National Cultures at Grass-root Level 9789633865262

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NATIONAL CULTURES AT THE

GRASS-ROOT LEVEL

NATIONAL CULTURES AT THE

GRASS-ROOT LEVEL by

Antonina Kloskowska

< » »

• C E U P R E S S * t » Central European University Press Budapest

First published in Polish as Kultury narodowe u korzeni by Wydawnictwo Naukowe Polish Scientific Publishers, PWN, Warszawa in 1996 English edition published in 2001 by Central European University Press Nädor utca 15 H-1015 Budapest Hungary 400 West 59th Street New York NY 10019 Translated by Chester A. Kisiel

© 1996 by Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN Sp. z o.o., Warszawa Published by arrangement with Polish Scientific Publishers PWN English translation © by Chester A. Kisiel 2001 Distributed in the United Kingdom and Western Europe by Plymbridge Distributors Ltd., Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PZ, United Kingdom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 963 9116 83 1 Cloth

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available upon request Printed in Hungary by Akademiai Nyomda Kft., Martonväsär

CONTENTS

Foreword

vii PARTI

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION 1. Controversies Surrounding the Concept of Nation 2. Historical Perspective 3. "Patria"—Fatherland, Homeland—as the Correlate of the Nation

5 31 41

PART II

THE CULTURALISTIC SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 4. The Complexity and Diversity of National Symbolic Communities . . . . 5. National Stereotypes and the Concept of National Identity 6. Personal Identity as Related to National Identification and to the Appropriation of National Culture—the Valence of National Culture . . . 7. Empirical Materials—Concepts and Methods

69 78 92 102

PART III

NATIONAL CONVERSIONS , 8. National Conversion as a Borderland Phenomenon 9. The Polish Conversion of Albert Winkler 10. German Conversions: Arrested or Realized

127 136 153

vi

CONTENTS PART IV

NATIONAL MINORITIES—PERIPHERIES OF THE DOMINANT CULTURE 11. Variants of Ukrainity in the Light of Autobiographies 12. The Problem of Belarussian Nationality in the Autobiographical Approach 13. Silesian National Dilemmas: the Older Generation of Silesians 14. Silesian National Dilemmas: the Younger Generation of Silesians 15. Open and Closed National Attitudes in a Borderland Situation

173

....

194 223 240 266

PART v

THE CENTER OF NATIONAL CULTURE 16. A Portrait of the Wartime Generation in the Background 17. Young Poles in the Period of the Democratic Breakthrough 18. Young Poles Facing Others. An Open or a Closed Nation?

289 311 345

PART VI

AN EPILOGUE ON EMIGRATION 19. Scales of Polishness 20. Jozef Czapski: Polish Identification and Cultural Polyvalence

379 383

Conclusions. The Nation: What for?

395

Bibliography

407

Name Index

435

FOREWORD

At the close of the twentieth century the problems of the nation and nationality are once again at the center of attention among social scientists and humanists. Empirical and theoretical studies of national phenomena are multiplying rapidly, especially in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton University is the leading center of these studies in the United States. The interests of theoreticians reflect the practical importance of national problems in the life of societies all over the world. There is a certain paradox connected with this practical side of the subject: On the one hand, the world today is striving for unity and as a matter of fact already is linked together by a network of political, economic and information relations. However, the rebirth of old and the birth of new centrifugal tendencies of national separation and self-affirmation accompany this tendency. This phenomenon encompasses both Europe, uniting on new principles, and Africa, entering the phase of transformation from ethnic communities into modern national states that are grappling with the problems of tribal groups contending for political and cultural supremacy. The bloody internal conflicts of Burundi, Rwanda, and Somalia, the dramatic processes of the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the struggle of the successors of the Soviet Union to suppress the drive for sovereignty of the Caucasian and Asiatic countries are examples of much wider processes, albeit not always so drastic in form. Given the intensity and nature of these developments, one can understand the enthusiasm with which many scholars of different scientific orientations take up the problems of the nation and nationalism. In the background of contemporary events, however, is the memory of German, Italian and Japa-

Vlll

FOREWORD

nese nationalism and the special variety of Stalinist communist nationalism. Observations of contemporary events and the memory of the extermination of six million European Jews and millions of members of other European and Asian nations or ethnic communities incline some scholars to argue that the nation is only a transient form of human relations created by modern times that will fade away upon the advent of "postmodernity". On the other hand, such clear tendencies in the contemporary world to claim national rights justify acknowledging the importance of these phenomena in the experience of large and smaller human communities. A theoretical controversy has been taking place against this background regarding the origin and survival prospects of nations; their antiquity or relative newness as forms of human relations; their historical transience or their long duration deeply rooted in human needs. The main orientations of empirical research and theories concerning these problems will be presented in the first part of the book. However, these orientations are not its main subject. An investigation of the nation requires a precise definition of this entity, because many notions colored by positive or negative biases, ideological passions and centuries-old prejudices as well as styles of thinking have grown up around this subject matter. Thus from the outset, for the sake of clarity it must be stated that the nation here is conceived as a large human collectivity joined together by a certain common culture that facilitates mutual understanding and a certain unity of its members. This definition leaves many unavoidable questions that will be taken up in the book in an effort to elucidate them, while at the same time trying to avoid oversimplification of something that, by its very nature, is open to various interpretations. There are many possible approaches to the problem of the nation. Some of them are presented briefly in Parts I and II of the book. The main position taken here is described in four parts, based on previous empirical materials that have not been used before in connection with the point of view put forward here (Parts II and VI), and on materials gathered from studies conducted especially for the purpose of this book (Parts IV and V). This purpose is to examine the phenomena of nationality from the standpoint of the experiences of individuals: people who create, process and experience the culture of their national community-group and make use of wider national cultures. Such an individualistic approach, in which the methodology of this

FOREWORD

IX

study is grounded, has a certain basis in the "personal documents" tradition of Polish sociology, which uses autobiographies to describe the subject side of the collective experiences and actions of human communities. The focus on the subjective aspect of the nation in this book does not imply a subjectivity of method. The main subject of the research indisputably concerns objective facts: published biographies and works, but especially recorded conversations containing lengthy pronouncements about individuals' own lives and attitudes gathered from dozens of people who lived through the historically dramatic events of the twentieth century in Poland and in Europe. The subjective attitudes of these persons are related to intersubjectively shaped and understood external facts; they are directed to the symbols and values of culture preserved in the works of national cultures and expressed in the actions of the members of various national groups. There is no reason why this approach to the subject should be regarded as more subjective than studies based on the results of wider but superficial surveys or monographic descriptions of field observations. The characteristic feature of the approach taken here reduces phenomena more often studied at the level of mass behaviors and historical manifestations of long duration to their manifestations in the individual dimension of nationhood. While applying this approach, the far-flung historical perspectives of the life of nations and the duration of national cultures have not been forgotten. On the contrary, one of the theoretical starting points here is the assumption that nations endure for a long time, although in different forms. However, studies of the nation require a method that, metaphorically speaking, may be described as using both a telescope and a microscope. The telescope shows the long-distance view, but the object is studied from afar. The microscope picks out the details and enables one to delve into the inner depths of the object. This approach goes to the grass roots of the aspects of nationhood, which stem from individuals' experience of their own culture and of culture in general. Roots in individuals, through reference to objective objects and intersubjective values of culture, enable nations to endure in their feeling of collective identity, despite the historical variability of forms. "Collective identity" may be described in philosophical language as a hypostasis, a purely mental creation that for some people is even fictional. The aspects of national culture studied at the grass roots are concrete and real; one may say that they pulsate with the blood of live human emotions and

X

FOREWORD

actions. They manifest themselves most clearly in conditions of human existence called borderline situations in the broad understanding of the term. Borderline situations are understood as encounters between separate cultures over a national-state frontier, but also as genealogical cultural translocations, changes of nationality, and participation in the culture of a minority. While focusing on the three largest minority groups of Poland today, the autobiographies of the few Lithuanians in Poland and those of Polish Jews and Poles of Jewish origin were not taken into consideration. These do not constitute a separate topic of analysis. However, the Jewish element is present in reflections on various personalities as a frame of reference. Although not always expressed explicitly, the author is conscious of this element throughout. For a thousand years the social and psychic condition of the Jews was an especially salient example of life in a borderline situation created by the Diaspora. Numerous sociologists today use different methods to study contemporary Polish Jews. Some young sociologists from Jewish families are also conducting studies based on autobiographies. The study of ethnic groups and minorities forms the main topic of the empirical part of the book. Less extensive data illustrate the border phenomena of national conversion and emigration, especially during the war and the period of communism in Poland that forced some persons to leave the country. The more extensive parts of this book are devoted to borderline situations in this sense. Part IV in particular contains many examples of the real words of persons who provide data and arguments for the dispute among theoreticians.regarding the prospects and chances of the nation in history and in the contemporary world. These persons, who of necessity and in accordance with the principles of research remain anonymous, are called authors and not merely respondents in order to emphasize their active and partially causative role in the creation of the book, in which they are deliberately quoted at length. The author here gives them the thanks that they deserve: forty or so older and younger Belarussians, Poles, Silesians—Polish and German—and Ukrainians. The presentation of their life histories, sometimes at great length, and their attitudes, and the intensity or superficiality of their national identification enables one to gain a better insight into aspects of national identity—or, to avoid using this risky notion, into the essence of the nation—than do more broadly based but superficial studies of a different type.

