public Health degree at the School of Public Health of Columbia University in New York. 42 Magdalena Sokołowska, “My Path to Medical Sociology,” in Medical Sociologists at Work, eds. Ray H. Elling and Magdalena Sokołowska (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1978), 296, emphasis in original. Maria Ossowska (1896–1974) was a Polish sociologist and social philosopher, a member of the Lviv–Warsaw intellectual school. In 1945–48 she was a professor at the University of Łódź; from 1952 to 1962 she headed the Institute for the History and Theory of Ethics in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Andrzej Malewski (1929– 1963) was a social psychologist and methodologist of social sciences. Adam Podgórecki (1925–1998) was a sociologist and one of the founders of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law; he moved to Carlton University in Ottawa, after being expelled from his professorship for the “anticommunist academic activities.” Stefan Nowak (1925–1989) was a sociologist, social psychologist, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and many international academic societies. Irena Nowak (1928–1995) was a sociologist, founding member of the Society for Scientific Courses (1978), privately, Stefan Nowak’s wife.

164  Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz



















Biographical Experience  165

















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Without Tradition and Without Female Generation? The Case of Czech Artist Ester Krumbachová1 Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová

Looking for an Erased “Her” Voice The idea for this text was born after we have managed to get access to the long-hidden estate of Ester Krumbachová (1923–1996), one of the most compelling, multi-talented Czech artists who is often dubbed an éminence grise of Czech cinema and theater and whose work was being thwarted in socialist Czechoslovakia, whose heritage is now after years of negligence newly “reloaded,” reinterpreted, and reshaped especially by young (women) artists.2 Although Krumbachová has become a source of inspiration for artists in the 2010s, her own search for artistic voice was intuitive and original, without much reliance on artists from the previous generation. Moreover, contemporaneous debates did not do much to aid her search. Preparing an exhibition and a publication on the 1990s Czech female visual artists entitled In a Skirt—Sometimes in 2014 and 2015, the curator Pavlína Morganová and her team labeled this generation of female artists as the first to have come into their own as a distinct force. The authors of the exhibition also stressed that this was the first generation of female artists whose herstory could finally be written down.3 If we define generation as a group of people who are internally connected by shared experience, intellectual horizon, and decisions that are closely tied to the place where they live, it turns out that while the 1990s female artists can really be considered a “generation,” in socialist Czechoslovakia there were only solitary figures, a female “non-generation,” though they were a part of many art movements in the 1950s and the 1960s.4 The disintegration of any unified creative work was all the more pronounced because the artists were uninterested in feminism and did not feel any need to collectively search for a distinct, free style. This is especially apparent in a survey conducted in 1993 in response to the influx of Western feminist ideas in post-socialist Czechoslovakia.5 It was prepared by Věra Jirousová (1944–2011), an art theorist associated with dissident circles, and tellingly entitled “There Is No Such Thing as Women’s Art.”6 In this chapter, we use Ester Krumbachová’s work to examine the reasons behind the solitary nature of women artists in Czechoslovak

Without Tradition and Female Generation  167 socialist culture. What happened with the long tradition of Czech female philosophical self-reflection that started in the 1870s and the 1880s?7 What happened to the generations of women who not only were not solitary in terms of feminist thought but also were pursuing their own feminist agenda in art and society? What happened to the search for “women’s inner freedom” as defined by generations of Czechoslovakia’s pre-war feminists,8 the search for women’s unique voice?

“Do Czech Women Understand Their Own H_story?” This is the title of the latest book by Mirek Vodrážka (b. 1954), a feminist activist and philosopher associated with late 1980s punk culture.9 The book contributes to the debate on the history of women’s emancipation by again including the vital issue of the artist’s individual ethical responsibility without which art is empty. Vodrážka writes that being uninformed and unconscious of their own history is precisely why women still lack the courage to look for their own space. Vodrážka also points out that women often give up on being honest with themselves. The American historian Margaret W. Rossiter, who has written extensively on women in science, asserted that every woman who wanted to achieve something in her field should spend a year researching her own history.10 Like Vodrážka, Rossiter views history as awareness of collective memory that helps individual existence in the world as well as in art, in the case of artists. Vodrážka writes that something happened after the 1948 communist takeover that still prevents women to come to terms with feminism. As some historians today agree, state socialism was a paternalistic structure that took over a number of feminist agendas, which some women scholars label as “expropriation.”11 The term alludes to the fact that feminism had to deal with similar processes as industry and agriculture when private property was seized and transferred into the hands of the state following the communist takeover. Just like there was almost no private land left for farmers, women were left with no agenda of their own. Their new task was to contribute to the development of socialism and their purpose was reduced to two roles: builder of communism and mother. According to Dana Musilová: [The communist regime] created an image of “a new socialist woman” that depicted an exemplary worker, an excited builder of a new society, and an excellent mother. First and foremost, there was a woman-worker with her new attributes, such as blue overalls and a bandana. . . . A man without property, a typical new man of the new state, no longer commanded authority and could no longer influence norms of behavior and conduct within society and family.12

168  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová Though impoverished, the new man remained at least the head of the household.13 Contemporary studies show that some of the demands of presocialist feminism—especially social demands—were fulfilled during communism.14 However, they often fail to mention the toll taken—at the cost of losing historical memory and continuity, denying the value of feminist agenda, and at the cost of (women’s) lives. This high cost is discussed in Vodrážka’s above-mentioned book whose poignant subtitle in English translation reads Critique of Gender Theory and Partisan Technocratic Female Activism Against the Backdrop of the Political Murder of the Politician and Feminist Milada Horáková.15 It examines feminist theories and discourse in Czech/ Czechoslovak society. Vodrážka refuses to reduce the issue of women in socialist society to social security and employment. Instead, he identifies reasons for why women have stopped asking who they were. In his view, this happened as the result of meticulous erasure of the words and actions of women who could disrupt and threaten the unity of the official discourse of universal equality that was promoted by the Communist Party from the top down. For Vodrážka, this repression is represented by the execution of Milada Horáková (1901–1950), an attorney, an influential member of the Czechoslovak Socialist National Party, and the most prominent representative of the Czech feminist movement. Horáková’s trial and subsequent execution on June 27, 1950 was designed to send a message. The state was not happy with murdering just her; it was crucial to destroy everything Horáková represented. Hence, they also “executed” pre-war feminism that was partly adopted by women during the brief period following the war until the 1948 communist takeover. The fundamental idea that shaped the movement was women’s self-determination as individuals and their place in society. It was clearly expressed by Horáková herself in the 1940 survey “Jak jsem se stala feministkou?” [How Did I Become a Feminist?] published in Ženská rada [Women’s Council] journal: Most importantly, women must realize who they are, what skills they have and what they want to achieve, and then, based on their ability, find their place in any private or public field. Typically, women never work just for themselves.16 At the time of the show trial when the state hijacked women’s agenda, Horáková’s words and her compassion were officially labeled as inhumane and her interest in public affairs as unfeminine or even unmaternal and criminal.17 Horáková spoke in a language that was, according to American historian Marci Shore, as decimated as everything it had stood for.18

Without Tradition and Female Generation  169 Vodrážka calls this kind of erasure the policy of sterésis—a deliberate negative determination of an individual and the policy of negation, rejection.19 As a result, one eventually accepts a way of existence that is not one’s own, that is, non-existence, non-humanity, abandonment. Successfully offered to Czechoslovakia’s women after 1945, this policy was not implemented with the use of force but, instead, with positive action and it was difficult to avoid. The new socialist woman did not have to think for herself; her voice was not just expropriated by the state; it was silenced. 20

The Second Sex To a certain extent, the position of women in the society in the 1960s had changed, owing to cultural thawing and a partial turn to the West. These trends culminated at the end of the 1960s, which Australian researcher Jacqui True calls “de facto feminism.”21 Not even then, as busy as Krumbachová was with some of the most important works of her career, did Czech/Czechoslovak feminism have a “language” of its own. Though some things had changed and there were debates on women’s social issues, abortion (from the medical perspective), men’s alcoholism, there were also more and more college-educated women and their ideas about men were changing as well. 22 Some women intellectuals started examining women’s creativity, identity, and subjectivity. 23 These debates were very much on the fringes, though, and never got much attraction. A fitting example that elucidates the situation at the time was the visit of the French writer, philosopher, and feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) to Prague in 1963 and the story of translating her well-known work Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) [The Second Sex, 1953] into Czech. 24 During her visit, de Beauvoir was viewed mostly as JeanPaul Sartre’s companion whose visit to Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Dobříš generated a lot of excitement. 25 Journalists mentioned de Beauvoir mainly when talking about her novels and they omitted feminist questions although she herself did not avoid talking about female identity and feminism in her lectures in Prague. As Musilová writes: Simone had a lecture before a crowded lecture hall at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. Her talk became a sensation, especially for the women students in attendance. . . . She talked about female identity in a way that seemed shocking for the audience, both in its form and content. Czechs and Slovaks had long stopped discussing women’s issues that were considered resolved by the communist ideology, and they were not used to reflections on women’s position in society that were common before World War II and for a brief period after the war. It was this “theoretical” world which de Beauvoir barged in

170  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová with her views on the relationships between men and women in a modern society, and on the shaping of female identity. 26 Parts of the lecture were published in the press because Antonín Liehm mentioned it in his in-depth interview with Sartre and de Beauvoir for the journal Literární noviny [Literary News], later published as a book. 27 One of the positive outcomes of Czechoslovakia’s liberalization and de Beauvoir’s visit was the publication of her several works. 28 In 1966, there came out the Czech translation of The Second Sex, followed by Une mort très douce (1964) [A Very Easy Death, 1964] and Les Mandarins (1954) [The Mandarins, 1956] in 1967, and Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958) [Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958] in 1969.29 An extensive selection of The Second Sex edited by the phenomenologist Jan Patočka was printed three times over the course of two years. Clearly, the book had a large following of male and female readers, yet we cannot speak of any broad impact as there was no reflection of the issues among the general public.30 Musilová summarizes this as follows: In 1967, Literární noviny opened up a debate on de Beauvoir’s views presented in The Second Sex. It started with Ivan Sviták’s [critical and somewhat ironic] text called “Man or Sexus?” that was countered by texts by Jan Patočka and, as the only woman, Irena Dubská [both confirming the importance of de Beauvoir’s ideas]. As the editor and author of the introduction, Patočka wondered why such a negative interpretation of de Beauvoir’s work failed to draw any reactions and said he decided to write one himself. The journal then allowed Sviták to reply to both opponents and then ended the debate.31 Sviták was able to continue with his insulting comments and the second time around targeted Dubská as well. After the 1968 Soviet invasion, Czechoslovakia gradually resumed its socialist operation, and the lesson the state learned from this crisis was the consolidation of the 1970s.32 Consolidated socialism resorted to its well-tried tactic of colonizing memory—in order to erase and relabel it. Women’s and feminist tradition that had its roots mainly in urban liberalism started gradually disappearing, along with the sparse contacts with Western feminism. The awareness of The Second Sex also started vanishing, just like the name of its interpreter and persecuted philosopher Jan Patočka who died in 1977 following police interrogations as a Charter 77 spokesperson.

Without Tradition and Female Generation  171 Let us revisit the term sterésis, a policy again applied by society. It helps Vodrážka to understand the discontinuity and silence of women when reflecting on their own experience. The sterésis policy does not simply imply hostility toward women or misogyny; it seemingly tries to improve women’s situation. In his text, Vodrážka points out the double loss of womanhood and humanity: If we agree with Simone de Beauvoir on the definition of feminism as a policy of processual human becoming with an open temporal and inner side pointed to having agency over one’s own existence, the sterésis policy reveals a transhistorical strategy of keeping women deprived of a personal and existential insight. It maintains both the threat of the ontological question that was phrased by some medieval theologians and that has secular totalitarian overtones: “Are women human?”—and, especially, the threat of a new kind of cruelty of being radically deprived of political womanhood and humanity.33 In order to understand the situation of female artists, their isolation and hard-won self-confidence prior to 1989, one should look to their specific creative and political approaches and strategies and, especially, their ability to stay human, which Krumbachová viewed as vital.

Can a Woman Be Human? Krumbachová’s High-Stakes Game I’m a woman, you know. I’d like to start from the little stuff. . . . One entire half of mankind, that’s us—women, is deformed by horrible limitations. I’m more interested in these different perceptions than all the various -isms. They’re the cause of it all. I’m inside this -ism. That’s why I’m mainly concerned with trying to change the structure within my life circle—that is, to humanize the things I’d like to be human. . . . I don’t care about anything else—whether they do this or that. Unless we’re dealing with fascism, war, or terror of the kind we’ve just been through. Ester Krumbachová34 Ester Krumbachová was a director, screenwriter, author, artist, set designer, film and stage costume designer. From 1953, she worked as a set designer for theater in České Budějovice and Prague. She was involved in a number of notable Czechoslovak New Wave films such as Démanty noci (1960) [Diamonds of the Night], dir. Jan Němec; Sedmikrásky (1966) [Daisies], dir. Věra Chytilová; Valerie a týden divů (1970) [Valerie and Her Week of Wonders], dir. Jaromil Jireš; Ucho (1970) [The Ear], dir. Karel Kachyňa. In 1970, she directed her only film Vražda Ing. Čerta

172  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová [The Murder of Mr. Devil]. Krumbachová’s diary entries from the years following the 1968 Soviet invasion show that she wanted nothing to do with the gradually consolidating socialism enforced by the new pro- Soviet administration united under the Communist Party, and she preferred to live in inner exile. She expressed her doubts about socialism—especially after the invasion and even more so after the self-immolation of Jan Palach in January 1969—in one of the last issues of Sešity pro literaturu a diskusi [Journal for Literature and Dialogue]: I had my doubts from the very first moment. When I heard about Slánský and Horáková, I actually shuddered and cracked and left to work in the border region for a year. I had doubts as early as 1948. . . . I don’t want to harbor any sort of illusions to comfort me. . . . I realized you really had to be hard on yourself and to learn how to endure pain so that the thing we’re born with doesn’t get damaged or soiled with lies.35 In 1972, she was blacklisted from the film and television industry. She managed to bypass the ban in 1983 when she co-wrote Věra Chytilová’s Faunovo velmi pozdní odpoledne [The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun]. After 1990, she resumed her work in filmmaking; her last collaboration was production design for Marian (1996). On the basis of her recently opened personal archive, we are looking at her film The Murder of Mr. Devil (released on September 18, 1970) that was made at a time of great political and social turmoil. The film depicts the relationship between a lonely woman named “She” and her youth friend Bohouš Čert, or rather captures the deep-rooted desire, the need for power and dominance, struggle between men and women, as well as many stereotypes.36 The action takes place typically in the kitchen where the woman is serving Bohouš, a poor man waiting for the next course. Before it was turned into a film, this subtle, sarcastic-ironic story appeared in several other mediums. Krumbachová first wrote The Murder of Mr. Devil as a short story that was published in 1968 in the Plamen [Flame] journal and in 1970 she recorded it as a serialized reading for the radio.37 She also wrote the film synopsis which was then reworked into a screenplay with the help of the original director Jan Němec (1936–2016).38 Němec later commented that the screenplay was made mainly for money, without any real intention to shoot it. 39 According to Němec, his work had already been blacklisted at the time but the production team Czechoslovak State Film was inclined to accept and fund a comedy. The screenwriters had allegedly agreed that the project would never go into production.40 Yet, Krumbachová insisted on it and ended up being the director. Krumbachová’s only directorial achievement marks the end of the collaboration with her partner Jan Němec and her 1960s work and, in

Without Tradition and Female Generation  173 a way, it is the end of her creative freedom because, according to her own statement, at the end of the 1960s the regime broke her down. After August 1969, filmmaking in Czechoslovakia was torn up by consolidation that went hand in hand with political purges, personnel, and structural shifts in Czechoslovak film.41 Creative teams were dissolved and, instead, a new system with editorial and production groups was introduced which separated script editing and production and led to a tighter supervision over new projects. Films whose subject matter and poetics referred to 1960s topics42 were labeled as objectionable and, for the most part, banned—their theatrical release was prohibited (e.g. The Ear; Skřivánci na niti (1969) [Larks on a String], dir. Jiří Menzel) or they were altogether pulled from distribution (e.g. Všichni dobří rodáci (1968) [All My Compatriots], dir. Vojtěch Jasný). Some of the projects approved in the past were allowed to be completed, for example, Ovoce stromů rajských jíme (1969) [Fruit of Paradise], dir. Věra Chytilová, with Krumbachová involved as the story author, co-screenwriter, and costume designer. This was the backdrop for the development of Krumbachová’s directorial debut. The Murder of Mr. Devil is not just a symbolic culmination of an era but an intersection of Krumbachová’s various activities. It involves, multiplies, and synthesizes all of her interests and crafts: Krumbachová was a set designer, script editor, artist, author, screenwriter, jewelry maker, dressmaker, furniture restorer, and an excellent cook. In a short report from the film shoot, the actor Vladimír Menšík says: “Ms. Krumbachová doesn’t get complacent for a single second. Ever. She’s by nature an incredibly creative person.”43 The result was a toxic, explosive, and, in many respects, a truly murderous mixture that would be impossible to make in its full form and scope only a few years later because—regardless of the fact that Krumbachová was blacklisted for not complying with the regime requirements—the standardizing and totalizing power of normalization cinema would hardly accept such a non-conforming outcome. We have chosen this film because it provides a window into the extraordinary nature of the situation, a crux period during which ideas from the creative 1960s still resonate only to be abruptly crushed; yet the features of normalization culture and new regulations are already taking shape.44 Krumbachová as an extraordinary artist is equally important— always a fearless experimenter with various levels of art and various mediums. In this instance, she encloses them in the film medium—a twentieth-century art form, as she called it45 —fixes them, and by doing so she also stages their spectacular murder because she takes away their “movement” and space for mutual dialogue. This showy killing was uniformly rejected by critics at the time. This extraordinary artist also allows us to trace possibilities for finding female voices/styles in socialist Czechoslovakia. It provides a good way to uncover various

174  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová stereotypes, especially in gender issues, as well as a strong association of Czech culture with provincial patterns of behavior and the prevalence of dumbing-down and banalization. This chapter also explores why state socialism—and namely, normalization—offered so little for discussion on gender differentiation in art. Some even say that it chose to silence and cover up female voices, a tendency that is still persistent in the country and has led to skepticism or outright rejection when it comes to feminism and gender issues in general, as discussed earlier.46 For some women artists, even looking for a female creative difference became something ridiculous, phony, and forcefully ideological because there was no shared language, as mentioned earlier. Due to the policy of sterésis, looking for a female voice was off limits. That is why some of the women who fled the country after 1968 could not understand Western feminist discourse. Here is a characteristic statement by Věra Linhartová (b. 1938), one of the most remarkable Czech authors of the latter half of the twentieth century, which she declared in 1975: I’m sorry that the circumstances (International Women’s Year) introduce a topic as ungrateful as “women’s writing” into our discussion. This topic doesn’t have any bearing on any deep reality, doesn’t describe any relationship or any basic contradiction between individuals who are committed to the act of writing and between the outcome of this act—writing style. It is a relationship (or contrast) that is largely artificial, unjustified, and almost negligible.47 The case of The Murder of Mr. Devil occupies a distinct place in these rare debates about female creativity and power and it is remarkable, symptomatic, and highly ironic. However, our interest in Krumbachová’s film is not only historical. We are equally fascinated by the cinematic space that shows the multifarious nature of her art in a single framework and a single frame, as well as the search for her own authorial style and female voice. It also allows us to use the cinematic space to cast a net of theoretical models and ideas that can elucidate different potentialities of her work, that can better explain why this film was not accepted at the time, why it can be important to study it today, and what has or has not changed since the time of its making. We believe that the film is a very radical and high-stakes philosophical artistic game.

Sophism of “Philosophical Humor” The ironic allegory in The Murder of Mr. Devil48 is based on an intimate and, at the same time, very absurd dialogue between She who is seemingly anxious to get married and the preternaturally hungry Mr. Devil aka Bohouš. She happened to summon Mr. Devil who was an old

Without Tradition and Female Generation  175 acquaintance of hers by reading from an old cookbook, like an incantation of an ancient alchemical formula.49 Mr. Devil is a lowly Mephisto and She is a vapid Faust who is not eager to know but to get eaten. This situation allows Krumbachová to launch a game of allusions, intertextual references, and media forms, while walking the thin line between the high- and low-brow, folk and intellectual, simple and sophisticated, and mining stereotypes related to men and women. While She is catering to him, Mr. Devil keeps manifesting his masculine superiority, which She finds desirable, with his constant quasi-philosophical statements and platitudes that cover up his Mephistophelian, albeit, lowly nature. The philosopher “misogynists” Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud who are logically referred to by Devil (“Listen, have you ever read Freud?” “I haven’t. What is it?” “You haven’t? You should read it.” Or: “Nietzsche said that, by the way.” “What is it?” “Well, it’s like. . . He was a writer.”) escalate his masculinity and, in turn, disrupt the woman’s emphasized femininity (As She says: “No matter what they ask me about, I always reply ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, no idea, you tell me.’”). Speech gets in conflict with the performative gesture of a woman who always makes herself available only to be let down again, which generates absurd tension and Dadaist humor. In a comment on Jan Němec’s film O slavnosti a hostech (1966) [A Report on the Party and the Guests], 50 which Krumbachová co-wrote, and that also applies to The Murder of Mr. Devil, Krumbachová said that she created “portraits of people out of contradictions and absurdities, people who don’t say a single sensible thing and everything they say is ridiculous but the sum of it all is a tragedy.”51 The true “devilish” nature of Mr. Devil is revealed at the peak of his bottomless gluttony. Devil relinquishes language and replaces it with physical action—and greedily chews on the furniture legs as well. Meanwhile, She starts talking without just repeating “I don’t know” or reciting the man’s statements and clichés. She is inquisitive, verbally attacks him, and finally understands. All there is left to do is drive away the devilish seducer, squash his quasi-intellectual superiority, beat him at his own game, and kill him using his own lowly desires—a bag of raisins (she is led to them by tarot cards, a woman’s most often used magic52). The absurdity of this ending emphasizes the illusive nature of this experimental “nonsense” that is the entire The Murder of Mr. Devil. As Vladimír Svatoň commented, writing about Gogol’s short story Nose with a direct reference to Russian formalism: “The important moments are ones when the plot diverts from its expected course, the frustrated anticipation, the contradictions in characterization, the meaningfulness of the meaningless.”53 The Faustian story is turned on its head. To an extent, the text and the film mock hero worship because they exploit basic myths of early modern Europe that—according to Svatoň—fit the structure of the European novel and become the basis for modern narrative:

176  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová Early modern myths are . . . myths about an individual, his will, guilt and punishment. On the one hand, there are “demonic” myths whose heroes represent a challenge (heresy) to the world order, on the other hand, there are “redeemer” stories that spread humility with respect to the world order. . . . On the lowest rank, there is the Falstaffian myth, apotheosis and elegy on gluttony and sensual delights. . . . It involves the myth of a voracious and lawless woman-harlot.54 The Falstaffian myth seemingly lacks transcendence but it does have, as Svatoň points out, sobering and death, passing in the middle of the festivities. It is followed by the Don Juan and Faustian myths, and all of these syncretic myths are, according to Svatoň, closely related. All three are stories of conquest and greediness and involve elements of magic. Their common features include gluttony, seduction, and knowledge; they realize a particular desire to be elevated above the laws of ordinary life. Falstaff, Don Juan, Faust (as well as their variant embodied by Hamlet), typical heroes of the modern novel, are absurdly concentrated in the character of Bohouš Čert and show off their different depraved forms. 55 The Murder of Mr. Devil does work not only with early modern “novel” myths but also with fairy tales. Krumbachová wrote the script around the famous fairy tale about the Devil and Kate. As Jan Bernard remarks, the dialogue is peppered with phrases and motifs from other fairy tales, including the Red Riding Hood or the giant turnip.56 The situations and their narrative form also resemble so-called dark, cynical fairy tales which Krumbachová wrote when she was blacklisted during normalization. In these ironic tales, Krumbachová combines myths and fairy tales with the regular and the mundane language oscillating between informal Czech and the mellifluous writing of Božena Němcová.57 The charm of Němcová’s legends and tales also relies on “folk tales,” that is, epic stories in popular books narrated in the vernacular style.58 In this type of narrative, epic stories get dissolved and become more of a spoken way to share a situation with the reader. In the case of The Murder of Mr. Devil, the big myth is not only narrated in a lowly way, blended with the folk form and language, but it is nearly destroyed or even “devoured” by the ridiculous titan. Mr. Devil eats his own myth. The word wins—the constantly repeated word, without any meaning, nonsensical, accumulated, disjointed, like raisins in a bag where the demonic protagonist finally ends up. The “alchemical” transmutation of Devil/devil into devilish and accessible raisins is hardly spiritual; instead it becomes a profitable business and an encounter with temptation, a basic principle of the world. It is completely devoid of spiritual content and it is entirely pragmatic. An encounter with the devil involves realization

Without Tradition and Female Generation  177 that it is all merely a business transaction. Each raisin contains a piece of Mephisto, an instant dose of temptation without side effects, with the male principle turned into small, popular aurum nigrae sold by weight that cause nothing but harmless dreams.59 All the while, Krumbachová keeps poking fun at everything, especially the female and male roles. As she said in one interview in 1966: Today, in the twentieth century, women can still hardly get by without men in many respects. We are still living as guests in a man’s world. Naturally, this also implies a certain advantage for women, since we can laugh at the world made by men.60

Flourish and Flourishing Orality The central joke takes place in the speech itself: in the way speech is performed, used, and distributed. The radio reading of The Murder of Mr. Devil is a genre based on voice. Its basic characteristic and practice is the spoken word. Unusually, the text of the short story incorporates this feature into its structure; yet the way the short story appears in print points to a deeper motivation. Documents of various forms (diaries, interviews, short stories, and letters) attest to the fact that Krumbachová had a very vivid and intense relationship to speech and spoken word, more so than to the written word. Her friends confirm that Krumbachová was an especially great storyteller who liked to engage in long monologues or dialogues, often at the Green Fox pub, not necessarily reliant on punchline or gradation.61 In Věra Chytilová’s documentary Pátráni po Ester (2005) [Searching for Ester], the painter and graphic designer Jitka Válová says: “While her texts had some good ideas, they couldn’t compare to the way she spoke.” All of her written texts are permeated with orality. Speech performed by Krumbachová flourishes and branches in various directions—archaisms alternate with informal Czech, overly elaborate sentences with simple, direct phrases, various styles blend in a generous narrative gesture, as shown in the short story about the murder of Mr. Devil62: “Oh, lass, my dear lass! What now?”—I asked myself, I felt so distressed, I was in such a mess that I started speaking in a dialect. . .— What now, poor hapless lass?—I told myself again and again, cooling my burning throat with ice-cold hands. . . Oh well—dear old pals—isn’t this a drama worthy of a less mighty pen????63 This short story has strong elements of the oral speech, including the frequent punctuation marks that resemble various expressive speech

178  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová ­

Without Tradition and Female Generation  179 narrative is not only disrupted by characterization and by a different construction of the narrative situation but also by the incorporation of folk stories, fairy tales, and oral expression. Orality provides a chance to change the woman’s position within the narrative. The build-up of words inside the story naturally works to destroy it because the structure can no longer generate meaning. Typical for Krumbachová, speech and shared storytelling, not just the pub variety “chatter,” become the goal and pleasure in and of themselves. Of course, speech built up in this manner includes an ironic and self-referential approach. At the beginning of the screenplay, She says: “I sound confused because I’m a lady and, as you know, ladies are individuals devoid of all logic, good judgement and common sense.”70 The story is structurally flawed, nonsensical, it is being told while the hero chews on the legs of a myth. Sprouting and overgrowing, speech in the film no longer serves communication and becomes a suggestive, self-enclosed image, a gesture. Story is rejected in favor of poetic effect and takes on a new shape. At the same time, the mythical “male” paradigmatic story whose structured form produces meaning, as de Lauretis writes, has its structure so destabilized that it turns into the non-story of the main protagonist. The integrity of the narrative keeps disappearing before our eyes (and ears) and, despite being dynamic and dialogic, it keeps stuttering and crumbling into a series of flat anecdotes. The only line of real (albeit illusive) dialogue takes place between She and the viewer, that is, the moment the fake narrative comes to a stop and the main protagonist becomes a boisterous storyteller who performatively and theatrically addresses an imaginary (female) viewer and refuses to be a passive character in a film narrative. Still, she remains locked in the portrait frame, in the very center of the fiction world. Orality wins. The story dies. We, as the viewers and interpreters, are having fun while a new female story without story is born.

Tableaux Vivants, Portraits, Still Lifes, and Ornaments Although the film is based on speech, it is most remarkable for its perfectly detailed, unchanging mise-en-scène representing the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room, a varied combination of disparate floral motifs, glossy surface of meals, geometric compositions of ingredients, the balanced color scheme, the precisely designed interiors of kitchen, and the costumes of the protagonists. This perfect and perfectionist production design keeps us glued to the fiction world and does not let us for a moment look away from the screen and yet, or perhaps because of it, it evokes a sense of the uncanny (or unheimlich). It is not just due to the aestheticization of all details, but because this arrangement constantly boycotts the principles of the film medium and narrative that are—with the cool expression of a “master chef”—torn to pieces until they fall apart like a well-roasted duck or a chewed-up piece of furniture.

180  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová The Murder of Mr. Devil is not so much a film but rather a case of real (visual) gluttony, a series of intense explosions in the form of intermedia knots, a series of shadows and echoes from the history of theater, fashion, and art (Krumbachová’s interests), a series of stylized formats and forms that do not leave any space for the film as such. The integrity of the fiction world is repeatedly disrupted by a mostly static camera and broken up by portraits of She in golden frames. The film fiction is contaminated by painter codes, practices, and techniques; invisible and subordinate cinematic framing is made visible and enriched by inner framing; and the optical illusion of a 3D space is boycotted by the materiality of the surface. The film medium is always reflected, confronted with different media practices, viewed from an outside perspective in the sense of Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie—the film’s principles and its construction are gradually revealed as much as the true essence of the devilish hero.71 This self-referential moment is not particularly unique for modernist films. The unique nature of this film becomes clear once we realize that scenes addressing the viewer do not disrupt a more or less traditional narrative, as is the case in other films, but that they are set among other caesuras—tableaux vivants.72 In other words, they do not constitute a break, an instance of defamiliarization in the continuous flow of traditional narrative, but they are simply another fragment in a heterogeneous collage, emerging next to other self-referential features and covering up other deviations to create multiperspectival images and sequences. Spectacular—nearly immobile—images replace the need for a narrative and, like in mannerism, underscore styling, stylization, artifice, and performativity. Even costumes and acting become less important; plot, action, and dialogue evolve into merely other art elements with their own aesthetic function.73 Details of plants, food, and drink resemble Arcimboldian still lifes, in the original sense of “nature morte.” They are not quiet, harmonious, and serene paintings; instead, their deathly peace is a symptom of inevitable decay, demise, and decadence. Just as a tableau vivant is marked with double logic—immobility and motion, deadening and reanimation—a film built around a series of embellishments and allusions can be viewed as the killing and at once the stimulation of a suppressed film memory, that is, the reawakening of its pre-modern and pre-overtechnicized image origin.74 These still lifes do not evoke only mannerism—like the portraits discussed—but also refer back to Czech surrealist tradition, as pointed out by Josef Škvorecký who accurately describes the fatal combination in Krumbachová’s work: “It contains a touch of surrealism, with its delight in sentimental campy kitsch.”75 It is no accident then that the film often resembles Jan Švankmajer’s animations of non-living organic and inorganic matter and exposes us to a similar, almost unbearable obsession with biting, swallowing, chewing, lip smacking, digesting, and expelling. What binds the three types of self-referential caesura is ornament.76 Ornament is pulsating in

Without Tradition and Female Generation  181 the regular rhythm of growing and dying, swelling and emptying (just as each course of the opulent evening feast gradually disappears only to be cooked again the next day—only the belly gets bigger77). Regular rituals that take place between the kitchen and the living/dining room are intensified by alternating between the individual isolated fragments, that is, tableaux vivants, still lifes, and portraits, linked together by Krumbachová’s various crafts and hobbies (theater, jewelry making, costume design, drawing), materialized and transferred within the space of other arts (theatricality and fine art build the mise-en-scène while costumes take on a sculpting quality), and shifted to a level of “intense intermediality,” as discussed by Brigitte Peucker with regard to tableaux vivants.78 The viewer is offered a suggestive vision, fetishist imagination, and heroic or mythical scenes, yet not in a continuous motion but in the form of alternating individual “exclusive moments,” typical for photography. Traditional narrative is lost among the spectacular images, erasing the male-female duality it is often based on. The film has no development, no beginning or end, no gist, much less catharsis, which was reflected in reviews.79 Writing for the Svobodné slovo [Free Word], Eva Hepnerová concluded that the story was not very dramatic and, as a result, too insufferable to keep one’s attention.80

The Normalization “Yuck” and Trivialized Caricature For Krumbachová, film provided a new aesthetic tool to show things, a mosaic of “various component approaches,”81 a gothic cathedral, a space for creative freedom in which the artist is in no way limited “by any dimension, whether it be in space or time.”82 Krumbachová wanted to approach film unbiased, with a fresh, beginner’s mind, and she wanted to go beyond “boilerplate aesthetic.”83 Had the film been released at the height of intense experimentation in the 1960s, and not in early normalization, it would have likely generated a very different set of expectations and reactions. Yet, the cultural and art “policy” during normalization no longer promoted diversity but a single, clearly structured story with a single meaning. It also meant an absolute rejection of any opposite approaches, including orality and performativity and their quality of sharing, naturally found in folk culture and cherished by avant-garde artists. The live gesture of a shared dialogue, performativity that is akin to the bustle of a carnival, and a dynamic structure open to mistakes and chance are rooted in everyday life; they are not tied to pre-made and normalized stories with the rational storyline of a male narrative. All approaches (over)used by Krumbachová in her film become perfect “still lifes,” “corpses” that break down the narrative as well as the overall cinematicity. The Murder of Mr. Devil stops motion inside the film image and replaces it with another one—based on performativity and gesture. Like the artist and theorist Mieke Bal indicates in a different context,

182  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová the film unwittingly points out that one should not ask what a moving image means, but also what actually makes it move.84 The former question seems irrelevant for this film—according to standard definition and conventional aesthetic, film has been killed—and it was replaced by the latter. The film does not deem crucial to retain the essence of the moving image, but to animate the relationship between the viewer and the image and, instead of creating time, create a space for co-existence. The Murder of Mr. Devil refers not only back to the crisis of representation and narrative but also thematizes the issue of scrambled and defunct communication with the viewer and, more to the point, a gradual erasure of dialogue in general. The film tries to re- establish communication using intermedia knots and encourages the viewer to engage in a shared contemplation, remembrance, experience, and in a different, unburdened vision, perception, and creation.85 The viewer gets connected to the film owing to the dynamic ornament of the excessive mise-en-scène that draws them in and does not let them look away. In the intersection of all the variants of traditional patterns, there is a work replete with unclear aspects and fluid transitions, an extraordinary work that will not readily adapt to any order or standard, a work saturated with figures that often and simultaneously contradict each other. Krumbachová followed strict rules only with respect to mutual color combinations and color schemes relating to the characters or the plotline. Yet, in the film language of images stuck between movement and stillness, “mistakes” are often deliberately displayed and—according to Mieke Bal—they not only highlight the medium itself and its artifice but also become buffers between the opposite ends of binary structures, which were so typical for the normalization mindset.86 The film is filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, tricky framing, and tension between the static and the moving image. It is not an anti-film, but rather is of an “acinematic” nature; its narrative is not non-narrative, but has an “antinarrative” structure; in other words, it always retains both opposites without having to “kill” either one of them. The Murder of Mr. Devil deploys all of the constructions, arrangements, and structures very loosely, playfully, just like She toys with Bohouš or, rather like Krumbachová toys with She. Krumbachová is not—as would be “appropriate” for a film director—inside the film narrative but watches from the side, askance, self-reflectively, cynically. At the end of the 1970s, Mira and Antonín Liehm were probably the only critics who pointed out the estrangement, internal subversion, and partly also the “acinematic” nature of the film. They noted that Krumbachová managed to make an independent film at a time when everything was coming undone. The Liehms write: “A sarcastic tract on the myth of maleness is practically the only really Brechtian film made in Czechoslovakia during the period.”87 Clearly, a “consolidated” society could never accept the director’s extraordinary approach, as shown in reviews. Critics wrote, among other