FOREWORD

XI

One final remark is due to readers of a book on such an emotionally laden subject as the problem of the nation. An author who lives up to the principle of refraining from value judgments has the right to his or her opinions, but also has the obligation to hold them in check in his or her work. The expression of this stance, with which I fully agree, is the motto to part I of this book taken from the works of Fernand Braudel.

PARTI

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

I declare once and for all: I love France with the same passionate love, demanding and complicated, as Jules Michelet. Without distinguishing her virtues and vices, what I prefer and what I accept less willingly. But that feeling has no influence on the pages of this work. FERNAND BRAUDEL, L'identité de la France

1. Controversies Surrounding the Concept of Nation

The nation is the subject both of common reflection and of scientific inquiries and theories. This reflection is not always expressed explicitly, but has dwelled deep in the consciousness of wider or narrower social circles for centuries. It is expressed externally in works of art, in the writings of publicists and in broad-based propaganda in the mass media. Common conceptions of the nation are not entirely uniform. They depend on the historical moment, on tradition and on the actual situation of a given national community, on its enlightenment and ethical attitudes. However, the nation in the common understanding is regarded as a natural phenomenon, which ensues from a natural bond based on common origin, common land and territory. That conviction is based on a faith that is sometimes experienced intensively and is sometimes pushed to the margin of consciousness. The etymology of the word "nation" is consistent with this belief. In many languages it is derived from the Latin word natio—from nascere, "to be born"—or from native counterparts with the same meaning, as in Polish and Russian. The absence of a separate ritual or act of introducing a new member into the national community strengthens the common conception of the naturalness of the national bond. Baptism or another ceremony introduces the neophyte into a religious community, while the conferring of a personal identity card, being entered on the voting list or being granted citizenship introduces a person into the state community. In popular belief a child becomes a member of a nation by the very fact of being born of parents of a particular nationality and in a country with a dominant or clearly distinct national group. Both of these conditions often go together and strengthen the

6

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

feeling of the nation as something natural. When genealogical origin and country of residence are not consistent as determinants of nationality, the psychic situation of a nationally atypical minority group becomes complicated and prompts deeper reflection on the essence of nationhood. Those are important and cognitively interesting situations, but they are not numerically dominant in the contemporary world. The concurrence of genealogical and territorial factors is less conducive to common reflection; however, the possible dissimilarity between these two categories of determinants may have practical significance for the conferring of citizenship. Either the principle of ius sanguinis (the "right of blood") or ius soli (a right deriving from being born or residing for a long time on a given territory) may govern legal regulations. More enlightened modern legislators who base themselves on one of these principles no longer hold the conviction that nationality is a factor that originates from nature. The conferring of citizenship has other justifications, but it is worth emphasizing the connection between nationality as a distinctive cultural fact, and the political principle of being the member of a state. On the other hand, popular thinking often hangs on to primary convictions, according to which natural factors, in particular the myth of blood, determine the ethnic or national identity of a person and automatically and fatalistically make him or her a member of a particular social community. Stanislaw Ossowski referred to that stance of common thinking as faith in the predestined and unbreakable nature of the national bond (Ossowski, 1967a). In extreme cases similar beliefs become the justification for racism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia (Sumner, 1995). Not every ethnocentric nationalism is racist, but it did manifest itself in its most extreme form in twentieth-century German National Socialism. Ethnocentrism by itself is not necessarily linked with xenophobia, the fear of strangers and innate antipathy for them. The strong, emotionally laden feeling of the bond with one's own ethnic or national group is called patriotism, but that is not necessarily the same thing as aggressive nationalism and intense group megalomania. Yet it is not easy to distinguish between these two attitudes since members tend to call the nationalism of their group patriotism, but someone else's patriotism nationalism. The feeling of unity with one's national group and its space is often expressed in the works of writers not suspected of morally reprehensible motivations. In Maria Konopnicka's Rota territory, as native land; family,

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

7

commonly understood as consanguinity; and native language are fused into one whQle that forges an unbreakable bond. Kazimierz Wierzynski expressed a similar attitude in a nostalgic verse written in the first year of his emigration: For there is no chosen land, There is only a predestined land, Of all the treasures four walls, From the entire world—that side. The family circumstances of the poet, whose grandfather was Austrian and who in his youth still bore a German sounding name (Wierzynski, 1991), repudiate the emotional truth of this poetry confirming the unbreakable nature of the national bond. Statistically speaking, most people adopt the culture of their parents rather than exclusively, or mainly, some other culture. This is due to a cultural process, which will be examined in detail below, and not to any natural necessity. One can speak of the social ascription of a person to some nationality and culture. Yet, this dependence is not exclusive, nor is it impossible to weaken, modify or even break. This ascription is the source of valuable human experiences, but also of painful burdens. Those problems will be addressed later in the book. Once again it must be underscored that these problems do not belong to the realm of nature but to the domain of culture. Scientific attempts were made in the nineteenth century to explain the problems of the nation on the basis of race. It may be supposed that those notions have finally been rejected by science and discredited by their use in the racist ideologies of the Nazi and Italian Fascist periods, as well as by racists in America and by supporters of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. At the end of the twentieth century only one truly scientific orientation deals with the problem of the biological determinants of group phenomena among people. That discipline is sociobiology, which stands cautiously aloof from any racist theses. Authors whose stance is derived from etiology are somewhat more prone to transfer hypotheses and conclusions drawn from studies of animal behavior to people (Edward Wilson, Konrad Lorenz). However, the sociobiologists who have studied the problems of xenophobia, racism and patriotism first-hand have shown great caution in this area (Vine etal., 1987).

8

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

These authors definitely have rejected the theses of social Darwinism. They cite Hamilton's conception of "inclusive fitness", according to which a genetically determined tendency prompts behaviors that facilitate the preservation of both individuals and the species. The counterpart of this principle is Edward Wilson's concept of the "altruism gene" (Wilson, 1975; 1988). At the same time, they made it clear that they do not suggest any biological imperatives that could be the source of ethnic prejudices, racism and racial egoism. People's social bonds are based on "cognitively perceived common features" (Vine et al., 1987, p. XIX), which means that those bonds are not derived from an instinctive drive. Ideological and not natural ties determine the direction and object of human aggression (ibid.). Symbolic systems created by people direct aggression towards other people for the defense of religion, king and nation, class, as well as race, which most often is a fictional construct that is not in accord with the scientifically discovered facts (Huxley, 1959). The genetic features of the species are responsible only for the capacity for, and tendency to, aggression and xenophobia in general, but the motives for aggression and the objects of xenophobia are culturally determined and historically changeable. Cultural anthropologists, historians and sociologists are even more agreed on the cultural sources and nature of the nation and ethnic groups. However, they represent a considerable divergence of stances since their concept of culture is not identical. This concept, which in most cases is accepted implicitly without explanation, differentiates approaches to national phenomena. The starting point of the conception developed here is an approach to culture close to the position of Alfred Kroeber (1973), but expanded by reference to semiotic theories (Kloskowska, 1981). According to this approach, the sphere of the culture of reality or existence must be distinguished from culture in the strict social sense and from symbolic culture. All of these spheres are closely linked together in the consciousness of primitive and archaic societies, thus all of them must be taken into consideration in a description of primitive ethnic communities. The notion of ethnic communities often appears in discussions on the nation, hence this notion must be defined before we go any further. There are many definitions referring to ethnic categories. Two types of communities described by this name should be noted here. They are not complete antitheses, but constitute the basis for polar types of a conceptual continuum. They are (1) primary or archaic or traditional ethnic groups, and (2) partial ethnic

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

9

groups and dispersed aggregations with a similar traditional culture functioning within larger societies. The first of these are not the main subject of interest here. However, there are intermediate forms between the first and the second type, which is why the term "continuum" is used, and why both collectivities must be described within the frame of the general category of ethnic communities. "The primitive, traditional ethnic community" or "ethnic group" is a small community closely connected to a certain territory, which has not only practical importance for it as the foundation of its existence but also has symbolic-magical importance. This is a group made up of face-to-face habitual contacts, linked together by neighborly ties, with a popular, folklore culture that is very uniform for the entire community, traditional and subject to little change. Its members lack historical awareness and self-reflection, but they constitute a tightly knit community on account of close contacts and the habitual nature of the similarity of their behaviors. From the standpoint of cultural anthropology these groups are a cultural unit. Raoul Naroll formulated the concept of cultural unit and used it as a tool to investigate primitive societies (Naroll, 1973). For that reason it cannot be transferred with all its details to an analysis of more complicated cultural entities. Yet I still maintain that, after making the necessary modifications, it is a very useful starting point for a sociological study of national cultures. Before attempting to take a stance in the controversy among historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists regarding the nature and specification of national cultures, the criteria for the identification and separation of national cultures and nations as units of culture must be laid down. Long and tedious efforts preceded the establishment of the main criteria delimiting the unit of primitive cultures. These efforts consisted in listing and comparing the research practices of many competent scholars studying and describing primitive and traditional societies. As far as I am aware, no similar efforts have been made so far in respect to developed nations. For this reason it is worth comparing Naroll's set of criteria with criteria regarded as suitable for a description of the nation as a community functioning in a different phase of social development, in other, different situational contexts, and not constituting the only form of human society. According to Naroll, a characterization permitting the identification of a separate unit of primitive culture (cultunit) ought to consider ten criteria

10

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

(p. 726), namely: ( 1 ) the distribution of the individual features covered by the study, (2) territorial continuity, (3) political organization, (4) language, (5) ecological adaptation, (6) the structure of local units, (7) the widest social unit appearing, (8) its own name, (9) common folklore or history, (10) a unit determined by the researcher. The first criterion in particular needs to be explained, since it is important for determining whether the community studied is in fact a separate, "discrete" cultural unit. The resolution of this problem is very important in respect to developed nations. To put it briefly, and to oversimplify somewhat, the aim here is to check the range of individual features in neighboring societies and draw the boundary lines of their appearance. Czarnowski adopted a similar criterion in respect to the range of a culture as the area of uniformly systematized values (Czarnowski, 1956a). It is worth comparing Naroll's views on the early social bond with those of Durkheim's famous pupil, Marcel Mauss (Mauss, 1969). Naroll looked at primitive society from the outside, with the eye of an ethnologist, who describes and compares specimens of cultural communities of a similar type. In advance of the approach closer to functional ethnology and later cognitive ethnography, Mauss looked at primitive society from the inside, from the angle of its unifying social-cultural bond {la cohésion sociale). Like Naroll, he uses criteria of self-identification when he mentions phenomena. For him, the names and rights that a community assigns to itself are not as important as the "will of unity". That will is understood as cohesion, separation and self-isolation in respect to those who speak of themselves as "we" in opposition to "they", strangers, helots, half-breeds and barbarians. It is only the "we" who call themselves "people" (pp. 314-315). Without stating this clearly Mauss goes beyond the reality of primitive society in the strict sense, a society of mechanical solidarity. In the summary of the chapter he speaks of "discontinuity in cohesion", of permeability to the influences of other cultures and the emergence of complicated societies. This line of thinking leads to the second concept of an ethnic community, a partial community. An ethnic community with a partial culture is distinguished on the principle of contrast to the dominant large culture of a developed society. In the United States and Australia members of such communities are called "ethnics". Such communities as a whole do not constitute cohesive territorial groups, although as immigrants they may strive to form local agglomerations (Irish, Polish,

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

11

and Negro ghettos) in large cities. They can also be remnants of autochthonous (Indian, Aboriginal) and regional groups. The culture of ethnic communities of this type is not entirely uniform. Their own traditional heritage is not enough to allow them to live in a foreign setting. They are partially adapted, "acculturated", or even partially assimilated with the dominant culture of the society of the country in which they live since their own traditional culture as a rule had the features of the folk or primitive culture described above. Members of those groups, who are commonly dispersed, can no longer base their cultural community on direct contacts. Their ethnic habitual bond of membership no longer holds them together. On the other hand, the contrast with the different, dominant culture sharpens their ethnic self-reflection. If they do not reject the customs, values and beliefs of their ethnic origin and do not assimilate completely, they have to base their feeling of ethnic separateness on consciously recognized elements of an ideological bond. That bond consists of genealogical knowledge, which is often recognized in the form of mythical consanguinity, reference to a fatherland as a symbolic territory of the group's origin (landscape, location), as well as the entire broad category of cultural group symbols (literature, art, coats-of-arms, emblems, colors and banners, historical events). Finally, a consciously cultivated language and religion are necessary if "ethnics" and/or immigrants are to be differentiated in these two spheres from the dominant culture. (Language but not religion differentiated Polish immigrants in France, whereas religion and not language differentiates Irish immigrants in England.) National minorities in modern states are an important variety of communities with a partial culture. They differ in many respects from scattered communities and those strongly set in the society with the dominant culture. Minority groups often inhabit densely settled borderland areas and preserve ties with the state or country of their origin, which is their across-the-border metropolis. However, this is not a homogeneous category, nor is it easy to define. Since World War I international law has been searching for an adequate and acceptable definition of a minority. According to the definition of Jules Deschenes being considered in the Subcommission of the United Nations, a minority is "a group of citizens of some state being a numerical minority and not occupying a dominant position, having ethnic, religious and linguistic features that distinguish it from the majority of the population, having a feeling of internal solidarity and—at least implicitly—guided by the

12

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

the collective will to preserve itself and to attain equality with the majority in the light of law and practice" (Stavenhagen, 1990, pp. 164-165). Sociologists add to the definition of a minority a certain characteristic underprivileged status, approaching minorities from the angle of their situation and not their numerical size (Heckmann, 1992). Roger Brubaker also very clearly supports such a conception of a minority. He defines a minority "not as a static demographic category, but as a dynamic political attitude" (Brubaker, 1995, p. 112). On account of "ethnocultural affinity", a minority in this sense belongs to "external fatherlands". These external ties encounter resistance from states that are organized on the national principle and that do not tolerate multiethnicity within their borders. The problem of a precise definition of a minority acquires special practical importance when minorities seek legal recognition and protection of their interests, when they put forward postulates of cultural and even administrative autonomy and form their own political parties. The granting of minority status, with its related protection of interests, has become an important problem for many categories of immigrants in various countries at the end of the twentieth century. The problem is especially urgent for minorities that live in dispersion, but that think of themselves as a national minority. In the United States Jews, the Irish, Poles and other "ethnics" do not bear the name of minorities. They have been thoroughly amalgamated in the American "melting pot", even if they are conscious of their origin and have sentiments for their "roots". Scattered ethnic communities with a partial culture and ethnic minorities are an important subject of research on aspects of nationality. However, it was not this form of ethnicity that Mauss had in mind when he spoke of the appearance of discontinuity and permeability to the influences of other, alien, most often neighboring cultures. He meant the process of evolution from a small homogeneous group to a more complicated tribe—and beyond its boundaries. It must be emphasized that the primitive ethnic group with its uniform and tightly knit cultural unit is identified with society. As social forms develop, such identification becomes problematic. Thus scholars of nations must determine the mutual relations of the concepts of nation, society and state. This is a field of contentious views. Their divergence stems from the aforementioned ambiguity within the concept of culture. A differentiation of

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

13

the category of culture is not so important in primitive ethnic groups, although the anthropologist Krober believes that it is appropriate. In those groups/societies all three aforementioned categories of culture (existence-reality, societal and symbolic) are closely bound together. Every element of the economy and social organization is saturated with symbolic meanings: it has the nature of a value and is linked with appropriate ritual practices. It suffices to recall Malinowski's description of the technique of the Trobriand islanders for building canoes and cultivating gardens on coral reefs, or Lévi-Strauss's analyses of kinship systems and structures in Brazil or his study of the practices of primitive medicine as a spectacle (Lévi-Strauss, 1970, p. 239; 1971). With the development of civilization and the progress of rationalist thought ridding the world of magic, the relationship between technique and practical actions is loosened and finally severed. The socio-political sphere is rationalized and deaxiologized less consistently. However, it also is stripped of magic in ordinary situations, except for moments of tension and crises. Instrumental culture becomes separated from symbolic-axiological culture. This separation takes place not only in the mind of the outside researcher, the anthropologist, who did not share the beliefs and convictions of natives on the connection between magical practices and the technical outcome of the action. Entire societies become aware of this differentiation of fields—at least in the area of practical interests. After one acknowledges the phenomenon of the nation as a cultural fact, one must reach agreement on which fields of culture are more or less characteristic of the definition and separation of national communities. This determines the plane of theoretical controversies concerning the definition of the relationship or the distinctness of the state, society and nation, the historical range of the latter and its different varieties in time and space. Separation of the state should not present any special difficulties, even bearing in mind the concept of the nation-state popular with historians. The state is an institution made up of a number of organs of power and the public administration; it is their network extended to areas that are more or less clearly limited in space and law—depending on the historical period. In external relations the state is characterized by sovereignty, internally—according to Weber's definition—it has a monopoly on the legal use of force. Various state institutions outfitted with a suitable apparatus of compulsion have these attributes in practice.