Without Tradition and Female Generation  183 things, that the “structure of the whole film got out of hand,”88 that the film had a zero comedy amplitude,89 that the story failed to be converted into the film medium,90 and that “what was a good story to read has no capacity to be expressed in a film.”91 The very ideologically tainted comments also often claimed that Krumbachová committed a “crime” on the socialist viewer, failed to meet their high demands, and failed to follow the prescribed consolidation in all areas of life.92 Even years after its making, some of Krumbachová’s collaborators dismissed the film. Jan Němec said that “there isn’t a dumber film than The Murder of Mr. Devil” and that “the entire film is nonsense,” and Věra Chytilová, a friend of Krumbachová, asked him why he “didn’t advise her,”93 while we believe it is powerful and compelling,94 like Josef Škvorecký who understood after reading the short story that “[t]he entire thing cannot be described in traditional and rational terms.”95 Released during consolidation, the film closed the period of crazy “daisies”96 —that is, the period of the artistic experiments of the Czechoslovak New Wave—and replaced it with mediocre comedy that concealed the true meaning.97 A new era arrived, an era of insanity, paranoia, silence (and silencing), impossibility of direct dialogue, and pacts with the Devil. Communication in the new era resembled the pathological situation of schizophrenics who experience the so-called double bind. The artist could not react directly; yet she received at once incompatible or contradictory information. The normalization “normality” generated confusing statements, unfeasible directions, instructions, and regulations that were designed to keep the individuals in the schizophrenic state as a distraction from their own emptiness. These double-bind regulations interrupted cultural regeneration of the late 1960s and caused irreversible individual and social changes that Krumbachová commented on in a letter to Jan Němec, dated November 19, 1979: Everyone was eager to get their party card because inside, like a sweet-smelling magic herb, lay the promise of pillaging, stealing, profit and success—too bad that these citizens fail to realize that their only goal is to survive as best as they can and they don’t have any idea that it in fact involves humiliation and shame that will contaminate their progeny and keep this vile disease (neřádstvo) going on and on. Yuck.98 While Krumbachová’s film might be boycotting cinematicity and the narrative sabotaged the story, it was all the more trying to fight the “disease,” and to stage a live dialogue and reaction to the occupation and the ongoing consolidation. Krumbachová was well aware of the consequences any compromise with the regime might have for her conscience

184  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová and actively opposed it for the rest of her life. Although other film professionals had to provide cover for her work which was at the edge of illegality, she needed to create and have some financial resources. Even an innocent collaboration could easily turn into working with the enemy, acceptance of the deplorable could lead to an irreparable stain on one’s moral credit, and any sharp edges could quickly be smoothed.99 The sarcastic critique of gender roles which was still possible in The Murder of Mr. Devil later turned into a vapid variety show. Subjects that had been derided in the late 1960s were viewed by Czech society as simply funny. The Murder of Mr. Devil took on a double-bind structure, in the positive sense of the word—it twisted the principles of individual mediums and refused to follow genre, style, and art form patterns, as much as it rejected the order of the normalization society. This productive and positive structure did not operate in later comedies. This was especially clear in the casting of the protagonists—the then rising popculture icons Jiřina Bohdalová and Vladimír Menšík. The pair was associated with various expectations because the scope of their roles ranged from serious drama to low-brow comedy.100 Krumbachová did not use just their predictable modes but, instead, shaped them into her vision and “dragged” them between elegance and pretentiousness, crassness and naiveté, without relinquishing her famed self-irony and cynicism. Although the result is a comedy, it does not take on a “consolidated” form but remains rather fragmented, shaky, and offbeat. According to Jan Dvořák, Krumbachová’s film belongs to the ambiguous and underused category of “a strongly stylized comedy.”101 The transformation described earlier and the acceptance of the “yuck” can be traced in the professional transformation of the actress Jiřina Bohdalová who played She. The same year Bohdalová starred in Krumbachová’s film; she also played the lead role in Karel Kachyňa’s strongly critical The Ear.102 Once the film was banned, she accepted the regime’s terms and mediocrity and, as Krumbachová noted, in order to survive, she became a crowd-pleasing, insipid, and often corny entertainer, and a docile protagonist in children’s shows. She was the voice artist for a number of animated characters and was frequently cast in film and TV fairy tale adaptations. Starting in 1970, she was paired up with the actor Josef Dvořák to co-host Televarieté, a dull and trite variety show made up of short skits. The jokes played out by She and Devil, along with the exaggerated tenor of the film, became a terrifying reality, just like the absurd, disjointed dialogues that now provided the basis for TV “entertainment” scripts. Once again, Bohdalová played a good housewife but in exactly the opposite position from She. Relationship stereotypes and banal jokes were the chief ambition of New Year’s Eve television programming and the “chewed-up legs” that symbolized decay of the middle-class world were now a common feature in the bizarrely eclectic normalization households. A woman in the kitchen was, once again, just a woman in

Without Tradition and Female Generation  185 the kitchen, not an inquisitive female Faust. She stopped speaking and started hiding her voice, dissolving it among dinner recipes. Like her female peers, Krumbachová was in a way isolated and lonely. This feature was so prevalent that we might, after all, talk about a particular “generation” that could be described by Krumbachová’s words cited earlier: I’m a woman, you know. I’d like to start from the little stuff. . . . One entire half of mankind, that’s us—women, is deformed by horrible limitations. I’m more interested in these different perceptions than all the various -isms. They’re the cause of it all. I’m inside this -ism. That’s why I’m mainly concerned with trying to change the structure within my life circle—that is, to humanize the things I’d like to be human. This concern was one of the few available options to disrupt the sterésis policy.

Notes 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). 2 Ester Krumbachová’s oeuvre has drawn renewed interest in recent years— owing also to the newly found estate—as it is critically reflected by young artists and serves as an inspiration for their own work (see among others Marek Meduna, Sally Hackett, France-Lise McGurn, Mikuláš Brukner, Barbora Dayef, Daniela and Linda Dostálková, Bracha L. Ettinger, Linda Hauerová, Jesse Jones, Tereza Kanyzová, Anja Kirschner, Jan Kolský, Kateřina Konvalinová, Kris Lemsalu, Marie Lukáčová, New Noveta, Matěj Pavlík, Johannes Paul Raether, Michaela Režová, Lucie Rosenfeldová, Sláva Sobotovičová). There have been three exhibitions (in Prague and Glasgow), a number of workshops and screenings; the upcoming projects include a retrospective exhibition at the Brno House of Arts, a monograph, and an online archive dedicated to Krumbachová’s work. 3 Alice Červinková, “Emancipace bez feminismu? Postavení žen, gender a feminismus v (post)socialismu,” in In a Skirt—Sometimes: Art of the 1990s, ed. Pavlína Morganová (Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2014), 54–66. 4 See for example Maruška Svašek, “Politics of Artistic Identity: The Czech Art World in the 1950s and 1960s,” Contemporary European History 3 (1997): 383–403. Next to the filmmaker Věra Chytilová, there were a number of extraordinary Czechoslovak artists, such as Adriena Šimotová or Jitka and Květa Válová, who were very close friends with Ester Krumbachová. 5 Pavlína Morganová, ed., Někdy v sukni. Umění 90. let (Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 2014), 14. Pavlína Morganová describes the situation in the early 1990 as follows: “Czech society is unfamiliar with feminist theories which contrasts with the refined feminist discourse in the West.” In her analysis of the situation, Morganová agrees with Martina Pachmanová’s

186  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová study and interviews in the same book. Cf. Eva Kalivodová, “Czech Society in between the Waves,” Europen Journal of Women’s Studies 4 (2005): 421–35. In the book In a Skirt, Morganová and Červinková adopt the term “state-sponsored patriarchy”: “The consequence of having women fully involved in the labor market was that women became dependent on the state (not on individual men as was the case with homemakers in liberal democracies).” They agree with the Hungarian philosopher Marie Joó who described the emancipation processes started during socialism in Eastern European countries as “gender blind.” Feminism as such was viewed as a bourgeois ideology that pits men against women, thus disrupting the class struggle, as well as the goals of the working class and the new state. 6 Věra Jirousová reached out to major Czech women artists of the time, including Adriena Šimotová, probably the most prominent postwar female artist. See also Pavel Brunclík, Adriena Šimotová (Praha: Galerie Pecka, 2001).



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jejich organizační činnost z pohledu gender history,” in České, slovenské a československé dějiny 20. století (Ústí nad Orlicí: Oftis, 2007), 156–57; Buduj vlast–poslíš mír! Ženské hnutí v českých zemích 1945–1955 (Brno: Matice moravská, 2011); “Women’s Organizations in the Czech Lands, 1948–89,” in Expropriated Voice, 57–81. This question would require an analysis of film and TV material from 1948 until the late 1980s that depicts everyday reality and family relationships. Domestic scenes usually have the man at the center, often sitting at the kitchen table or on the living room couch, with his spouse catering to him. See for example: Alena Wagnerová, Žena za socialismu. Československo 1945–1974 a reflexe vývoje před rokem 1989 a po něm (Praha: Slon, 2017); Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). One should keep in mind that the new laws on family were drafted by the pre-war Women’s National Council and the postwar Czechoslovak Women’s Council, especially by JUDr. Milada Horáková. Vodrážka, Rozumí české ženy vlastní h_storii?. Milada Horáková, “Jak jsem se stala feministkou?,” Ženská rada 16, no. 2 (1940): 31. Cf. Karel Kaplan, Největší politický process. “M. Horáková a spol” (Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 1995). The show trial involved petition campaigns, led mostly by women, demanding the death penalty for Horáková. Two other women politicians, Fráňa Zeminová and Marie Kleinerová, were also convicted as part of the same trial. Marci Shore, “Narrative/Archive/Trace: The Trial of Milada Horáková,” Jedním Okem/One Eye Open, special issue 1: Gender and Historical Memory, eds. Eva Kalivodová, Marci Shore, and Jacqui True (1998): 11–26. Mirek Vodrážka applies this term in reference to Jan Patočka and his interpretation of Aristotle and Plato; cf. Jan Patočka, Aristoteles, jeho předchůdci a dědicové. Studie z dějin filosofie od Aristotela k Hegelovi (Praha: ČSAV, 1964). The term “expropriation” when referring to this kind of takeover and erasure is used by contemporary researchers to focus mainly on the social analysis of the positive impact of socialism on women’s lives, regardless of issues pertaining to philosophy and memory, psychology and ethics that necessarily come into play when we deal with art and women artists. Jacqui True examines women’s issues in social and economic structures in a work cited in the aforementioned Alice Červinková’s study “Emancipace bez feminismu?,” 59. Jacqui True, Gender, Globalization and Postcolonialism: The Czech Republic after Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Cf. Musilová, Na okraj jedné návštěvy. In 1960, Sešity pro literaturu a diskusi published a poll called “Žena jako autorka” [Woman as an Author] that generated fairly controversial reactions among the responding Czech female writers and poets. The poet and translator Jiřina Hauková was one of the few authors not to be offended by the term “woman-author” and, instead, used it to reflect on the possible femininity in creative work. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Hauková had translated works by major authors, including Emily Dickinson, Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Plath, as well as Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and Herman Melville. She was better equipped to view the differences between male and female writing not as a determined quality but as a matter

188  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová of personal possibilities, different experiences, and a responsibility for the “creative” act of both biological and symbolic birth: Although there is only “good poetry,” I believe that up until recently, women’s poetry was different from men’s poetry and it will likely always be different. It had to fight mainly to achieve its own emotional independence and free expression of love. One of the few other replies that was not just skeptical came from Věra Stiborová who poignantly quipped about the 1960s woman: To be able to work, writers need to dedicate all of their time, all day, all night. What’s a poor woman supposed to do when she also has to prepare plum compote, make a hare stew, knit some baby pants, and also not let mankind die off?

24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36

See “Anketa Žena jako autorka,” Sešity pro literatura a diskusi 32 (1960): 27–31. In Czech: Simone de Beauvoirová, Druhé pohlaví, trans. Josef Kostohryz and Hana Uhlířová, preface and afterword by Jan Patočka (Praha: Orbis, 1966). The Association of Czechoslovak Writers had its offices in Dobříš. Musilová, Na okraj jedné návštěvy, 22. Ivan Sviták, “Páté přes Deváté,” Literární noviny 47 (1963): 6–7. The cover of this issue showed Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir upon their arrival in Prague. A documentary film was made about their visit. The interview was not the result of a single session; it was made in several installments during Sartre and de Beauvoir’s visit. De Beauvoir ended the trip before Sartre and so her interview remained a fragment of what had been originally planned. By the mid-1960s, de Beauvoir’s only book published in Czech was Le Sang des autres (1945) [The Blood of Others, 1948]. In Czech: Krev těch druhých, trans. Antonín Bartůšek (Praha: Máj, 1947). In Czech Simone de Beauvoir, Velice lehká smrt, trans. Eva Pilařová (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1967); Mandaríni, trans. Eva Musilová (Praha: Odeon, 1967); Simone de Beauvoir, Paměti spořádané dívky, trans. A. J. Liehm (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1969). Musilová, Na okraj jedné návštěvy, 28. Literární noviny (1967), no. 9: 1 and 6; no. 12: 3; no. 18: 7. Consolidation relied on the document Poučení z krizového vývoje from 1970, passed by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, http://web. quick.cz/pr/history/pouceni.htm, accessed July 9, 2019. Vodrážka, Rozumí české ženy vlastní h_storii?, 30. For the question whether women were/are human beings, see e.g. Gisela Bock, Women in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); and Catharine McKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). “Slovo má Ester Krumbachová,” Sešity pro literaturu a diskusi 24 (1969): 59. Ibid., 59–60. Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952) was a prominent Czech communist politician in the postwar period, arrested in 1951 on a wave of purges within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, tried in a show trial, accused of treason, and executed on December 3, 1952. This text is a reworked version of our original paper “Esteřiny vraždy: Zabíjení filmovosti a zrod acinematičnosti,” Iluminace 30, no. 1 (2018): 29–44.

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190  Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová shows that Linhartová did not consider these celebrations as relevant because of her experience with women-centered anniversaries and holidays, such as the International Women’s Day, which she viewed as pointless and insignificant for her as an artist. As for women’s style, Linhartová was skeptical: Back to my personal experience . . . I think that I can tackle questions that turn up at a purely grammatical level. Should the “speaking I” that represents me in a dialogue be expressed in the feminine or the masculine gender? The masculine gender comes up first, relative to the effort made by the narrator to fill up the empty space for an encounter with the reader, a partner in dialogue. To speak in the masculine gender implies a more neutral, general reference, while the feminine gender suggests a unique expression, always referring the reader back to a single, specific individual, the author. Věra Linhartová, “Žena a rukopis,” in Soustředné kruhy. Články a studie z let 1962–2002 (Praha: Torst, 2010), 313–15. 48 Unless stated otherwise, the text refers to the film, not any of its other forms. 49 Visually, this moment is intensified by leather-bound books on the shelves of the “adorable kitchen” (as described in the literary screenplay), with the names of spices suggesting an old pharmacy or an alchemy workshop. 50 A tragicomic allegory about demagogic power mechanisms that degrade human dignity or destroy anybody who refuses to submit to them. 51 Liehm, “Ester Krumbachová,” 296–97. 52 A conversation with a card reader is described in the short story as follows: Have you even considered my prophecy? Have you considered the bag of raisins standing by the bad card? – – Raisins, raisins..... – I whispered, feeling dazed. I opened my bag and rubbed a little cologne on my temples – – – – – that cooling, exquisite cologne scented with sour apple...... and my mind flashed back to the ugly scene in my kitchen – suddenly I got up, my necklace rattled like a venomous snake and I shouted: – Raisins! Yes! Excellent! They’ll make a great bait! – I kissed the stunned card reader, put on my fur coat and ran out into the freezing night. . . Ester Krumbachová, “Vražda Ing. Čerta,” Plamen 10, no. 111 (November 1968): 97. It should be noted that Krumbachová always uses the form “hrozinky” for raisins, as opposed to “rozinky”—the former variant has a much more powerful associative potential. 53 Vladimír Svatoň, “Román a mýty nového věku: Tři variace faustovského mýtu,” in Na cestě evropským literárním polem. Studie z komparatistiky (Praha: FF UK, 2017), 191. 54 Ibid., 191. 55 In a skewed form, the Falstaffian myth appears in The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun, another remarkable film made by Věra Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová. The film’s Falstaff is an ageing, gluttonous Faun. The film captures the way his gluttony and lewdness drive him to his death, which is symbolized by a woman. Falstaff gets completely lost in her, which is accompanied by a complete erasure of physicality. 56 Bernard, Jan Němec, 508. 57 A connection between The Murder of Mr. Devil, fairy tales, and myths has also been made—though from a different perspective—by Stanislava

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Přádná. See Stanislava Přádná, “Dáma s čertem,” Kino-ikon 16, no. 2 (2012): 119–26. Novelist Božena Němcová (1820–1862) occupies a peculiar spot in Czech literary tradition. She is viewed as the mother of Czech novel (according to, among others, Milan Kundera), and as the starting point of women’s emancipation in the region. She also became somewhat of a wartime patron saint, often addressed as “Our Lady,” and she has been the frequent target of travesty and persiflage, especially her most famous work Babička (1855) [The Grandmother]. (In 2018, the main protagonist of the novel was used as a national symbol). See Wilma A. Iggers, Women of Prague: Ethnic Diversity and Social Change from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995); Božena Němcová, Die Großmutter. Eine Erzählung aus dem alten Böhmen, trans. Hanna and Peter Demetz (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Zurich: Manesee, 1995); Libuše Heczková, “Národní spisovatelka a její pohádka v čase normalizace. Poznámky k Pavlíčkovu scénáři k filmu Tři oříšky pro Popelku,” in Kultura a totalita I: Národ, eds. Ivan Klimeš and Jan Wiendl (Praha: FF UK, 2013), 395–406; Hana Šmahelová, Cesty folklórní pohádky k literatuře (České Budějovice: Krajské kulturní středisko, 1988); Jack Zipes, The Irresitibile Fairy Tale: Zhe Cultural and Socila History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). At the end of the literary screenplay, Krumbachová oversaturates the film image with golden color and even places She in a land of gold; yet in the film version, gold is more of a frame. Liehm, “Ester Krumbachová,” 297. Krumbachová’s book První knížka Ester also opens with a reflection of her relationship to the spoken word: “I often talk to myself and I often swear at myself out loud, which is something a lot of people who live alone do as well. But I don’t think I write that way too—after all, writing is a little more serious undertaking than a chitchat.” Ester Krumbachová, “Dopis pro Ester,” in První knížka Ester (Praha: Primus, 1994), 7. Krumbachová’s storytelling style resembles the writing style of the famous Czech author Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942). Krumbachová, “Vražda Ing. Čerta,” 90. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 96. Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 103– 57. In this text, Teresa de Lauretis explores two related lines of criticism of structuralism, that is, from the perspective of narratology and psychoanalysis. In her view, the Oedipal myth is a paradigm of all European narratives. De Lauretis approaches this structure from a different, feminist perspective and uncovers its non-universality, potential violence, and even sadism. In film, narrative violence holds women—all female protagonists— in a passive position, just as it establishes a passive space for women viewers. While male viewers can easily identify with the fiction world and its roles, for women there is a lot more ambivalence in accepting the fiction world, including one of its functions—to seduce women. Women become both the object and the prisoner of someone else’s desire that they are supposed to accept as their own. The issue of sadism in film narrative that was first discussed by Laura Mulvey (cited by de Lauretis in her text) involves mainly symbolic violence against women (protagonists and viewers) who cannot step out from this arrangement and become an active subject in the narrative. For more on the relationship between orality and narrativity in

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Czech context, see Jan Matonoha, Psaní vně logocentrimu (diskurz, Gender, text) (Praha: Academia, 2009). This text is based on the theories of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Sigrid Weigel. For example, in her text “Případ Chytilová a Krumbachová,” Petra Hanáková examines the disruption in the traditional representation of women in film, which takes place in the breakdown of “male” Oedipal narrative in Daisies and The Murder of Mr. Devil: “Female desire and pleasure are inscribed in both films—they can be found in narrative fissures, breaks, and gaps, in the disobedience of protagonists with respect to Oedipal orders that come from the world defined by prescribed narrative conventions.” Petra Hanáková, “Případ Chytilová a Krumbachová,” in Volání rodu, 211. De Lauretis focuses on two texts not related to psychoanalysis, namely Propp’s study “Oedipus in the Light of Folklore” and Lotman’s analysis “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology” that, though written many years apart, share some similarities. Propp’s dialectic, literary-historical “formalism” does not approach the subject matter as “rigidly” as Lotman’s later semiotic text that follows the Oedipal story synchronously like structure movement. See Vladimír Jakovlevič Propp, “Oidipus ve světle folklore,” in Morfologie pohádky a jiné studie (Jinočany: H&H, 1999), 235–70; Jurij Lotman and Julian Groffry, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 161–84. De Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” 118–19. Ester Krumbachová and Jan Němec, Vražda Ing. Čerta: Literární scénář (Praha: Filmové studio Barrandov, 1969). We have discussed the term ostranenie, its revisions, and uses in greater detail in our text “Sentimentální cesta,” in Kultura a totalita III: Revoluce, eds. Ivan Klimeš and Jan Wiendl (Praha: FF UK, 2015), 183–200. On the connections between tableaux vivants and film narrative, see for example Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 121–48; Ágnes Pethö, “The Tableau Vivant as a ‘Figure of Return’ in Contemporary East European Cinema,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies 9 (2014): 51–77. One review complained about this specific approach, judging it, paradoxically, as an indication of the film’s literariness: The film . . . remains firmly rooted in the literary domain, in the sense that most of the qualities that make it good are also “literary.” The author has not managed to elevate the story into a cinematic shape. . . . It feels like we are watching a series of prettily arranged tableaux vivants rather than a comedy. Mladá fronta (October 8, 1970).

73 In an interview with Anička Fajferová, Krumbachová points out that watching background actors in good films is a good way to see that every character and every gesture carry a creative function. Galina Kopaněva, “Jasnozřivý ‘filmmaker,’ inspirátorka režisérů a životadárná osobnost Ester Krumbachová,” in Ester Krumbachová—mučednice filmové lásky, ed. Pavel Doucek (Hradec Králove: Filmový klub Hradec Králové, 1996), 52. 74 According to Steven Jacobs, tableaux vivants can be interpreted as moments that capture the suppressed memory of film, the perfect surface of a traditional narrative traps the pre-modern image origin of cinema that was suppressed by the objective, unbiased technology for audiovisual reproduction. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 101.

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Part IV

Aesthetic Representations of Gendered Generations in Communism and Beyond

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group

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10 Girls from the Polish Youth Union (Dis)remembrance of the Generation1 Agnieszka Mrozik “Generations,” or How to Narrate Them In recent years, the concept of “generation” has experienced a veritable renaissance in the humanities and social sciences. It proves useful in diagnosing contemporary consumer styles, career models, economic migrations, but also in “ordering history,” because more so than most other categories, it imbues history with an anthropological dimension. Nothing, after all, materializes history like the life and death of those who created it. 2 Perhaps it is also for this reason that researchers of more contemporary history, including of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, apply “generation” so keenly as a category providing the frameworks for the narrative and a tool for systematizing the collected materials (that is, personal documents, interviews with living “witnesses to history”). Most researchers are particularly interested in the “last generation” of socialism, which is usually also the first generation of the transition, but also, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the “first generation” of the post-World War II builders of state socialism. Depending on the approach, as well as the context and the socio-politico-cultural determinants, these “generations” are ascribed various attributes and made the carriers of various values.3 From the perspective of a researcher who examines how generational narratives, especially those about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism, function within the public discourse, the real problem turns out to be the still underdeveloped theoretical reflection on “generation” as an analytical category and a political tool. Narrowing down the scope of analysis exclusively to Poland, or more precisely speaking, to the state of research on the more recent history of Poland, we have to notice the absence of works employing the category of “generation” in a critical manner, one which would problematize the material and the position of the researcher.4 Anticommunism, which sets the frameworks of contemporary Polish public discourse, 5 creates the conditions for celebrating “generations of rebellion,” for anointing members of the political and cultural opposition in the Polish People’s Republic as heroes of the collective imagination,6 with the simultaneous depreciation of interwar

198  Agnieszka Mrozik activists of the radical left and of the builders of state socialism.7 Within the same frameworks, there is a consolidating belief that the only true revolution that took place in Poland over the past decades was when “Solidarity” stood up to the socialist authorities,8 while what happened here after World War II—that is, the modernization of this peripheral country—was at best an “over-dreamed revolution” (to use the phrase coined by philosopher Andrzej Leder),9 and thus one which occurred without the conscious participation of Poles, one which was a consequence of the war and processes hastened by foreign domination—the disappearance of Jews (as a result of the Holocaust) and liquidation of the landed gentry (as a result of the agrarian reform and nationalization of the industry). Yet, “generations” also engender other methodological problems, which are not always adequately addressed. One of them is the difficulty, or perhaps even impossibility, of separating the researcher’s position from his or her status, in those cases where the two overlap. This comes through in the personal tone, often politically involved, in tendencies to evaluate, judge, and use labels, which leads to the blurring of the boundary between scholarly analysis and private opinion. Another issue is the selection of sources and materials for analysis that can weigh in on which representatives of the given generation we get to know, and which we do not. For example, in the book Młodzież PRL. Portrety pokoleń w kontekście historii (2010) [The Youth of the Polish People’s Republic: Portraits of Generations in Historical Context] by sociologist Hanna Świda-Ziemba (1930–2012), seminal from the perspective of this chapter, the “ZMP generation” (and the abbreviation comes from Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, that is, the Polish Youth Union) is only ever mentioned as “followers of the ideology”: blinded, powerless instruments of Stalinism, for whom the only redemption could be at first revisionist and then anticommunist opposition activism. The author, who underscores time and again that she was not a part of the “ZMP generation,” because she never belonged to the ZMP and thus could not learn its communication codes, has a clearly negative attitude toward this organization. In her typology of the “youth of People’s Poland,” the “generation of ZMP followers of the ideology” occupies a special place: from it, in opposition to it, in a gesture of severing all connections with it, emerge other “generations”—of “opposition of customs,” “revisionists,” of “small reform and great rebellion,” and of “agency and community bonds.”10 In introducing this generational periodization of the history of Polish People’s Republic, Świda-Ziemba employs the contemporary concepts of “agency,” “empowerment,” “freedom,” and “individualism,” taken from the dictionary of Western liberal democracy. With their aid, she not only judges and evaluates the described “generations” but also uses them as a measure of civilizational development of Poland. It goes without saying that the youth became more empowered and individualistic

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  199 as the end of state socialism approached. The author’s conclusions are based on testimonies of student youth. These testimonies come almost exclusively from the intelligentsia, some of whom became later members of the anticommunist opposition. Importantly, they are mainly men. The choice of her definition of a “generation,” that is “a community of world-views,” is not clear, either.11 It additionally comes with a number of reservations, albeit with no references to the extensive body of research on generations. This, coupled with the emotionally loaded language, makes it more appropriate to read the book by Świda-Ziemba as a personal and political one, written from the inside, and not distanced and external to the object of her research, as a scholarly work—in this case, an anthropological and sociological study of the generational history of Polish People’s Republic—should be. That said, let me start by clarifying that in this chapter I do not write the history of the ZMP.12 I am more interested in how the story of the “ZMP generation” and thus of the members of the first and, thus far, only Polish mass youth organization that existed between 1948 and 1957 is told, by whom, and for what purpose.13 I ask how this story changed over the period of a few decades, and whose voices are missing from it, and most importantly: I look at the “ZMP generation” from the perspective of women’s representations. I wonder what the (self-) representations of female ZMP members meant and continue to mean in the discussion on women’s emancipation or, more broadly speaking, on the place of women in the history of Poland over the last seventy years, including in the history told from a feminist perspective. The analyzed material comprises memoirs, interviews, movies, and TV series, especially contemporary ones (produced after the 1989 political change), but also some earlier ones, from the Polish People’s Republic.14 I bring up the latter in order to trace the development and evolution of the discussed phenomena—the narrative about ZMP and the representations of its members, women in particular. The authors of these texts are former ZMP members of both sexes, of whom many with time became involved in oppositional activity (some, like politician Jacek Kuroń (1934–2004), journalist and social activist Antoni Zambrowski (1934–2019), or historian, academic, and politician Karol Modzelewski (1937–2019), already in the 1960s; others, like writer and literary critic Jacek Trznadel (b. 1930), in the 1970s and 1980s). Others expressed their anticommunist stance not so much through political activity, but rather by means of academic or artistic endeavors before and/or after 1989 (e.g. writer Joanna Chmielewska (1932–2013), literary scholar and writer Michał Głowiński (b. 1934), painter and writer Roma Ligocka (b. 1938), film director and screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowski (b. 1938)). Yet, others exhibited an ambivalent attitude toward communism, combining their role as members of the elite in this system with its criticism (e.g. film and theatre director, recipient of an honorary Oscar Andrzej

200  Agnieszka Mrozik Wajda (1926–2016), journalist, writer, and politician Jerzy Urban (b. 1933), poet and writer Agnieszka Osiecka (1936–1997)), or criticism of the system with “faith” in socialism as an idea (e.g. journalist and writer Janina Bauman (1926–2009)). Some of the former ZMP members were of Polish-Jewish origin and the Holocaust survivors who years later explained that the wartime experiences influenced their decision to join ZMP (e.g. Bauman).15 But some of the authors discussed never belonged to ZMP—they were born too late to join this organization. This, however, did not stop them from criticizing ZMP as an embodiment of gloom, formulism, and authoritarianism (e.g. political activist Zofia Romaszewska (b. 1940), film directors Feliks Falk (b. 1941), Jerzy Domaradzki (b. 1943), and Wojciech Marczewski (b. 1944)). Most belonged, or still belong, to the intellectual-artistic-political elites of the postsocialist period, who shared a critical attitude toward the Polish People’s Republic. And all of them originated from the intelligentsia and/or had an intelligentsia habitus, which is of significance in the discussion on who represents this generation, who speaks on its behalf, and whose voice we do not hear. I distinguish three main narratives about ZMP in this chapter. The first, dominant one, paints an unequivocally negative picture of the organization and (especially) of the women active in it. This narrative is spun by men, intellectuals, for whom anticommunism is a significant component of their position and identity as members of the intellectual and political elites. The depiction they offer is not only sexist but also frequently classist: women, peasants, and workers, as the main beneficiaries of postwar politics, personify the world that has fallen out of its mold, a world upside down, which is a frequent metaphor for socialism (particularly in its Stalinist version). This is a relatively immutable narrative, re/produced since the times of the thaw of 1955–57, with periods of hiatus (the 1960s) and of escalation (the 1980s, 1990s, and present). The second narrative, present in the public discourse, but not as expansive as the first one, shares with it the generally critical evaluation of ZMP and of Stalinism, or, more broadly speaking, of the Polish People’s Republic, but it is much more toned down in its assessment of women’s activity in the organization and of their role in a socialist society. Its proponents—female representatives of the intelligentsia, members of intellectual and artistic elites after 1989—do not notice the emancipatory influence of socialism on women’s lives. This narrative is interesting in terms of the evolution it has undergone: in the 1960s we witnessed a heated debate on the meaning of involvement in ZMP and other political organizations for the identity of women and for the way in which they defined their own role within society. This debate was held by women writers, journalists, and scholars who, despite a critical view of Stalinism, noted the positive effects that socialism had on the situation of women and on their self-image as independent, self-sufficient, and

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  201 valuable. It was one of the very last moments in Poland that the socialist project of women’s emancipation was discussed seriously.16 And finally, the third narrative—silencing. It is characterized by the absence of the voices of peasants and workers of both sexes about their experience of membership in ZMP, and so of the upward mobility and emancipation that came with it. This voice began to die out already in the Polish People’s Republic: still heard in publications from the 1960s and 1970s, it started to fade in the 1980s, and after 1989 it died out altogether. Today, it is scholars and journalists who speak on behalf of the former ZMP activists from working and peasant classes, trying to explain their motivations and reasons in many different ways. A comparison of memoirs of female ZMP members from underprivileged classes, published in the Polish People’s Republic, with contemporary works, in which their voice is appropriated, accompanied with a litany of explanations and reservations, or, in short, is inscribed in the prevalent anticommunist frameworks, makes it possible to notice a change in thinking about the emancipation of women in socialism: from appreciating it as something material and noticeable in everyday life, albeit not always sufficient, to its complete invalidation and disregard.