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

The instrumental nature of the state is beyond doubt, albeit in certain social situations the state may become an autotelic, non-instrumental value in itself. This happens especially when a nation without a state aspires to its own state. Another situation arises in traditional, absolutist, and especially totalitarian states, where those in power create a cult of the state and impose it on the society by various means. A liberal and rationalistic ideology, on the other hand, desacralizes the state. It tries to reduce the state, if not to the role of a night watchman, then at least to practical, utilitarian dimensions. In modern states the axiological values of the attributes of the state are derived from the repertoire of national symbols, not vice versa, although the example of the United States may raise certain doubts in this regard. In contrast to the state, the nation is a social body with the nature of a cultural community. This statement may serve as its most succinct and preliminary definition. There is no question that the nation is a social collectivity. For this reason it is more difficult to distinguish between the nation and the society. This is especially so in situations in which the expressions Polish, French, German society, etc. are used. However, the empirical differentiation between the phenomena of society and nation becomes obvious when we apply these concepts to multinational states such as the First or Second Polish Republic. In this case society is not coterminous with a nation representing the culture of a politically dominant collectivity. There are no state societies that are entirely homogenous nationally. However, in conditions of considerable uniformity, such as in Poland after World War II, it is fitting to use the terms "nation" and "society" differently, even when alluding to the same collectivity. For example, we would rather speak of the reaction of society to price rises, but of the reaction of the nation to the threat of foreign aggression. That difference should become clearer after a more detailed exposition of the concept of nation accepted and proposed here. The differentiation between civil society and nation may provide a better understanding of the nature of the nation as a collective whole of a singular type. Scottish social philosophers and economists of the eighteenth century introduced the term civil society to designate an independent social organization of citizens in contrast to the state and acting of their own free will for the realization of their interests. Hegel's approach, which sees in civil society (biirgerliche Gesellschaft) the antithesis of the family united with a family in the state synthesis, obviously does not help to distinguish between the society

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

15

and the state. For Marx, on the other hand, civil society viewed from the standpoint of the anti-Bourbon and anti-Bonapartist opposition in 1851 expressed aspects independent of the state shaped by the society and its common interest (Marx, 1946, pp. 19, 128). This notion, which is a child of liberal thought, tends to resurface in various periods of struggle against the usurpation of the state, including, and especially, of the socialist state. This notion is thus definitely incompatible with tendencies to identify the society with the state. Like the state, however, society is also a network of instrumental institutions. The individualistic nature of this ideology, which goes back to Ferguson, Smith and Hume, does not alter this fact. Adam Ferguson popularized the concept of civil society in the eighteenth century. That conception, which was developed in Enlightenment thought, is rationalistic, but a similar understanding of society in Rousseau and in the theories of Romanticism has a different tinge. The scholars of Hegel vary in their interpretation of his position. The concept of civil society became even more complicated at the end of the twentieth century, when the problem of this form of social action and coexistence once again became of immediate vital interest in the fight against totalitarian fascist and communist states. In a lengthy monograph on this problem Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992) state in their conclusion that the civil society of the present age is characterized by the following properties: legality, privacy, pluralism, the tendency to form associations, mediation and the openness of public affairs (p. XIV). This view is consistent with the conception of civil society outlined above as the entire body of institutions independent of the state. Particular emphasis is laid on the nature of those institutions as voluntary associations often emerging from previous social movements. The Polish Solidarity movement of the eighties is a characteristic example and object of study in this regard. According to the Cohens, civil society ought to be distinguished not only from the state but also from the economic domain: "the capitalistic economics of the market" (p. 2). This monograph, which is authoritative with respect to the subject under discussion, significantly omits the problem of the nation. The term "nation" is mentioned only in connection with the views of Hannah Arendt on the German state in the age of Romanticism. That state pursued the doctrine of national economics and the philosophy of the nation-state, which the authors criticize on the grounds that it led to the totalitarian state.

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

Polish philosophers and social thinkers of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century devoted a lot of attention to the concept of the nation. In his writings on society and the nation Florian Znaniecki, in the years between the wars, put forward suggestions for solving the difficult problem of the interrelations of various categories of bonds forming complex and dynamically changing social wholes. According to Znaniecki, society is a general category, which is primary in relation to various complexes of social groups that crisscross through the manifold affiliations of their members. Qualification of the nature of a given complex depends on the type of collective social body that we regard as dominant from the standpoint of the problem investigated. Depending on the point of view chosen, one can speak of state, church, national, class, and racial societies, even when the same physical aggregates of people are meant. However, from a given standpoint these physical aggregates are only an unimportant substratum of the dynamics of human actions and of the dependencies between crisscrossing groups (Znaniecki, 1973, pp. 65, 67-69). This position does not identify the nation with the society, because Znaniecki here understood society as a general category of the human bond originating from constant interactions. This did not exclude the concept of society in the narrower sense, for example as a complex of groups dominated by groups of collective interest. Znaniecki did not use the notion of civil society in the meaning previously discussed. However, he favored the idea of such a society, as did Stanislaw Ossowski, who propounded the concept of the polycentric social order (Ossowski, 1967a). In his postwar work on modern nations Znaniecki put the main emphasis on an analytical separation and empirically possible independence of the nation from the state (Znaniecki, 1990). This position, of course, was bolstered by the new experiences of the Polish "national society" after World War II. Those experiences brought back memories of the partitions of Poland in Znaniecki's mind. Irrespective of this, his book on nations was a continuation of his previous views on the nation as a collective body, whose separateness is based on awareness of the uniqueness and distinctness of its culture. In the foreword to Contemporary Nations Znaniecki clearly opposed this position to views dominant among political scientists, according to whom the state is an indispensable factor for national unity. He cited not only the experience of Poland, but also the examples of Greece, Ireland, Czechoslovakia and Serbia. These examples demonstrate that the community of the

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17

national culture is the product of a more durable and more effective social bond than a common government. The cultural approach to the nation in Zaniecki's theory touches here upon an essential point of divergence in the positions of sociologists, historians and political scientists of the end of the twentieth century on the nature of nations, nationalism and ethnic groups towards the close of the second millennium of our era.

The Concept of Political Nation One of the orientations in late-twentieth-century theories of the nation places special emphasis on the political functions of the nation and on a clear-cut definition of the nature of this collective body. Some political philosophers, sociologists and historians maintain such a position. Ernest Gellner conceives the nation as a result of the magnetism of the idea of nationalism. He believes that the nation can be defined only by nationalism, which is a claim that the ethnic and state boundaries should be the same (Gellner, 1991, pp. 9-10). Nationalism "establishes today's norm of the legal validity of political units" (p. 65). According to Gellner, nationalism is not an awakening of national consciousness. On the contrary, nationalism invents nations where they previously had not existed. To support his thesis Gellner uses the heuristic fiction of Ruritania and the Empire of Megalomania. However, the birth of nations was a real historical process, and sociological generalizations on the genesis and nature of nations should be sought in this real sequence of events or rather in various nation-creating historical processes. A fundamental question arises in connection with Gellner's stance: What is the social subject of nationalism in the absence of a nation, or even the traces of a nation, that could create such an ideology? His interpretation depreciates the role of ethnic groups and the entire problem of the primitive cultural community. Culture is interpreted as a factor of manipulation applied by social categories with ambitions to rule. Ethnicity expresses itself as nationalism in the political domain "whenever the economic foundation of social life requires cultural uniformity (but not classlessness)" (ibid., p. 115). This assertion applies to industrialism. For Gellner the nation is a child of the industrial age and of modernism, which bring it into existence.

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

Thus Gellner is interested in the nation in its mature historical form. There are no essential doubts and no divergent views as to the historical frames of such a form of the nation. That form, however, is not the only and initial form of the nation. Liah Greenfeld, who comes close to Gellner in her use of the political conception of the nation and nationalism, differs from him in the wide use of historical materials. She analyzes the historical paths to nationalism in five nations: England, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. She understands this term broadly and, by assumption, neutrally, without negative value judgments. She defines nationalism as a style of thinking, as an idea that binds people together within large collective bodies not enclosed by the boundaries of a local community, as a feeling of identity, and as an ideology and the human collective bodies based on it (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 3). Here the concept of nationalism also embraces the nation. This scholar distinguishes between the category nation-nationalism with individualistic-liberal features and the category nation-nationalism with a collectivist-authoritarian nature. She also mentions the ethnic nation type. However, she focuses on the first category, which she regards as the only genuine, mature form of nationalism. The nation in this genuine form is characterized by sovereignty of the people, and this in turn implies the sovereignty of individuals. Membership of this nation is civil and may be acquired (Greenfeld, Chirot, 1994, pp. 82-83). Greenfeld's position leaves no doubt that she identifies the nation, at least in its most perfect and most complete form, with what she calls the "civil state society" (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 399), whose first manifestation she sees in England. A ruler as symbol and idea cannot express the democratic, civil nature of the nation. This accounts for her negation of the national character of France in the period of the Renaissance and enlightened absolutism. Although Greenfeld does not deny that civil liberties in England under the Tudors and Stuarts were mainly a principle rather than a reality that did not include the "people-nation" as a whole, she clings to her conception of the civil nation. Like Gellner, she also holds that ethnicity itself does not lead to nationalitynationalism (1992, p. 13). She devotes more attention to problems of national culture, especially in respect to seventeenth-century England. However, she definitely recognizes aspects of the social-political culture as the essential feature of the nation. From this position she draws an important conclusion

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19

on the connection between nationality and the aspirations of individuals to satisfy the need for personal dignity. She links these postulated and partially realized functions of nationality and nationalism with the sphere of religion—more precisely, with the Reformation. That is why Greenfeld does not agree with Gellner's statement that industrialism was the necessary and sufficient condition for the appearance of the nation (Greenfeld, 1993). This important aspect of her theory deserves attention and reference to later analysis based on other materials. Many authors, including Polish ones, use the conception of the nation-state to define an early form of social collective body that was ethnically differentiated but subordinated to one state, whose administrative policy also leads to gradual uniformity in the field of culture (Bardach, 1988; 1993). That approach, which is characteristic of legal orientations, is more convincing than abstract speculations about nationalism creating the nation on the principle of the instrumental causative functions of industrial and economic determinism (Gellner). The conception of the nation-state is not equivalent to the concept of the civil nation. It does not imply the democratic nature of a self-governing society, as Liah Greenfeld referred to the earlier phases of the formation of the English nation. The concept of the nation-state should be supplemented with a description of the role of the dominant culture in the actions of its ruling circles in relation to the other ethnic and estate elements composing the state. For the nation-state does not arise without roots in some ethnic foundations. Charles Tilly, who uses the term "nation guided by the state" (which is close to the concept of nation-state), brings into relief singular cultural nation-creating factors (Tilly, 1994, p. 133). For him there is no question that the formation of European nations must be studied starting from at least as early as the fifteenth century. He also is of the opinion that our knowledge of this subject is such that it disposes us to ask questions rather than to give ready answers. In the characterization of the early phases of the formation of the nation he emphasizes the state factor. He regards early English "nationalism" as non-cultural, mainly political, and then goes on to say that "central control also definitely embraces culture, that is, the validation or creation of one language, history, art, practical tradition encompassing all persons living on the territory of the state" (Tilly, 1994, p. 140). To be sure, this last assertion may also apply to the later phase of the formation of nations (eighteenth century). On the basis of statistical data, however, Tilly sees stronger mani-

20

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

festations of nationalism in the social movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He finds these developments especially in Iberia, Britain and France. This problem, in turn, he links with his second (in addition to the "nation guided by the state") conception of "state-seeking nation". This view is completely the reverse of Gellner's conception. Tilly is aware of the diversity of development paths of nations in European history and of the multiformity of the phenomenon of the nation, which has no fixed boundaries and no clearly defined beginning. In any case, this beginning may be sought before the age of industrialism. The inclination to find manifestations of national cultures before the end of the eighteenth century differentiates Tilly from Hobsbawm, whose stance considerably restricts the historical range of the practical area of national cultures. Like advocates of the political approach, Hobsbawm tends to treat the nation as a phenomenon that is very limited in time and in real properties. Consequently, the nation is a precise and well-defined phenomenon that should not be equated with different, though similar, historical forms. In the history of national cultures Hobsbawm perceives more fictions and myths than reality (Hobsbawm, 1990; 1992,1994). This approach to the problem of the nation gives the impression of being an attempt to exorcise a phenomenon that unquestionably carries serious social and moral threats. Apart from the cognitive doubts to which it gives rise, this method does not appear to be effective and consistent with its intended aim. Absolutizing the concept of nation in respect to history also absolutizes the phenomenon itself as an object of human experience. Bringing into relief the historical and psychic variability of nationality is not only closer to the truth, but also can help to disarm that important but potentially dangerous object of human experiences, the nation. Hobsbawm, who approaches the political understanding of the nation more through his interpretations than on the basis of factual materials, as a historian enters the field of the cultural conception and characteristics of nations. So his works may serve as a passage to a historical perspective of the subject matter of the nation that suggests and even imposes the culturological approach. On the other hand, some German scholars strongly accent the political concept of nation with reference to the present day (Willms, 1992). This position also has a foundation in earlier German classical literature (Meinecke). Before the unification of Germany, East German historians, in

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21

conformity with the doctrine of Marxism, derived the origins of the nation from the social movements of the sixteenth century (Schmidt, 1993). However, given the lack of a centralized German state after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the regional differences of long duration on the territories of the Reich, East German historians prefer to place the beginnings of German national ideology in the Napoleonic era (Winkler, 1993). Benedykt Zientara leans towards the position that the earlier variety of German patriotism, still medieval by date or ideology, was imperial universalism, a stance that is close to political nationalism. A more complete analysis of the later development phases of German nationality should strive to investigate the formation of pan-German culture. Notwithstanding centuries of political division, a culture spread that produced great works of religious rhetoric, music, poetry and philosophy. That culture spurred self-examination, defining one's own nation as Kulturnation, The motifs of German nationalism as a doctrine of superiority over others and of the exclusive right to exist emanated from this culture and from its oldest sources. This is no longer a matter of separate, autotelic, symbolic culture, but a matter of its use in the sphere of the practices of social-societal culture. This does not mean, of course, that the symbolic sphere plays an unimportant role in primitive ethnic groups.

Culturalistic Approach and Anthropological Perspective The most convincing thesis pertaining to research on the nation reads: "No single universal theory of nationalism is possible" (Hall, 1993, p. 1). Many Anglo-Saxon writers are inclined to identify the nation with nationalism as a national ideology, which complicates this difficult problem even further. I call theories that recognize a relationship between forming nations and their primitive ethnic foundation "culturalistic" theories of the nation. Their proponents view the nation as a cultural unit similar to, but not identical with, the one Raoul Naroll characterized, because it is more difficult to establish criteria defining national culture than to codify the aspects of primitive cultures. For example, "ecological adaptation", which in the terminology of ethnology stands for the entire spectrum of instruments and actions permitting survival—that is, technique, production, organization of manufacturing, distribution and consumption—is not a very useful criterion for differentiating