ZMP Girls, or the World Turned Upside Down If life writing can be considered a confession about a life lived, then the tale about ZMP membership is located somewhere in this part where the confession of sins smoothly transitions into repentance and a willingness to make up for one’s wrongdoings. In the auto/biographies of representatives of Polish elites, many of whom had an oppositional episode in the Polish People’s Republic, remembrance of ZMP membership in the late 1940s and early 1950s is a stinging, shameful wound. And we are talking here not about some angry anticommunists, but about the elite which formulates quite balanced judgments about the People’s Republic of Poland. Former ZMP members appear to have a hazy recollection of their reasons joining the organization. Among those reasons they list the desire to escape the control of their parents (Głowiński), rebellion against the bourgeois lifestyle of adults (Urban), peer pressure (Trznadel), but also wanting to participate in the great historical endeavor of reconstructing the country from wartime destruction and building a new system based on equality and brotherhood (Modzelewski, Kuroń, Zambrowski). They have little to say about the positive undertakings of this organization such as cultural and education campaigns, fighting illiteracy, and the popularization of readerships. They consider them to have been a mere smokescreen and are much more keen on recalling the schematic, pointless activities, such as making school wall bulletins, parading banners at gatherings, participating in boring talks, and on disciplining or even violent activities such as peer tribunals for “insubordinate” members or

202  Agnieszka Mrozik repressions against “bikiniarze” [bikini boys] and “kociaki” [kittens]: boys and girls who dressed against regulations, not in green shirts and red ties, but in colorful socks, pants with rolled up legs or wide skirts, and blouses with boat-shaped necklines. They give the most coverage to what their lives looked like after the disbandment of ZMP in January 1957, when they supposedly began to lose their illusions concerning socialism and to rebel against the rituals in which they had partaken, against the emptiness and pointlessness of being involved in an organization that was in essence a facade, but a highly conformizing one. If they point to any positive aspects of belonging to ZMP after all these years, it is the lesson they learned for the future: one must be able to protect his/ her autonomy and his/her own voice in public life, even if it is at the risk of ostracism (e.g. an initially dramatic expulsion from ZMP with time rises to the status of a breakthrough moment (Kuroń)). In short, a lesson in non-conformism.17 What, then, were ZMP and the membership in this organization, if the recollections of them after so many years bring up the worst nightmares and unprocessed traumas, as we will see below? It follows from auto/biographies, interviews, movies, and TV series—interestingly, not only post-1989 ones but also those produced in the Polish People’s Republic—that ZMP was, first of all, one big ideological load of drivel, that is, its ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood were empty slogans without any relation to reality, in which there still existed those who were equal and those who were “more equal,” and, second and more importantly, it was a great “conformizing machine” that produced obedient masses. The texts brim with examples of situations in which the authors were mentally broken by the group or willingly succumbed to its rules or, worst of all, participated in witch hunts against others. In this sense, activity in ZMP, besides being unproductive, pointless, and/ or boring, was also harmful and socially dangerous. Thus, these authors tend to focus on reconstructing the process of “reaching the truth about ZMP” and regaining clarity when thinking about reality, rather than on describing the organization’s operations, unpleasant in their opinion. While making themselves look like those who relatively quickly recovered from the “disease” of belonging to ZMP and, with time, managed to atone for their sins through their oppositional activism, they ironically observe that not everyone was this quick to wake up. Some, in fact, felt so comfortable in ZMP structures that the disbandment of this organization was a true shock to them. Among those critically assessed ZMP members, women, but also rural and working youth, come to the fore. Yet, while this latter group is judged rather lightly, even patronizingly, treated as a blind tool in the hands of the authorities, who promised it social advancement in return for obedience,18 the former group—women—cannot count on such

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  203 leniency. The discussed texts brim with sexist comments that reiterate and consolidate the stereotypical image of women in the public space. What are ZMP women like, then? The first blow is about the way they look: female ZMP activists are described as ugly, unkempt, frowsy; moreover, in the name of the ideology, they want to impose this unfeminine style on other women. That is why they attack those women who wear make-up and dress in colorful and sexy outfits. Second, they are unlikable, overbearing, nosey: their hyper-activity in the organization, participation in ideological talks, at meetings, preparing wall bulletins are a sign of no social life. As they are sexually unattractive, they cannot hope for the interest of men, which is why they seek an avenue to direct their energy in zealous political activity, all the while bringing down their peers who would rather have fun. Some of them, nevertheless, nourish the hope that a youth organization is a good place to meet a suitable male partner. When this hope is frustrated, they take revenge. This is the example of Zoja, a ZMP activist from the TV series Dom (1980) [The House] by Jan Łomnicki (1929–2002). Rejected by Andrzej, who loves another woman, she forces him to publicly condemn his colleague who maintains contacts with family in the West. The ZMP women’s prudery, doused with Marxist theories on the unwavering morality of a communist, thus reeks of hypocrisy. In the movie Wielki bieg (1981) [The Big Run] by Jerzy Domaradzki, a principled ZMP girl quickly gives in to the seduction of a typical womanizer, who soon loses interest in her, instead choosing to dive into the more fascinating world of male friendship and competition. Going further, ZMP girls are at the forefront of “kiss-asses and confidantes,” people with no moral spine, but who are also not creative, content to perform activities that make no sense whatsoever, coupled with ideological manipulation and the destruction of “defiant spirits.” Finally, which in reality is the worst in the eyes of the authors, female ZMP activists have power. By heading various organization clubs, chairing peer tribunals, sitting on commissions that issue opinions for university candidates,19 they maintain good relations with the authorities, and use this to their advantage in both political and personal confrontations: JAROSŁAW MAREK RYMKIEWICZ [b. 1935]: In order for this memory to be clear, it has to be said that ZMP ruled at school. Not the principal and not the teachers; the ZMP management always had the final say. What did these girls in green shirts want? They were mostly girls, not many boys. . . . They were always running from one conference with the principal to another. . . . [T]hey were ugly girls, the ones from ZMP. The ones in the school management were pitifully ugly, poor things. The pretty ones didn’t go for this, they needed none of it, while the ugly ones didn’t go to parties, didn’t

204  Agnieszka Mrozik dance. I went to a lot of house parties, kissed girls secretly, but not the girls in green shirts. 20 Two girls in calico dresses came to me, to the ZMP school management. They were pale, ugly, with bags under eyes filled with despair. 21 First sex with a certain activist in bushes during camp. 22 [T]his group comprised of many ideologically zealous female colleagues, whom nature usually short-changed when it came to looks. It was then that the type of party-ZMP hag emerged. 23 One of the super-activists, and they were worse than the guys, more fanatical, mostly unprepossessing, so they probably compensated for their complexes with tremendous zeal, one of them called their closest friends and said: we have to put an end to bourgeois coquetry, we’re not wearing make-up anymore. I heard that these girls started yelling: “no, we won’t stop wearing make-up!” and they shouted her down. This zealous ZMP girl or party activist had to step down, because the resistance was strong and unrelenting. 24 In memoirs, and even more so in movies and TV series, female ZMP activists were a part of quite a large group of women to whom the Communist Party, bandying about the slogan of emancipation, gave power. This group included officials, teachers, directors of public institutions, politicians, but also pupils and students. Women held power in horizontal relations (in peer groups) and in vertical ones, also when they theoretically stood on a lower rung in the hierarchy (as students or pupils of their teachers), inspiring fear and aversion. For example, in Andrzej Wajda’s last movie Powidoki (2016) [Afterimage], shot shortly before his death, there is a scene in which the lecture of an outstanding artist, avant-garde painter Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952) at the Łódź State Academy of Fine Arts, is brutally interrupted by a female ZMP activist, who screams at the students to quickly make the room ready for the arrival of a party dignitary. In the same movie, a heartless female official from the Association of Polish Artists and Designers strips Strzemiński of his membership card, thus depriving him of food stamps. In the 1981 movie Był jazz [And All That Was Jazz] by Feliks Falk, a dogmatic ZMP girl reports her colleague who plays jazz, a genre of music looked down upon in the ZMP and university circles. The report results in the boy being stripped of his student’s rights. A similar situation happens to the teenage main character of the 1995 movie Cwał [In Full Gallop] by Krzysztof Zanussi (b. 1939), who is threatened with expulsion from school after failing to keep a straight face at an honor guard held after the passing of Comrade Stalin. Here the punishing hand of the authorities is represented by a young female principal, a member of ZMP, whose looks (blond hair) and demeanor (sadistic) are reminiscent of a Nazi, a labor camp overseer.

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  205 The boorishness and crudeness of ZMP women, signaled by their looks (rough facial features, heavy-set bodies), but especially by their behavior (their loud, coarse manner of speaking), in these movies and TV series embody the violent, “primitive” character of the new authorities, who have no respect for individualism and freedom of artistic expression, who are indifferent to great art and contemptuous of artists, uniformizing and conformizing. Sometimes, although rarely, ZMP women are depicted as seductresses: usually older and experienced, who tempt young boys, thus personifying the other, insidious face of socialist authorities. (For example, in Wojciech Marczewski’s 1981 movie Dreszcze [Shivers] an older female ZMP member takes a teenage boy from a pioneer camp under her wings. She alternatingly inspires son-like devotion and erotic fascination in him.) In this way, they are even more dangerous than simpletons and country bumpkins, because by seducing delicately and slowly, they create stronger attachment and instill obedience with more success. Interestingly, historical sources do not confirm this image of the ubiquity of women in ZMP structures and especially in the organization’s leadership. Marek Wierzbicki, the author of the most exhaustive work about ZMP to date, writes that even though women’s membership in this organization was constantly increasing—in 1950 it was 31.5 percent, and by 1954–57 their share reached ca. 43 percent—their percentage in leadership positions was much lower. Despite the intensive campaigns promoting the presence of women in decision-making bodies, in 1950 girls accounted for only 23.3 percent of cell management and for 34.7 percent of the workplace, school, commune, and “team” organization management.25 Thus, just like the Soviet youth organization Komsomol, 26 after which ZMP was in fact fashioned, the Polish organization was highly masculinized, which is often confirmed by the discussed texts of culture. Memoirs, movies, and TV series both from state-socialist and postsocialist periods bring up pictures of male communities, boys’ groups linked by bonds of fraternity, known also from the earlier history of Poland. Girls transgress into this space like aliens, inspiring hostility, externalized immediately (as outsiders, they become the object of boys’ mockery), or suppressed and revealed after many years (when they return as a reminiscence of the Stalinist authorities, of breaking moral spines). It can be said that this temporal distance blurs reality: that is, the actual low share of girls in ZMP leading positions, demonstrated in scholarly works, exposes the narratives indicated earlier as imaginations, fantasies of the omnipotence of women, which feed on male fears and stoke them. 27 The tale about ZMP women—alternately grotesque and scary—is full of misogynistic images: the male gaze is either violent or erotic; it situates women in the role of objects of heterosexual desire, which determines their attractiveness or lack thereof, because, after all, this is the

206  Agnieszka Mrozik only role in which they can function in the world. But it is also a strongly anticommunist tale. Socialism, especially of the Stalinist variety, is presented as a world turned upside down: a world in which the natural gender and class order has been disturbed by the incursion into the public space of those who should not be there, a world ruled by women and boors who embody its abnormality and dysfunctionality.28 I would describe this tale as therapeutic: by producing it, the authors undertake the effort of working through their male, intelligentsia trauma caused by the symbolic castration that Stalinism performed on this group. It is individual therapy, but also, judging by the spate of texts in this convention, a collective one. This is not a new approach to women’s emancipation under socialism. Similar efforts were made in the past, starting from the times of the thaw. The history of Polish misogyny, classism, and anticommunism includes, for example, descriptions of “hermaphrodite masons,” as Leopold Tyrmand (1920–1985) referred to them on the pages of his Dziennik 1954 [Diary 1954], published in installments in Tygodnik Powszechny [The Catholic Weekly] in 1956, or of female workers of Nowa Huta, whose mass-scale abortions were trumpeted by Adam Ważyk (1905–1982), author of Poemat dla dorosłych (1955) [A Poem for Adults], the most well-known Polish work of the thaw period.29 But it was not until the times of the transition that it picked up the pace and developed without any restraint. It is worth noting that the thaw and the disbandment of ZMP, whose very last chairperson was a woman from a working-class family, Helena Jaworska (1922–2006), function in this tale as the moment of restoration of the “natural” order, especially the gender order: women no longer hold high positions, they lose power.30 Male editors of the student magazine Po prostu [In Plain Words], a press organ of the thaw youth, recalled that in the wake of de-Stalinization their bosses were no longer “Party hags,” and that many easy-going girls appeared at the office: they were smart and, above all, pretty.31 The magazine itself, which had become a “hotbed of rebellion” and for this reason was closed by the authorities in mid-1957, announced a contest for “the prettiest female student smile” in April 1955, and began to print casual, somewhat playful photos of young women and acts. “Pretty girls,” who are the counter-balance to the monstrous ZMP women, function in this tale as a sign of normalization of gender relations. When they appear, the symbolic castration of intelligentsia males is no longer as acute. The dissolution of ZMP is also a symbol of Poland’s shift to a new, less humiliating position in its relations with the Soviet Union, a portent of the upcoming end of its submissive standing in international relations. No wonder, then, that the thaw and later October 1956, when power was taken over by Władysław Gomułka, the new First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  207 Workers’ Party, are indicated in these texts as a true moment of generational initiation. These are experiences around which the former male ZMP members wish to build their identity, which they want to remember and recall with pride.

Modern Girls, or the Disappearing Emancipation When we take a closer look at memoirs authored by intelligentsia women, we will notice that the story of their ZMP membership takes up a lot less space than in the memoirs of men from their social stratum; it also inspires less intense emotions. The general assessment of ZMP membership is critical: “I sank low for a career once, to wit: I joined ZMP. I needed ZMP like a hole in the head, but luckily I got thrown out of it later,”32 so Joanna Chmielewska summarizes in the first volume of her autobiography. Women share this criticism with men, but they motivate it somewhat differently, accentuating the psychological and aesthetic dimensions more than the political one. They present ZMP primarily as a boring, formulaic organization that inhibited individual expression. Female authors recall the unending processions and community actions in which they participated out of duty rather than out of conviction. “At four o’clock there was some really boring general meeting of ZMP, at which Jadzia R. and I gossiped about flirting and dances”; “I’m tired. In the morning I attended a horrible ZMP meeting, which bored me out of my head,”33 Agnieszka Osiecka notes in her diary. They also recall peer trials and forced self-criticism: “At yesterday’s ZMP meeting Eliza, Krysia and I, as well as Jola a little bit, got ‘flagellated’ as ‘false geniuses’; I was called ‘a bad influence’ and a liar for talking about how ‘I don’t study,’”34 Osiecka writes. Only seldom do they mention ZMP as an organization that offered opportunities for meaningful activities: “I decided to join the Polish Youth Union at university—I was sick of standing to the side, I wanted to do something, belong somewhere. I accepted the function of movie reviewer at the ZMP university newspaper with enthusiasm,”35 Janina Bauman explains in her autobiography. They also describe their motivations for joining ZMP in aesthetic and psychological categories. They recall hopes for being treated seriously as grown-ups by those around them, and especially by their mothers. In their memories, the ZMP uniform becomes a symbol of being an adult: a green shirt and red tie, worn with pride, against the will of the mothers and in tribute to the female teachers and principals: young, active representatives of the new order. Unlike in the texts penned by men, here the female officials of the socialist state have nothing to do with grim castrators; instead, they are beautiful and fascinating: I remember how everyone was joining ZMP, so I wanted to join too. When I was in seventh grade and my breasts started growing,

208  Agnieszka Mrozik I thought of myself as very mature. And anyone who wore a red tie looked so much more adult. I remember how I came home and said that the principal signed up all of seventh grade to ZMP. The only thing I really wanted to have, and what was supposed to show I was not in primary school but in high school, was the khaki shirt and the red tie. My daddy bought them secretly for me, but mom got really angry and she cut the attributes of my adulthood with scissors. I was so woeful at the time and I didn’t understand any of it.36 The meeting is chaired by a pretty blond girl. She speaks in a strong, beautiful, resonant voice. I immediately take a liking to her. She is wearing a fashionable green blazer; her eyes are also green, and they glisten. The other one is a bit younger and she looks emaciated. She is wearing an olive-green shirt and a red kerchief around her neck. I know this is the Polish Youth Union uniform. . . . Now I’m eleven years old and Irena Ratan, our new principal, is a role model to me. . . . I am impressed with her powerful speeches and fashionable, well-tailored clothes.37 Yet being an adult, which comes with ZMP membership, is not only the distinctive uniform, but above all the opportunity to speak up, to appear in public, to do their part. The female authors devote a lot of space to these issues, but they do not reflect deeper on the message behind them; that is, they do not problematize the fact that strengthening the presence of women in public, a visible sign of which was the opportunity to speak freely to large audiences, was one of the core items on the socialist agenda: I joined the girl scouts now. I have braids, a white shirt, a navy-blue skirt with plaits, white knee highs and a red kerchief around my neck. I am proud. I am one of three chosen children who march in the first row during ceremonies and meetings. I have a drum, another girl has a trumpet, and the third one carries the banner. . . . I pound on my drum with fiery zeal. For a new order of the world!38 [T]he ZMP cell management decided that we should have a wall bulletin and assigned me the permanent function of editor-in-chief. I liked that very much.39 Presence in the public space, holding responsible functions, being able to speak up with no obstacles—these visible elements of women’s emancipation are noted in the memoirs, but without any comments. The authors, who ritually bemoan how ZMP restricted individual freedom, pass over in silence the fact that as women they acquired the possibility to escape the traditional roles of daughters, wives, and mothers, and to become people, full-fledged citizens of the state, without looking for men’s permission. As members of the intelligentsia class and beneficiaries

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  209 of interwar emancipation of women, they do not notice, nor appreciate, what their peers, female ZMP activists from the working and peasant classes observe with enthusiasm. The ZMP women from the intelligentsia are clearly convinced that they are naturally entitled to equal rights, regarding these rights as something obvious. The emancipatory dimension of ZMP membership is thus pushed into the background in their memoirs and becomes invalidated in the face of a shared fate of the intelligentsia—equally bleak for both women and men.40 Nonetheless, belonging to ZMP, and later the thaw and dissolution of the organization, do not have the same meaning for intelligentsia women and men. The women authors do not assign these events an extraordinary status; they do not see them as a generational experience of identity-forming significance. For them the thaw was simply the time when it was finally admissible to wear more colorful clothes, listen to jazz, dance, and thus reject the ZMP monotony. The thaw was a time for a re-assessment of their recent enthusiasm for the green shirts and red ties as symbols of being an adult; also femininity (and masculinity) of the ZMP variety seemed a lot less attractive from the perspective of the thaw. In her autobiographical novel Dziewczynka w czerwonym płaszczyku (2001) [The Girl in the Red Coat], Roma Ligocka writes: From time to time Barbara and I buy a colorful skirt or shoes and fashionable jewelry on the black market. We spend hours in front of the mirror along with other girls. . . . I’m using black drawing ink to change my cheap sneakers into ballerinas, and I’m sewing skirts out of colorful curtain fabric. This is the synonym of the West to us.41 But not much more than that. The female intelligentsia tale of ZMP and of the thaw is surprisingly calm: we rarely see anger, shame, mockery, or sentimental tones, so frequent in the men’s narratives. There are, instead, a lot of jokes, sometimes irony that indicates distance toward the events from many years ago. Yet, an analysis of women’s memoirs written over a few decades also indicates that the dynamics of emotions in texts written by women and by men are different: in the former, the temporal and emotional distance go hand in hand, while in the latter, negative opinions about membership in ZMP and the idealization of the thaw intensify with the passage of time. If we compare the diaries of Agnieszka Osiecka, written from 1945,42 with her autobiography Szpetni czterdziestoletni (1985) [Ugly Forty-Year-Olds], we will notice that the ironically frivolous approach to Stalinism and to the thaw earthquake came to her with time and looked nothing like the serious considerations she had put down in the heat of the moment. In the mid-1980s, a mature Osiecka neither disowned nor condemned her ZMP past. With a grain of salt, she recalled the way that “youth activists” had carried themselves,43 first sex during

210  Agnieszka Mrozik delegations to fight illiteracy,44 the boredom of meetings and even expulsion from ZMP, traumatic at the time. The years spent in the organization (1949–53) were the years of her and her female friends’ coming of age, but she wrote about this without pathos or sentimentality: “I started university, Stalinism rolled over me, and then slowly, very slowly, I got into the first recitations of Gałczyński’s poems, and the girls, even the most puritan of activists, started to notice that they had breasts.”45 Such an approach toward Stalinism and the thaw was untypical for Poland of the 1980s, wrought with political and social conflicts: lighthearted and amusing, unlike, for example the (self-)critical collection of Jacek Trznadel’s interviews with intellectuals Hańba domowa (1986) [Domestic Disgrace]. Such was Osiecka’s attitude also toward “women’s issues”: there was no stigmatization of principled ZMP girls, but there were also no lofty words about women’s emancipation. This is just one example showing the change that took place in this author’s narrative over a few decades. Her diaries written in the Stalinist period, youthfully serious, at times soaring with pathos, full of musings on “grand matters,” indicated that she saw political involvement as an opportunity for women to gain agency. While at ZMP, she built her identity as a girl immersed in current matters, appreciative of both fun and studies, athletic, sociable, empathetic to the plight of the weak, willing to help. To Osiecka being a modern young woman did not mean hanging off a male shoulder; it was based on the belief in her own worth, which was a necessary foundation for developing relations with other people, men included. Importantly, and this is so unfathomable today that it required a commentary from the editor who translated Osiecka’s “communist newspeak” into contemporary Polish—this modern femininity clearly shaped in association with socialism and its promise of equality.46 Osiecka—who became less and less enthusiastic with time toward her own youthful fascination with ZMP, which was revealed in the subsequent volumes of her diaries—wrote her notes at a time when probably the last serious discussion about the socialist project of emancipation and its consequences for women’s lives was taking place. After the thaw criticism of “errors and distortions,” in the 1960s there was a possibility to reflect on the accomplishments of Stalinism and its influence on the situation of various social groups. Female representatives of the intelligentsia—writers, journalists, and scholars—keenly joined this discussion, taking up reflections on, among others, women’s membership in ZMP. Remaining just on the level of literary fiction, inspired by the authors’ personal experiences, we may notice that besides voices unambiguously distanced toward ZMP’s monotony, gloom, and hypocrisy, there were also voices that combined criticism of ZMP’s practices with a generally positive evaluation of the influence that belonging to this organization exerted on young women’s self-awareness.47 In 1960s novels,

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  211 such as Zawsze jakieś jutro (1965) [There’s Always Tomorrow] by Janina Wieczerska (b. 1931), and especially in Słoneczniki (1962) [Sunflowers] and Paladyni (1964) [Paladins] by Halina Snopkiewicz (1934–1980), girls did not join ZMP automatically, but after long consideration, against the resistance of their surroundings and upon overcoming their own prejudices against this organization, inspired by anticommunism, which was very strong after the war. Once they joined, however, it was with firmness and ardor: “So I had a choice—to be for or against it. I can stand to the side and passively wait who knows for what. The concept of an uninvolved youth is unacceptable and objectively disgusting to me,”48 confessed Snopkiewicz’s teenage female protagonist. With time, once exultation passed, the characters of these books began to question ZMP’s methods such as peer tribunals, witch hunts against all who thought differently, and disciplining the defiant ones. They became frustrated by the dogmatism and adherence to principles of the organization, especially by the double standards in judging the morality of men and women, and the controlling of female sexuality. Yet, it was within ZMP where they built their femininity based on the ideals of rationality, self-sufficiency, curiosity of the world, and completeness without a man. In Wieczerska’s novel, the female protagonist explains her credo to the boy she was in love with: Because I, as you know, am a rationalist, a devotee to logic and common sense, so of course I wish for the world of emotions to be ordered as well. . . . actions are important not only to men. I would really wish for the “fatherland not to mess up.” That’s what we said at the camp last year. And as a rationalist, I know that good laws are . . . are a lot.49 A similar view on femininity can be found in 1962 Snopkiewicz’s novel, in which the heroine announces: “The most endearing thing is that male colleagues from the course don’t see us as women, but rather as activists. I am delighted.”50 Thus, in post-thaw literature for girls, settling accounts with ZMP was tantamount to settling accounts with the ideals of youth, with the values of the generation, but also with a given vision of femininity, actively promoted after the war as part of the socialist emancipatory agenda. This settlement was not easy, its balance was not always positive, but by doing it, ZMP intelligentsia girls did not avoid what in later decades they passed over in silence: the significance of belonging to a youth organization for woman’s identity, self-knowledge, and a role in society. “I have never believed in anything as deeply and fervently as I believed in ZMP, and that’s it. Not even in you,”51 Snopkiewicz’s protagonist told her lover after she was removed from the university unit of the ZMP.

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Working Class and Rural Youth, or about Them without Them The picture of the “ZMP generation” is nowadays primarily constructed by mainstream scholars and authors with an intelligentsia background. It is their voice that is heard, and their perspective is deemed the legitimate one. We cannot hear the voice of former ZMP members from peasant and working classes other than via the intellectuals: journalists, scholars, and writers. Reportage, biographical, historical, and anthropological publications from recent years52 often offer an orientalizing perspective on them53; they show them as peculiar specimens, relics of the past, whose story has to be given a proper spin before it is presented to the contemporary reader. The authors of these publications explain the decisions, reasons, and motivations of their protagonists with a more or less patronizing attitude, making them legible only to the extent to which they can be placed in the contemporary anticommunist discourse on the Polish People’s Republic. What, then, do the intelligentsia narratives about ZMP youth from the peasant and working classes look like? In the construction of the protagonists’ life stories, the emphasis is not on emancipation, or on upward social mobility in the Polish People’s Republic, which are only visible once poor childhood in the interwar or wartime period is juxtaposed with the opportunities that opened up after the end of World War II as a result of access to high-school and university level education, stable employment, improved residential conditions. The emphasis is instead on the disillusionment with the pathologies of Stalinism and of ZMP itself. The protagonists are depicted as lone titans who took up the battle against the system as rebels and individualists. This applies mainly to those whom we know that with time became important figures of the anticommunist opposition such as Anna Walentynowicz (1929–2010), gantry crane operator from the Gdańsk Shipyard, ZMP member in the 1950s (nicknamed “Anna the Proletarian”), who in the 1980s was one of the icons of “Solidarity.” Her biographer, historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz, emphasizes that she was active in ZMP against its apathy and calcified structures, but quickly came to the conclusion that she was involved with a despotic organization that employed “Bolshevik discipline”54 and gave up her membership. Sometimes former ZMP activists are presented as derailed people, deeply unhappy, who paid for the communist “brainwashing” with an unsuccessful professional and family life (Piotr Nesterowicz, journalist and writer, mentions the alcohol problems of former ZMP members, their divorces, and disappointment with social activism).55 In this tale, the communist authorities are invariably depicted as the enemy that makes things more difficult rather than easier for individuals, an enemy that wants to break their will, and thus must be resisted. And thus the “generation of ZMP” or at least

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  213 some of its representatives deserve admiration and respect as the heroes of grassroots anticommunist opposition (Cenckiewicz), but also the sympathy due to their participation in a failed experiment that was socialism (especially in its Stalinist variety), whose construction cost them their health and lives (Nesterowicz). This narrative has a much longer tradition, one that can be traced back to the Polish People’s Republic and Andrzej Wajda’s famous movie Człowiek z marmuru (1976) [Man of Marble]. Its main character, young female film director Agnieszka is shooting a diploma documentary about Mateusz Birkut, a ZMP member and a builder of Nowa Huta, who had been chewed up and spat out by Stalinism. As a result of an accident at the construction site, he lost his status as a shock worker, and by defending a colleague who was unjustly accused of sabotage, he destroyed his career: he fell out of favor with the authorities, his family life crumbled to pieces. The story of Birkut, yet without the voice of Birkut, framed by other people and especially by the film director herself, is a classic example of how Polish intelligentsia appropriated workers’ life stories in its own power plays with the authorities. The tale of an alliance between workers and the intelligentsia is told according to the rules of the latter class: Birkut is shown as a victim of Stalinism, who needs his spokespeople and defenders, even if not until the next generation: “This is my father’s youth. I know everything about this,” declares Agnieszka. Characteristically for the increasingly conservative Poland of late socialism, Agnieszka appropriates not only Birkut’s story but also that of his wife, Hanka, a talented gymnast, honored with awards under Stalinism, and a ZMP member. Hanka is treated instrumentally by the film director, as a source of knowledge about Birkut, whom she actually left when he fell out of favor with the Stalinist authorities, and also strongly patriarchally: she turns out to be unimportant as a human being (the director is not interested in her successes as a gymnast) and condemned as a woman (she had left Birkut in the most difficult time of his life, out of convenience choosing a relationship with a restaurant manager, a type of socialist entrepreneur, which she subsequently paid for with alcoholism and suffering from domestic violence). 56 The intelligentsia’s tale about ZMP members from the working and peasant classes appropriates their voices—by summarizing them with comments of an omniscient narrator who knows the thoughts and feelings, and especially the ending to the history, and from this perspective sheds light on the protagonists’ fates, by blurring the boundary between the voices of the characters and that of the narrator (seemingly reported speech)—and inscribes them in the dominant anticommunist discourse. Within the frameworks of this discourse, women’s emancipation in socialism is either passed over in silence or shown as an individual accomplishment, gained by force of will, against the system.

214  Agnieszka Mrozik However, the voices of the unprivileged classes sound entirely different when we read them in memoirs, anniversary books, contest or special journal series issued in the Polish People’s Republic. More importantly, they sound different when we read them in the context of their times: of postwar poverty but also modernization, of the struggle to climb up the social ladder but also against “class enemies”. 57 Those who wish to hear them should reach for publications from the 1960s and 1970s, that is from the period of a veritable outburst of life writing by former ZMP members of both sexes originating from the working and peasant classes.58 It was there that they summed up their involvement with the youth organization. They wrote of their hopes and enthusiasm, but also of disillusionment with schematism. Yet, they complained about boredom and grayness much less frequently than their intelligentsia peers. One of the activists noted: ZMP was dissolved. It was quite a blow for me. ZMP was a good organization, feisty, deeply involved, with a great societal authority. Sure, there were mistakes. They were difficult to avoid in times of the “cult of the individual.” But I believe that the grand total of positive aspects exceeded the number of negative phenomena.59 The authors were more inclined to praise the concrete, tangible changes that ZMP membership brought into their lives such as easier access to university, the opportunity to see the world thanks to the organization’s summits, the chance to speak during public discussions: “I admit that I wanted to be someone important, to become popular. And so I decided to act, the social activist in me woke up. After all I was at a good, tough, ZMP school”60; “I got to know new villages, new people. . . . I often spoke to large crowds on behalf of the ZMP organization. . . . I always did so without reading from a paper.”61 They also wrote about an aspect that the intelligentsia texts had omitted altogether, that is how their own activity in ZMP, and later in other social organizations, affected the lives of local communities, by contributing to the modernization of Polish rural areas (e.g. by building community centers, opening libraries, bringing traveling cinema to villages): “We gathered a group of former ZMP members. . . . People started to build a new, brick fire station, with a community room and a garage to hold all the equipment. The entire village joined the action.”62 But they also recalled the resistance that their actions inspired in conservative circles, organized around the Catholic clergy which was very influential in the rural areas. In one of the texts a female activist complained, for example: A doctor is giving a talk about planned motherhood. He starts with personal hygiene. The women force themselves to listen, they are visibly nervous. After the doctor leaves, I ask them about the reason for

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  215 such a reaction. I hear a surprising answer: tomorrow they will have to confess that they had listened to indecent things. I was shocked. Do we really have this much work ahead of us?63 In this sense their accounts, dispersed throughout publications from the 1960s and 1970s, nowadays are a source of information about the distribution of political power in postwar Poland: about the conditions in which socialism took root here, including the reactions that it caused (e.g. excommunication, family conflicts, and the hostility of local communities). Stories of former ZMP women seem particularly interesting in this context, because they reveal that anticommunism had a very solid conservative background in Poland: hostility against female activists was even stronger than against male ones, as their choice of lifestyle clearly clashed with the traditional model of woman as a wife and mother, particularly robust in rural areas: “[The women] went running to the priest and ratted on me, how I was such a red commie.”64 Yet, their stories are also interesting because they show the obstacles that the program of women’s emancipation ran into in their own, that is socialist, ranks. Women’s memoirs teem with complaints about patriarchy, male hypocrisy, and unequal treatment: I was the school chairperson of ZMP. . . . I had finished [carpentry] school with distinction. How great was my disappointment when I  heard at the employment office: “A woman carpenter? No, my child, in this region you won’t find work in your field.”65 Today women come second, even if their qualifications exceed those of a man. When it comes to promotions, the men are always noticed first.66 These are, in a way, field reports that show how the implementation of progressive theories looked in practice, far from large urban centers and the watchful eyes of the party elites.67 The memoirs of working class and rural youth also reveal what is of significance from the perspective of this chapter: the complexity of a generation as a socio-cultural unit, its gender and class diversity, and thus a polyphony that can only be exposed by way of a detailed and gendered analysis of generational narratives and representations. It makes it possible not so much to share the diversity of experiences of the “generation’s” members, but rather to show that they are constructs that are constantly engaged in a struggle for recognition and acknowledgement. Not all “generational experiences” have the same status, not all have the chance to be noticed.68 Only the ones that dovetail with the dominant discourse will come out on top, strengthening its hegemony. The fading of voices of former ZMP members from the working and peasant

216  Agnieszka Mrozik classes, including women’s, shows that their experiences have been out of sync with the mainstream public discourse in Poland for a long time. The only medium that allows for their transmission is the intelligentsia narrative and, as the carrier mainly of its own interests, it works according to its own rules.69

ZMP Girls: A Lost Link in the History of the Polish Women’s Movement ZMP girls were certainly a “product” of socialist emancipation policy in postwar Poland. They were the first generation which, growing up in the period of Stalinism, took advantage of the changed model of education and of making high schools and universities accessible to working class and rural youth, of the reorganization of the labor market that, in times of hasty industrialization, pushed for the “productivization of women,” of new cultural models, including the new image of an independent and self-sufficient woman. All these phenomena were elements of the program in which gender egalitarianism went hand in hand with class egalitarianism. Youth press popularized this program; it was promoted at talks and in educational brochures. Left feminists—activists of the party and of women’s organizations, journalists, and writers—took a special interest in its propagation. Many of them had been active already before World War II, involved in campaigns for women’s rights and discussions about models of femininity and directions of the development of emancipation politics. To them, the new political system offered an opportunity to turn into reality all those progressive ideas that had previously been systematically blocked, which I have discussed elsewhere.70 From their perspective, the situation of young women, coming of age after the war, seemed much better than their own, because these girls had been given opportunities that the previous generations could only dream of. In fact, they wanted to make sure that their “younger sisters” had as many such opportunities as possible and that they would put their education and employment to the best use. Wanda Żółkiewska (1912–1989), one of the most active postwar propagators of the emancipation message, wrote in 1949 in Moda i Życie Praktyczne [Fashion and Practical Life] magazine: My Younger Sister! You choose for yourself today. You can make any choice you wish. The new Poland puts no obstacles, no barriers to your dreams. Reach out for the life you want. Reach out for the life in which you can use all of your talents, passions, and desires. Choose the right profession! Don’t make a mistake! You are envied by all the generations of women whom life deprived of free choice.71 Not wanting to create a distance between herself and the readers, she called them “younger sisters,” not “daughters.” While emphasizing her

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  217 hopes for the new generation of women, she also accentuated the continuity of the female pursuit of equal rights and the work of many past generations that contributed to the accomplishment of this goal. The enthusiasm and optimism of activists such as Żółkiewska, which stemmed from the belief that equal rights for women and men were a given in socialism, often clashed against the calcified patriarchal structures within the party and political organizations, including ZMP. During the last serious discussion about the socialist project of women’s equality of rights, in the 1960s, with some isolated instances continuing into the next decade, the recent ZMP girls accused their male colleagues of moral double standards, hypocrisy, discrimination against women, and the general inability to apply lofty theories in practice.72 Importantly, women from the intelligentsia took the same stance as working class and rural women. Snopkiewicz’s protagonist Lilka Sagowska, accused by ZMP male activist of immoral behavior because she dared, along with other girls, sunbathe on the roof of the dorm, wrote in her diary: They didn’t accuse us openly of immorality, this incident was after all quite farcical, but we were given a solemn lecture to the effect that ZMP youth should protect the good name of student residences. . . . Banasiak is full of energy, seems to be at fifteen different places at the same time. He thinks, for example, that wearing make-up is extravagant and below a ZMP girl.73 Leokadia Tymińska, wife of the ZMP activist whose theory and practice of family life did not go hand in hand, complained in her memoir: He was a fervent activist, he organized things, he spoke convincingly at meetings. . . . we decided to get married. . . . We wore our ZMP uniforms to the wedding ceremony. . . . Our relationship left a lot to be desired. Full of energy and initiative in social activities, at home he couldn’t even drive the proverbial nail into the wall. The fact that I whitewashed the room myself while eight months pregnant, climbing up a stack of stools is evidence enough. . . . he told me he was leaving. After two whole days and nights of crying, I told him he could go. He stayed after all. Too bad.74 Life writing as well as journalistic and literary texts from the 1960s shows that to women from different classes public activism, including in ZMP, was an important impulse for rethinking their role within society. How did membership in this organization affect their agency? Did it change their way of thinking about themselves, and if so, how? What shortcomings of the emancipation policy did it reveal? My analysis shows that women, while identifying with the “generation of ZMP,” that is while sharing many of the men’s emotions and reactions—such as

218  Agnieszka Mrozik enthusiasm toward the promise of building a brave new world or disappointment with the schematism of undertaken actions—at the same time noticed their separateness or difference, which on the one hand was a result of gender inequality and, on the other hand, of women’s empowerment, even if incomplete. And even though this “community of feminine fate” did not eliminate class differences between intelligentsia, working class, and rural women, within the context of our considerations it is important to notice that it was articulated at all. In subsequent years, former ZMP girls were also connected by something else: the silencing of women’s experiences, although caused by different reasons. While the voices of working class and rural women were entirely pushed out of the public discourse (similar to what happened to the men from their classes), and male intellectuals began to speak on their behalf, translating their experiences into contemporary language, the intelligentsia women accepted nearly without any reservations the narrative of intelligentsia men, in which there was either no room for women’s emancipation or which presented it in a distorted way. Silencing or, in fact, erasing the theme of women’s emancipation in socialism was at the same time a part of polarization of class relationships in Poland, which I consider to be one of the pillars of the Polish anticommunism. Today, no one brings up the story of “ZMP girls,” neither they themselves, now advanced in age, nor the women activists of today. The latter refuse to acknowledge the endeavors of left feminists as emancipatory, and so are not interested in them.75 If we take a closer look at how the history of women’s movement in Poland is constructed, we notice that cutting the link of the “ZMP girls” out from this chain is not anything new: it began already in the Polish People’s Republic, although today this gesture has acquired an additional meaning. This is because it is accompanied by anointing other women as icons of feminism: those who better fit a modern emancipation narrative in which the struggle for women’s rights is intimately connected with the struggle for the nation’s freedom. For this reason, it is especially “women of Solidarity” who are now perceived as Polish icons of the women’s movement, even if they themselves do not see their activism as part of the fight for women’s rights, and do not define their political experiences in emancipatory categories.76 This is not exclusively Polish: research indicates a similar trend in most postsocialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.77 The problem here is not so much the absence of voices that, by expressing different experiences or by expressing them in a way differently from the dominant one, could weaken the hegemony of the anticommunist discourse in its conservative, traditionalist variety. The problem is, above all, the absence of willingness to listen to them and to transmit them without the compulsive adaptation to the circumstances of today. The stakes are high. What I have discussed is not (only) about the simple cultivation of remembrance of the past of women and the women’s movement, but

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  219 about the way in which the remembrance contributes to current and future thinking about gender roles and relations, about the shape of the family and of society. In this sense the case of “ZMP girls” seems instructive and worthy of our attention. What, then, do ZMP girls tell us? First, that emancipation, to be complete, cannot only refer to gender, but must also concern class, as it is at the intersection of class and gender that the scale of inequality is striking. For working class and rural women, the change in their life situation was evident when they looked at the fate of their grandmothers, mothers, and older sisters—for them, membership in ZMP was associated with empowerment. Second, contrary to Western feminist theories that true emancipation is bottom-up only, the example of ZMP girls shows the important role that the socialist state, including youth and women’s organizations, played in women’s empowerment. Emancipation was implemented with a significant commitment by the state; it consisted in using the opportunities that the state created, although it also took place against ossified state structures and by significant individual efforts. Women’s criticism of the ZMP male condescension, hypocrisy, and double standards was a manifestation of the acquired/enhanced agency and empowerment of women who expressed their dissatisfaction with the incomplete/ineffective implementation of the socialist program of gender equality. Young women held the ZMP accountable for its “errors and distortions,” seeing the organization as a tool of the state’s emancipation policy: not always successful, but still revolutionary in comparison with what existed before the war and what they knew from the stories of older women. Third, the patriarchal and sexist narratives about women in ZMP show that even declaratively progressive organizations are not free from conservative patterns of thinking, and that, along with men who support women’s emancipatory aspirations, there will always be those who will want to hinder women. The case of ZMP girls was unique as much as was typical,78 which is why it is so important to find a place for it in the history of women and the women’s movement in Poland.

Notes





220  Agnieszka Mrozik





Girls from the Polish Youth Union  221 trzydziestolecia (Warszawa: Iskry, 1977); Jan Łomnicki, dir., Dom (Zespół Filmowy Iluzjon, 1980); Wojciech Marczewski, dir., Dreszcze (Zespół Filmowy Tor, 1981); Feliks Falk, dir., Był jazz (Zespół Filmowy X, 1981); Jerzy Domaradzki, dir., Wielki bieg (Zespół Filmowy X, 1981); Jerzy Skolimowski, dir., Ręce do góry (Zespół Filmowy Syrena, [1967] 1985); Agnieszka Osiecka, Szpetni czterdziestoletni (Warszawa: Iskry, 1985); Jacek Kuroń, Wiara i wina. Do i od komunizmu (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1989); Joanna Chmielewska, Autobiografia, vol. 1: Dzieciństwo (Warszawa: Vers, 1993); Halina Snopkiewicz, Słoneczniki (Łódź: Hammal Books, [1962] 1993); Halina Snopkiewicz, Paladyni (Łódź: Hammal Books, [1965] 1994); Krzysztof Zanussi, dir., Cwał (Studio Filmowe “Tor,” 1995); Stefan Bratkowski, ed., Październik 1956—pierwszy wyłom w systemie. Bunt, młodość, rozsądek (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 1996); Ewa Kondratowicz, Szminka na sztandarze. Kobiety Solidarności 1980–1989. Rozmowy (Warszawa: Sic!, 2001); Jacek Trznadel, Hańba domowa. Rozmowy z pisarzami (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo ANTYK—Marcin Dybowski, [1986] 2006); Antoni Zambrowski, Syn czerwonego księcia (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo von borowiecky, 2009); Michał Głowiński, Kręgi obcości. Opowieść autobiograficzna (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010); Janina Bauman, Nigdzie na ziemi. Powroty. Opowiadania (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Officyna, 2011); Jerzy Urban and Marta Stremecka, Jerzy Urban (Warszawa: Czerwone i Czarne, 2013); Agnieszka Osiecka, Dzienniki, vol. I: 1945–1950, ed. Karolina Felberg-Sendecka (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2013); Karol Modzelewski, Zajeździmy kobyłę historii. Wyznania poobijanego jeźdźca (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Iskry, 2013); Agnieszka Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. II: 1951, ed. Karolina Felberg-Sendecka (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2014); Agnieszka Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. III: 1952, ed. Karolina Felberg-Sendecka (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2015); Andrzej Wajda, dir., Powidoki (Akson Studio, 2016); Agnieszka Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. IV: 1953, ed. Karolina Felberg- Sendecka (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2017); Roma Ligocka, Dziewczynka w czerwonym płaszczyku, trans. from the German Katarzyna Zimmerer (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, [2001] 2017); Michał Głowiński and Grzegorz Wołowiec, Czas nieprzewidziany. Rozmowa-rzeka (Warszawa: Wielka Litera, 2018); Agnieszka Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. V: 1954–1955, ed. Karolina Felberg-Sendecka (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2018). 15 Hanna Świda-Ziemba includes people born between 1926 and 1935 in this generation, pointing out that Stalinism in its most expansive phase (1949– 51) affected them most strongly. She notes, however, that in the case of this generation, the birth year was of tremendous importance, because it was a decisive factor in determining the extent to which those subjected to Stalinist socialization were able to form “a world-view community.” According to Świda-Ziemba, the oldest and youngest members were the weakest link: the former had lived through the “gentle revolution” right after the World War II, marked with the influence of interwar traditions in education and culture; the latter were quickly tainted by the gradual liberalization of public life following Stalin’s death. Świda-Ziemba, Młodzież PRL, 98–133. 16 See Małgorzata Fidelis, “Epilogue: From Communism to Postcommunism,” in Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 238–54. 17 Analyzing the memoirs of former party or youth activists published after 1989, as well as memoirs of their children and grandchildren, I paid attention to the recurring motif of “awakening,” of shaking off the blindness of socialism, whose value depended on the time, that is: the sooner, the better. Thus, the real non-conformists were those who never became

222  Agnieszka Mrozik

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29

“true believers,” or who lost their illusions much sooner than others. See Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Dziadek (nie) był komunistą.’ Między/transgeneracyjna pamięć o komunizmie w polskich (auto)biografiach rodzinnych po 1989 roku,” Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 46–67. For example, an easier access to university studies for shock workers who built Nowa Huta—one of the Stalinist flagship investments, not far from Krakow. It was difficult to get into university without a ZMP recommendation. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, “Nieśmiertelny Stalin i złowieszcze więzienie nudy,” in Hańba domowa, 188–91. Kuroń, Wiara i wina, 41. Urban and Stremecka, Jerzy Urban, 71. Głowiński, Kręgi obcości, 175. Głowiński and Wołowiec, Czas nieprzewidziany, 42–43. Wierzbicki, Związek Młodzieży Polskiej i jego członkowie, 301 and 311. Anne E. Gorsuch points out that among 614 delegates on the fourth Komsomol congress in 1921, only twenty-five were women. Matthias Neumann, in turn, writes that in 1928, only twenty-two percent of Komsomol members were women. Anne E. Gorsuch, “‘A Woman is Not a Man’: The Culture of Gender and Generation in Soviet Russia, 1921–1928,” Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 653; Matthias Neumann, “‘Youth, It’s Your Turn!’: Generations and the Fate of the Russian Revolution (1917–1932),” Journal of Social History 46, no. 2 (2012): 288. Regardless of the data showing the relatively low participation of women in the ZMP authorities, it should be noted that male fantasies about powerful ZMP female members and fear of them did not come out of nowhere. In the socialist project of the modernization of Poland, a lot of space was devoted to the emancipation of women, above all at work, but also in the family. The image of a professionally active, educated, socially and politically involved woman was promoted, which not only influenced women’s awareness of their own value but also led to the transformation of relations between the sexes. ZMP girls, mainly in the countryside, although not only there, symbolized the break with the traditional role of the Polish woman as wife and mother, hence visible fear and reluctance to them mainly in conservative circles, including the Catholic Church, but also among liberal (predominantly male) intelligentsia. I write more about this below. See also Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland; Natalia Jarska, Kobiety z marmuru. Robotnice w Polsce w latach 1945–1960 (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2015); Aránzazu Calderón Puerta, “Przygoda w hucie i na Mariensztacie. Rodzina i emancypacja kobiet w polskim kinie lat 50.,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018), 225–46. In the male intelligentsia narrative, the attitude toward ZMP is reminiscent of the attitude toward socialist realism, which in the Polish culture is an embodiment of an aberration. The “Polish approach” to socialist realism is, first of all, ironic and contemptuous, and second, highly condemning. See Anna Artwińska, Bartłomiej Starnawski, and Grzegorz Wołowiec, “‘Fluctuat nec mergitur. . .’: On Socialist Realism in Meta-Discursive Perspective,” in Studies on Socialist Realism: The Polish View, eds. Anna Artwińska, Bartłomiej Starnawski, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2016), 25–52. See Małgorzata Fidelis, “Women Astray: Debating Sexuality and Reproduction during the Thaw,” in Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland, 170–202; Agnieszka Mrozik, “Communism as a

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  223

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women,” History of Communism in Europe 8 (2017): 261–84. The latest research also points to the gradual ossification of the class structure in post-Stalinist period, evidenced by the decreasing percentage of rural and working class youth at universities. See Agata Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście (Kraków: Nomos, 2016). Bratkowski, Październik 1956—pierwszy wyłom w systemie, 17, 19, 50, 69. Chmielewska, Autobiografia, 316. Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. 3: 1952, 125 and 155. Ibid., 117. Bauman, Nigdzie na ziemi, 53–54. Zofia Romaszewska, in Kondratowicz, Szminka na sztandarze, 64–65. Ligocka, Dziewczynka w czerwonym płaszczyku, 257 and 264. Ibid., 261 and 265. Bauman, Nigdzie na ziemi, 70. Constructing the remembrance of the significance of socialism for the situation of women and their roles in the society depends on many factors: the life experiences of memoir authors, their position within the social structure, and changes of this position in the course of historical transformation; the conceptualization of terms such as “revolution,” “emancipation,” “agency,” “empowerment”; and especially on the overall social and political atmosphere that determines the conditions for thinking about socialism as either a modernizing project, or to the contrary, a destructive one. It is important to notice that remembrance of belonging to the communist youth movement and of the women’s sensation of participating in the revolution which consisted in the transformation of traditional gender roles in the society, in Poland or, more broadly speaking, in countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc in Central Europe, shaped differently than in countries such as the USSR or China, which is addressed by female members of the “first revolutionary generations” as well as by researchers of their memoirs. See for example Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di, eds., Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Anna Krylova, “Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia,” Gender & History 16, no. 3 (2004): 626–53; Anna Krylova, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation,’” in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101–21. Ligocka, Dziewczynka w czerwonym płaszczyku, 291. Five volumes of Agnieszka Osiecka’s diaries comprising the years 1945–55 were published between 2013 and 2018. Osiecka, Szpetni czterdziestoletni, 41: “‘A youth activist’ is a figure very characteristic for the 1950s. There probably isn’t a single person of my generation who would not come in contact with a youth activist.” Ibid., 17: Just think about it, the times were incredibly tough when it came to intimate relations. Parents’ apartments were crammed beyond belief, student residences were run like military barracks, with their “black lists,” and hotels only accepted married couples. Fighting illiteracy had the smell of a night spent together in the haystack, of a cozy barn and a glass of fresh milk for breakfast.

45 Ibid., 26. Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953) was a Polish poet, well known for his grotesque, pour nonsense, and humorous works. His poetry was and still is an inspiration to many authors of popular music.

224  Agnieszka Mrozik 46 Karolina Felberg-Sendecka, editor of Osiecka’s Dzienniki [Diaries], thus writes of their language: [It] is a mix of newspeak, home language, youth slang (taken both from the schoolyard and from youth novels) and literary Polish, with which Osiecka came into contact at school and through reading classic literature. Tellingly, to Agnieszka words such as “progress,” “vestige of the past,” “materialism,” “assembly,” “ZMP girl” are completely transparent (newspeak, after all, formed part of her world and everyday life), while words such as “reaction” or “reactionary” are clearly negative, sometimes even offensive words in the personal dictionary of the future writer. Osiecka, Dzienniki i zapiski, vol. 3: 1952, 545.

47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

This type of evaluation of Osiecka’s language veils a belief, common in contemporary Polish intellectual circles, that only the language of socialist discourse was burdened with ideology (“newspeak”), while liberal-democratic discourse supposedly takes place with the use of neutral language, free from “ideology.” Literary critic Eliza Szybowicz devoted several articles to this issue. See Eliza Szybowicz, “Emancypantka z ZMP,” Bez Dogmatu 4 (2013): 9–11; Eliza Szybowicz, “Pisarka, emancypacja i prestiż w peerelowskich kontekstach. Przypadek Magdy Lei,” in Polityki relacji w literaturze kobiet po 1945 roku, eds. Aleksandra Grzemska and Inga Iwasiów (Szczecin: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego, 2017), 87–108; Eliza Szybowicz, “‘Sfinks w wieku podlotka’: (Po)odwilżowa powieść dla dziewcząt,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, 247–81. In this place, I would like to thank Eliza Szybowicz for discussing with me the motif of ZMP girls in the Polish literature and culture and for sharing with me her observations and findings. Snopkiewicz, Słoneczniki, 126. Wieczerska, Zawsze jakieś jutro, 396. Snopkiewicz, Słoneczniki, 128. Snopkiewicz, Paladyni, 129. See e.g. Sławomir Cenckiewicz, Anna Solidarność. Życie i działalność Anny Walentynowicz na tle epoki (1929–2010) (Poznań: Zysk i S-ka, 2010); Piotr Nesterowicz, Każdy został człowiekiem (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2016). See e.g. Anna Artwińska, “The (Post-)Communist Orient: History, SelfOrientalization and Subversion by Vladimir Sorokin and Michał Witkowski,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 62, no. 3 (2017): 404–26. Cenckiewicz, Anna Solidarność, 44. Nesterowicz, Każdy został człowiekiem, esp. 223–29. Feminist researchers point out that the Man of Marble’s Agnieszka, Wajda’s alter ego, was an embodiment of male fantasies about liberated women. In reality, she was a highly masculinized character, machist even, who built her position in the world of film, as well as her self-confidence, upon the real and/or symbolic exploitation of other people, especially those weaker than her, less combative, with a lower standing on the social ladder, e.g. workers (Birkut as movie material), women (Hanka as source of information), older people (camera operator, who was not agile enough, was not able to keep up with the director’s ideas). This position of Agnieszka changed in Wajda’s next film, Man of Iron (1981), in which she was transformed from an independent woman into a typical Pole who visited her husband

Girls from the Polish Youth Union  225

57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69

Maciek Birkut (Mateusz Birkut’s son) in prison after he was arrested following the suppression of the so-called first “Solidarity.” See for example Janina Falkowska, The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda: Dialogism in “Man of Marble,” “Man of Iron,” and “Danton” (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996); Ewa Mazierska and Elżbieta Ostrowska, eds., Women in Polish Cinema (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006); Monika Talarczyk-Gubała, “Ewa vs. Agnieszka. Reprezentacje reżyserek w wybranych filmach Andrzeja Wajdy i Barbary Sass,” Kwartalnik Filmowy 77–78 (2012): 282–97. See e.g. the nine-volume series entitled Młode pokolenie wsi Polski Ludowej. Pamiętniki i studia (1964–80) [The Young Rural Generation of People’s Poland: Diaries and Studies], joint work of, among others, sociologist Józef Chałasiński and philologist Bronisław Gołębiowski; collections Moje 25- lecie (1970) [My 25 Years] and Pamiętniki kobiet. Biografie trzydziestolecia (1977) [Women’s Diaries: Biographies of the Past Thirty Years]. In the 1980s, there were incomparably less testimonies of former ZMP members from working and peasant classes than in the previous two decades. See for example Jan Dancygier and Tomasz Szczechura, eds., Pokolenia przemian wsi polskiej, vol. 2: Budując nową Ojczyznę. Wspomnienia działaczy młodzieżowych (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1986); Kazimierz Karabasz, dir., Pamięć (Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych i Dokumentalnych, 1985). “Wrzos,” “W rodzinnej wsi,” in Moje 25-lecie, 270. Jerzy Bauer, “Z pamiętnika aktywisty,” in Moje 25-lecie, 199. “Krystyna Rejkowska,” “Wsi spokojna, wsi wesoła. . .,” in Moje 25-lecie, 305. “Wrzos,” “W rodzinnej wsi,” 271. Jadwiga Włodarczyk, “Zawsze na pierwszej linii,” in Pamiętniki kobiet, 359. “Mamy prawo do cywilizacji,” in Młode pokolenie wsi Polski Ludowej, 166. Joanna Moroczyńska, “Powrót do środowiska,” in Pamiętniki kobiet, 411–12. Krystyna Jaworska, “Pamiętnik aktywistki,” in Pamiętniki kobiet, 435. Jill Massino makes a similar observation on the Romanian example. See her article “Constructing the Socialist Worker: Gender, Identity, and Work under State Socialism in Braşov, Romania,” Aspasia 3 (2009): 131–60. Literary scholar Lidia Burska, researcher of, for example, the role of “generation 1968” within the area of Polish avant-garde poetry, noted that what decides whether or not generations go down is history are not so much breakthrough events, but rather the method in which representatives of generations (usually intellectual and political elites) connect these events with their own history and communicate them convincingly to themselves and to the world. Lidia Burska, “‘Pokolenie’—co to jest i jak używać?,” Teksty Drugie 6 (2005): 17–32. See also Tomasz Kunz, “Pokolenie jako kategoria nowoczesna (o pragmatyce narracji pokoleniowej),” in Formacja 1910. Świadkowie nowoczesności, eds. Dorota Kozicka and Tomasz CieślakSokołowski (Kraków: Universitas, 2011), 11–21. Historian Robert Wohl, researcher of, among others, the history of “generation 1914,” has observed that in the early twentieth century Europe became very taken with thinking in generational categories, and the concept of historical generations became an alternative for class. In his opinion, “generations,” by invalidating class divisions, are becoming an important instrument of power in the hands of the minority, that is of the intellectual

226  Agnieszka Mrozik

70 71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78

elites. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 236. Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Bo dziewczyna to ludzie.’ Projekty i polityki emancypacji kobiet w powojennej Polsce,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, 185–224. Wanda Żółkiewska, “Do mojej młodszej siostry,” Moda i Życie Praktyczne 17 (1949): 2. The research by Anne E. Gorsuch shows that the experience of sexual violence, sexism, and humiliation was shared by female members of the Soviet Komsomol throughout the 1920s, that is, in the entire period she analyzed. As a consequence of this trauma, many young women left the organization, while others were scared to join it. Gorsuch, “A Woman is Not a Man,” 636–60. Strikingly, Marek Wierzbicki, when writing about “pathological phenomena in the ZMP apparatus,” does not address what happened to female members of this organization as violence or sexual abuse. He instead opts for such terms as “promiscuity,” “extramarital sex,” and “intercourse out of wedlock” which, as they originate from conservative discourse, castigate not the men who abused their power, but the women who conducted themselves questionably (which is allegedly confirmed by the high percentage of unwanted pregnancies). Wierzbicki, Związek Młodzieży Polskiej i jego członkowie, 337–41. Snopkiewicz, Paladyni, 49 and 68. Leokadia Tymińska, “Muszę być mocnym człowiekiem,” in Pamiętniki kobiet, 300–01. See Magdalena Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2018). See Agnieszka Mrozik, “Poza nawiasem historii (kobiet), czyli po co nam dziś komunistki,” Wakat On-line 3 (2014), http://wakat.sdk.pl/pozanawiasem-historii-kobiet-czyli-po-co-nam-dzis-komunistki/http://wakat. sdk.pl/poza-nawiasem-historii-kobiet-czyli-po-co-nam-dzis-komunistki/, accessed March 1, 2019. See for example Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, eds., Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). Historian Wang Zheng analyzed the case of activism of Chinese female communists in the Mao era as an example of the possibilities and limitations of the socialist state policy on women’s emancipation. Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).

11 “We’re Easy to Spot” Soviet Generation(s) after Soviet Era and the Invention of the Self in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Anna Artwińska

Generation in Literature and in the Literary Research: An Introduction As we can read in the book Literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Generationsforschung [Literary Contributions to Generation Research], “the concept of ‘generation’ is notoriously ambiguous.”1 Yet, literary scholars generally agree that, despite its multifaceted meanings, the category of generation is useful for analyzing specific groups and movements inside a given literature’s history (e.g. Sturm und Drang in Germany or the generation of Columbuses in Poland 2). They equally agree that the category of generation can be useful to analyze literary texts focusing on the “conflict between generations,”3 especially texts dedicated to problems of intergenerational communication and those concerned with creating literary models for family genealogies.4 The category of generation becomes a particularly useful tool for interpretation when analyzing literature from the beginning of the twenty-first century, meaning those literary texts to which a memory-forming function is ascribed. This applies primarily to the works that tell of traumatic historical events (Nazism, Stalinism) through family stories in which the generational conflict is exposed. And so, for example, Predlej zabvenija (2010) [Oblivion, 2016] by the Russian writer Sergey Lebedev tells the story of a young man who discovers in the process of reconstructing the family archives that his “Grandfather II” was a commander in a Stalinist Gulag.5 Family stories of this type show how generational logic can aid in presenting a problem from the area of memory culture, but they also can explain the aesthetics of a literary text, and, by extension, how generations are narrated.6 Thinking in generational categories plays an important role in the analysis of non-fiction texts, that is, of any type of memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, and other texts stemming from the field of oral

228  Anna Artwińska history, which have the ambition of giving testimony about the “generation” in question, or of attesting to that generation’s state of (self-)awareness, its values, and views. Narratives of this type, particularly in the field of history, are regarded as source texts, providing arguments concerning the identity of a group or community of people in question, their generational awareness, as well as methods of establishing generational connections.7 From the perspective of literary studies, the meaning of non-fiction texts is not bound solely by their documentary function: their literary composition is equally important. Hence the questions posed about their structuring,8 their language, style, and, in the case of biographical works having more than one author, the unique character of their respective textual landscape resulting from the collaboration of a secondary author (that is, a biographer, interview questions posed by a journalist, as well as the collaboration with a ghost writer). It is precisely this final factor which proves to be determining; the existence of the co-author in collaborative (auto)biographical texts as well as his/her role in shaping the material often proves key to their understanding.9 In this chapter, I will demonstrate how, in the case of the novel Vremya sekond hend. Konec krasnogo čeloveka (2013) [Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, 2016],10 by Belarusian author and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, the category of generation may be used in a literary analysis of texts from the field of oral history, and what may be discovered through such a discourse about communism, generations, and partially also about gender in the Soviet Union.

Secondhand Time: Life in the Ruins of Socialism What happened to Soviet culture in 1991? To what extent was the upheaval predictable? What did being “Soviet” actually mean, and how far have Soviet attitudes and behavior patterns survived the demise of the state in which they were created?11 Secondhand Time engages in the current literary and academic discourse on Soviet and post-Soviet identity. Alexievich advances the thesis that individuals who spent the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union, irrespective of what their ideological differences may be, fall under one common denominator of identity: the “Soviet man” or homo sovieticus, both catch-all terms used by the author as general descriptors for (female and male) inhabitants of the USSR.12 The Soviet Union, in the author’s view, represents not only a period of history but also an anthropological phenomenon, a form and a way of life.13 Although she concedes that homo sovieticus is a category that encompasses both women and men, ethnic, national, and religious groups, as well as, curiously, individuals with differing stances towards communism,14 she

“We’re Easy to Spot”  229 places the accent on the fundamental shared elements of their identity. She claims: Although we now live in separate countries and speak different languages, we couldn’t mistake us for anyone else. . . . We’re easy to spot! People who’ve come out of socialism . . . we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil. . . .15 In the course of the interviews, the concept of the “Soviet man” comes up quite often, not only with the aim of evaluating a set of experiences implied by this category but rather for highlighting the peculiarity of those experiences. In this sense, all “Soviet people” belong to one allencompassing “generation,” whose defining characteristic is that they belong to a certain period of Soviet history. Inside this framework, communism becomes a key experience—something that permanently defines the way of living, thinking, and acting of individuals. Alexievich expresses this in her book, as one reviewer of the English edition of Secondhand Time puts it, as a “desire to homogenize memory.”16 A homogeneous, codified memory is a necessary condition of enabling the transmission of various experiences from the Soviet period. Published in 2013, Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic narrative is comprised of interviews which the author conducted with residents of the selected former Soviet republics in the years 1991–2001. The topics are communism, perestroika, and the events that occurred in Russia during the collapse of the USSR, starting with the first war in Chechnya, through the phase of brutal capitalism, and finally to the blossoming of the Orthodox Church. Alexievich’s interviewees are “regular citizens,” so to speak, whose reflections and remembrances can be treated as interesting supplements (and at times with rewordings and corrections) to the official historiography. Even though all these experiences are without doubt gendered, Alexievich does not differentiate between women’s and men’s perspectives on the past. Nevertheless, those differences emerge during the interviews and have to be considered. In the first part of the book, entitled “The Consolation of Apocalypse,” the author collects memories of the Soviet Union, both from individuals who identified as communists and those who constructed their own identity in opposition to the system. In the second part, “The Charms of Emptiness,” conversations about life in the post-Soviet reality take precedence.17 These recollections—that is, those with specific, named authors—are preceded by a collection of short stories, sketches, and anecdotes called “Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations.” This “kaleidoscope of voices” presents a means for approaching the topic and, simultaneously, functions as an announcement of the polyphonic poetics adopted by the author.18 The leitmotif of Secondhand

230  Anna Artwińska Time is the conviction that Russian society finds itself, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in a state of enduring, collective shock, the reason for which is the society’s inability to rediscover itself in the context of a new, post-Soviet reality—equally true on both the individual and collective levels. This feeling of shock further gives rise to a sense of disillusionment,19 resulting from a dissatisfaction with life in the wake of this social transformation. The structure of the book makes use of montage techniques.20 Alexievich connects individual interviews, reflections, and anecdotes to one another, occasionally supplementing them with her own commentary and adding her own emphasis. The techniques employed elicit a sense of polyphony: the narrator of a story is not just one person, but rather a chorus of voices. Just like in modern theater, Alexievich’s choir does not exist to fulfill a moral function, but rather represents a kind of mirror in which the experiences of average people are reflected: in this instance, not so much those of the audience at the theater, but rather those of the book’s readers. The author is also a member of this chorus, even though her reflections occupy only a small portion of the work; while presenting questions, the author seeks to be as little intrusive as possible, instead ceding the stage to her characters. She expresses her own views directly only in a few comments in the first, personal chapter of her book, “Remarks from an Accomplice.” Despite this, Secondhand Time is, indeed, an authored work, and Alexievich is a writer who fully controls her material, deciding what to include and how to arrange and stage it. She inserts herself here into the Russo-Soviet tradition of “documentary literature,” which began in the 1920s and 1930s with authors such as Osip Brik and Sergei Tretyakov, later continued by Alexievich’s own literary master, Ales Adamovič. 21 The constitutive hallmarks of “documentary literature” include, on the one hand, a certain factographic quality and the technique of montage, and, on the other hand, dialogicality and emotionalism. One may find all of these characteristics not only in Secondhand Time but also in the earlier works by this author, who is interested in the dramatic nature of human fate and consistently aspires to collect and document individual experiences. Based on “Ten Stories in a Red Interior,” five told by women and five by men, the narrative in the first part is an interesting attempt at dealing with memories of the Soviet past, without limiting oneself to one single perspective. It confronts memories that are still fresh, shaped in the ruins of the former system, with the influence of those memories on the present moment. The problem of identity here is intimately connected to the problem of memory: Alexievich’s interviewees are concerned with the question of who, precisely, the “Soviet man” is, and how far his attempts at asserting this identity can be understandable for people unfamiliar with the USSR. The material presented in this book is heterogeneous, surprising, and it provokes a number of questions. The

“We’re Easy to Spot”  231 category of generation lends itself well to interpreting this material, first due to the fact that the author chose interviewees born at a very different time, but also because references to one or another generational formation are made by many of the male and female interviewees as political and identity self-declarations. It is not without significance that Alexievich herself makes use of this category. While she admittedly does not problematize the concept of generation on a theoretical level, nor seeks to explain it in a systematic manner, she employs this concept in her commentary. The structure of the book itself demonstrates that the category of generation is important for her, because her source material is organized in such a way as to illustrate the characteristics of communism, but also its dynamics, that is, the distinct experiences of individual generations. It is possible to insert the history she presents into a greater context, because the birth year of each of her interviewees is recorded in the work 22; even if generational diachrony is replaced by synchrony, the “Soviet man” here is presented simultaneously in different scenarios and at different moments in time. To demonstrate this by means of a couple of representative examples, the main character of her first conversation is the forty-nine-year-old Elena Yurievna S., while the sixty-three-year-old Alexander Porfiryevich Sharpilo stands at the center of the second one; the fourteen-year-old Igor Poglazov is the focus of the fifth one, while yet another centers around Vasily Petrovich N., a “member of the Communist Party since 1922, 87 years old.”23 The author engages in discourse not only with people who grew up in Stalinist times but also with members of the “generation of the Sixties.”24 The book is constructed in such a way as to confront starkly different points of view and to combine stories about work, politics, ideological views, and party careers with love stories and tales of family life. Generation here becomes both an analytical tool and a type of “self-thematization.”25 The author’s goal is not to determine or to declare whether it is possible to distinguish individual generations, nor whether her interviewees fulfill certain conditions necessary for them to be included in one generation or another. She is rather concerned with demonstrating that the category of generation can be useful for the structuring of a biography—just like for the ordering of history, 26 as it allows for individual experiences to feed into a greater narrative and for the presentation of individual experiences as a collective phenomenon, resulting from a specific historical and geopolitical situation. What becomes clear in the analyzed book is that the concept of generation is not an elitist one, reserved for groups that can boast of some particular symbolic capital or social authority. Quite the opposite, for Alexievich, generation is an egalitarian category: members of generations are not exclusively historical and political actors seeking to take over power in society. Such an understanding of generation has already been a rather frequent subject of criticism 27; the work in question demonstrates that

232  Anna Artwińska scholarly debates connected to the concept of generation do not necessarily resonate in the fields of social and cultural practice. There is an undertone of disillusionment in several of the reflections from the perspective of life “after” communism: for some, the calamity is that the communist project did not succeed, while for others, it is the fact that the transformation which followed did not bring about changes for the better. Representatives of this Soviet “generation,” as it is understood, are markedly different from those who were born after the collapse of communism: “Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience—it’s like they’re from different planets.”28 While not overlooking the crimes of the Stalinist regime or other perversions of the communist system, Alexievich attempts to gather memories about the positive aspects of this time. In several accounts, the belief is expressed that the “Soviet man” was one living an idea, not bothered with materialist values, and convinced that solidarity and a feeling of community are more important than the egoistic individualism forced by a capitalist system. Two representative examples are offered. The first one by the fifty-nine-year-old Anya, an architect by trade, who contends: My entire generation, the former Soviet nation . . . no bank accounts, no property. All of our things are Soviet, no one will give us a single kopeck. Where is our capital? All we have is our suffering, everything that we went through. 29 The second one comes from another woman, who furthers this sentiment, saying: Those were Soviet times . . . Communist. We were raised on Lenin, fiery revolutionaries, so fiery, we didn’t consider the Revolution an error and a crime. Although we weren’t into that Marxist-Leninist stuff either. . . . But overall, everybody seemed happy. . . . We lived in our kitchen. . . . We had our own rituals: kayaks, tents, hikes. Songs by the campfire. There were common symbols by which we recognize one another. We had our own fashions, our own jokes. Those secret kitchen societies are long gone. And gone with them is our friendship, which we had thought was eternal.30 The concept of generation used in describing people that can be categorized as a “Soviet person” obviously carries a transferrable meaning; its use does not correspond to academic definitions of the category.31 Demonstrating a communion of experiences among people born in the USSR, the author simultaneously emphasizes that it is necessary to describe and commemorate this community, since communism becomes a mere “prosthetic memory” with the passage of time.32 In referring to the findings of the German sociologist Bernhard Giesen, by replacing

“We’re Easy to Spot”  233 specific “visceral experience” with immaterial experiences, this memory becomes a mere symbolic representation.33 Alexievich appreciates the danger of this transfer and of the reduction of the experience of communism to a few select symbols, 34 especially to those visible only in the sphere of everyday life: “I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?”35 The interviews she carried out reaffirm Reinhart Koselleck’s proposition that “[e]xperiences are specific to generations, and are, for this reason, not immediately transferable.”36 Memories may only become fixed in cultural memory through those individuals who lived through the events in question themselves. In Svetlana Alexievich’s opinion, instead of a reduction to a few selected symbols, what is needed is a thorough analysis of the specificity of the experience of communism, an attempt at documenting what has happened in cultural memory. The fear that communism may return is also present in this view: first, in a symbolic sense and then in a very real one. There are passages in this book illustrating a generational conflict—former dissidents are unable to understand their own children and grandchildren who are attracted by the classics of Marxism: I grew up in a dissident family. . . . Not a single one of my friends was a communist. . . . Twenty years have passed . . . I go to my son’s room, and what do I see but a copy of Marx’ Das Kapital on his desk, and Trotsky’s My Life on his bookshelf . . . I can’t believe my eyes! Is Marx making a comeback? Is this a nightmare? . . . Nothing has taken root. It was all for naught.37 Fragments such as this one should be read with the appreciation of the fact that the category of generation has also a genealogical dimension. It is based on biological ties and is applicable in, among others, studies on the relationships within the family unit. The assertion that the Soviet generation fails to understand the post-Soviet generation finds credence on a micro scale: in certain families, children are unable to understand their parents’ engagement with the communist system, while in others the dissident attitude is met with resistance and opposition: “In interfamiliar generational discourse the relationship of genealogical continuity is negotiated with generational divide.”38 Generational conflicts within the family unit offer a lens to the problems that plague contemporary Russian society.