22

THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

between modern or "postmodern" developed societies. So it is not in this sphere that the distinctive factors characterizing national cultures must be sought, at least not within larger, similar civilizational wholes such as Western civilization, the capitalist system, etc. The name that members of a national community adopt and the name that others, especially neighboring social communities, give to it is an important determinant of conscious separation, especially in the earlier phase of the formation of a nation. This problem occupies a lot of space in the considerations of historians who postulate the early genesis of nations, for example in the works of Benedykt Zientara and his school in Poland and in many of the works of medievalists in general. In later phases of national existence the name of the country-nation becomes obvious, but it usually has symbolic, in special moments even sacral, meaning. In comparison with Naroll's list of criteria, separation of the developed national cultural unit is usually connected with a considerably expanded sphere of symbolic culture and collective memory, a criterion that Naroll calls "folklore and history". This does not mean that the symbolic sphere has an unimportant role in primitive ethnic groups. On the contrary, in them everything, or nearly everything, is permeated with symbolism. However, this factor does not promote autonomy and a break away from the sphere of existence or "reality" in the same degree as the purely autotelic culture of specialized fields of life in developed national communities (Kloskowska, 1981). These fields in particular have special, albeit not exclusive, significance for enabling "common communication", which is the essence of a nation in the definition of Karl Deutsch (1966). In characterizing contemporary nations (not primitive ethnic groups) Deutsch—like cultural anthropologists—calls attention to the multiplicity of elements of every national culture, which he calls the "building blocks" of its construction. This interpretation is essential for understanding the nation as a cultural community. Approaching the culture of cultural groups as wholes has its basis in many older and more recent theoretical orientations of various kinds. They can be found in Comte's conception of consensus, in evolutionary theories of the social organism, in the functional theory and later configurationalism of cultural anthropology, as well as, obviously, in the structuralism of LéviStrauss and its different varieties. In a study devoted to a structural analysis

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23

of symbols in social anthropology, Edmund Leach expresses the conviction that an understanding of symbols, hence of the very existence of symbols, is not possible without putting them into a structural whole. A decoding of binary signs appearing in paradigmatic associations is not sufficient for this. Leach reaches this conclusion: "We must be very familiar with a given cultural context, with a particular state of things, before we can set about decoding a communiqué" (Leach, 1989, pp. 95-96). Clifford Geertz, another cultural anthropologist with a vast fund of knowledge acquired in empirical studies of traditional cultures of various ethnographic regions and someone who has traced the births of new African nations, takes a similar position (Geertz, 1973). Geertz formulated the principle of "dense description" as a method of relating individual facts observed by the researcher. This description consists in relating an individual event to the entire complex of relations, beliefs and norms characteristic of a given culture and to events that happened at another time and in different situations. So ethnographic description is an interpretation. In such a form it preserves a picture of fleeting events, which thereby becomes an element of reality accessible to later study. Geertz sees the entire sense of the semiotic approach to culture in the fact that it makes possible "communication" ("conversation") with the objects of research. It provides us with access to their conceptual world, that is, to culture as a construction. Researchers obviously re-create this culture in their descriptions and interpretations. This construction is not their invention; it is not a fiction without a basis in the reality studied. The concept "culture" means "a historically transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in symbols, by means of which people communicate with each other, preserve and develop their knowledge of life and their attitudes towards life" (ibid., p. 89). Geertz's definition, which does not differ so much from many others that inspired the semiotic position, refers to culture in general. Nonetheless, it contains the intention to operate with the concept of specific cultures, individual ethnic or national communities, because they construct singular symbolic universes that constitute the foundation for the mutual communication of their members. Karl Deutsch called the nation a community of communication precisely on account of these functions of national cultures. The special emphasis on such an understanding of culture and such a position stems from the culturalistic approach to the nation adopted here and developed in this book. Given the fact that some sociologists reject the concept of culture as a

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

whole that relates to particular social formations, the assumptions of the culturalistic conception of the nation must be clearly defined. Hence the conception of natural cultures must be developed further and empirically verified. Many researchers and theoreticians regard national cultures as a certain form of integration of selected elements of many systems of culture: language, religion, customs, art, and organization. An example of such an approach is the aforementioned conception of cultural unit proposed by Naroll, Geertz and the school of Boas. The functionalists, structuralists and phenomenologists also accept the assumption of the systemic nature of cultures. Margaret Archer came out against this position. She labeled the conception of the integration of systems of culture and social-cultural systems a myth, even in relation to primitive traditional societies (Archer, 1989, chapter 1). However, the author's reasoning contains a certain fundamental flaw, consisting in a strict treatment of the concept "system". Such a treatment of the system may be ascribed to some, but not to all, of the authors of the conception that she criticized. In the methodology of the social sciences and in sociological or anthropological theories the use of the conception of system is often, if not always, accompanied by the reservation that the systems referred to are not closed. For example, in Polish literature Znaniecki uses the conception of relatively isolated systems (1988), and Ossowski speaks of systems isolated in a certain respect (1967a). Jean Viet (1965) and especially William Buckley (1967) emphasize the open nature of social-cultural systems. Margaret Archer herself formulates a similar thesis relating to social systems subject to "morphogenesis", namely, to the process of a radical change of "form, structure or state of the system" (p. XXII). Piotr Sztompka stresses this conclusion when he discusses Archer's position in a study of development and social change (Sztompka, 1993, p. 199). My analytical distinction of culture and society does not alter the essence of this problem, since in the sociological approach culture always is related to the actions of people, to human subjects tied together by a societal bond and symbolic culture (Kloskowska, 1981; 1986). In the conceptual sense the nation, or before this the ethnic group, creates the common syndrome of culture. They create their own national (ethnic) culture by forming themselves as social collective bodies. Through the succession of generations these social

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collective bodies endure in change, and together with them their culture endures and develops. However, the notion of the endurance of cultures requires some comments. The feeling of continuity experienced by their participants belongs to the concept of identity of national cultures, about which we say more below. Yet this feeling does not necessarily exclude awareness of the changes taking place in the culture. Old Polish culture belongs to the enduring traditions of Polish literature. Without Kochanowski, Mickiewicz would have been a different poet, and without Mickiewicz—and without the older and later but universal national tradition—the poetry of the "Skamander" group would not have existed in the form that it did. Every type of literary output mentioned is simultaneously different from the others. National culture is a dynamic system, because it is the product of the creative and receptive actions of people. This applies to all social-cultural wholes as well as to primitive societies, although their endogenous changes are not very visible. Activity obviously is not opposition to culture but its fulfillment. For certain purposes of analysis, however, it is useful to speak not of systems of actions, but rather of the correlates of culture or its materialized elements, as Karl Popper states it. Such materialized elements of national culture are the monuments of architecture, collections of literary and scientific works and other texts in the national language, painting and sculpture, film tapes and cassettes, scores of musical works and their recordings. These examples strikingly show that it is not the correlates/objects that are the most important for culture, although they may be indispensable, but their creation, performance and reception, hence always the form of action and attitudes directed to these objects/correlates. However, in a characterization of national cultures it is hard to do without presenting them in their analytically separated objective form, for this form is the main basis of duration in developed societies. To preserve the rich universe of culture in time, this form of long duration is indispensable, but it is not a sufficient condition. An element preserved in its original form but never renewed in performance and current reception would become dead and, to all intents and purposes, would disappear from contemporary culture. The acceptance of those fundamental assertions of the sociology of culture represented here (Kloskowska, 1981) is necessary for the subsequent analysis of national cultures. Once again it must be stressed that the conception repre-

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

sented here of the problems of nationality is culturalistic. It consists in understanding the ethnic group and nation as collective bodies with the nature of communities defined by the relative identity and relative separateness of their cultural characteristics. National cultures arise and function through the action of partially overlapping and only analytically distinguishable, but in part historically separate and empirically delimiting mechanisms. These mechanisms are: (1) the creation of symbolic systems resulting from man's generic capacities, (2) the separation of the arrangement of those systems as belonging to the group, which in this way distinguishes itself from other, alien groups, (3) the enlargement of the scope of common elements within the compass of a wider social collective body, for example within the tribe or state, and (4) the expansion of the cultural community beyond the borders of states and nations. The latter process may be called the process of universalization. It is usually preceded by a partial acceptance of patterns of action and values realized between the cultures of neighboring social collective bodies or collective bodies that are close to each other in another sense. The first two factors operate at the same time, because primitive forms of ethnic cultures do not arise through selection from the existing stock of general symbols and values not assigned to any group. They are a choice of specific realization of possible systems of culture. Only the sum of those realizations makes it possible to determine the general nature of systems. This is how one may understand Ruth Benedict's metaphor contained in a parable of the Comanche Indians: it describes drawing the unshaped element of culture with one's own cup, which only then gives shape to this substance (Benedict, 1966). Universal systems of culture have existed in the form of numerous individual ethnic and national cultures. Each of these cultures marks out its area within the whole, of which it is a part. However, the whole is more or less integrated depending on the historical period and the relations that join individual societies. The diagram below illustrates this. In this diagram the vertical columns stand for the main systems of universal symbolic culture: language, art and literature, knowledge and science (humanities), religion, customs and rituals, which are characteristic sets of symbols and emblems relating to criteria and objects of special veneration or significance. These systems are paradigmatic.They are elements of an invented or real culture apprehended as an imagined potential universal whole or as the real sum of all the partial ethnic and national systems of a given kind.