From the “Soviet Generation” to Soviet Generations: Identity and Distinction in Alexievich Despite her convictions concerning the identity-forming strength of the socialist period, the author does not treat communism in an exclusively essentialist way, as something fixed and unchanging. Quite to the

234  Anna Artwińska contrary, Alexievich is aware of communism’s individual phases, just as she is aware that these discrete, individual phases produced concrete, unique experiences for each generation. Her homo sovieticus “generation” is itself divided into several smaller groupings: “I would divide the Soviets into four generations: the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these,” asserts the author in the part entitled “Remarks from an Accomplice.”39 The division of generations as enacted by the author is based on the assumption that each change in party leadership (from Stalin to Gorbachev) brought about the birth of a new generation, and that political changes shaped changes in lifestyle, thinking, the range of political freedoms, and the politics of memory. Each of these individual generations was, as a matter of fact, a generation of “Soviet people,” and as such people who experienced the daily life of the USSR. One’s political preferences and worldview, as well as attitude toward communist ideology, are not of key importance. Each generation had its own active party members, as well as opposition figures.40 Alexievich finds common ground between perpetrators and victims; or, perhaps better put, despite being aware of the differences between these two groups, she calls attention to their similarities, resulting from the fact that they both lived in the Soviet era. Her division of generations does not always coincide with the divisions generally accepted according to the current state of research, something which I will return to later. The author is not so much concerned with precisely examining a group labeled as a generation, but rather with demonstrating that all of the featured generations are rooted in a common anthropological foundation. Alexievich chose members of all representative generations as interviewees, although it would be difficult to attribute a deliberate concern for representation to her. As I already mentioned, she was more concerned with the creation of a multifaceted narrative about the past, one making it possible to demonstrate as broad a range of human experience as possible. Certainly, a given interview was not chosen for inclusion based on its connection to a certain generation, but rather on the basis of the emotional impact of experiences brought up in the conversation. An analysis of the material contained in her book allows us to propose that, on the one hand, Alexievich has sought to draw attention to the unique and exceptional qualities of each individual story, while, on the other hand, she has also sought to demonstrate their typicality, which, in turn, allows us to identify collective experiences in individual cases. In my opinion, the most interesting interviews are those that engage with the memory of men and women who themselves were actively involved in the communist system. Although they are not thematically dominant, these recollections are nonetheless an important part of the work. From the very first pages of the book, Alexievich emphasizes that “perpetrators” and “executioners” are not terms to be associated solely with

“We’re Easy to Spot”  235 high-level state officials, and that as we attempt to evaluate involvement in the communist system, we must also remember that this was a matter of common people themselves. In the words of one of her interviewees, Why didn’t we put Stalin on trial? I’ll tell you why . . . In order to condemn Stalin, you’d have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you. . . . It’s not just Stalin and Beria, it’s also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga.41 In keeping with this, the voices of individuals who identified as communists (and in many cases continue to do so) are also included in her book. “I recant nothing! I’m not ashamed of anything. I never changed my colors, repainting myself from red to gray. . . . I still take pleasure in writing ‘USSR,’” states Elena Yurievna, one of Alexievich’s first interviewees, who made a career for herself as a secretary in the district party committee.42 Elena Yurievna was born during or shortly after the war, and therefore we can suppose that her active participation in the communist system occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. She is not a member of the often tragically represented “first Soviet generation”43; her communist biography rather played out in times that were not directly marked by political terror.44 Regarding the awareness of her own generation, Elena Yurievna explains: Communists of my generation had very little in common with Pavka Korchagin. They weren’t like the first Bolsheviks with their briefcases and revolvers, all that was left of the forefathers was their army jargon. . . . We no longer felt like the soldiers of the Party, we were its public servants. Clerks.45 Her words express a certain appreciation for difference in relation to previous generations and indicate how one’s engagement with the matter was supposed to look like. It is not by accident that Elena Yurievna recalls her activity in the party as defined primarily by specific, everyday work: while not deprived of hope for a better future, it was not motivated solely by an idealistic “faith” in the communist project to fix the problems of the world either. Elena Yurievna’s story can be best labeled as a story of disappointment with contemporary evaluations and representations of the Soviet Union. As someone formerly involved in the system, she does not understand the post-Soviet stance against communism, flat out condemnation of the Soviet past, nor the principles governing capitalism and the free market.46 What she has retained in her memories regarding the past half-century cannot simply be written off with the words “totalitarianism” and “crimes against humanity.” Quite to the contrary, in fact, as in Elena Yurievna’s memory, communism was an emancipatory project, based

236  Anna Artwińska on building solidarity between people. Although she also experienced the darker aspects of the previous system—her father spent six years in the Gulag camp in Vorkuta for “treason against the motherland”—this did not color her views. The drama of her conversation with Alexievich is that Elena Yurievna is herself aware of her own position and that her point of view has no place in contemporary discourse because it does not fit into the officially imposed memory construct. Many of Yurievna’s memories are connected to specific facts from the past—of what exactly the party was and how it functioned. Referring to the assumption that young people were compelled to join communist organizations by force, she suggests that the majority simply wanted to become involved, precisely due to their belief in the emancipatory power of the communist project: “Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others.”47 In the course of their conversation, Elena Yurievna emphasizes several times that her activity in the party committee gave a sense of meaning to her life, and therefore she will never cease to identify as a communist. She presents her views with conviction, although she does not quite manage to believe that Alexievich will publish their entire interview.48 Elena Yurievna’s commentary is intertwined with (shorter) reminiscences of her friend, Anna Ilinichna, who was disappointed that perestroika did not work out in Russia, and that the system that emerged after the collapse of communism turned out to be so inhumane and disinterested in solidarity. Anna Ilinichna represents the generation of people who actively sought to overthrow the communist authorities in the 1980s and who built their political identities around this event. From Alexievich’s point of view, the friendship between these two women, who hold such radically different viewpoints, is a testimony to the fact that, at the end of the day, much more connects “Soviet people” than divides them. It is not by chance that both conversations find their way into the same chapter. As Alexievich explains in her author’s note: “I want to be a cold-blooded historian, not one who is holding a blazing torch. Let time be the judge.”49 The author’s plan, however, to remain objective is only partially successful. Although she refrains from censoring her interviewees and from commenting on their views, her own opinions are nonetheless made obvious through the composition of the book. Her interview with Elena and Anna is entitled “On the Beauty of Dictatorship and the Mystery of Butterflies Crushed Against the Pavement,” and it forms part of the section “Ten Stories in a Red Interior.” It is difficult not to notice that, thanks to her choice of words, the image of committed communists is somewhat close to those who lost themselves inside “the inner red workings” of a “beautiful dictatorship.” Interviewees such as Anna represent an exception that confirms the rule, and

“We’re Easy to Spot”  237 serve as evidence that one could have made other choices. Yet, for the sake of accuracy, we must note that the author does relate to her interviewees with a sense of empathy—her goal is not to judge, but rather to understand. At the same time, though, the limits of this understanding are made obvious throughout the book: although Alexievich does not condemn individual stories, she nonetheless regards socialism in an unequivocally negative way, as a system based on violence.50 The need to understand is present in all the stories, including the one of Vasil Petrovich N., “crazy old man” who in his will bequeathed his three-room apartment not to his own family, but to “serve the needs of my beloved Communist Party, to which I owe everything.”51 The interview with him is entitled “On a Different Bible and a Different Kind of Believers.” The aforementioned “other Bible” is, of course, communism, and its adherent is the author’s interlocutor. Vasil Petrovich’s declaration, “You can’t judge us according to logic. You accountants! You have to understand! You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith!”52 serves as the point of departure for making this comparison. Centered around the motif of religious “faith in communism,”53 this story is designed to offer an example of the unbounded, dogmatic commitment to communism held by those born in the 1920s, as was Petrovich, who witnessed with their own eyes all of the most important events of the twentieth century, from the Revolution to the Great Patriotic War (World War II), all the way up to the collapse of the system. There is a place in this story for both fervent ideals and bold plans, as well as betrayal and death. When he was fifteen and a member of the Komsomol, Petrovich denounced his own uncle for illegally storing grain. The uncle was subsequently killed by Red Army soldiers and had his house burned down. From the author’s perspective, the story’s main function is cautionary. In her commentary to the interview, Alexievich writes that she decided to publish it because “everyone laughed at the crazy old man. They never did put a monument on his grave. . . . It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual.”54 Without denying the author’s empathy, one could ask whether this story could be presented outside of the pattern of seduction by communism and the tragic errors of youth. The fact that Vasil Petrovich himself positions his narrative along the lines of a “conversion” still does not presuppose any judgments—it was most certainly an attempt on his part at finding a justification for his own reasons in a situation where rational arguments stood absolutely no chance (it is not by accident that Petrovich’s reminiscences are intertwined with jokes told by his grandson about the USSR). Would it not make sense to use this story to consider if it can be something more than a “cautionary tale”? Svetlana Alexievich is a writer sensitive to questions of gender, the problems faced by minorities, and social inequality. One of her first publications is U vojny—ne zenskoe lico (1985) [The Unwomanly Face of

238  Anna Artwińska War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, 2017], which is dedicated to women’s experiences in the Red Army during World War II.55 The author strives here to capture the memories of women who served in military capacities on the front. By publishing the memoirs of female soldiers, snipers, and pilots, Alexievich emphasizes the unique ways in which women experience and remember extreme events. 56 In her later works the gendered perspective is not so prominent, but that she strives to include equal numbers of male and female interviewees, and not to present a masculine point of view as being “neutral” or “universal.” In Secondhand Time, the memories of women are also intertwined with those of men, and moreover, the author breaks with established social hierarchies, giving a voice to those who heretofore have not had the opportunity to make themselves heard. In many of the assertions made by both men and women, a certain self-contradictory gender consciousness comes to the fore: Alexievich’s female interviewees are convinced that they can do exactly the same jobs as men; yet, at the same time, they often perpetuate differences defined by gender essentialism, which assign to women traits such as sensitivity, the need for love and motherhood, and somehow also an innate ability to sacrifice. Since these observations are anchored within autobiographical declarations, we may assume that they mirror the gender consciousness of the postwar period, during which emancipatory and progressive movements often intertwined with traditional gender roles.57 The German Slavic scholar Eva Binder has called attention to the fact that, although the central issues of the book are connected to a clearly defined historical period, Alexievich suggests that apart from concrete historical experiences we may also find traces of a timeless, constant, and somehow “eternal” Russianness in the recollections of her interviewees. This tendency is most obvious in the final story, in which an older woman explains how 1991 did not mark any real boundary in her life—now, just as before, daily matters continue to be what is most important in her life: planting potatoes, clearing the roads in winter, and waiting for spring.58 Analogically, the gender roles as represented in Secondhand Time may also seem “timeless” and “eternal.” Irrespective of their social or political roles, Alexievich’s interviewees define themselves as women or men, that is, they reproduce sets of features typically regarded as “feminine” or “masculine” in their accounts. The section tellingly entitled “On the Sweetness of Suffering and the Trick of the Russian Soul” includes the love story of Olga and a former prisoner of the Soviet Gulag, named Gleb. Reflecting on the decisions she made based on her love for this man, Olga concludes: But why him? Why him specifically? Russian women love finding these unfortunate men. . . . Russian women have never had normal men. They keep healing and healing them. Treating them like heroes and children at the same time. Saving them. To this very day.

“We’re Easy to Spot”  239 Women still take on that same role. . . . Russians love to suffer, that that’s the trick of the Russian soul.59 The material collected in Secondhand Time confirms rather than challenges the established gender stereotypes. At the same time though, the material presented also clearly demonstrates that, in thinking about the “Soviet man,” one cannot exclude the category of gender. The experience of communism was something different for women than for men. And precisely for this reason the memories of women differ from those of men—despite many points of common experience and inflection are undoubtedly shared between them. The category of gender, similarly to the concept of generation, allows for a better understanding of the differences to be found in attitudes, experiences, stories, and convictions related to the past. Pride in having been able to contribute to the materialization of the communist project clearly resonated throughout the story told by Elena Yurievna. Being a party member afforded her the opportunity to participate in the public sphere, previously reserved for men. Her career confirms the thesis on the emancipatory power of communism, which allowed women to transgress the traditional gender roles of wives and mothers, and which made it possible for them to have professional careers. These new social models were certainly far from perfect as, despite the declarative equality of rights, women did not enjoy the same professional opportunities as men and on top of that they often had to combine work with caring for the family. Yet thanks to these roles, social change was slowly ushered in. Elena’s professional biography proves that the traditional “Russianness,” which nota bene, in Russian grammatically has a defined feminine gender,60 can be overcome: it is not as “eternal” as might seem. At the same time, the most striking interviews leave no doubt that both under communism and after, the lives of Russian women were harder than those of men, as they were discriminated due to their gender and the attendant expectations.

Conclusion: Secondhand Time between Fact and Fiction The concept of generation is employed in contemporary research on communism in the Soviet Union with varying degrees of awareness concerning its methodological complications. Nearly the entire Soviet past has been researched and described in the course of the past two decades using this category. The subjects of research and discussion—to list just a few of the most important publications in recent years—have been the “first Soviet generation,”61 the generation of the Soviet “baby boomers,”62 “the last Soviet generation,”63 as well as “Stalin’s last generation,” which had previously remained understudied.64 In the eyes of those seeking order and systematization concerning the unique experience of communism in the Soviet Union, the experiences and views

240  Anna Artwińska of individual groups, self-declaring as generations, or acknowledged as generations, became a topic of analysis and simultaneously of reflection. Many authors, like Alexievich, have made use of (auto-)biographical materials for their research, especially interviews and statements from representative members of the groups they have studied.65 This intensive use of the category of generation is not an obvious choice. As recently as 1996 in the work entitled Gender, Generation, and Identity in Contemporary Russia, one may find the assertion: “Age [and the experiences resulting from or linked with it] has never been accepted as a macrosocial category of the significance of class, race, and gender.”66 Calling attention to generational issues may be seen as a worthwhile shift in contemporary academia; however, an interest in “generations” does not necessarily coincide with the conviction that this category, as a “slippery” one,67 has to be treated very carefully. While summarizing the main points, it is also worth asking whether Alexievich’s story brings something new to the knowledge of generation and the Soviet Union, and in what ways a narrative about the “Soviet generation(s)” may complement what has already been established on this topic. Secondhand Time is neither a scholarly study, nor does it seek to make a claim about the current state of research, even if in many places confirms or expands it. Alexievich is concerned with gathering, in one place, the voices of “average people” and granting them the opportunity to explain their experiences during the Soviet period—and not infrequently, these are memories that have no place in the official culture. In Secondhand Time, communism is not made into a taboo subject; it is not represented as something that concerned only a part of society. Thanks to her montage approach and references to the most outstanding authors of documentary literature, Alexievich succeeded in creating a multi-dimensional, complicated, and often contradictory depiction of the Soviet past. In this rich tapestry, one may identify the voices of different generations—in the author’s view, all individual experiences relating to one’s generation share one element in common, and that is the experience of life during the Soviet period. This idea of uniting or unifying experiences and memories may raise objections, just as would the author’s belief that people who experienced life in the USSR are similar to one another in terms of their identity. Alexievich attributes an immense significance to the socialist period, almost treating the inhabitants of the former USSR like people with similar DNA.68 Unlike academic studies concerned with a specific period of time or dedicated to a certain set of issues, Alexievich’s interviews are marked by a greater level of generality and span a long period. The author did not present her interviewees with certain selected questions, with the intention of confirming or rebutting a given thesis formulated beforehand, nor did she lead them to respond in any particular way. Rather, she allowed them to reconstruct the past at their own discretion, in

“We’re Easy to Spot”  241 accordance with the workings of their memory. This does not mean that the method adopted automatically guarantees access to “authentic” memories—even in this case we must take into account that the author’s interlocutors were not wholly transparent regarding their own memories and often adapted their stories to official narratives.69 Nevertheless, the book’s value lies in the fact that its author was able to collect so many different experiences and describe the remembrance of the past with so many different voices, all together in one place. To a literary scholar, Secondhand Time offers wonderful material for verifying the extent to which the concept of generation can be used in the analysis of literary texts that take up the subject of communism. Alexievich’s book, as I have tried to demonstrate, is interesting not merely as a “source” of knowledge about Soviet generations, but as much as an example that generation, next to gender, is an important identity mode, and that the problem of belonging to a given generation is so complex that it requires revisiting it from a theoretical perspective.

Notes 1 Gerhard Lauer, “Einführung,” in Literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Generationsforschung, eds. Gerhard Lauer (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 7. 2 The Generation of Columbuses (Polish: pokolenie Kolumbów) is a term denoting the generation of Polish writers who were born soon after Poland regained its independence in 1918 (mostly in the early 1920s) and whose adolescence was marked by the catastrophic times of World War II. Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921–1944), Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944), and Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014), among others, belong to the Generation of Columbuses. 3 These conflicts may appear in various forms. In literature the family is often treated, as per Sigmund Freud, as the “source of suffering.” See Peter Matt, Verkommene Söhne, missratene Töchter. Familiendesaster in der Literatur (München: DTV, 1977). 4 Lauer, “Einführung”; Björn Bohnenkamp, Till Manning, and Eva-Maria Silies, “Argument, Mythos, Auftrag und Konstrukt. Generationelle Erzählungen in interdisziplinärer Perspektive,” in Generation als Erzählung. Neue Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Deutungsmuster, eds. Björn Bohnenkamp, Till Manning, and Eva-Maria Silies (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 9–33. 5 Sergei Lebedev, Oblivion, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: New Vessel Press, 2016). 6 Aleida Assmann, “Unbewältigte Erbschaften. Fakten und Fiktionen im zeitgenössischen Familienroman,” in Generationen. Erfahrung—Erzählung— Identität, eds. Andreas Kraft and Mark Weißhaupt (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009), 49–70. 7 See for example Piotr Osęka, My, ludzie z Marca. Autoportret pokolenia ‘68 (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2015). This book, as suggested by its title (in English: The People of March: A Self-Portrait of Generation ‘68), takes a look at the self-image of the generation of Poles born soon after the war, who in March 1968 protested against the politics of the Communist

242  Anna Artwińska Party and against the antisemitic witch-hunt that drove between 13,000 and 20,000 Poles of Jewish background out of Poland. For this generation, participation in the protest against the authorities was a formational event. On the webpage of the publishing house, we read: The book traces the life stories of its protagonists from their childhood to 1989; it sheds light on the biographies of both legendary oppositionists and lesser-known rebels from Warsaw, Krakow, Wrocław, Gdańsk. The protagonists are activists born both in communist and Home Army families; people of widely divergent political views and attitudes toward the transformations brought about by the Round Table. The book also attempts to answer the question about the place of Polish rebellion within the worldwide 1968 protests of youth. https://czarne.com.pl/katalog/ksiazki/my-ludzie-z-marca, accessed December 13, 2019. 8 For the usage of the category of generation as a narrative category and its connections to the theory of narration, see Bohnenkamp, Manning, and Silies, “Argument, Mythos, Auftrag und Konstrukt,” 18–21. 9 Anna Artwińska, “Komunistyczne autobiografie. Oni Teresy Torańskiej w perspektywie współczesnych paradygmatów rozumienia przeszłości,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018), 347–77. In the chapter I discuss this problem based on the example of Teresa Torańska’s book Oni (1983), a collection of interviews with top-ranking Polish communist politicians (in 1987, it was published in English as Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets). I point out to how the journalist’s questions orient or even evoke certain statements and reflections in her interlocutors. I am also interested in the moment when Torańska resigns from her role of a journalist and enters the role of a biographer who explores communist biographies and organizes them in accordance with her own vision of the world and the accepted system of values. 10 Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of Soviets, trans. Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2016). The English-language translation was released in 2016, a year after Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Throughout the chapter I use the following abbreviated title: Secondhand Time. 11 Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly, “Introduction: National Subjects,” in Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, eds. Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. 12 Alexievich is not the author of the concept. The term homo sovieticus was first introduced into the realm of Russian/Soviet culture by Alexander Zinovyev in his 1982 autobiographical work under the same title. Zinovyev used this term in a negative sense, as a descriptor for an inauthentic identity dedicated to an ideology. In Russian the term may be used synonymously with sovok. Klaus Gestwa recently performed a critical analysis of this concept as one that promotes anthropological homogenization. See Klaus Gestwa, “Der Sowjetmensch. Geschichte eines Kollektivsingulars,” Osteuropa 68, no. 1–2 (2018): 55–82. 13 Karl Schlögel, Das sowjetische Jahrhundert. Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018), 21. The historian Karl Schlögel came to similar conclusions, calling the USSR not just a political system, but a “way of life.” Here it is also worth consulting the findings of the American scholar Svetlana Boym relating to “the

“We’re Easy to Spot”  243

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27

mythology of everyday life in Russia.” See Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Alexievich uses the term “communism” to denote the Soviet reality from the revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the USSR. Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 3–4. Serguei Oushakine, “Neighbours in Memory: Svetlana Alexievich: The First Major Postcolonial Author of Post-Communism,” Times Literary Supplement (November 18, 2016): 12. In this chapter I am concentrating on the first part of the book. Connie C. Thorson and James L. Thorson, “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 52, no. 4 (2018): 487. See Anja Tippner, “Die große Enttäuschung. Krisenerfahrung und Desillusionierung bei Svetlana Aleksievič,” in Nackte Seelen. Svetlana Aleksievič und der “Rote Mensch,” eds. Manfred Sapper, Anja Tippner, and Volker Weichsel, Osteuropa 68, no. 1–2 (2018): 27–44. Eva Binder, “Von den Sowjethelden zum russischen Menschen. Lebenserzählung und Geschichtserfahrung in Secondhand-Zeit von Svetlana Aleksievič,” in IchErzählungen. Narrative Identitäts/De/Konstruktionen, eds. Nicola Mitterer, Florian Marlon Auernig, and Andreas Hudelist (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2018), 39. Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, The Blockade Book (Moscow: Peak Independent Publishers, 2003). The Blockade Book contains interviews conducted in 1974 with people who lived through the blockade of Leningrad that lasted 900 days, from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. The authors’ intention was not to write another story of Soviet heroes, but rather to show the disastrous circumstances of people locked in the city and their ways of coping with extreme experiences (being trapped, hunger, cold). This book, and especially the method of conducting interviews with people affected by a tragedy, had an exceptional influence on Alexievich’s writing. In one of her interviews, she refers to the book as a “revelation.” See Karla Hielscher, “Die Menschenforscherin. Leben und Werk Svetlana Aleksievičs,” Osteuropa 2018, no. 1–2 (2018): 7. We do not know, however, when the interviews themselves were conducted. Alexievich notes only that the first part of her book was compiled in 1991–2001, and the second between 2002 and 2012. Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 165. The Sixtiers (Šestidesatniki) was a generation of the Soviet intelligentsia born between 1925 and 1945 and subjected to the culture and politics of the USSR during the late 1950s and 1960s. Although most of the Sixtiers believed in communist ideals, their points of view were formed by World War II and by the years of Stalin’s repressions and purges. The Sixtiers were distinguished by their antitotalitarian views and by their activity in the field of culture. Many Soviet poets and authors belong to this generation. Ulrike Jureit, “Generation, Generationality, Generational Research,” Docupedia, August 9, 2017, http://docupedia.de/zg/jureit_generation_v2_ en_2017, accessed December 13, 2019. See Hubert Orłowski, ed., Pokolenia albo porządkowanie historii (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2015). See e.g. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, eds., Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005), 7–26.

244  Anna Artwińska 28 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 8. 29 Ibid., 266. 30 Ibid., 155–56. Concerning the importance of the kitchen and its influence on both the Soviet dissident movement and civil society, see Schlögel, Das sowjetische Jahrhundert, 398–419. 31 See Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik’s chapter “Generational and Gendered Memory of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: Methodological Perspectives and Political Challenges” in this volume. 32 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Alison Landsberg utilizes this term to denote memories of things that one has not lived through personally, but acquired them via audiovisual culture (film, television). As suggested by its name, prosthetic memory is thus “attached,” appropriated from mass culture, and adopted to one’s needs. According to Landsberg, thanks to visual culture it is possible to identify with the memories of other people and to integrate them fully into one’s own memory system. 33 Bernhard Giesen, “Ungleichzeitigkeit, Erfahrung und der Begriff der Generation,” in Generationen. Erfahrung—Erzählung—Identität, 204. Giesen follows a similar logic as Landsberg when he writes about the migration of memory from the material to the symbolic. 34 Alexander Etkind has arrived at similar conclusions, writing: “Uncomfortably for the historian, postcatastrophic memory often entails allegories rather than facts and imaginative fiction rather than archival documentation. . . . Like all memory, intergenerational memory has its limits.” Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 244. 35 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 11. 36 Reinhart Koselleck, “Historik and Hermeneutics,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and eds. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 50. 37 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 291. 38 Andreas Kraft and Mark Weißhaupt, “Erfahrung—Erzählung—Identität und die ‘Grenzen des Verstehens’: Überlegungen zum Generationsbegriff,” in Generationen. Erfahrung—Erzählung—Identität, 33. 39 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 6. 40 She thus confirms Reinhart Koselleck’s assertion that “[t]he intersection of the respective generational experiences includes both victors and vanquished, even if they are realized and processed in different ways, insofar as they can yet be processed.” Reinhart Koselleck, “Transformation of Experiences and Methodological Change: A Historical and Anthropological Essay,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 52. 41 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 32–33. 42 Ibid., 43. 43 Anna Krylova calls attention to the fact that the first generation was in no case exclusively the victim of Stalin’s ideology: “How did Soviet citizens who lived in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s come to think about themselves? Whose terms did they use when they thought, wrote, talked, dreamed?” See Anna Krylova, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation,’” in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101.

“We’re Easy to Spot”  245 4 4 “The Baby Boomers benefited in untold ways from decades of peaceful, organic, evolutionary development.” Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 45 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 54–55. 46 Ibid., 164. What is interesting in Secondhand Time is that not only communist ideology but also capitalism is subjected to criticism. The motif of disappointment with liberal democracy and the free market in the Russian context appears in many of the interviews, as well as in those conducted with people who considered themselves to be dissidents in the USSR. In comparison with the post-Soviet reality, in which the most valuable things are material ones, the Soviet past presents itself as a space in which values such as culture, art, and solidarity played a central role. Those who were born shortly before the transformation find themselves in a particularly difficult situation. This “lost generation” spent its childhood under communism, yet was then forced to live in capitalism. 47 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 51. 48 Ibid., 47. 49 Ibid., 74. 50 Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka—kronika implozji imperium według Aleksijewicz,” wyborcza. pl (October 7, 2014), http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,16761304,_Czasy_ secondhand_ KoniQec_czerwonego_czlowieka_.html, accessed December 13, 2019. Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir has called attention to the limits of this understanding, writing that Secondhand Time is not itself a “balanced book,” but certainly one “searching for balance.” 51 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 186. 52 Ibid., 184. 53 Comparing involvement in communism (not only Soviet) with religious involvement has a long tradition in the discipline. See Marcin Kula, “Communism as a Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 3 (2005), 371–81. What is interesting in the interview discussed here is that the interviewee himself defends his position by employing parareligious arguments, which the author treats as proof of his ideological blindness. Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 186. 54 55 Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2017). 56 Anna Artwińska, “Gewalt legitimieren? Krieg und Affekte bei Svetlana Aleksievič,” in Verbrechen—Fiktion—Vermarktung. Gewalt in den zeitgenössischen slavischen Literaturen, eds. Laura Burlon et al. (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 2013), 161–76. 57 Barbara Evans Clements, A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 253–86. 58 Binder, “Von den Sowjethelden zum russischen Menschen,” 45. 59 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 214–16. 60 I would like to thank Agnieszka Mrozik for pointing this out to me. 61 Krylova, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation.’” 62 Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers. 63 Alexei Yurchak, Everything War Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

246  Anna Artwińska 64 Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 65 Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 4. Donald J. Raleigh’s book is subtitled An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generations and based on interviews the author conducted with graduates of two schools in Moscow and Saratov from 1967. 66 Hilary Pilkington, ed., Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London: Routledge, 1996), 1. 67 See Stephen Lovell, “Introduction,” in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, 8. 68 Such a perspective of the Soviet past is not anything new, of course; the author’s merit is primarily in that she formulated it based on the experience of concrete people and that in her comments she does not reproduce the orientalizing, grotesque judgments of this past. Thus, in Alexievich’s approach, “homo sovieticus” is not an ironic figure. 69 There is a recurring doubt in the state of the art about the author’s credibility: did she publish actual conversations, or rather their modified versions? Johanna Lindbladh put forward the thesis that Alexievich’s interviews (especially those published in Voices of Chernobyl) are interpretations of the conversations rather than their verisimilar record. See Johanna Lindbladh, “The Problem of Narration and Reconciliation in Svetlana Alexievich’s Testimony Voices of Chernobyl,” in The Poetic of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narrations, ed. Johanna Lindbladh (Lund: Center for European Studies 2008), 48.

12 Entering Gray Zones Questions of Female Identity, Political Commitment, and Personal Choices in Jiřina Šiklová’s Memoir of Life under Socialism and Beyond Anja Tippner A Participant Observer of Czech History The sociologist and feminist Jiřina Šiklová is an affectionate observer and critic of Czech society. Though she sees herself in the tradition of European engaged intellectualism, Šiklová describes herself as an ardent participant observer who never fully subscribes to one ideology or another, be it communism, dissidence, or feminism. Born in 1935, she has witnessed radical societal changes in her native country, and analyzed them through the lens of sociological and feminist studies. One of her latest publications is a collaborative life narrative, called Bez ohlávky [Without Restraints], published in 2011, in which her life story is recreated through interviews and conversations with two younger Czech intellectuals.1 In Bez ohlávky, she looks back on her life but also on Czech contemporary history. Šiklová’s narrative veers between irony and sympathy for her younger self, and between estrangement and engagement with regard to the societal changes she witnessed. According to Anthony Giddens: Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. . . . A person with a reasonably stable sense of self-identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able to grasp reflexively and, to a greater or lesser degree, communicate to other people. . . . A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. 2 The narrative Šiklová “keeps going” in her spoken life story is that of a participant observer, someone close to the center of events who nevertheless keeps a critical distance. She situates herself in distinct social

248  Anja Tippner environments and historical moments, sometimes as a participant claiming agency, but often as an observer. At one point, she states: This inability to join a group is good and bad. The good thing is that you never become a fanatic. Although there were times when I longed to be one. I could never accept dogma as such. The bad thing was that there are situations where you are only a bystander.3 Šiklová uses these words to describe her position as a public intellectual and a contemporary witness. Here and elsewhere, she creates the image of an involved bystander who has a vantage point but is not too involved to judge the events impartially. She describes herself as committed to the causes she believes in but was never completely invested in. Or, in her own words: “I do not have the ability to immerse myself completely in any kind of ideology or religion.”4 This is the stance she takes toward her political activity in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s, her work in the citizen’s rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and her work as a feminist activist and gender scholar in the 1990s. Concerning her identity as a member of the Communist Party, this stance allows her to embrace only those parts of the party history which suit her. She thus never has to “revise” former ideological positions, being able to stay true to her somewhat detached observer self. As a result of her sociological and feminist training, she intertwines private and public activities, and because of her self-image as participant observer, she is not particularly interested in underscoring her own role in dissent or in the feminist movement. Instead, she locates herself in a network of friendships, working relations, and family ties that all add up to a larger picture of Czech society in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the narrative Šiklová keeps going in her conversations with the author and editor Michal Plzák and Magdalena Čechlovská, a journalist and a literary critic, respectively. Plzák and Čechlovská interviewed Šiklová over the course of a year, in 2010 and 2011, at her family home in Prague and at her summer house, in Jelenov in Šumava. The resulting life narrative is presented in nineteen chapters that roughly follow Šiklová’s biography from her childhood in Prague in the 1930s, her studies at Charles University, and her activities as a student leader organizing discussions, meetings, including those with foreign leaders of the communist youth movement, motherhood, her involvement in the dissident underground, imprisonment, to the post-transition years, and her work at the Center for Gender Studies in Prague, which she founded in 1991. In these conversations Šiklová is at the same time outspoken and discreet. The questions serve as impulses to remember, and are often of the type of: “You were a pioneer?”5 or “And what happened then?”6 The interviewers do not strictly adhere to the rules of oral history, since they at

Entering Gray Zones  249 times comment and convey a certain attitude toward past events, but all in all their questions are short and neutral and not suggestive. The questions do serve as a kind of authentication of certain events and truths. The psychodynamic between Šiklová and her interviewers is amicable— sometimes motherly on Šiklová’s side and almost reverential on Plzák and Čechlovská’s side. What is apparent in the dialogue between Šiklová and her interlocutors is that they bring a different historical knowledge to bear while reflecting historical events such as the German occupation during World War II, the Stalinist era, or the Prague Spring. The general addressee of Šiklová’s biographical narrative is a younger generation without personal experience of the vagaries of life under socialism. This does not mean that she is apologetic of everyday life under socialism, but it results in a few didactic asides to make this life more accessible to her young addressees. The resulting text is less an autobiography and more a memoir, if one follows the distinction made by Lee Quinby: whereas autobiography promotes an “I” that shares . . . an assumed interiority . . . , memoirs promote an “I” that is explicitly constituted in the reports of utterances and proceedings of others. The “I” or subjectivity produced in memoirs is externalized and . . . dialogical.7 Although the “I” that Šiklová presents in these interviews is dialogical and externalized, she makes no claims of being a representative of her generation, class, or gender. Instead, she insists on her own individual perspective refusing to take a collective view whenever possible. When she speaks of persons of the same age, of her schoolmates, and fellow students, she notes that they were in general a politically aware generation,8 due to war experiences, the political changes after 1948, and the politicization through youth movements in school and at university. Coming from a bourgeois background with social democratic leanings, she first refused to join the communist youth organization, because she did not want to be considered opportunistic or part of the general wave of careerist communists that appeared after 1948. The moment she had obtained her place at the university, she felt free to choose and joined it.9 As a university student, she became one of the leaders of the communist youth movement, though she herself considers the years leading to 1968 to be the time of her real involvement with party politics. The questions Plzák and Čechlovská ask are meant to bring to the fore Šiklová’s historical consciousness: they focus on class, gender, and, most of all, on her political commitment. Her answers convey an acute sense of a generational divide between herself and her interviewers who are too young to remember 1968, let alone the 1950s. Although the interviews cover almost all aspects of her life and dwell exhaustively on some periods, Šiklová’s answers display lacunae and obvious omissions. To cite Giddens again, the narrative Šiklová “keeps going” is marked

250  Anja Tippner by a certain scarcity of political thought in her life story. Instead, her narrative centers on the mechanics and the ethics of everyday life in the Czech Socialist Republic, the state where she has spent the greater part of her adult life. It mostly falls in line with the idea of a “Czech third way,” that is, a “democratic socialism” as it was purported in the 1960s, neither disavowing its socialist roots, nor denying its totalitarian tendencies.10 While she relates personal facts, such as her divorce or her father giving in to the system, her narrative is never transgressive with regard to the people involved in her life. She goes to great lengths to describe the ways in which the underground postal system of bringing documents and texts to the West was organized, but does not dwell on the content of these documents and texts, nor on the differences between the dissident factions and the sometimes strained and complicated relations among individual dissidents. In a way which mirrors her activities after 1989 when she worked closely with much younger women, her circle of friends, co-workers, and collaborators seems to not be defined by generational boundaries. In many ways, Šiklová’s biography is atypical for the vast majority of Czech people. She belongs to the two percent of Czechs who were either members of the nomenclature or members of the dissident movement and underground, or in her case in succession made part of both groups.11 But she certainly fits the bill of a 1970s and 1980s Czech dissident. She describes herself as a public intellectual and emphasizes the importance of her inner circle of friends and dissidents, and the fact that she always tried to stay within the confines of law. Like other dissidents, she argues against the “currently fashionable axiom that the Communist regime was totalitarian to the extent of effectively denying the individual any space for freedom.”12 Instead, she pleads for a balanced view of personal options and circumstances that influence life choices.

The Gray Zone or Questions of Choice One of Šiklová’s most influential texts is a short essay with the title “The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia.”13 In this article from 1990, she explores the relationship between dissidents, the nonpolitical majority of Czech society, and the nomenklatura, and purports adding a fourth category, that of the gray zone, that is, people who were not outspoken dissidents, but did support the political opposition as much as possible. Although the concept of dissidence has a very positive ring to many Western scholars and intellectuals, many Czech citizens, even those engaged in anticommunist activities, do not want to be identified as dissidents.14 Prototypical of this “gray zone” are the women dissidents who worked their daytime jobs, cared for children, and, for example, did not sign Charta 77, but still were a vital part of

Entering Gray Zones  251 the operations of the underground. In her essay, Šiklová puts forth the following opinion: [E]xperts, journalists, artists, authors, and, generally, people who are concerned about and with politics differ from one another not so much by how much they know or by how they assess the facts but mainly by their moral stance and the courage with which they voice their views. This stance distinguishes them from one another far more than whether they carry a party card.15 Šiklová develops her concept of the “gray zone” in dialogue with Western intellectuals (whom she calls “friends from abroad” and who perceive communists as bad and dissidents as good) and with regard to the societal changes after the fall of communism. Her understanding of the “gray zone” in some aspects overlaps with Primo Levi’s similarly named concept, but differs in others. She, too, focuses on the moral ambiguity that can often be found in totalitarian circumstances. She, too, refuses an uncritical division in “good” and “bad” people, heroes and collaborators, communists and democrats. As does Levi, she too rejects the “Manichean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities”16 and points her audience toward the fact that the gray zone is characterized by a “complicated internal structure” that clouds our judgment. The Italian Holocaust survivor and the Czech dissident agree that victims should not be considered complicit. This does not mean that she is not willing to differentiate between those who did right and those who did wrong, but as with Levi, she is more interested in the mechanics of people’s choices. Most of all, she does not feel entitled to judge others. She writes: [I]t will be inappropriate for us to remind them [the members of the gray zone] of their petty collaboration with the regime, or of our own merits, lost opportunities and careers, of how much we suffered and the years we spent behind bars.17 One of the most prominent examples of the gray zone in Czech culture concerns the writer Pavel Kohout (b. 1928). Kohout worked for the Czech state radio, wrote panegyrics about Stalin, was a cultural attaché at the Czech embassy in Moscow for two years, and after finishing his studies at Charles University became the editor-in-chief of the satirical newspaper Dikobraz [The Porcupine]. In all these capacities, he promoted official Stalinist politics. It was only in the mid-1960s that he took a more critical stance with regard to cultural politics in the Czech Republic. After the Prague Spring, in the period of “normalization,” he became a prominent member of the Czech dissident movement, which he later supported from exile in Austria. Kohout often is perceived as an

252  Anja Tippner example of the cultural establishment that brought about, and tried to keep alive, socialism in the Czech lands after 1945 well into the 1960s. His refusal to disavow his youthful Stalinist leanings, as well as his involvement in party politics, has irked many contemporary critics. Some years ago, the Czech writer Radka Denemarková (b. 1968) voiced her discontent with Kohout and other members of his generation: I am always annoyed by the idea that after the war everybody was communist and enthusiastic about creating a new and better world. I mean, everyone who has a little bit of intelligence could see that a better world is not made with violence. I can’t listen to Pavel Kohout and his likes anymore. They pretend to be the voices of their generation and in reality, they destroyed their generation . . . and to this day they never apologized.18 Šiklová acknowledges that Kohout is an interesting case but she refuses to condemn him or others for writing “silly poems about Stalin.”19 In her view, the good he did in exile, the people he helped, makes up for his youthful Stalinism. This is an opinion she has iterated in other contexts as well. In a 1999 article on the Czech screening law—that is, the law meant to deny agents and informers of the State Secret Service, “conscious collaborators,” as well as “candidates for collaboration” access to any kind of state function or positions as civil servants—she points out that this third category “should never have been included in the law.”20 Later on, she mentions Kohout as one of the cases of unjustified accusations. Her reasoning in favor of the gray zone consists of two arguments: one, which she already elaborated in her essay on the gray zone, namely, that things are not black and white, that people and circumstances change; and a second one that society needs the members of the gray zone if it wants to rebuild and democratize itself. Taking into account the general consensus in today’s Czech society among the general population and intellectual elites regarding the socialist period as “totalitarian,” as well as a very pronounced anticommunism, Šiklová’s nuanced assessments of communist era intellectuals and their achievements and mistakes have more of an edge than it is immediately visible. 21 Šiklová is forgiving not only with those who compromised themselves by flying a little bit too close to power; she also includes perpetrators in her wish to differentiate. This stands in contrast to Levi, who unequivocally condemns the perpetrators; Šiklová argues for a nuanced view of the perpetrators, too. In her opinion, neither victims nor perpetrators should be judged. With regard to her old prison guard Andula Bíla, she remarks: “This was a job. They [the prison guards] are also people. One has to differentiate, there is no need to generalize.”22 In her article on the gray zone, she writes that the majority of people who were party members joined not because of conviction, but for more sanguine reasons. Even

Entering Gray Zones  253 members of the socialist establishment might have had a good reason in the first place. Her credo is: “Do differentiate, do not generalize.”23 Opinions like this gain much of their moral weight because of the fact that she was imprisoned for her activities in the underground communication network for eleven months from May 1981 to March 1982.24 The situation gets even more complicated when one takes a look at those wedged in between dissidents and the socialist establishment. In an article published under a pseudonym in the samizdat journal Kritický sbornik [Critical Almanac], Šiklová argues for the right to anonymity as a way to move between dissident and official culture: Even someone who does not want to be harassed, who wants to remain in the structures and work in them, has every right to contribute to the “second culture,” to the unofficial one, and we . . . should be grateful for him or her for enriching us, we should respect and defend his or her right to anonymity. 25 Here, her argument resembles the reasons she puts forth for her own work for the Communist Party, stressing once again that there should not just be the opposition between us and them, between those who go along with the system and those who opt out. For her there is no question that righteousness can be found in the in-between too. Throughout her writings she claims that these “good workers, qualified, professionally erudite people” are geared toward being the ruling class in postsocialist Czech Republic. 26 Šiklová’s refusal to accept a clear-cut opposition seems to be due as much to intellectual convictions as to a certain need to (re-)interpret her own life story, which is marked by ambivalence and ambiguity, too. Although she first refused to become a member of the Communist Party, she applied for membership, and, what is more, she became an active party official within the Czech Communist youth organization at Charles University in 1956 and only left the party in 1969, after the Prague Spring. When asked: “Were you at least a ‘good communist’ in the beginning?,”27 she asks back: “What is a good communist?” Then she goes on to present herself as a bystander and remarks that some of those who were fervent party members then became ardent critics in the 1960s and 1970s. Summing up these times, she points out that she was not alone with her somewhat complicated relationship to the party. She writes, “the moment I became a member, the problems started.”28 She perceives this fraught, critical attitude toward the party as characteristic for her “generation.”29 Later on she makes a distinction between being a “communist,” that is someone who is really dyed in the wool, a label which she does not accept for herself, and being a member of the Communist Party, that is someone who engages in party politics without necessarily being a communist believer.30

254  Anja Tippner

Terms of Engagement: Party Politics, Dissent, Feminism A recurring theme in Šiklová’s life narrative is the question of choice. Her approach to the question of party membership is informed by this concept. She points out that not everybody was asked to join the party, so that not being a party member might not have been the political statement as which it is perceived now, but may have happened due to a lack of choice.31 She then goes back to the question of Pavel Kohout and recounts a dialogue with her friend and fellow dissenter Zdeněk Rotrekl (1920–2013), who accused Kohout and other party members of the late 1940s and early 1950s of opportunism: Rotrekl condemned people, like Pavel Kohout, and I told him what I tell you now: “Don’t forget, you did not have a choice!” And he says: “I was a Catholic!” “Exactly, you did not have a choice.” “I always had my Christian point of view.” “You did not have a choice.”32 In her article on lustration, she mentions a similar debate with the writer Jiří Gruša (1938–2011) and concludes that party membership cannot be used as a measurement for morality or amorality, that the only relevant question is what someone did as a party member. So, when it comes to her own party membership, she clearly reflects on her own possibility to choose her intellectual environment at the time, a time she still calls “enthusiastic communism.” On the one hand, there was her comfortably bourgeois family, and on the other hand, there were her teachers at the university—Karel Kosík (1926–2003), Ivan Svítak (1925–1994), Eduard Goldstücker (1913–2000), and Milan Machovec (1925–2003)—who were all brilliant, convinced party members and critical thinkers in the 1950s.33 All of them became prominent proponents of democratic socialism in the 1960s and were excluded from the party and chased from university after 1968, were arrested, or, as in the case of Goldstücker, went into exile. The text contains interesting lacunae, though, since Šiklová does not reflect on how gender limits or shapes choices, and she also does not reflect upon the experiences that shaped this preceding generation of communists, just as she does not refer to Kosík’s wife, the literary scholar and reform communist Růžena Grebeníčková (1925–1997), as a fellow female party member and a possible role model. In her account, she remembers that she was asked to join the party several times. She declined because joining could have been perceived as a wholly opportunistic move since she applied for university at the same time and party membership would have helped her application and somewhat dimmed the stain of a bourgeois upbringing.34 She then goes on to tell her interviewers that she finally joined the party when she got her spot at the history faculty. She did not just become a party member; she became a party activist at the university branch of the Communist

Entering Gray Zones  255 Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1967, she was elected head of the student council of the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University. As she points out, she took this function at a specific point in time, namely during the era of reform communism, and quit after the Prague Spring. She remembers that she became involved when many people used the new freedom to leave the party, stating that these people should have fought for democracy, that they voluntarily gave up positions that then could be taken over by hardliners.35 This is the standpoint that Šiklová claims for herself, as she states: I would not accept to be called a communist. I was a member of the Communist Party, that’s a difference. A party member does not need to identify him- or herself with the party. I was a member of the university youth and almost felt handicapped because I was not a true believer.36 But as she points out, she joined to work the system from within, to criticize it from within. Almost the same attitude can be found in her accounts of underground activities; here, too, she describes herself as more of a witness and not as a true believer: “My position was that of a person who is active, who expresses her own point of view, but who does not take the banner. That was done by others.”37 Still, she is aware that her actions helped keep the system in power, even in the times of dissent, as she says. As Vladimir Andrle has noted, “being a dissident naturally involved, being a target of the Communist state’s repressive apparatus,” and while personal experiences varied, this meant living with victimization. 38 Throughout her biographical interview, Šiklová insists that she never felt victimized, not even in prison. She uses two lines of argumentation to do so: the first is to describe the secret service men as being comically inept at their job, and the second is to point out that the prison guards only did their job. Especially her account of the late 1970s abounds in anecdotes about stupid secret service agents who got duped, who did not understand the intricate fabric of underground post, and whom she dubbed Jirka and Jirka. But more important is her refusal to be rehabilitated and reinstated at the university. In her view, a demand for rehabilitation would have been an acknowledgment of her wrong-doing in the first place, something she does not accept.39 Being very active in the reform movement that brought about the Prague Spring in the late 1960s, she opposed the closing down of the critical journal Literární noviny [Literary News] in 1967; in her position as leader of the party section at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, she signed “The Two Thousand Words” manifesto in summer 1968. She left the party in 1969 after it became clear that the group of hardliners around Gustav Husák had won the internal power struggle. After 1968, she had

256  Anja Tippner to leave her position at the university and worked different jobs, until she finally got a job at Thomayer Hospital in Prague, doing social work as well as research. During the period of normalization, she was active in the Czech dissident movement and one of the key figures in the network of underground communication and publication. While she occupied a crucial place in the infrapolitics of the dissident movement, she never took part in the political debates of different factions. Despite the fact that she was imprisoned as a member of the Czech political opposition movement, she does not regard herself as a full-blown dissident, describing herself as acting from the fringes of dissent, more of a facilitator than activist.40 This is not just a personal quirk but a very common attitude within Czech dissent, especially among women, as Marketa Spiritova has pointed out.41 Regardless of the context, Šiklová insists that issues of personal agency and moral responsibility are never black-and-white but gray. This is especially true for the times of normalizace, or normalization, that is the years after the Prague Spring, the 1970s, and early 1980s. This period is often perceived as the apex of communist oppression after Stalinism and as a time of collaboration with the regime. In contrast to the 1950s, and in light of the Soviet invasion of 1968, this time working with the regime could not be excused by the after-effects of the recent war experience, enthusiasm, or naivety. But, as Šiklová points out, other motifs like earning a livelihood or trying to get your children into the university can be found in both periods. In her texts, she provides us with Czech examples for Aleksei Yurchak’s thesis that citizens of late socialism were not all hypocrites, but also believed in values such as solidarity, internationalism, and peace that were presented and perceived as hallmarks of socialist societies, and that they shared a socialist discourse. The system began to weaken when Soviet citizens stopped to believe in these values and gradually abstained from referring to them into their everyday interactions.42 Like Šiklová, Yurchak is critical of “binary socialism,” that is, a discussion of socialism as bad, corrupt, and dismissive of peoples’ lived realities if they do not conform to this model. Václav Havel’s concept of “living in lies” and “living in truth” is based on the assumption that ordinary Czech citizens had to live a public life conforming to the demands of ideology and a private life where they decried the same ideology as false. “Living in truth” meant ordinary, everyday acts of defiance in the face of power without necessarily declaring them as such.43 Šiklová perceives her own activities in this vein: hers were multiple acts of defiance without an open declaration of political opposition, at least until 1977 when she signed Charter 77 as one of the 242 original signatories. In Yurchak’s opinion, “Soviet late socialism provides a stunning example of how a dynamic and powerful social system can abruptly and unexpectedly unravel when the discursive conditions of its existence are changed.”44 Šiklová points out several times that the Czech situation

Entering Gray Zones  257 was quite similar, a fact that has also been noted by researchers of normalization like Michal Pullmann and Pavel Kolář.45 Not unlikely Soviet dissidents, Czech dissidents, too, were part of a collapse that they did not anticipate or even wanted to bring about. Or as Šiklová says: “Don’t forget, we did not even imagine that the regime could change. And those in exile, too . . . and Pavel Tigrid, too.”46 And then she goes on to say that they did not want to change everything, just some things. Later on, she points out that all they, or the dissidents, wanted was “a better socialism without the Communist Party, without Soviet troops in Milovice, without the Secret police,” that there were very few people who even could imagine this.47 The change that came surprised everyone, even those who had most suffered under the regime and tried to bring it down. Jiřína Šiklová’s attitude toward feminism and gender likewise can be characterized by a refusal to think in binary oppositions, in this case of men versus women, feminist versus traditionalist. Especially her opinion of Western feminism is marked by an ambivalence, which is astonishing for someone who is the doyenne of Czech gender studies. But then again, this is in line with attitudes toward feminism and gender roles that existed in Czech dissent. The Czech dissident movement was notoriously traditional when it came to gender roles, with men writing political papers and representing the movement in public spaces, and women working behind the scenes typing manuscripts, working as messengers, and holding families together.48 The ethnologist Marketa Spiritova has conducted interviews with women who were active in the dissident movement, and comes to the conclusion that, although women had to take over the role of the pater familias, because men were either incarcerated or without jobs, there was also a noticeable turn toward more conservative and traditional roles.49 In the end, she quotes Šiklová who puts forth the idea that women accepted these roles because they were not interested in power, but in “keeping Czech culture alive.”50 Thus, although Šiklová is one of the founders of gender studies in the Czech Republic, she is reticent to consider herself a feminist. Obviously, she does not think that feminism is dada, as Václav Havel writes in one of his essays, 51 but she is still wary of embracing Western feminism wholeheartedly. When she comes into contact with Western feminists from the United States or West Germany, she views them as dogmatic and rather inflexible. Nonetheless she acknowledges the support by American, German, or Irish scholars who in the 1990s came to research but also to support the budding Czech feminist movement, not only with books and money but also emotionally. These first contacts were informal and she was the go-to person, since she was one of the few women in the Czech Republic who had published on feminism. 52 With a certain gusto, she recounts how she was rebuked by a visiting feminist for baking a cake for a visitor from the United States. 53 In her

258  Anja Tippner essay “Únava z vysvětlování” [Tired of Explaining] she describes her situation in the 1990s as “schizophrenic”: while she was confronted with simplistic concepts of feminism at home, she was annoyed by the uncritical and ideological attitude of Western feminists. 54 Here, as elsewhere she opts out of binary structures, and positions herself somewhere in the “gray zone” of intersectionality. Her answer to the question “Are you a feminist?” is: “I consider myself first of all to be Jiřina Šiklová, and then a woman, mother, European, Czech, and so on.”55 As other dissidents, too, she perceives conflicts with the state apparatus, be it communist or capitalist, as conflicts that “citizens” have, not men or women. What is important for her are the traits that feminism shared with the human rights movement, and as she gets older, she looks toward feminism for strategies to combat ageism.

Conclusion By claiming to never having been a dyed-in-the-wool communist and presenting her activities as a party member in a certain way, Šiklová manages to create a life without need for revisions or reshaping.56 In contrast to other party members who later on felt the need to make excuses or even disavow their former party membership, she is thus able to meaningfully incorporate it into her biography without ascribing too much meaning to it or acknowledging its formative influence. The one identity she is willing to accept, and most powerfully articulates, is that of a public intellectual, albeit one who keeps her distance most of the time. Even if she does not like to describe herself in these terms, 57 she sees herself as deeply invested in cultural discourses and their impact on the society at large, as someone who is in tune with her era and the historic times she has experienced. As she narrates them, her experiences molded her views of Czech society and her presentation of them and her public service (in this she includes teaching as well as cleaning toilets and clandestinely ferrying manuscripts to the West) instilled in her an appreciation for the practical aspects of politics and an interest in the politics of everyday life. She brings forward the idea of being a public intellectual with regard to her interactions with audiences in the Czech Republic: for example, the emails and letters after TV appearances or her newspaper columns. Her role model here is the Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík, who was one of the leading theorists of the Prague Spring. In her mind, Kosík is a very good illustration of the fact that public intellectuals are not politicians. Politicians need to act strategically; they have to simplify in order to express themselves in an easily accessible way and to take sides, while the task of the intellectual is to differentiate, to see everything from multiple angles, which keeps her or him from taking sides easily.58 Like Kosík, she strives to be a dissenter from the reigning ideology and spirit of time, to regard the events from

Entering Gray Zones  259 an intellectual vantage point, and not to compromise. Referring to her father, who joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia after 1948 in order to support his family, she recalls that she promised herself never to betray her convictions, not even for her family and children.59 In an interesting move, she does not refer to Václav Havel but to the French sociologist Raymond Aron when she sketches her own personal version of being a public intellectual: [A public intellectual] is a person, who is not a politician, who has no power, but from time to time makes public appearances. People address him and complain to him [she uses the male form here]. I have been addressed as a public intellectual. I have read that Raymond Aron was perceived as a public intellectual. So, I said to myself, being compared to him that’s not so bad, that’s not bad company.60 The association with Raymond Aron, who is famous for his 1955 book L’Opium des intellectuels (1955) [The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1957], in which he dissected the shortcomings of intellectuals in the twentieth century, is telling. Aron viewed himself as being a “committed observer,”61 that is someone trying to regard history and society objectively while not being detached. Like Aron’s, Jiřina Šiklová’s self-description relies on this duality of being an “actor and spectator,” on understanding rather than voicing judgments and criticism of Czech political life.

Notes 1 Jiřina Šiklová, Bez ohlávky. (Rozhovory). Michal Plzák—Magdalena Čechovská (Praha: kalich, 2011), 107. 2 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 53–54, emphasis in original. 3 Šiklová, Bez obhlávky, 107. 4 Jiřina Šiklová, “Únava z vysvětlování,” in Feminismus devadesátých let českýma očima, eds. Marie Josef Chuchma and Eva Klimentová (Praha: Edice nové čtení světa, 1999), 136. 5 Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 50. 6 Ibid., 186. 7 Lee Quinby, “The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press), 299. 8 Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 50. She shares the comfortable bourgeois background (her father was a doctor, her mother a teacher) with another notable Czech dissident, Václav Havel (1936–2011), from whom she was only a year older. 9 Ibid., 80. Her musings on joining the party are another variation of her belief in “choice.” 10 For a description of Czech attitudes toward communism, see Muriel Blaive, “The Czechs and their Communism, Past and Present,” in Inquiries into Past and Present, eds. Deanna Gard, Izabella Main, Martyn Oliver, and James

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Wood (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, vol. 17, 2005), www.iwm.at/publications/5-junior-visiting-fellows-conferences/vol-xvii/ muriel-blaive/, https://www.iwm.at/publications/5-junior-visiting-fellowsconferences/vol-xvii/muriel-blaive/, accessed October 15, 2019. See Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke, Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 219. Vladimir Andrle, “Czech Dissidents: A Classically Modern Community,” in Biographical Research in Eastern Europe: Altered Lives and Broken Biographies, eds. Robin Humphrey, Robert L. Miller, and Elena A. Zdravomyslova (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 126. Jiřina Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia,” Social Research 57, no. 2 (1990): 347–63. Marketa Spiritova, “‘Ich habe lieber gedient als zu schreiben.’ Die Rolle der Frau in dissidentischen Netzwerken in der Tschechoslowakei nach 1968,” in Soziale Netzwerke und soziales Verhalten in den Transformationsländern. Ethnologische und soziologische Untersuchungen, ed. Klaus Roth (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2007), 109. Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone,’” 347. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 36–37. Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone,’” 357. Radka Denemarková and Ondřej Nezbeda, “Není člověk bez trhlin. Rozhovor,” Respekt 29 (July 18, 2010). Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 68. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 69. Jiřina Šiklová, “Lustration or the Czech Way of Screening,” in The Rule of Law after Communism: Problems and Prospects in East-Central Europe, eds. Martyn Kriegier and Adam Czarnota (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 249. Lukáš Valeš, “Antikomunismus jako nova politická ideologie,” in Společenskovědní aspekty fenoménu vyrovnání se minulostí v kontextu výchovy k občanství, eds. Pavel Kopeček a kol. (Praha: Nakladatelství Epocha, 2013), 60–81. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 247. Ibid. She was imprisoned in Prague in Ruzyně prison. Besides in Bez ohlávky, her prison stay is documented and reflected in an edition of the letters sent from prison to her children and her mother which was published in 2015. See Jiřina Šiklová, Omlouvám se za svou nepřítomnost. Dopisy z Ruzyně 1981–1982 (Praha: Kalich, 2015). A. Nonymová, “Etika anonyma 1983,” in Kritický sbornik 1981–1989. Výbor ze samizdatových ročníků, ed. Karel Palek (Praha: Triada, 2009), 15. Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone,’” 350. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 83. Ibid. Ibid., 85. Šiklová uses the term “my generation,” but does not specify what else defined her generational cohort. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 71. With the exception of Goldstücker, they all were born in the mid-1920s and thus were adults in 1948. Their political activities thus fell into the years of “enthusiastic” communism. As Šiklová remarks, the seven years that distanced her from these men made a huge difference regarding attitudes toward communism. It is also telling here that she mentions Goldstücker who never distanced himself from the party, not at the height of Stalinism, nor after 1968.

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52 53 54 55 56

57

Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 80. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 158. Andrle, Czech Dissidents, 119. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 291–92. This view is not shared by all researchers. Kamila Bendová states in her article that in the 1970s almost all communication with foreign countries depended on Šiklová. See Kamila Bendová, “Ženy v Chartě 77. Vzpomínky na ty, které vydržely,” in Opozice a odpor proti komunistickému režímu v Československu 1968–1989, ed. Petr Blažek (Praha: Dokořán, 2005), 63. See Spiritova, “Ich habe lieber gedient als zu schreiben,” 110. She points out that many wives of dissidents could be described in terms of Šiklová’s “gray zone.” With regard to self-attribution as dissident, see Marketa Spiritova, “‘Ich bin doch kein Dissident!’ Die Dissidenten Osteuropas als eine Erfindung des Westens?,” in Das “Prinzip Osten.” Geschichte und Gegenwart eines symbolischen Raums, eds. Gunther Gebhard, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 145–75. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4–10. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Václav Havel or Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 36–122. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 295–96. Pavel Kolář and Michal Pullmann, Co byla normalizace? Studie o pozdním socialism (Praha: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2016), 42–43. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 321. It is no coincidence that she mentions Pavel Tigrid (1917–2003) here. The Czech writer and journalist had been the driving force behind the anticommunist Czech exile after 1948. He was one of the founders of Radio Free Europe, the editor of one of the main Czech journals in exile, Svědectví [Testimony], and an advisor to President Havel after 1989. Ibid., 292. This phenomenon is not confined to Czech political activists of the 1970s and 1980s. Shana Penn perceived the same reticence toward self-declarations as feminist in the women of the Solidarity movement in Poland. See Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 82. Here, as well as in Czechoslovakia, feminism was perceived as a movement that only fought for the particular interests of women and not as a social movement. Spiritova, “‘Ich habe lieber gedient als zu schreiben,’” 117. Ibid. Václav Havel, “Anatomy of a Reticence,” in Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1999 (London: Vintage, 1991), 297. In her spoken memoir, she remembers calling out the writer Josef Škvorecký for a similar remark. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 303. The concept of Western feminism seemed to be completely alien to both writers. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 303. Ibid., 302. Šiklová, “Únava z vysvětlování,” 133. Ibid., 136. As was the case for many other members of the Communist Party who had to adapt their biographies time and again to the oscillations of the party line. See Pavel Kolář, “The Party as a New Utopia: Reshaping Communist Identity after Stalinism,” Social History 37, no. 4 (2012): 402–24. Šiklová, Bez ohlávky, 331.

262  Anja Tippner







13 Gender, Generational Conflict, and Communism Tonia Lechtman’s Story Anna Müller

I first encountered Tonia Lechtman (1918–1996) in prison reports of an informant who was planted in the cell in which Lechtman was confined from 1949 to 1950.1 She was the only Jewish prisoner in Cell 26 of the investigation unit of Warsaw’s infamous Mokotów prison, where soon after the war, communist authorities detained people, including communists, accused of antistate crimes. In the reports, the cell spy described Lechtman as strangely cooperative with prison authorities while trying to help them uncover the story they were investigating. Lechtman presented herself as a communist who sought to understand what other communists were accusing her of. While trying to help, she assumed that they all fought the same battle that aimed to strengthen socialism—the ideology of the disfranchised. Eliminating communist enemies was just part of that battle. The strength of Tonia Lechtman’s commitment was inspiring, yet perplexing and slightly naïve. I encountered her again on a poster for the movie Tonia and Her Children that the long-time family friend, Marcel Łoziński, made in 2011. It features a photo from 1948 of Lechtman and her two children, Vera and Marcel. It was taken at the liminal moment when the devastation of war was behind them and the future had not yet fully unfolded. Vera, born in 1938, was ten; Marcel, born in 1940, was eight. While embracing both children, Lechtman looks at her son; she is motherly and caring. While looking at her protective embrace I cannot stop thinking that World War II ended barely three years earlier. In that embrace is the worry of a Jewish mother who managed to save her children from the destruction that took the lives of many of her family members, including the children’s father. But in the same embrace there is also hope for their future. Lechtman was a communist, politically engaged in seeking betterment for the world and her children. She was also a Jewish woman, crossing from the world of Jewish traditions and customs into the world of communism, which she imagined as a path to a world free of limitations that more traditional cultures imposed. Communism was a choice she made as an adolescent girl. Over the following decades, the reification of that youthful choice became an important element in her life choices. Communism stood behind her daily practices, it lay at the heart of her

264  Anna Müller values, and it was an element of her moral horizon. It was more than only her means of emancipation from Jewish tradition, from the power of her parents, finally from an antisemitism. It was her source of individual empowerment that provided her with a framework that imbued her life with social, political, and existential meanings. As a daughter and mother, she negotiated her various social roles and responsibilities through communism. Communism was an important factor in who she was and who she was becoming. Through both its uniqueness and commonality, Tonia Lechtman’s story provides a close look at the process of negotiating one’s identity— one’s origins, new social roles, and ideological commitments—a process that is circumscribed in time and space and yet one that draws creatively from complex interactions between gender, individual intricacies, and ideological commitments, in this case, communism. What makes Tonia Lechtman’s story unique is the collection of sources she left behind: a lengthy interview that she gave toward the end of her life in 1994 to Dorota Dowgiałło in Tel Aviv, Israel, and a rich cache of letters, which allows us to have a deep, almost intimate, look into her life. The correspondence gives us insight into how she continued playing certain more traditional gender roles, that of a daughter and mother, while negotiating their meaning through communism, which became the center of her private and public life. Or perhaps we should say, communism, by providing her with a public mission, helped her individualize the meaning of her private life. Tonia Lechtman’s life also represents choices and decisions of a certain generation of Polish Jews, many of whom were in a similar situation. The commonalities in her story help us reflect on the generational choices that this group had at their disposal. Her story provides a microhistorical insight into the life of an “ordinary person in whose life many significant social forces and events converge.”2 Following historian Jill Lepore, I argue that this insight “lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual’s life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.”3 In this chapter, after providing a brief overview of Tonia Lechtman’s life, I contextualize her life and her life decision in view of the specificity of her generation, communism as her ideological choice, and finally her relationships with her parents, especially her mother, as something that circumscribed her life. The last section of this chapter is devoted to the pre-war correspondence that she sent from France to her family in Palestine from 1937 to 1939, in which she negotiated social roles that came with being a daughter and a mother, and her public commitment to communism.

Tonia’s Story Tonia Lechtman (neé Bialer) was a Jewish woman born in Łódź in 1918 to a family of wealthy textile industrialists. Already as a teenager she

Gender, Generational Conflict  265 became enchanted with communism and joined a communist youth organization in Łódź. In 1935, due to financial trouble, rising antisemitism, and a growing fear of the younger generation’s fascination with communism, the Bialer family left Poland for Palestine, where Tonia lived until 1937. In May of that year, at the age of nineteen, after an imprisonment in Bethlehem for her continued communist activism, she and the man she was romantically involved with, a Russian Jew named Sioma Lechtman, left for Paris.4 Sioma, also a communist, was expelled from British Palestine. He was stateless and hence had no place to go. Tonia, despite having Polish citizenship, decided not to return to Poland and to remain with Sioma. Her brother was in Poland at the time and most likely was either imprisoned or in hiding in fear of being imprisoned for his communist views. Despite Lechtman’s later insistence on her continued longing for Poland, the young couple did not consider 1930s Poland a place where they could start a new life. Paris, they hoped, would be a better place. The young couple traveled to France just weeks after the German Condor Legion combed the Basque town Guernica, an action that foreshadowed the impending conflict. It is not quite clear why they chose Paris. In his book A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, historian Ivan Jablonka attempts to reconstruct the history of his grandparents who in 1937 left Parczew, a shtetl in eastern Poland, for France.5 He also poses the question of why his grandparents left for Paris, and not Israel, Argentina, or the United States. Jablonka shows the appeal of France for potential émigrés as a country known for its respect for human rights and also ultimately the fact that France signed a treaty of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union against the Nazi threat.6 It is impossible to say if any of these reasons spoke to the couple, but their early letters do show a conviction that France would always give political asylum to refugees, and of the hope that they would be recognized as legal aliens in France, something that could eventually lead them to become legal citizens.7 Only later, soon before the war, did Tonia begin discussing the possibility of leaving for America in her letters. But in 1937, France seemed to be the only option. Before their departure from Palestine, Sioma and Tonia got married. As Lechtman later explained, and many other communists confirm, the marriage was not a natural choice for communists, who perceived it as a bourgeois institution that stifled love and usually limited women.8 Tonia and Sioma loved each other deeply, but the decision to marry was motivated by the need to legalize their relationship to make their travels easier.9 Toward the end of 1937, Tonia Lechtman informed her parents of their plan to leave for Spain in order to fight in the Spanish Civil War.10 Just two weeks after Sioma left for Spain, another letter from Tonia came, this time informing the family of her pregnancy, which forced her to stay in Paris, without money, stable employment, or even a place to live.11 Almost two years later, in June 1939, Tonia left Paris and moved

266  Anna Müller to the south of France to be close to her husband who was confined in an internment camp in Gurs, France, as a prisoner of war. She got pregnant for the second time soon after their first meeting in Gurs.12 Tonia Lechtman spent the war years in France and Switzerland, where she struggled to escape Nazism and save herself and her children.13 Eventually, in 1946, she decided to return to Poland as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit organization that wanted to bring relief to the countries affected by the war. Her direct supervisor was Noel Field, an American spy for the Soviet Union.14 In January 1947, she brought both of her children to Poland hoping to begin her life anew. However, in 1949 Field was arrested, which led to her arrest as well. Cell 26 of Mokotów Prison was one of the cells where she spent her imprisonment. Despite her parents’ efforts to move her children to Israel, Vera and Marcel were shuffled between various orphanages in Poland until their mother’s release in 1954. After her release, she had to rethink her life, her public activism, and her approach to communism. Finally, in 1970, she left for Israel, where she spent the rest of her life taking care of her grandchildren.15

A Generation of Hope and Rupture Tonia Lechtman belonged to a generation who came of age during interwar Poland. Following sociologist Karl Mannheim, a “generation” can be defined as a group of individuals of similar age whose members have experienced a noteworthy historical event within a set period of time.16 Recently, in his book devoted to the Jewish youth of interwar Poland, Dzieci modernizmu [The Children of Modernism], historian and sociologist Kamil Kijek argues that the generation of Jews who grew up in interwar Poland differed significantly from their parents.17 In Kijek’s words: “An important and unique part of their generational experience was the fact that the majority attended public schools, and all grew up in the nationally-oriented Polish state.”18 On the one hand, one of the biggest changes that framed the life of this generation was the reemergence of an independent Poland in the same year Lechtman was born, 1918. The prospect of an independent Polish state gave many Jews hope for a more inclusive, and hence, a safer and more fulfilled life. However, these hopes for more inclusion in Polish society were soon dashed as the new Poland was turning out to be consumed by nationalism and antisemitism. Expectations were replaced by anxiety and thwarted prospects. But before that happened, a new Poland had to be invented. The new state embraced a mission to turn its inhabitants, previously divided among three partitioning states, into Poles. Mass education focused on Polish patriotism and respect for the Polish state was one of the tools of the process. As Brian Porter-Szűcs notices, “[t]he creation of the Second Republic brought with it . . . regulations . . . mandating that children

Gender, Generational Conflict  267 stay in school for at least seven grades.”19 For the Jewish youth, this meant participation in a state-driven mass education campaign that valorized the state at the expense of local, ethnic, and religious communities.20 The percentage of children enrolled in public schools grew: “[B]y the late 1930s at least 90 percent of all children stayed in school until at least age 11, and more than 70 percent continued their studies all the way through age 13.”21 The process of recreating what it meant to be Polish was in full swing. In his work, Kijek draws on a collection of memoirs written for a competition that YIVO, a Jewish institute in Vilnius, organized in the 1930s. A similar set of sources attracted other historians as well; for example, Gershon Bacon, while analyzing gender norms in interwar Poland, notices a phenomenon he calls “victory of schooling.”22 One of the sources both scholars quote is a memoir by Esther from Grójec, who wrote: Why do I have to suffer like this, when I have such a drive to learn? Why must I suffer within the narrow confines of my limited duties, when everything in me longs for broad horizons? Why must I content myself with conforming, when I know that, given the opportunity, I can accomplish great things?23 Gershon interprets Esther’s words as evidence that education was becoming a factor driving young Jews to change their lives. He explains that “[w]hether in the public schools or in the various Jewish school networks, Jewish children were educated according to curricula that deviated in almost every aspect from that of traditional Jewish education.”24 For Kijek, Esther came from a relatively well-off Hasidic family and used her knowledge to criticize the world around her and the limitations it imposed on women.25 For many members of this generation, access to schooling was an important force driving individual ambitions, but it was also a source of criticism that lied at the heart of the newly discovered mobility and the search for a new identity. We do not know much about how Tonia Lechtman treated her education. The only piece of information we have comes from a long interview that she gave in 1994, when she admitted regretting being expelled from her high school for her involvement with communism. 26 However, in the same interview, she shared a bit about the education she and her siblings received, revealing how her parent’s view of their children’s education vacillated over the interwar period. She remembers that her older brother Romek, who was born in 1913, started off in a Polish public elementary school, from where he was moved to a boarding school—a cheder in Switzerland—only to return later in life to a public school again. 27 Lechtman attended the private high school of Madame Hohenstein for Jewish girls in Łódź, where the students followed the program of Polish public school with Polish being the main language and where

268  Anna Müller she emphasizes she received a “patriotic, fully Polish education.”28 However, the two youngest children (born in 1919 and 1924) were sent to private Jewish schools, where Hebrew and Polish were the two main languages. 29 The fact that the Lechtmans switched between public and private schools may reflect a need to somehow deal with the problems that they had with their older children—Romek and Tonia—who early in life became communists. Nevertheless, the change may also suggest something about the diminishing trust that the Lechtmans felt toward the Polish state and the importance of the public education. The interwar period is the time when assimilation gained new traction.30 Anna Landau-Czajka argues that assimilation was parallel to modernization, which was either a way to emancipate oneself from one’s community and/or to join the mainstream Polish community. Throughout the centuries, Jews constituted a closed community that lived according to their own social and religious rules. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, opening to a more secular way of life was slowly looming on the horizon.31 That trend continued in the interwar period: but the departure from traditions was traumatic. It often implied a rebellion against or at least a rejection of Jewish culture, Jewish religion, and a socially predetermined path.32 Jews were leaving their own structures while hoping to enter Polish ones, but in general they were not accepted by Poles. As Landau-Czajka argues, Poles were more willing to accept traditional Jews who lived their own separate lives, but modern and assimilated Jews constituted a threat. Policies aimed against Jews—the bench ghetto (that is, the official segregation of Jewish students at Polish universities, legalized in 1937), numerus clausus (postulated already in 1919), suggestions to remove them from the free professions—were directed specifically against Polonized Jews, who were perceived as pretending to be somebody they could not become: Poles.33 The hopes that the independent Polish state awoke were hence critically disappointed. Historian Marci Shore calls the moment when old identities are being challenged and new identities are emerging a “temporal rupture,” which we can understand as a sense of growing estrangement in complex and fluid social and political contexts.34 The generation of young Jews that Lechtman was part of was invited to the process of creating certain social and political meanings via their participation in the public education of the newly established Polish state. But the same people were also shown the limits of their own participation and the fragility of their status as citizens. Youth activism—engagement into one of many ideologies that began looming on the horizon toward early in the interwar period—emerged as a response to that estrangement and means of providing social and ethical meanings in a world defined by a sense of rupture. This was certainly Lechtman’s choice, as she rejected the possibility of a relatively stable life of a well-off family in favor of engagement

Gender, Generational Conflict  269 and the thrill of a life full of struggle to regain agency in a world that seemed to be dominated by forces aimed at eliminating it.