27

CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE CONCEPT OF NATION

Diagram 1 Rejection, Ignorance Canon of national culture

Affiliation, Adaptation and Assimilation

1 i

>

h u

c

1

t

a

r

m

u

a n

e r

r t

e 1

a n

s t

g u

a t

i g

i t

0 m

a

u r e

i 0 n

i e s

s

g e

Foreign cultures— Sphere of alienation Syntagma of national culture

Foreign cultures— Sphere of universalization

> SYNTAGMATIC AXIS

They comprise all religions, languages, sets of customs, and systems of arts that at any time and anywhere have been realized in human history. Lines separating individual national cultures intersect the columns of these universal systems. The term "syntagma" has been used to designate these wholes. It is taken from the conception of the French structuralists, especially Roland Barthes, who extends his semantic definition of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes to other spheres of culture, to attire and to the preparation of meals, for example (Barthes, 1964). In the cultural syntagma, as in a linguistic utterance, the rules of syntax determine the relationships between individual elements. The syntagma of a national culture differs from the relationship examined by Barthes in that its elements are drawn from different systems. There is only a certain analogy here with the linguistic concept, and the entire structuralist conception is also treated only as a useful metaphor. Here one must agree with Margaret Archer, who criticizes the structuralists' practice of applying linguistic conceptions to an analysis of other fields of culture. In his comments on the theories of Lévi-Strauss Chomsky also, protested against this. So, metaphorically, the said concept of syntagma is only supposed to illustrate the relationships taking place between individual systems of culture in the same national community. National and ethnic communities stand out

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

from among many other cultural communities, such as groups with a specific purpose, occupational categories and even social classes, in respect to the multiplicity and complexity of the elements of their cultures. This fact justifies the need to search for the internal relationship of the culture uniting them. The approach followed here does not aim to discover the deep functional or structural principles of such a relationship. It has a much more simple and ordinary purpose, which is to assert that unbreakable ties exist between language and literature, religion and custom, humanities and literature and the tradition of a given nation. The concept of a nation that, in a foreign language (other than the native tongue), conveys literary content pertaining exclusively to another group and tradition, that is guided by other norms and customs without any connection with this tradition and literature, and that professes a religion that has no tangential points with any of these fields, including folklore, would be internally contradictory. The "syntagmas" of a national culture—unlike language culture—should not be treated rigidly. Returning to the previous, hypothetical example, it must be admitted that there are nations, for example the Irish, which in a foreign language create literature that is consistent with their own tradition. Many world religions are universal in nature, though the religion accepted is always adapted to the converted group. So, formally speaking, within different national cultures varieties of the same creeds are not identical. Hence, when they enter into other cultures, even elements of systems with the same genesis undergo ethnic modifications. An example of this is Polish Catholicism with its characteristic rites, the gallery of Polish saints and the special cult of the Virgin Mary, who in the seventeenth century was formally acknowledged as the Queen of Poland. However, the processes of ethnic modification do not contradict the existence of similarities that bring national cultures closer together and work in the direction of universalism that transcends the boundaries of the syntagma. The fact that all criteria defining a "cultural unit" should be treated as alternatives is especially important for a characterization of national communities as cultural communities. Their model register may undergo changes, either in certain historical periods only, or constantly. Individual elements do nothave the same importance forvarious nations. Jerzy Smolicz (1987; 1990) reached the same conclusion in his study of the multiethnic Australian society of various national origins. Language is not a characteristic element of the cultural syntagma in all national communities (Lapierre, 1988; Fishman,

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1983). It does not distinguish the Jews, who, despite this, in many countries of the Diaspora—mainly thanks to religion—retain the feeling of separateness and national identification. However, in independent Israel the language of the ancient tradition is taking root as an important element of the national syntagma. Using the metaphor of Deutsch, who speaks of the large number of building blocks that compose national culture, it must be added that the type of building block may be replaced. Certain kinds of block appear in some edifices of national culture, but are absent in the structures of other cultures. The functions and importance of individual kinds of element are also changeable. For some language, for others religion, and for still others local custom are especially important for the character of the nation. More will be said about this later in connection with the individual experience of national culture. In developing the conception of the nation as a community with a characteristic culture that distinguishes it from other, similar social collective bodies, all possible arguments must be considered that acknowledge the changeability of the principles for separation and for the delimitation of the separateness of individual nations. Only primitive groups that do not communicate with other groups on account of natural conditions of isolation are entirely uniform and separate in respect to culture. Every developed nation builds its own culture and recognizes it as its own in contacts with other nations, especially, but not exclusively, with neighboring nations. The above diagram shows this process as the assimilation and adaptation of cultures genetically different from one's own. Many-sided processes of cultural diffusion take place in all of the aforementioned systems of culture, but there are also boundaries isolating these processes from a sphere that is entirely unknown and impossible to know, or potentially accessible but rejected for various reasons. Intercultural relations depend to some degree on the attitude towards the communities that are carriers of other cultures. This is not a clear-cut dependency, however. For example, the Christian nations of medieval Europe, and in part of later Europe as well, displayed a negative attitude towards the Jews, even though Christianity had borrowed many important elements of its culture from them. The negative stereotype of Germans in Poland was accompanied by numerous borrowings, which mainly, but not exclusively, belonged to the non-symbolic sphere. Culture, especially Polish literature of the period of Romanticism, took much from German and English Romanticism. It also took up many

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THE THEORY, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NATION

motifs of Ukrainian culture, which it developed creatively, while Ukrainian culture absorbed numerous elements and inspirations from Polish culture. This process took place in the face of a hostile attitude, or at least great fears and awareness of conflict on both sides. The great complexity of the subject matter of the nation and its numerous ambiguities are no reason for excluding it from consideration or for oversimplifying it by strict definitions in order to restrict the phenomenon to narrow historical and substantive boundaries. The conviction of the ephemeral nature of the nation has not proven true at the end of the twentieth century, while acceptance of the theory of its later, nineteenth-century origins does not help in an understanding of contemporary national affairs. This conviction leads to a stereotypical approach to the nation, contrary to the intentions of the representatives of such a view, who otherwise are inclined to combat national stereotypes as commonplace ideas. Like every aspect of culture, the nation is historically changeable. So, if one wants to search for the genesis of this form of social coexistence, one must accept varieties of great diversity but which fit into its general type. One must accept alternative criteria that belong to the definition agreed upon and the different distribution of accents on the primary or secondary importance of those criteria.

2. Historical Perspective

The following presentation of positions is not a summation of historical monographs on the problem. Rather, it focuses on works on the borderline of historiography and sociology, mainly by authors who deal with the historical characteristics of nations. The theories of authors who use the political/civic concept of nation will be mentioned briefly. That conception must be distinguished from the concept of political nation (Bardach) or "nation guided by the state" (Tilly). The last two approaches apply to the earlier historical forms of the nation; they do not encompass society as a whole, but concentrate on the royal power or one estate and are not incompatible with the culturalistic position. Liah Greenfeld represents the civic conception of the nation. She devotes a lot of attention to historical materials, but succumbs too much to her own vision of the civic nation. This results in an uneven treatment of strictly cultural materials pertaining to the national processes of France and Germany in comparison with England. In confrontation with her conception of the nation, her treatment of Russian materials is also surprising. According to Greenfeld (1992), England is the nation that attained civic form the earliest and it was also the first to become aware of its separateness, which found its expression in dislike of strangers (p. 42) and the sense of its mission as a nation chosen by God. The author quotes the symptomatic utterance of the Bishop of London of 1559: "God is an Englishman" or "is English" (p. 60). She uses extensive historical materials also relating to cultural criteria of England's national maturity. She is inconsistent when she does not ascribe similar meaning to the features of the history of France. However, she is aware of the variety of possible interpretations of the same

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historical facts, and in spite of herself provides examples of complete divergences in her subsequent expositions. Her lengthy monograph on nationalisms also contains a lot of material characterizing the formation of national cultures in the understanding accepted here, namely, in strictly cultural form. Her views on the development of the French nation obviously differ from those of French authors, but also from other historians and English sociologists. As stressed before, the entire problem of the genesis and character of the nation is a subject of controversies and doubts. Other historians who follow sociological approaches and sociologists who use historical materials formulate different variants of culturalistic conceptions of the nation, that is, relating the national community to national cultures. In works devoted to this problem the boundary line of the disciplines is fluid. The theoretical assumptions of the interpretation are not always clearly presented and often are not consistently followed in research practice. For the purposes of the subsequent analysis of culturalistic conceptions and its application I attempt to formulate the assumptions that are, or should be, the basis of such an approach to the nation. 1. The nation is a cultural unit in a sense close to, but not identical with, Naroll's anthropological conception. This means that the nation is common communication based on a developing cultural universe of considerable richness and the internal union of elements (syntagma of culture). This universe is understood as a fatherland in the symbolic sense, which is much broader than a strictly territorial reference. This universe is not an unchanging structure, nor is it a final state, but rather a process replete with transformations, albeit with a relatively constant core called the canon. 2. National identification, the feeling of domesticity as opposed to foreignness, forms on the basis of the emerging universe of a culture recognized as a person's own. One's own group becomes marked off from other groups. Awareness of the boundary grows, and members of the group become willing to defend these territorial and symbolic boundaries. This process runs parallel with the separation from strangers in practical, non-symbolic activities, caused by conflict of interests, the feeling of being threatened, and the tendency to expand the territory of one's group. 3. The birth of a nation is a process of the internal unification of culture, the expansion of the scope of participation in the cultural universe of the social body, which nevertheless never and nowhere reaches complete homogeneity.