Emancipation through Communism For Tonia Lechtman, it was communism that served as a stepping stone in the process of figuring out her life’s priorities. Initially, communism was a way to create her own social space, perhaps away from the influence of her own family, but over time it became a way of life. Her involvement with communism began in 1933 when she was only fifteen years old. She wanted to become a scout but was told in her local scout branch that Jews were not accepted. In response, she joined a communist youth organization that one of her friends was part of. Her early experience fits well into what Kijek describes as the main reasons for Jewish youth’s political engagement. He sees it as new social space, devoid of intergenerational conflict and offering the possibility of spending free time with peers (also with peers of the opposite sex).35 Hence, activism played a more social than political function.36 For Lechtman it was communism, but as Kijek shows it was far from the most popular option among Jewish youth. In his book, he demonstrates very convincingly that young people’s interests and the nature of activism depended on their cultural capital, social status, and place of origin. What mattered more than political attitude was a social closeness to a given group. For example, he sees the tendency that Jewish youth with high cultural capital was joining Jewish organizations and political parties. However, it was geography that also played a decisive role— while the Bund members were easier to spot in east central Poland, the members of the Communist Party of Poland recruited mostly from the larger cities of central Poland.37 Kijek challenges many assumptions regarding the participation of Jewish youth in communism. For example, while he confirms that many Jews from disfranchised and poor families were joining communism for the promise of a more just world, he shows that it was not the most natural choice for them since communists did not accept a separate Jewish identity and rejected the postulates of Jewish autonomy.38 For the youth from the acculturated and relatively well-off families, such as Tonia Lechtman, the motivations were more related to a sense of antisemitic rejection that they often experienced, for example, in public schools settings.39 It is hard to say what impact the initial rejection by the local scout group had on Lechtman. The way she framed her recollection about communism in the 1994 interview gives the impression that for teenage Tonia Lechtman, communism meant caring for others, for example, sharing food. According to her, in richer schools in Łódź, there were special baskets where students could leave their homemade meals to share

270  Anna Müller with people who had less. The baskets were usually taken to schools where children did not have much to eat.40 Lechtman remembered communism as an idea of interest to many young people at her school. The private high school for Jewish girls she attended left no records, so it is impossible to say with precision which kinds of social and political groups were represented there. She claimed that there were no Zionists in her school. Even though there were some Bund followers, communists were decisively the most popular. There was only one more recollection from that school that I managed to find. It was by Irena Wojdysławska, born in 1921, who grew up in a family of assimilated Jews in Łodź—she was three years younger than Tonia and came from a roughly similar social background. Thus, it is very likely that their time at school overlapped.41 Similarly to Tonia, Wojdysławska remembers the active presence of young communists in school. Both claim being involved with the Union of Communist School Youth (Komunistyczny Związek Młodzieży Szkolnej, KZMS), a division of the Communist Union of Polish Youth (Komunistyczny Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, KZMP). It was a branch of an illegal youth organization operating between 1922 and 1938, led by the Communist Party of Poland. Similarly to the Communist Party of Poland, the KZMS was a clandestine organization. They played a supportive role by publicly condoning communism, but also engaged in a number of self-educational activities. “A speaker . . . would come to each of the meetings. There were all kinds of propaganda materials, brochures, we collected money for political prisoners,” remembered Wojdysławska.42 In 1950, during one of her interrogations, Lechtman described her first communist meeting similarly: “Two months after I entered the Union, there was a general meeting, which was attended by a handful of people. I remember that there was a speaker, who was giving a lecture. I don’t remember what the topic was.”43 As a young communist, she most likely participated in mass protests in front of select factories in Łódź. Learning about communism happened alongside her growth as a citizen learning about (and criticizing) the societal order of which she was becoming a part.44 School-age communists were expected to expand their political horizons by engaging in various discussions and contemporary readings on social injustice and the world’s future progress. Tonia must have at some point read the Communist Manifesto, which she described as simply beautiful.45 However, in her own words, it was Polish intellectual Stanisław Brzozowski’s (1878–1911) Płomienie (1908) [Flames] that registered deepest with her. We are missing details of how exactly he appealed to her. But some scholars suggest that what was attractive in Brzozowski was a romantic (and very Polish) version of communism as a world-saving ideology that called to become “the people of the future— conscious witnesses of history.”46 But the circumstances in which she received the book suggest another possible influence. Literary scholar Lena Magnone underscores the importance of Brzozowski’s reflection in

Gender, Generational Conflict  271 Płomienie on women, body, and sexuality. Hence, she links Brzozowski with individual growth and the development of gender identity.47 Tonia received her first copy of Płomienie from her aunt, whom she recognized as a role model of an independent and free-thinking woman. The fact that she treated the gift as important in her life and the gift giver as a role model—slightly in opposition to the traditions that her parents represented—suggests the importance of learning, also learning what it means to be a woman. After the family moved to Palestine, her commitment to and also probably her understanding of communism deepened. From the 1994 interview, it seems that she was getting increasingly involved in the ideological debates and problems that characterized communism as well as much more aware of the social problems that surrounded her: the predominance of religion among Jews; the social problems among Arabs, especially the poverty of fellaheen, the Arab farmers in Palestine; and finally, the constant tension between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine.48 And yet the framing remained the same. Communism was her social space, where she felt accepted among people thinking similarly. It was her space to be brave, to decide for her own life, and become independent. The importance of that increased when she met Sioma, a Russian Jew, who was translating for her the discussion during the communist meetings from Hebrew into German. Tonia and Sioma, a year her senior, became romantically engaged. They worked together by spreading communist leaflets at night and leaving them in private apartments.49 In many respects, Lechtman’s story is typical. Her engagement was motivated socially more than politically. Also, the way she tried to make sense of her experiences fits what Bacon regarded as a “female” style of remembering, “where relations with others, whether parents, schoolmates or others loom large, as opposed to ‘male’ style, which is characterized by a more clearly focused discussion of ideological awakening and moving toward some loosely or more carefully defined goal.”50 What Bacon refers to is a different process of socializing for boys and girls: more individualized in the case of boys and more based on relationships with others in the case of girls who are being prepared for motherhood and caretaking. In that sense, communism by emphasizing the importance of relationships and collectivity provided for her—a young Jewish woman—with a voice. Though empowering, it was also a source of conflict with the people closest to her. The irony is that while grounding Lechtman in various relationships, communism also pushed her to redefine her own space as a Jew, a daughter, and a woman.

Mother and Daughter Communism was certainly one of the most rebellious forms of youth activism and for many young people their involvement meant a conflict with their parents. Tonia Lechtman was born into a relatively well-off

272  Anna Müller family of four children—two boys and two girls. Her home was a multigenerational household, with the grandparents trying to keep it kosher and traditional and parents following some Jewish traditions while abandoning others. They accepted Polish as their daily language. As already mentioned, the children received a mixed public and private education. Małgorzata Górecka, a distant family member who did some research on a branch of the family, notices ironically that the family was stricter with the education of the boys than the girls. In contrast to men, who had to follow the path delineated for them by the head of the family, the women were given freer rein.51 Thus, it is probably safe to assume that while growing up, Tonia had significant options at her disposal: her parents were relatively flexible with regard to her education and most likely over time also learned to accept her leftist leanings. But the time of her growth into communism and their time learning to accept it were most likely stormy. Many of her communist views stood in direct opposition to what her parents, as industrialists, believed.52 In the 1994 interview, she recollects criticizing the working conditions for the employees in their factory.53 She also challenged her father’s political views. In 1935, when Józef Piłsudski died, she cried out happily: “Oh, great! That fascist!” She remembers that her father slapped her across her face for the first and last time.54 Her parents supported Piłsudski, a soft authoritarian, who in the 1930s ran the Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem, BBWR), which favored accommodating minorities. Piłsudski was certainly not an antisemite and he believed that Jews (and other ethnic groups) could join or assimilate to the Polish nation without giving up their communal ties or, within reason, their mother tongue. For that reason, many wealthy Jews, including Lechtman’s parents, supported Piłsudski, rather than the more radical proponents of social change who criticized his authoritarian tendencies.55 Her mother most likely had a dominant voice with regard to Tonia’s education, especially in stirring her interest in literature. She believed that literature needed to be read in its original language and thus pushed her children to study foreign languages.56 The description that Lechtman provided of her mother’s role fits Bacon’s suggestion that Jewish women often played an important role in the acculturation of their families to the Polish language and culture.57 In the bits and pieces of information that we have on Bialer, she emerges as an independent and strong-willed woman who was significantly involved in the most important family decisions, including those regarding business.58 Perhaps then it is not surprising that in her 1994 interview, Lechtman admitted that it was her mother, Róża Bialer, that she argued with the most. Their relationship was very close, occasionally even intimate, and yet difficult. It was her mother who tried to coax her away from communism, by telling stories

Gender, Generational Conflict  273 of what she knew about the version of communism that was developing in the Soviet Union. It was also her mother that humiliated her— something she bitterly remembered even in 1994—by trying to bring her a mattress to a jail and then bailing her out of it when at the end of May 1934, she and a couple of friends got arrested for having participated in the strikes at Bałuty, a Jewish and very poor district of Łódź.59 Finally, it was her mother that noticed that Lechtman was pregnant and took her to a clinic to abort her first child in 1937 just months before she and Sioma moved to France.60 Perhaps Lechtman’s activism was unique as it was not an escape from poverty, or even sense of limiting antisemitism, as much as it was a form of emancipation from loving and relatively open parents and a safe and happy home into a space that was her own. The letters that Lechtman kept sending from France and later Switzerland to Palestine, mostly to her mother, reveal the conversations that Lechtman engaged in with her mother. Róża Bialer loomed large in them as if it was her mother’s approval, more than her father’s, that Tonia Lechtman needed. But interestingly, through the dialogue with her mother, in which she defended the ideology she believed in and the life choices she made, Lechtman engaged in a conversation with herself, with her worries and expectations. In that process, she was figuring out what it meant to her to be a Jew, a communist, and a woman.

Letters Tonia Lechtman’s letters, or really all letters, are a captivating source. The fragility of the paper and individual characteristic of the script prompts us to believe that by the very act of reading we immerse ourselves in the most intimate aspect of the life of the author: the joys and sorrows she or he wished to share only with family circles. Deciphering often times barely legible writing somehow mirrors the process of decrypting the complexities an individual life presents. The form is volatile, the audience limited, the author exposed and vulnerable. All of that helps us believe that the letters situate us close to the author’s voice. And yet, the voice that we hear is clearly mediated. According to Stefania Skwarczyńska, a theoretician of Polish literature, the act of writing a letter depends on the interactions between at least two people—the writer and the recipient. Depending on that relationship, the correspondence can simultaneously take the form of a conversation, confession, or monologue.61 Therefore, the letters are always a combination of private and public, of monologue and dialogue, of self-centeredness and an attempt and desire to reconstruct life with others and through others. Lechtman’s relationship with her family was imbalanced, to say the least, but it was also conflict ridden: her engagement with communism, her expulsion from school, her slow emancipation from Jewish

274  Anna Müller traditions, her imprisonments, finally her marriage to a man her family did not accept at first. The letters do not reflect the conflict—they show a loving daughter communicating with her loving family. The letters are long and filled with details regarding what was going on in her life. Most likely, Lechtman welcomed the physical distance between her and her family with joy. The separation gave her space for individual growth. But how much of what was happening in her life was she willing to share with her parents? How much did she self-censor to protect herself, her husband Sioma, but also her family from the anxieties that they were facing daily as immigrants? Initially, the letters functioned as a way to maintain contact with her family. She tried to be a good daughter as much as she was able to despite the distance, perhaps as much as she knew how to. While addressing her mother she was attendant to all the rules that she presumably learned at home, rules that she believed helped her maintain a better relationship with her parents. “Do not worry about me, I am dressed well and I drink milk twice a day,” she wrote in July 1937.62 In the parts written to her father, she showed interest in his business, asking about his most recent business trips to Syria and suggesting some potential business for him in Paris. Finally, while addressing her father, she made sure that he knew that she and Sioma did not cut their ties to Jewish culture. “We did not isolate ourselves from the Jews—we go to the Jewish clubs. We remained Jewish, we are perhaps more active Jews here than you are there,” she wrote early after the arrival to France.63 In the letters, she is loving, respectful, and engaged in family matters. The sense of closeness that they all worked so hard to recreate was necessary to tame all the wounds in order to be able to continue looking toward the future. That closeness, the awareness that there is “someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page,” as Virginia Woolf writes about the meaning of correspondence, is a necessary element of the letter writing that is predicated on the attempt to respond to the expectations of people on the other end of that exchange.64 But in Lechtman’s difficult life circumstances, the sense of closeness and caring that she was recreating had a life-saving quality. Nevertheless, in the letters she continued arguing with her parents, especially her mother. The tone of her voice, her usual eagerness to please them, occasionally transformed into determination in proving to them that her life decisions, especially her commitment to communism that led to her departure from Palestine, were the only right decisions. The decision to move away from Palestine put her in a position of an emigrant who tried to reconfigure the new world on her own. And that was something that she felt she had to reiterate in her letters often. However, when moved onto the paper, her thoughts and reflections, at least the ones she decided to share, served one more purpose: while sharing her concerns about the suffocating antimigrant atmosphere in France, she

Gender, Generational Conflict  275 tried to convince herself that her misfortune must change. In that sense, the letters were a form of double dialogue that she was conducting with her family and herself. The correspondence became a way to silence her own worries and assure herself that she was going to be alright. Lechtman began writing soon after she and her husband left Palestine for Paris. The first one was dated May 5, 1937, and was sent from Alexandria, Egypt, on their ship to Marseille. Their first months in Paris were consumed by attempts to find a way to legalize their stay in France. At that point, however, France was an unwilling home to nearly three million foreigners. Many of them lived in precarious situations with no legal paperwork. The police mercilessly chased undocumented aliens.65 Tonia Lechtman hoped that once they obtained the document of Sioma’s statelessness, the so-called Red Help or the League of the Protection of Human Rights could be of some assistance in their attempt to legalize their stay in Paris. She believed that as soon as they managed to produce paperwork that confirmed they indeed were political migrants, they would receive the right to stay legally as refugees. As she informed her family, they planned to contact the Soviet Embassy in Paris to confirm his statelessness. “It’s actually nothing,” wrote Lechtman, “but it will get the seventh sweat out of the man to receive this scrap of paper. This scrap of paper is everything.”66 However, nothing they did seemed to work. Their entire life seemed to depend on paperwork that could provide them with the possibility of obtaining a job, renting an apartment instead of staying at an expensive hotel, and gaining a sense of safety and stability. Regardless of the difficulties, while in Paris they emphasized that they felt empowered by their communist commitment, by the network of comrades whose presence made them believe that moving across borders may be possible, and finally, by their newly discovered mobility. However, the mobility across social roles, ethnic stereotypes, and nations that in principle were supposed to define their experience was all seriously hampered by the borders that they kept encountering. For an illegal immigrant, borders were not only physical spaces between countries. The couple lived with the constant danger of potential deportation in case they failed to blend into French society. In her letters, Lechtman often underlined the need to dress and act as the French did in order to blend in with them.67 The reference to the necessity of blending in with French society suggests that they realized how precarious their situation was. Blending in meant hiding from their own vulnerability rather than integrating with the society. In spite of or perhaps because of the difficulties, Lechtman relied on people and emphasized that fact often in her letters. Already in her first letter, she wrote about the communists in Paris as “good people” who helped them organize themselves soon after their arrival.68 They spent evenings and free time attending political rallies or conducting party work. Their immediate social circle were German communists, whom she trusted.69 Even years later, when recollecting the

276  Anna Müller experience, she remembered it warmly—despite fear, poverty, and occasional hunger—mostly because of the people she encountered. It was the relationship with others that made it meaningful. In November 1937, Lechtman informed her mother that Sioma was soon leaving for Spain. She planned on attending a military course for nurses and joining Sioma in Spain in three months. She justified this decision: It is the most honest and most consequent—a fight for Spanish independence is a fight against national fascism. I don’t think I need to tell you why we decided to do so—we have always been and will be faithful to our party. I understand that you perceive it as a shock, but this is our common enemy—FASCISM.70 In December, most likely in response to a letter she received from her parents, Lechtman wrote: For us, it is the path we chose a long time ago. . . . Our departure makes us very happy and I think only there we will be able to achieve complete satisfaction, there we will be able to live the way we understand it. Once again please be more level-headed and welcome the news the way we did. The answer she sent to her parents was polite but decisive. There is even a note of rapprochement, when she said: “Once again, please be more level-headed.”71 In December 1937, Lechtman announced her pregnancy and, hence, a change of plans: she would not be going to Spain but would stay in Paris where she would be expecting her child and the return of Sioma from the war. In a letter to her mother, she wrote: I’m pregnant. You will be afraid. I have a hard fight ahead, but it’s worth it. I do not know if you will understand me. This is a great obligation, but at the same time I have a purpose in life for which it is worth sacrificing a lot. You may say that I am young and I should have waited; certainly, but not under these conditions. I do not know when I will see Sioma again, but we have to be prepared for everything (although I am sure we will be happy together again) so this is the reason why I did this. His child will be able to replace him and help me in difficult moments of my life. Our love is not an empty word or a youthful rush, no, that’s why I decided to take this step and I’m happy. Please try to understand me. At the moment, I don’t have a job, but with the help of my comrades I will get one in the future. In the meantime, I eat quite normally, my comrades take care of that and my condition demands it.72

Gender, Generational Conflict  277 Lechtman wrote all her letters to both of her parents, but the explanation related to her pregnancy was directed to her mother (she alternated between you singular and you plural). It was as if Lechtman needed her mother to understand, even if not approve, her decision. This may be partially related to the fact that her mother convinced Lechtman to abort her first pregnancy just before the couple left Palestine. Lechtman never blamed her mother for that decision, but in the 1994 interview, in which she revealed this fact, she strongly emphasized that it was her mother’s decision, and that Sioma regretted it. Interestingly, in the letters informing her mother about her pregnancy and the decision to keep the child, she took responsibility for it by underlying that she did this as if Sioma was not part of the decision. The child was her space of agency and independence from her mother. A month later she wrote: “You cannot even imagine how happy I am that I am going to become a mother. I will have somebody to fight for and somebody to worry about. This is worth living for.”73 Here Lechtman reached for a different tool: not only was the expected child the fruit of her love for Sioma, but it also gave her a chance to engage in a struggle that would match Sioma’s struggle. While her mother perceived motherhood as a burden and a challenge, Lechtman saw it giving her the potential to participate in Sioma’s fight. While her mother saw pregnancy as weakness, Lechtman was thrilled by the fact that her body—pregnancy and ultimately a child—provided her with an opportunity to be useful, to show her commitment to Sioma, and by extension to the cause of communism. The pregnancy, and later the baby, became by extension a loved man, a battlefield for a better future, and a sense of being useful. Already in the first letter informing her parents about the pregnancy, Lechtman made a connection between the decision to have a child and her commitment to communism. She began the letter with a statement that the separation from Sioma was not easy, but that the German comrades who were around her helped as much as they were able to. A note of reproach to her mother is noticeable in the letter. “I did not expect so much attention and care. They are helpful both morally and financially. Only now do I understand the meaning of the word Comrade, which you do not understand at all, Mother!” Further she stated: “As a single person I am nothing, in a group we are everything.”74 An already familiar tone appears in these letters where Lechtman emphasizes differences between her and her mother. She marks her space of freedom and agency that was far beyond her mother’s influences— because of spatial distance and perhaps generational differences. Sioma and her child helped her interpret her life in terms of the mission; ultimately, she saw her private life as a public statement. The confluence between private and public helped Lechtman to gain agency or perhaps voice some generational differences and fuller independence from her family.

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Conclusion For this chapter I examined only a handful of letters that Lechtman wrote and sent prior to the war, but she continued writing to her family throughout the entire war and afterward, while moving from France to Switzerland, and still after the war, when she eventually settled in Poland. In the letters she informed her family of her whereabouts and the work she was doing, talked a lot about how beautifully her daughter, Vera, and later on also her son, Marcel, were developing. While trying to stay positive, she rarely mentioned her needs, anxieties, or fears. Toward the end of the war, she began mentioning communism more often as if the hope for the possibility of resuming normal life with her husband revived her belief in communism. Throughout the letters, she reflected on her life in terms of roles and choices and situated her social roles within the broader spectrum of communism, as something she saw defining her life: its moral horizons, daily practices, relationships, and even plans for the future. These letters were her space of agency: they reflected her life experiences, but they also pushed her to give her experience some meaning. Through the letters we get a chance to participate in the process through which Lechtman was reinforcing her identity as a communist. Communism played a similar role in her life as the one it played in the lives of other members of this generation—it was first and foremost a space of social relationships. For Lechtman—an immigrant single mother without a stable income—communism meant a group of people who constituted the only network of support she had in Paris. In the letters she presented her communist camaraderie as enriching her life and providing her with networks that enhanced her safety and well-being. Her sense of camaraderie was based on trust: a modern phenomenon that always resides within people, is personal, and emerges with freedom of agency and individual autonomy. It was a phenomenon that mediated relationships between her and others that she kept meeting in the modern world where many choices and options rendered modern individuality unpredictable. It was also a space for her own individual growth independently from the life that her parents, and especially her mother, imagined for her. In that sense, communism marked the framework of her own emancipation. But over time communism gained a political and even existential dimension. In reality it is impossible to say how much help she received from her communist comrades, but communism dictated optimism and trust and it created a framework that reinforced for others and her the meaning of her daily struggles with poverty, lonely care for her children, fear of the oncoming war, and perhaps also a sense of guilt due to the pain she had caused her parents when she left Palestine. Finally, Agnieszka Mrozik in an article on inter- and transgenerational memory of communism argues that the Polish memory of the

Gender, Generational Conflict  279 communists’ past, especially of the past of close family members, is perceived as questionable heritage: their choices are perceived as something that is difficult to understand, difficult to make sense of and integrate with our own understanding of rational life choices.75 On the poster to the movie by Łoziński that I mentioned in the introduction, Lechtman is a loving mother. The movie itself presents her children striving to understand how their mother was able to reconcile motherhood with commitment to communism. There are no simple answers. And yet, what Lechtman’s letters provide us with is a unique chance to hear the motivations of a communist, the sense of agency that communism provided her with. It is not an image of a person who erred, or who made life choices that were incomprehensible. Communism helped her to discover an agency in herself. In that sense, her identity was established in doing—in reiterating her commitment to communism daily.

Notes 1 Lechtman was imprisoned from 1949 to 1954. 2 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History 8, no. 1 (2001): 131–32. 3 Ibid., 133. 4 She was most likely involved in the activities of the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP). The PCP was established in 1919 mainly by Jewish communists but subsequently became a binational party. “The nature of both Jewish and Arab leadership changed during its years of existence: in some periods, the Jews were more dominant than the Arabs; in others, the reverse was true.” Abigail Jacobson, “Between Ideology and Practice, National Conflict and Anti-Imperialist Struggle: The National Liberation League in Palestine,” Nations and Nationalism 25, no. 4 (2019): 1414. 5 Ivan Jablonka, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 6 Ibid., 77. Jablonka also mentions Leon Blum, a French socialist politician and Prime Minister at the time—a Jew who often proclaimed his Jewishness with pride and took “advantage of the universalistic and egalitarian values of the post-revolutionary French state . . . to achieve emancipation through public service.” See also Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 3, 4. 7 Lechtman to her family, August 8, 1937. The letters are in the possession of her family, Vera and Marcel Lechtman. 8 Tonia Lechtman, interview by Dorota Dowgiałło, Tel Aviv, 1994. The interview in the possession of her daughter, Vera Lechtman, Tel Aviv. Wanda Wasilewska (1905–1964), Polish leftist writer and politician, similarly perceived an institution of marriage before World War II. Agnieszka Mrozik, “Crossing Boundaries: The Case of Wanda Wasilewska and Polish Communism,” Aspasia 11 (2017): 33. I would like to thank Agnieszka Mrozik for this suggestion. For a critical view on marriages among the women of earlier generations of communists, see for example Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for the Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth,” in The Russia

280  Anna Müller

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Reader, ed. Adele Marie Baker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 351–61. Dorota Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. Copy in the Vera and Marcel Lechtman Archives. Lechtman to her family, November 16, 1937. Lechtman to her family, December 12, 1937. Lechtman to her family, January 17, 1940. Lechtman, interview by Dowgiałło. For more on Field, see Tony Sharp, Stalin’s American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show-Trials (London: Hurst, 2014); and Katie Marton, True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). Recent scholarship shows that Field was not a double agent, meaning he collaborated only with the Soviets, and not with both the Soviet and American regimes. Vera Lechtman, interview by author, Tel Aviv, May 2018; and Marcel and Henia Lechtman, interview by author, Stockholm, October 2018. See also my other work where I describe her imprisonment: If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Also, “Walls That Unite: Unlikely Friendships in Mokotów Prison, 1949–1956,” Rocznik Antropologii Historii 8 (2015): 245–62. Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: Collected Works, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 276–322. Kamil Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu. Świadomość, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2017), 13. Ibid., 419. Brian Porter-Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 110. Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu, 16–22. According to Porter-Szűcs, “only a minority went on to secondary schools, but this figure was increasing steadily.” Porter-Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World, 110. Gershon Bacon, “Woman? Youth? Jew? The Search for Identity of Jewish Young Women in Interwar Poland,” in Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-placing Ourselves, eds. Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 11. “Esther,” in Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, ed. Jeffrey Shandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 329. Bacon, “Woman? Youth? Jew?,” 11. Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu, 74–77. Tonia Lechtman, interview by Dorota Dowgiałło. Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. Ibid. Ibid. For a very interesting discussion on the problems with defining assimilation, see Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu, 228–40. Anna Landau-Czajka, Syn będzie Lech. . . Asymilacja Żydów w Polsce międzywojennej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2006), 47. About how traumatic and difficult the process of emancipation from one’s culture was, see Joanna Wiszniewicz, A jednak czasem miewam sny. Historia pewnej samotności (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017), 13; and Landau-Czajka, Syn będzie Lech, 45.

Gender, Generational Conflict  281

















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53

54 55

56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

realized that his daughter was politically involved, told her to come to him if she ever got into trouble. Zatorska, Spoza smugi cienia, 40. Similar elements of criticism toward some of the family members, Łódź and Warsaw industrialists, present a memoir by Maria Kamińska (1897–1983), a communist activist and politician. I would like to thank Agnieszka Mrozik for this suggestion. See Maria Kamińska, Ścieżkami wspomnień (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1960), 46–49. Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogrom on the Eve of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 37; and Joanna Michlic-Coren, “Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1918–1939 and 1945–1947,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 13 (2000): 34–61. See also Joanna Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. Gershon Bacon, “The Missing 52%: Research on Jewish Women in Interwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 56. In 1937, Róża Bialer embarked on a journey from Palestine back to Poland for reasons that seemed to be closely related to the family’s financial troubles: possibly a combination of debt in Poland and very likely complications from starting a new life and business in Palestine. In the letters, she wondered a lot about things such as the effectiveness of new machines for textile factories, potentially in search for the best solution for their own factories that had been transplanted from Łódź to Palestine. Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. “Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanej Warszawa, dn. 2.01.1950 r. oficer śledczy MBP w Warszawie,” 39. Dowgiałło, interview with Tonia Lechtman. Stefania Skwarczyńska, Teoria listu (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Białegostoku, 2001), 6 and 12. Tonia Lechtman to her family, July 15, 1937. Tonia Lechtman to her parents, July 1937 (the letter is missing a page and is missing a day date). Quoted in: Anne Bower, Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th Century American Fiction and Criticism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 6. Birnbaum, Leon Blum, 106–107. Lechtman to her family, May 14, 1937. Ibid. Ibid. Lechtman to her family, May 14, 1937 and June 9, 1937. The word “fascism” is written in bold and in capital letters. Lechtman to her family, November 16, 1937. Ibid. Lechtman to her family, December 15, 1937, emphasis in original. Lechtman to her parents, January 4, 1938. Lechtman to her parents, April 21, 1938. Agnieszka Mrozik, “‘Dziadek (nie) był komunistą.’ Między/transgeneracyjna pamięć o komunizmie w polskich (auto)biografiach rodzinnych po 1989 roku,” Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 46–67.

Conclusion From “Communism as Male Generational History” to a More Inclusive Narrative Francisca de Haan In cities across mid-1930s Yugoslavia, young communist women joined the organization called Ženski pokret [Women’s Movement] and formed its youth section. They also issued a new journal, Žena danas [Woman Today], in whose first number they presented their worldview as “new feminism.”1 From 1945 to 1965, women played a significant role in the ruling party in Poland, most of them belonging to the interwar generation of communist activists, which in postwar Poland gave them the status of “preservers of the communist revolutionary past” and made them function as “guardians of the party’s identity and purity.”2 In 1950s and 1960s Italy, Communist Party members Camilla Ravera and Teresa Noce contributed to enhancing women’s rights and working women’s labor rights, whereas Noce was active for working women’s rights on the international level as well.3 All of them were, if not “enchanted with communism,” as Anna Müller writes about the young Tonia Lechtman, a Jewish woman born in Poland in 1918, then in any case convinced of the emancipatory potential of communism as a social and political project or work-inprogress. These women, and numerous others like them, are largely lacking in the current historiography of communism, which is extremely androcentric.4 There is an enormous dearth of serious scholarship on the lives of women communists and the ways in which they—as activists, scholars, parliamentarians, artists, political migrants, and much more— contributed to building a more just world.5 “Emancipation through communism” is how Müller describes the perspective of Tonia Lechtman, who became a committed communist as a teenager and remained so throughout her life.6 The rich tapestry of communist women’s carefully contextualized lives and work in Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond is therefore an important contribution to the existing historiography. This is also the case because this book includes examples from European socialist states and “beyond”—that is, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Cuba—in that sense contributing to socalled New Cold War studies that explore across-the-Blocs interaction and exchange.7 The inclusion of this broader set of countries, in turn,

284  Francisca de Haan makes visible connections between communist women in different parts of the world and similarities in their struggles—that is, the ways in which they operated in political parties that at the very least theoretically supported a women’s rights agenda, but at the same time were patriarchal bulwarks, so that communist women in different times and places had to devise strategies to avoid or overcome male resistance to their womenfriendly policies or laws. An important platform for their cooperation was the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), an organization mentioned in several chapters here. It was in a 1978 article about socialist Hungary in the WIDF’s influential monthly Women of the Whole World that Krystyna Niedzielska, the Polish editor-in-chief of the magazine, reminded her readers that “equal rights have never been a gift.”8 Along the same line, historian Susan Zimmermann recently concluded that “the world of men” (a formulation also used in 1908 by communist foremother Alexandra Kollontai)9 in state-socialist Hungary defended its advantages in the spheres of paid work and unpaid care work, as well as sexual privilege, just as it did in other industrial societies. . . . The leadership of state and Party, as well as many minor officials, played an ambivalent role in this struggle, subject to change depending on the various constellations of interest.10 This is not to say that the communist women who advanced a women’s rights agenda did not have male allies in their struggles—often they did. Finally, this book offers new insights by including a remarkably wide range of perspectives on women’s (and men’s) active participation in, reservations about, and outright opposition to the rule of communist parties in Eastern European countries—perspectives to some extent related to the historical generation these women and men belonged to. Many women and men sincerely believed that communism was the best way to a better world, and a number of them were party members from the 1920s or 1930s onward. In the years before World War Two, the latter were often persecuted or forced to work underground. After 1945, these long-term party members instead could actively contribute to building the more egalitarian society they believed in. For Poland, Natalia Jarska’s chapter sketches some of these women’s histories and the particular status their longer party membership gave them. Possibly an in-between position was that of a group of women sociologists Barbara Klich-Kluczewska and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz focus on through the lenses of biography, gender, and generation. These Polish academics seem to have been less ideologically motivated, but in a pragmatic manner, and through their scientific work from the 1960s onward, developed new insights about women’s position in society, based on the realization that there was a significant gap between the “women are equal” discourse and the realities of women’s lives. Then there were those who joined or remained

Conclusion  285 in the Communist Party for all sorts of other, mundane, and material reasons. The Czech sociologist and feminist Jiřina Šiklová, also a wellknown dissident in Czechoslovakia, discussed this in her spoken memoirs, as the chapter by Anja Tippner relates.11 According to Šiklová, her own reason for staying in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was that she hoped to change it from within. Like many other dissidents, she was not opposed to the communist project per se, but wanted the Soviet army out of the country and sought to create a more humane socialism. Finally, there were those for whom the communist rule represented what feminist activist and philosopher Mirek Vodrážka calls “sterésis—a deliberate negative determination of an individual and the policy of negation, rejection,” as a result of which “one eventually accepts ‘a way of existence that is not one’s own,’ that is, non-existence, non-humanity, abandonment.”12 Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová quote Vodrážka in their chapter on Ester Krumbachová, a Czech “director, screenwriter, author, artist, set designer, film and stage costume designer.”13 Heczková and Svatoňová take Krumbachová’s case to examine “the reasons behind the solitary [hence non-generational] nature of women artists in Czechoslovak socialist culture.”14 Concurring with Vodrážka, they explain this with the by now well-known notion of a communist “takeover” of feminist ideas, referred to as “expropriation,” which “left women with no agenda of their own.”15 While I think the “expropriation” paradigm among other things ignores the women’s liberation agenda that Marxists developed since roughly the 1880s, the chapter provides an extremely insightful gender analysis of Krumbachová’s film Vražda ing. Čerta [The Murder of Mr. Devil], released in September 1970. The rich and complex picture we find in Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond is the fruit of the book’s innovative approaches. Among these are its multi-disciplinary perspectives on the history of (mainly European) communism in the form of a combination of straightforward historical analyses with theoretical, literary-historical, and art-historical contributions. In addition to the chapter about Ester Krumbachová just mentioned, another example is Anna Artwińska’s beautiful analysis of Belarusian author and 2015 Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history book Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (published in Russian in 2013, in English translation in 2016). In addition, the book enriches our knowledge and understanding of the history of communism by applying the lenses of gender and generation. Several contributions help us think through the ways in which the concept of generation has been theorized, in particular those by Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik, and Sigrid Weigel. The latter discusses what she calls the transgenerational bond of generations, for which she goes back to the work of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich

286  Francisca de Haan Heine, and Sigmund Freud. The German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s 1928 work on generations has been widely influential but his notion of generation has a masculine inflexion, as Artwińska and Mrozik point out. Nonetheless, his definition of generation can be used to rethink women’s social and political history, as Müller, Jarska, Grubački, and Sercan Çınar show here. Both Grubački and Çınar refer to the women they write about as having constituted a “political generation,” and in this way complicate the current understandings of the history of women’s movements in interwar Yugoslavia and that of 1970s and 1980s Turkish women migrants to Western Europe, respectively. In other words, the book clearly shows that the notion of generations becomes even more useful if we combine it with a critical gendered lens. As an organizing principle of social relations,16 gender influenced the experiences these various cohorts had, and shaped their status and reputation. An example from another context is that of generations of women in the Communist Party of China, as analyzed by the historian Wang Zheng.17 Two more striking examples from this book are the female members of the Polish Youth Union and the generation of postwar elite communist women in Poland, discussed by Agnieszka Mrozik and Natalia Jarska, respectively. The latter group largely lost power after the de-Stalinization of 1955–57 and came to be depicted in negative gendered terms as fanatical, irrational, or sectarian, culminating in the wording “aunts of the revolution,” which, Jarska concludes, “ridiculed women’s communist idealism or their political involvement.”18 The concept of generations can also help us map genealogies and continuities that are currently missing from most of the historiography of women’s movements and feminisms. One issue is the still dominant Western “first and second feminist waves” metaphor, which problematically “assumes a half-century that was devoid of waves, which flies in the face of the now voluminous literature documenting activism during this fiftyyear trough,” in historian Dorothy Sue Cobble’s apt summary.19 Cobble suggested to “add a wave,” or to adjust the historical periodization and “make a case for a ‘long women’s movement.’”20 For a number of reasons, this is easier said than done. It is not by chance that precisely leftist women’s movements have become invisible with the dominant feminist waves metaphor, whether in Western contexts or elsewhere. The problematic tripartite “first wave—nothing—second wave” not only continues to dominate Western women’s movement narratives but also those in former state-socialist countries. There, the dominant anticommunist discourse, present in feminist circles as well, endorses what Magdalena Grabowska has called the “broken genealogy” narrative, consisting of a feminist period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the communist period as a black hole (the “nothing”), and then the post-1989 resurgence of liberal feminism, supposedly reconnecting with what existed earlier in the twentieth century.21 The work of historians Chiara Bonfiglioli and

Conclusion  287 Eloisa Betti on Italy shows not just a great deal of continuity and overlap between the struggles of earlier communist activists and second-wave leftist feminists. It also adds another factor explaining the rejection of the work of earlier communist women: “second wave” feminists, who regarded “autonomy” as a key characteristic of their politics, were unwilling to include earlier generations of communist women in the feminist “we,” because these earlier generations largely worked through political parties, thus lacking “autonomy.” Similarly, in the former European socialist countries, socialist and communist women are actively rejected from the women’s movements’ and feminisms’ genealogy.22 The new scholarship on this topic, some of it included in this book, can help us reconsider the post-World War Two decades, notice previously overlooked connections and continuities, and in other ways create more complex narratives, which also have to be transnational. To conclude, Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond opens up important new perspectives on the ways in which histories of gender, generations, and communism intersected, and brings us an important step further in challenging the dominant “narrative of communism as male generational history.”23

Notes

288  Francisca de Haan

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

d’Histoire, no. 109 (janvier–mars 2011), special issue: Le bloc de l’Est en question, eds. Justine Faure and Sandrine Kott; Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy, eds., Reassessing Cold War Europe (New York: Routledge, 2011); Patryk Babiracki, Kenyon Zimmer, and Michael David-Fox, eds., Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014). As quoted in Francisca de Haan, “La Federación Democrática Internacional de Mujeres (FDIM) y América Latina, de 1945 a los años setenta,” in Queridas camaradas, 28. Alexandra Kollontai, “Introduction to the Book The Social Basis of the Woman Question,” in Selected Articles and Speeches (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), 32. Susan Zimmermann, “Gender Regime and Gender Struggle in Hungarian State Socialism,” Aspasia 4 (2010): 17. See in this volume Anja Tippner, “Entering Gray Zones: Questions of Female Identity, Political Commitment, and Personal Choices in Jiřina Šiklová’s Memoir of Life under Socialism and Beyond.” Tippner introduces Šiklová as a “sociologist and feminist.” See in this volume Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová, “Without Tradition and Without Female Generation? The Case of Czech Artist Ester Krumbachová,” 169. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 166–67. Ibid., 167. See Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75. Wang, Finding Women in the State. Jarska, “‘Old’ Women and ‘Old’ Revolution,” 138. Kathleen A. Laughlin, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1 (2010): 87, and as quoted in Chiara Bonfiglioli’s chapter “Communisms, Generations, and Waves: The Cases of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba” in this volume. For reconsiderations of the Western feminist waves metaphor, see e.g. Nancy A. Hewitt, No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism: Transnational Histories (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Francisca de Haan, “The Global Left-Feminist 1960s: From Copenhagen to Moscow and New York,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, eds. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 230–42. Laughlin, Gallagher, Cobble et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship?,” 87–88. Magdalena Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia: działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2018). For a discussion of some of these issues, see e.g. Francisca de Haan, ed., “Forum: After Ten Years: Communism and Feminism Revisited,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 102–11. Agnieszka Mrozik, “Communism as a Generational Herstory: Reading Post-Stalinist Memoirs of Polish Communist Women,” History of Communism in Europe 8 (2017): 261.

Notes on Contributors

Anna Artwińska is a Junior Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture Studies and Chair of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Leipzig. She received her PhD in 2007 at the University of Poznań. Her main research interests are the memory of communism in Slavic literatures, postcatastrophic representation of the Shoah, the concept of generation, auto/biographical writing, gender, and postcolonial studies. Recent publications include: Anja Tippner and Anna Artwińska, eds., Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); “Komunistyczne autobiografie. Oni Teresy Torańskiej w perspektywie współczesnych paradygmatów rozumienia przeszłości,” in Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989, eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiecń (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018), 347–77; Anna Artwińska and Anja Tippner, eds., Nach dem Holocaust. Medien postkatastrophischer Vergegenwärtigung in Polen und Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2017); “The (Post-)Communist Orient: History, Self-Orientalization, and Subversion by Vladimir Sorokin and Michał Witkowski,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 62, no. 3 (2017): 404–26. Eloisa Betti is an Adjunct Professor of Labour History at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna. In 2014–15 she was a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study (University of London) and in 2015–16 she was awarded the EURIAS Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences of Vienna. She co-coordinates the Feminist Labor History Working Group of the European Labor History Network and the Emilia-Romagna Network of the Union of Italian Women Archives. Her main research fields are labor history, gender and women’s history, urban history in twentieth- century Italy and Europe, with specific attention to the Cold War period. She is the author of Precari e precarie: una storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Roma: Carocci, 2019). Her other recent publications include: “Gendering Political Violence in Early Cold War Italy: The Bologna Case,” in

290  Notes on Contributors Violência política no século XX. Um balanço, eds. Ana Sofia Ferreira, João Madeira, and Pau Casanellas (Lisbona: IHC-Instituto de História Contemporânea, 2018), 673–83; “Unexpected Alliances: Italian Women’s Struggles for Equal Pay, 1940s–1960s,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, eds. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 276–99. Chiara Bonfiglioli is a Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at University College Cork, where she coordinates the MA programme in Women’s Studies. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Gender Program, University of Utrecht. From 2012 to 2014, she was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, within the framework of the CITSEE project on citizenship in Southeastern Europe. From 2015 to 2017, she carried out her research project as NEWFELPRO postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism (CKPIS), University of Pula, and as EURIAS Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. Her research addresses transnational women’s history with a specific focus on the former Yugoslavia and Italy. She has recently published a monograph entitled Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019). Sercan Çınar  is a PhD candidate in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University. His research includes gender and women’s history and the Cold War in Europe and Middle East, the transnational history of left-wing women’s movements and communism, critical studies on men and masculinities, and the history of migration from Turkey to Western Europe. His publications include: “Arkadaşlık, Yoldaşlık Peki Ya Sonrası?,” Birikim 326–327 (June– July 2016): 77–83; Ani Poghosyan and Sercan Çınar, “Those Who ‘Left’ and Those Who ‘Stayed,’” in Moush, Sweet Moush: Mapping Memories from Armenia and Turkey, eds. Mattias Klingenberg, Nazaret Nazaretyan, and Ulrike Pusch (Bonn: dvv international, 2013), 23–33. He writes in the socialist monthly journal Birikim and various blogs, mostly on left-wing politics in Turkey, Kurdistan, and the Middle East. Francisca de Haan  is Professor of Gender Studies and History at the Central European University. Her research interests center on transnational women’s and gender history, histories of inter/transnational women’s movements, socialist and communist women’s political activism, women’s work, and women’s archives. De Haan is Founding Editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and South Eastern European Women’s and Gender History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), for which she designed and edited two

Notes on Contributors  291 forums on “Communism and Feminism”: Aspasia 1 (2007) and Aspasia 10 (2016). Her other publications include: Myriam Everard and Francisca de Haan, eds., Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017); Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, and Krassimira Daskalova, eds., Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006); Annemieke van Drenth and Francisca de Haan, The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Francisca de Haan, Gender and the Politics of Office Work, the Netherlands 1860–1940 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998). Isidora Grubački  is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the Central European University. Her research interests focus on the intellectual and transnational history of women’s movements and feminisms in the first half of the twentieth century in Southeastern and Central Europe, and the history of Yugoslavia, with a specific emphasis on the ambiguities and complexities of feminisms in relation to other political ideologies in interwar Yugoslavia. In 2017, she defended her MA thesis entitled Emancipating Rural Women in Interwar Yugoslavia: Analysis of Discourses on Rural Women in Two 1930s Women’s Periodicals. Libuše Heczková  is Deputy Head of the Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Her fields of research include literary criticism, history of modern literature, and gender studies. She is a member of the editorial team, led by Vladimír Papoušek, that writes a comprehensive modern history of Czech literature. The first volume Dějiny nové moderny. Česká literatura v letech 1905–1923 (Praha: Academia, 2010) won the 2010 Magnesia Litera Award. She co-authored, among others, Heslář české avantgardy. Estetické koncepty a proměny uměleckých postupů v letech 1908–1958 (Praha: Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta, 2011), which in 2012 won the Union of Interpreters and Translators Award for Best Dictionary. She is the author of Píšící Minervy. Vybrané kapitoly z dějin české literární kritiky (Praha: Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta, 2009). Since 2009, she has collaborated with Marie Bahenská and Dana Musilová on the study of the history of the Czech feminist movement and women’s work. They co-authored, among others, Nezbytná, osvobozující, pomlouvaná. O ženské práci (České Budějovice: Veduta, 2017), and Iluze spásy.

292  Notes on Contributors Dějiny české feministického myšlení 19. a 20. století (České Budějovice: Veduta, 2011). Natalia Jarska is an Assistant Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include women’s and gender history, history of sexuality, and labor history under state socialism. Recent publications include the book Kobiety z marmuru. Robotnice w Polsce w latach 1945–1960 (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2015), and the articles “Modern Marriage and the Culture of Sexuality: Experts between the State and the Church in Poland, 1956–1970,” European History Quarterly 3 (2019): 467–90; “Female Breadwinners in State Socialism: The Value of Women’s Work for Wages in Post-Stalinist Poland,” Contemporary European History 4 (2019): 469–83. In 2020–21, she is a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, with a project entitled “Women’s Movements between National Dictatorships and International Agenda: Comparing International Women’s Year (1975) in Spain and Poland,” funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. Barbara Klich-Kluczewska is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropological History, Institute of History, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. She was a Visiting Fellow in Prague (project “Sozialistische Diktatur als Sinnwelt,” USD AV and the ZZF Potsdam, 2009), Berlin (project “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism,” ZZF Potsdam, 2013), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Rochester (2009). Her fields of research include the cultural history of post-World War II Central and Eastern Europe, urban history, gender and sexuality, oral history, and the methodology of private life. She teaches courses on communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the methodology of anthropological history, and gender history. Recent publications include: Rodzina, tabu i komunizm w Polsce, 1956–1989 (Kraków: Libron, 2015); “W tym domu panuje strach. Kultura przemocy i porządek płci w Polsce późnego komunizmu,” Rocznik Antropologii Historii 4, no. 2 (2014): 165–79; “Making Up for the Losses of War: Reproduction Politics in Postwar Poland,” in Women and Men at War: A Gender Perspective on World War II and Its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Maren Röger and Ruth Leiserowitz (Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2012), 307–28. Agnieszka Mrozik  is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN). She is affiliated with two research teams: The Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Archives of Women. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies (2012) and an MA in American Studies (2005). Her doctoral dissertation examined the identity politics of the

Notes on Contributors  293 feminist movement and women’s literature in post-1989 Poland. She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled “Forgotten Revolution: Communist Female Intellectuals and the Making of Women’s Emancipation in Postwar Poland.” She is the author of Akuszerki transformacji. Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She co-edited and coauthored several volumes: Agnieszka Mrozik and Stanislav Holubec, eds., Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (New York: Routledge, 2018); Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec, eds., Komunizm—idee i praktyki w Polsce 1944–1989 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018); Agnieszka Mrozik et al., eds., Encyklopedia gender (Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2014); Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, and Grzegorz Wołowiec, eds., PRL—życie po życiu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013). Anna Müller  is an Associate Professor and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). From 2010 to 2013, she worked as a curator at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland. She collaborated with the Emigration Museum in Gdynia on a project entitled The People of Hamtramck that included a series of interviews with the Hamtramck Polonia. Most recently, she coordinated an exhibit on contemporary masculinities and femininities in Eastern Europe, titled she, he, me. The exhibit was on display at the Oloman Café in Hamtramck. Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies and an MA in History. Her interests range from gender and women’s history in post-World War II Poland to the history of popular culture and discourse analysis. She is a member of the Committee on Women’s History (a section of the Polish Historical Society). She is the author of Opowieści o trudach życia. Narracje zwierzeniowe w popularnej prasie kobiecej XX wieku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2010), and co-author and editor of two collective monographs on the popular culture in the Polish People’s Republic. Kateřina Svatoňová is the Head of the Film Studies Department, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on media theory, history and philosophy, media-archaeological research of (Czech) modern art, shifting perceptions of space and time in visual

294  Notes on Contributors culture, parallel history of cinema, and film’s relationship to other media. She is the curator of several exhibitions on film and media history, co-editor of specialist journals and publications, author of Meziobrazy. Mediální praktiky kameramana Jaroslava Kučery (Praha: NFA–FFUK–Master Film, 2016) that received the F. X. Šalda Award for Czech art criticism; Odpoutané obrazy. Archeologie českého virtuálního prostoru (Praha: Academia, 2013); 2 ½ D aneb prostor (ve) filmu v kontextu literatury a výtvarného umění (Praha: Casablanca, 2008). Anja Tippner  is Professor of Slavic Literatures at Hamburg University where she teaches Russian, Polish, and Czech literature. She held positions as lecturer at Prague University (Czech Republic, 1990–92), assistant professor in Slavic Literatures at Kiel University (Germany, 2006–11), guest lecturer in comparative literature at Copenhagen University (2001), as well as full professor at Salzburg University (Austria, 2006–11). Her research interests include Holocaust and Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe and literary representations of experiences of catastrophe and trauma, as well as cultures of remembrances, especially with regard to nostalgia and childhoods in state-socialist countries. She published on concepts of documentation, life-writing, and auto-fictions both as general concepts and within the field of Holocaust literature, memory studies, transnational literature, and childhood studies. She co-edited and co-authored several volumes: Anja Tippner and Anna Artwińska, eds., Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Doerte Bischoff and Anja Tippner, eds., Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 5 (2018); Anna Artwińska and Anja Tippner, eds., Nach dem Holocaust. Medien postkatastrophischer Vergegenwärtigung in Polen und Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2017); Anja Tippner and Christopher F. Laferl, eds., Extreme Erfahrungen. Grenzen des Erlebens und der Darstellung (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2017); Anja Tippner and Christopher F. Laferl, eds., Texte zur Theorie der Biographie und Autobiographie (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 2016). Sigrid Weigel is Professor of History and Theory of Literature and the former director of the Research Center for Literature and Culture (ZfL Berlin, 1999–2015); prior professor at the University of Hamburg (1984–1990), Zürich (1992–98), TU Berlin (1999–2015), and Visiting Professor at Princeton, member of the directors’ board of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Essen, 1990–93), and director of the Einstein Forum (Potsdam, 1998–2000). She received an honorary doctorate from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the UNSAM Buenos Aires, and the State University of Tbilisi, is an honorary member of MLA, and honorary president of the International Walter Benjamin

Notes on Contributors  295 Society. She published on Heine, Warburg, Freud, Benjamin, Scholem, Arendt, S. Taubes, Bachmann, cultural history, image theory, memory, generation/genealogy, cultural history of sciences. Her selected book publications include: Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017); Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Empathy: Epistemic Problems and CulturalHistorical Perspectives of a Cross-Disciplinary Concept (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Sigrid Weigel and Gerhard Scharbert, eds., A Neuro-Psychoanalytical Dialogue for Bridging Freud and the Neurosciences (Cham: Springer, 2016); Grammatologie der Bilder (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015; Eng. 2020); Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel, eds., “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Walter Benjamin. Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2008; Eng. 2013, Ital. 2014, French 2020); Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006); Body-and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aboim, Sofia and Vasconcelos, Pedro 46, 60n10, 114; see also Mannheim, Karl, Mannheimian theory of generations; political generation Alexievich, Svetlana 4, 228–38, 240–1, 242n10, 242n12, 243n14, 243n21, 243n22, 246n68, 285; see also oral history; Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets anticommunism 1, 11, 20, 22, 104, 197, 200, 206, 211, 215, 218, 220n5, 252 antifascism 50, 108; see also Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism (WWCAWF) antifascist generation 74, 87; see also Noce, Teresa; Ravera, Camilla Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ) 50, 70; see also state socialist women’s organization antisemitism 9, 137, 264–6, 273 archaic heritage 37–40; see also Freud, Sigmund Arendt, Hannah 3, 29–33, 40, 285; see also natality aunts of the revolution 137–8, 286 autobiography 15, 74, 84, 92, 94, 128, 207, 209, 227, 249; see also biography; oral history Bauman, Zygmunt 154, 159; see also Polish sociology Benjamin, Walter 3, 29, 32–5, 40, 41n15, 285 Benninghaus, Christina 2, 21; see also Mannheim, Karl, Mannheimian theory of generations Bible 237; Biblical ideas 34

biography: communist 235; intellectual 159; of Italian communist women 85, 87, 92; of Polish communist women 4; scholarly 147; of women 20, 47, 147; see also autobiography; oral history Bohdalová, Jiřina 184, 194n96, 194n99; see also normalization; Televarieté bourgeois feminism 47–8; see also proletarian women’s movement Brystiger, Julia 9–10, 131, 137, 142n38; see also Stalinism Camilla Ravera Historical Archive 83, 85; see also Ravera, Camilla Center for Gender Studies (Prague) 248; see also Šiklová, Jiřina Chałasiński, Józef 149, 162n23, 225n57; see also Polish sociology Charter 77 170, 256; see also normalization; Prague Spring; Šiklová, Jiřina Chytilová, Věra 171–3, 177–8, 183, 190n55; see also Czechoslovak New Wave; Krumbachová, Ester Cobble, Dorothy Sue 73, 286; see also feminist waves Cold War: activism 67, 74, 96; context 102–3; era 66–7, 89; paradigms 115; politics 66, 78, 108–9; see also Iron Curtain Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 188n35, 248, 259, 262n59, 285 Communist Party of Poland (KPP) 126–7, 129, 131–2, 134–6, 138, 140–4, 269–70

298 Index Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) 107–10, 114–15, 119n36 Communist Party of Yugoslavia 49, 51 communist revolutionary past 125, 283; see also revolution community feminism 110–11, 115–16; see also Turkish migrant left feminism Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ) 67–8, 72, 74, 76; see also state socialist women’s organization Cotton, Eugénie 88; see also Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Czech dissident movement 251, 256–7; see also Havel, Václav; Šiklová, Jiřina Czech women in dissent 20; see also women of Solidarity Czechoslovak New Wave 171, 183, 189n38; see also Chytilová, Věra; Krumbachová, Ester; Němec, Jan De Beauvoir, Simone 169–70, 188n27; see also The Second Sex Democratic Federation of Cuban Women (FDMC) 68, 70; see also Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) de-Stalinization 71, 137, 142n38, 152, 156, 206, 286; see also thaw dissent 18–20, 248, 254–7; see also Czech dissident movement DuBois, Ellen C. 47, 109; see also left feminism Duchêne, Gabrielle 46–7, 50, 60n7; see also Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism (WWCAWF) emancipation: individual 115–16; model 77, 89; paradigm 72, 77; project 82, 86, 88, 91–2, 210; socialist/state’s policy 216–17, 219; of women/women’s 22, 47, 68–70, 72–3, 78, 83–4, 87–9, 91–2, 103, 146, 167, 191n58, 199, 201, 206, 208–10, 213, 215, 218, 222n27 Espín, Vilma Castro 68, 71; see also Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) expropriation 167, 187n20, 285

family: communist 86; intelligentsia 147, 155; Jewish 142n37, 149; modern socialist 150; related metaphors 15–16, 20; reunion policy/ reunification 103, 105, 107, 111; Soviet 89; story 13, 16, 227; tree 15 fascism 53–4, 58–9, 69, 93, 95 Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) 68, 71; see also Espín, Vilma Castro Federation of Turkish Socialists in Europe (ATTF) 106–7, 115; see also Federation of Turkish Workers in West Germany (FIDEF) Federation of Turkish Women in Europe (ATKF) 110; see also Turkish migrant left feminism Federation of Turkish Workers in West Germany (FIDEF) 115; see also Federation of Turkish Socialists in Europe (ATTF) female “non-generation” 166, 285; see also Krumbachová, Ester feminist generation 69, 75; see also left-feminist generation feminist waves 73; as metaphor 286; conceptualization of 66; see also Cobble, Dorothy Sue; first wave; lost wave; middle wave; missed wave; red wave; second wave first generation: the category of 111, 113, 116; of communist women 4; of female artists 166; of left feminists 103, 115–16; of Polish communists 25–6n36; of socialism 19, 197; Soviet 244n43; of transformation/transition 19, 197; of women sociologists 159 first wave 286; see also feminist waves Fleck, Ludwik 148; see also thought collective Freud, Sigmund 3, 29, 37–40, 175, 241n3, 286; see also archaic heritage Gabrielli, Patrizia 85–6; see also biography, of Italian communist women gender-only feminism 49, 61n15, 109; see also multi-issue feminism genealogy: biological 30, 33; broken 286; as dimension 12, 29, 37, 233; as discourse 13; family 227; female genealogy of communism 95, 135; feminist 86, 287; intellectual 159;

Index  299 as perspective 12, 14–15, 39; see also Weigel, Sigrid generation: 1968 11, 22, 29, 225n68; as an analytical category 13–14, 103, 111, 126, 138, 197; of Columbuses (Poland) 227, 241n2; of the end 18–19; as a formula of identification/identity 4, 14; of partisan fighters (Italy) 86–7, 95; of the Polish Youth Union 4, 20; of reconstruction (Aufbaugeneration) 18, 20; as self-thematization 13, 231; of the Sixties (Šestidesatniki) 231, 243n24; of transformation 19; see also antifascist generation; female “non-generation”; feminist generation; first generation; Husak’s generation; KPP generation (pre-war Poland); last generation; left-feminist generation; March 1968 generation (Poland); political generation; postsocialist generation; post-Soviet generation; PPR generation (postwar Poland); Soviet baby boomers; Soviet generation; ZMP generation generationality 13; see also Jureit, Ulrike generations: bond of 29, 285; chain of 21; conflict of 16; solidarity of 35–6 Gomułka, Władysław 131, 138, 206; see also de-Stalinization; thaw Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich 234 gray zone 5, 150, 250–2, 258, 261n41; see also Šiklová, Jiřina Gulag 227, 236, 238; see also labor camp Havel, Václav 194n99, 256–7, 259, 259n8; see also Czech dissident movement; Prague Spring Heine, Heinrich 3, 29, 35–7, 40, 41n21, 286; see also generations, solidarity of homo sovieticus 228, 234, 242n12, 246n68; see also Soviet man Horáková, Milada 168, 187n17; see also Stalin’s/Stalinist purges Husak’s generation 10, 23n5; see also normalization International Women’s Year (IWY) 108–9, 174, 189n47; see also United Nations Decade for Women

Iron Curtain 88, 164n47, 236; see also Cold War Italian Communist Party (PCI) 71, 75, 83–8, 90–1, 93–6 Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) 82, 88, 90–2, 94–6 Jarosz, Maria 146–54, 159, 161n9, 164n47; see also Polish sociology Jaworska, Helena 206; see also Polish Youth Union; ZMP generation; ZMP girls Jureit, Ulrike 11, 13; see also generation, as an analytical category; generation, as selfthematization; generationality Khrushchev, Nikita 70 Kohout, Pavel 251–2, 254; see also gray zone Kollontai, Alexandra 48, 85, 284 Komsomol 205, 222n26, 226n72, 237; see also Polish Youth Union KPP generation (pre-war Poland) 126–7; see also PPR generation (postwar Poland) Krumbachová, Ester 4, 166, 169, 171–85, 190n52, 190n55, 191n59, 191n62, 192n73, 193n85, 194n95, 285; see also Chytilová, Věra; Czechoslovak New Wave; female “non-generation”; The Murder of Mr. Devil; Němec, Jan labor camp 141n27, 141n36; see also Gulag last generation: the concept of 19; of the GDR (Wendegeneration) 18, 26n40; of socialism 18, 197; Soviet 19, 239; of Stalinism 18; Stalin’s 239; of Yugoslavia 18 Lechtman, Tonia 5, 263–79, 283; see also antisemitism; Spanish Civil War; Stalin’purges left feminism 3, 45–7, 49, 55, 57–9, 107–10; see also DuBois, Ellen C.; multi-issue feminism; socialist feminism; Turkish migrant left feminism left-feminist generation 52, 59; see also feminist generation Les Femmes 50, 59, 63n41; see also Žena danas

300 Index liberal feminism 68, 286; see also radical feminism; second wave Łobodzińska, Barbara 146, 148–9, 154–6, 159; see also Polish sociology lost wave 87; see also feminist waves; middle wave; missed wave; red wave Man of Marble 213, 224n56; see also Wajda, Andrzej Mannheim, Karl 3, 10, 12, 23n6, 33, 37, 46, 112–13, 266; Mannheimian theory of generations 2, 21, 33; Mannheim’s approach 29, 114; see also “The Problem of Generations” March 1968 generation (Poland) 10, 241n7 Marx, Karl 14, 51; see also Marxism Marxism 16–17, 35, 133, 159, 186n8, 233; see also Marx, Karl memory: collective 20, 22, 167; of communism 2, 9–10, 21, 278; of communist struggle 127; of communist women 85, 92–3, 95; cultural 19, 233; generational 19; historical 168; intergenerational 24n10; politics of 17, 84, 234; private 13; prosthetic 232, 244n32; theory of 12, 15, 29; transgenerational 3; of women’s emancipation struggle 84; see also postmemory middle wave 67, 83; see also feminist waves; lost wave; missed wave; red wave missed wave 83; see also feminist waves; lost wave; middle wave; red wave Mitrović, Mitra 51, 54, 63n47, 64n72; see also Žena danas; Ženski pokret’s Youth Section modernity 11, 29, 152 multi-issue feminism 49; see also left feminism The Murder of Mr. Devil 172–8, 180–2, 184, 285; see also Czechoslovak New Wave; Krumbachová, Ester natality 30, 32, 40; see also Arendt, Hannah Nazism 40, 51, 93, 227, 266

Němec, Jan 171–2, 175, 183, 189n38; see also Czechoslovak New Wave; Krumbachová, Ester new feminism 47, 49, 52–4, 55, 58–9, 77, 283 new left 66, 74; see also old left Noce, Teresa 84, 86–7, 90, 92–5, 283; see also antifascist generation; Spanish Civil War; Union of Italian Women (UDI) Noi Donne 72, 89; see also Union of Italian Women (UDI) normalization 23n5, 173–4, 176, 181–4, 189n41, 251, 256–7; see also Charter 77; Prague Spring Nowa Huta 20, 206, 213, 222n18; see also ZMP generation old left 66, 68; see also new left oral history 104, 228, 248, 285; see also Alexievich, Svetlana; Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Osiecka, Agnieszka 200, 207, 209–10; see also ZMP girls Palach, Jan 172, 189n41, 194n98; see also normalization Patočka, Jan 170; see also Charter 77 perestroika 229, 236 Polish sociology 4, 146–8, 155–6, 162n23; see also Bauman, Zygmunt; Chałasiński, Józef; Jarosz, Maria; Łobodzińska, Barbara; Sokołowska, Magdalena; Tryfan, Barbara Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) 23n5, 125, 134–5, 138, 140–4, 150, 162n24, 162n26, 220n12 Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) 125, 140–3, 220n12; see also Polish United Workers’ Party Polish Youth Union 140n24, 198, 220n12, 286; see also Komsomol; ZMP generation political generation 51, 54, 58, 68–9, 87, 116, 286; the concept of 46–7, 57, 103, 113–14; see also Aboim, Sofia and Vasconcelos, Pedro postcommunism 2, 21–2, 197 postmemory 12; see also memory postsocialist generation 19 post-Soviet generation 233

Index  301 PPR generation (postwar Poland) 126; see also KPP generation (pre-war Poland) Prague Spring 20, 23n5, 249, 251, 253, 255–6, 258; see also Charter 77; normalization “The Problem of Generations” 23n6, 37, 112–13, 286; see also Mannheim, Karl progressive student movement (Yugoslavia) 46, 51–2, 55, 58; see also Ženski pokret’s Youth Section Progressive Women’s Association (IKD) 108, 110; see also left feminism; transnational feminism proletarian women’s movement 47–8; see also bourgeois feminism purges: antisemitic 161n9; in the party 126, 137, 188n35; political 173; Stalin’s/Stalinist 131, 135, 142n37, 243n24 radical feminism 72–4, 110; see also liberal feminism; second wave Ravera, Camilla 83–4, 87, 92–5, 283; see also antifascist generation; Camilla Ravera Historical Archive; Union of Italian Women (UDI) red wave 67, 69, 78; see also feminist waves; lost wave; middle wave; missed wave religion 14, 34, 268, 271 revolution: communist 9, 223n40; Cuban 68, 71–2; French 30; Hungarian 87; over-dreamed 198; the 1848 revolution 41n21; the 1905 revolution 141n33; the 1917 revolution 133, 237, 243n14; see also communist revolutionary past The Second Sex 169–70; see also De Beauvoir, Simone second wave 20, 66–9, 73–8, 82, 84–5, 87, 89, 95, 286–7; see also feminist waves Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets 4, 228–30, 238–41, 245n46, 285; see also Alexievich, Svetlana; oral history Shore, Marci 16–17, 168, 268 Šiklová, Jiřina 5, 247–59, 285; see also Center for Gender Studies (Prague);

Charter 77; Czech dissident movement; dissent; gray zone Snopkiewicz, Halina 211; see also ZMP girls socialist feminism 11, 67, 77, 109–10; see also left feminism Sokołowska, Magdalena 146, 148–50, 152–4, 157, 159, 164n47; see also Polish sociology “Solidarity” movement 20, 150, 198, 212, 261n48; see also women of Solidarity Soviet baby boomers 239 Soviet generation 233, 240–1; see also first generation, Soviet; last generation, Soviet Soviet man 228–32, 239; see also homo sovieticus Spanish Civil War 93–4, 265; see also Lechtman, Tonia; Noce, Teresa Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 71, 87, 131, 204, 221n15, 234, 244n43, 251; see also de-Stalinization; last generation, of Stalinism; Stalin’s; purges, Stalin’s/Stalinist Stalinism 127, 137, 156, 159, 198, 200, 206, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 221n15, 227, 252, 256, 260n33 state socialist women’s organization 50, 68–70, 73–4, 78; see also Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ); Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ) sterésis 169, 171, 174, 185; see also Vodrážka, Mirek Šuvaković, Milica 51, 54, 64n72; see also Žena danas; Ženski pokret’s Youth Section Świda-Ziemba, Hanna 17, 198–9, 221n15; see also ZMP generation Televarieté 184; see also Bohdalová, Jiřina; normalization thaw 200, 206, 209–11; see also de-Stalinization thought collective 148; see also Fleck, Ludwik Tomšič, Vida 49, 71; see also generation, of partisan fighters totalitarianism 31, 235; totalitarian state 27n56, 130; see also Cold War; Iron Curtain

302 Index transformation: after 1989 158; postsocialist 18 transition 16, 206; see also transformation transnational feminism 67, 78; see also Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Tryfan, Barbara 146, 148–9, 151–2, 154, 157–9; see also Polish sociology Turkish migrant left feminism 102–3, 106–7, 109–11, 113, 115–16; see also community feminism; left feminism; Women’s Union in the Ruhr-Gelsenkirchen (GKB) Union of Italian Women (UDI) 67–8, 70–6, 82–4, 86–93, 95–6; see also Noce, Teresa; Noi Donne; Ravera, Camilla; Viviani, Luciana United Nations Decade for Women 69, 78, 108–9; see also International Women’s Year (IWY) Viviani, Luciana 75–7; see also Union of Italian Women (UDI) Vodrážka, Mirek 167–9, 171, 285; see also sterésis Wajda, Andrzej 200, 204, 213, 224n56; see also Man of Marble; ZMP generation Walentynowicz, Anna 212; see also “Solidarity” movement; women of Solidarity Weigel, Sigrid 3, 12, 15, 21, 126, 285; see also genealogy; Mannheim, Karl, Mannheimian theory of generations women of Solidarity 20, 218, 261n48; see also Czech women in

dissent; “Solidarity” movement; Walentynowicz, Anna Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 47, 50, 57, 59, 67–71, 81n38, 82, 89–90, 93–4, 102, 108, 110, 284; see also Cotton, Eugénie; transnational feminism Women’s Union in the RuhrGelsenkirchen (GKB) 102, 104, 107, 109–11, 113–15, 117n1; see also Turkish migrant left feminism Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism (WWCAWF) 45–7, 50, 59; see also antifascism; Duchêne, Gabrielle Yurchak, Alexei 26n49, 256; see also last generation, Soviet Žena danas 45–7, 49–52, 54–9, 283; see also Les Femmes; Mitrović, Mitra; Šuvaković, Milica; Ženski pokret’s Youth Section Ženski pokret 45–6, 48–9, 51–4, 58, 59n2, 283; see also Ženski pokret’s Youth Section Ženski pokret’s Youth Section 45–7, 49–55, 57–9, 63n53, 283; see also progressive student movement; Žena danas; Ženski pokret Zetkin, Clara 48, 84, 88, 91, 93, 120n60 ZMP generation 198–9, 212, 217; see also Polish Youth Union; ZMP girls ZMP girls 201, 203, 210, 216–19, 222n27; see also Jaworska, Helena; Osiecka, Agnieszka; Polish Youth Union; Snopkiewicz, Halina; ZMP generation