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For this reason the national membership (or nationality, e.g. "Polishness") of individuals and of groups and categories should be treated as differentiated, though fitting within the frame of the national type. The aforementioned problems do not exhaust the vast complexity of the subject matter of nationality. They serve only as preliminary assumptions for the analysis of empirical materials in parts II, IV and V of the book. However, these assumptions provide certain support for a synoptic discussion of the representative conceptions of cultural anthropologists, historians and sociologists who use the culturalistic approach to the nation and the historical perspective. These premises help us to understand why there are so many differences and doubts in the views of the authors discussed. Even more importantly, the theses explain why the most distinct boundaries separate those who see the nation as a process of becoming, from those who would like to see it as a clearly crystallized, achieved state that perfectly matches one model of the nation. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even in the West, nations did not assume forms corresponding to such a stereotypical model. Hobsbawm, who correctly emphasizes that the nation cannot be reduced to any single dimension or criterion, also says this (1990, p. 8). However, he claims that the nation cannot be spoken of before the end of the eighteenth century, which is already less convincing. The works of this historian show a tendency to negate earlier manifestations of national life expressing themselves in culture. This is especially true of his conception of the "discovery of tradition" (Hobsbawm, 1992). The studies of Hobsbawm, and of several other historians and cultural anthropologists from Great Britain and the United States, present various fragments of the culture of Scotland, Wales, England, colonial India and Africa from this angle (Hobsbawm, 1992). In those monographs and in the theoretical studies of the editor of the volume the concept of the invention of tradition does not have the same meaning. Sometimes it simply means the appearance of a certain custom, and sometimes the unwarranted ascription of a remote historical origin to some custom, symbol or text, thereby creating a historical fiction. The term "discovered" in this meaning has a pejorative sense and is synonymous with "invented", hence artificial and even false. Charles Tilly (1994) criticizes this stance by denying that national values are a chimera, though he is also of the opinion that their use as a tool of indoctrination spread after 1789.

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There is no rational justification for regarding all traditions as an invention and a fraud. This may be said only of an obvious apocrypha, or of such literary frauds as MacPherson's Ballads of Ossian. The Welsh eisteddfod music competitions, which started at least as far back as the seventh century and were revived in the eighteenth century, were not an "invented" tradition in this sense. This renewal was a return to an ancient real tradition, not a fraudulent invention of a fictional antiquity. Hence the materials contained in the volume edited by Hobsbawm justify criticism of his conception. By the "discovery" of a tradition different from custom Hobsbawm apparently understands a message, custom, ritual or ceremony taking root that did not arise from spontaneous actions, but was designed and introduced by institutions, groups and persons for purposes of propaganda and manipulation. In respect to the remote past, it is difficult or impossible to distinguish spontaneous sources from calculated action. However, the experiences of colonial imperialism and European totalitarianism support the correctness of Hobsbawm's opinions on the manipulative functions of some rituals and legends that are created for political purposes and dressed in the garments of ancient tradition. Yet the same mechanism was resorted to in the exploitation of unquestioned traditions, authentic works and customs of national culture in order to legitimize imposed authority in socialism. Here the tradition was not false; only the ends it was supposed to serve were false. On the other hand, the motives behind the intentional creation, or even "invention", of tradition are not always so perverse. The example of MacPherson testifies to this, even though his work was a fabrication. It is also worth remembering that true or invented facts of the past may be exploited for commercial purposes, for example by organizers of tourism, the souvenir industry, or programs of the media. The functions of tradition, more changeable than Hobsbawm assumed, are one thing—the reality of the data that are related to the tradition is another. In contrast to a small ethnic group, every large national community must be "an imagined community", according to Benedict Anderson's expression. This means that the large community must appeal to the entire stock of symbols, the value of knowledge and convictions, which may be shared by various groups, categories and individuals within this same community. This symbolic universe is usually given importance by ascribing the authority of antiquity to many of its elements. In this sense, the national community united by collective recognition of this universe, or part of it, is an imagined community. This does not mean that it is a false community, even if some of

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the collective beliefs holding it together are based on a tradition that refers to unreal, in fact invented, facts, for example the legend of Frederick Barbarossa waiting to appear again among the living and restore the glory of the empire, or tales of the numerous miracles of St. Patrick recounted on the basis of old yarns by Czarnowski (1956a). The rise of national communities on ethnic foundations is a complicated historical process. Many authors strongly accent the ethnic sources of nations (Armstrong, 1982; Smith, 1986). To reject such conceptions it would be necessary to assume that nations originated from the idea of nationalism that came from nothing. Even Hobsbawm, whose theory tries to limit the historical range of the appearance of nations, speaks of the phase of protonations. In the final analysis, this is a historical question that must be examined on the basis of original sources. The ambiguity of the concept of nation, the criteria for defining it, as well as the need to draw on supplementary data from ethnology, complicate the conclusions. The heuristic method complicates this process still further, resulting in the different stances of researchers. Greenfeld's picture of the rise of the French nation differs from the position of many French historians and sociologists, even though their opinions, also, are not identical. In searching for the sources of such divergences one must bear in mind the multiplicity of criteria on which the definition of the nation may be based. Crystallization of the national consciousness in all social strata, as well as the wide scope of internal communication established by the far-advanced harmonization of language, custom and attitudes, is an especially precise criterion that limits the historical range of this phenomenon. Bloch categorically states that the national consciousness in France and Germany became an accomplished fact around 1100. Mauss, in turn, believes that the clear differentiation of the nation and the king became pronounced in sixteenthcentury France with Bodin, and in Germany with Luther's addresses to the German nation (Mauss, 1969, p. 574). Alluding to the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Zientara even speaks of lingual nationalism—in the Polish understanding of the word—in Moravia and in Poland (Zientara, 1985, p. 355). We will return to these matters later. Marc Bloch raises the question of the extent to which feudal states became nations. He argues that the resolution of this problem requires reference not only to the time, but also to the setting. According to him, until the twelfth century the intellectual elite represented by the clergy was attached to the idea

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of Roman and Christian universalism founded on the common Latin language (Bloch, 1981, p. 631). Many other scholars (Mauss, 1969; Braudel, 1986; Serejski, 1937; Zientara, 1985) speak of European Carolingian universalism enduring in culture for the next centuries in spite of the treaty of Verdun. Bloch admits, however, that the Crusades contributed to the progress of the national idea among the middle French knighthood by making them aware of the foreignness of knights of a different origin and of the commonness of the French language: even knights from Lorraine and Languedoc could understand each other (Bloch, 1981, p. 637). So, without equating language with nationality, Bloch emphasized its role in forming the national community. Mauss stressed this even more strongly: "A nation believes in its language" (1969, p. 596). Other French historians stress linguistic differences rather than common language. Lestocquoy emphasizes the regional differences of the French language even during the times of Molière, whose servant, when far from Paris, could not communicate with the sellers in the marketplace (Lestocquoy, 1968). Taking into consideration only such a criterion it would be hard to acknowledge the existence of nations even in contemporary, twentieth-century countries of the West, in which the development of civilization and postmodernity has not entirely rooted out local dialects—in France, Germany, England, and even more so in Italy and Spain. Although universal primary education has given the inhabitants of all regions knowledge of the national language, it has not eliminated dialects in the home and in everyday use. Jean-William Lapierre (1988) investigated the links between language and political power and brought into relief the role of the state in the process of establishing national languages, both in the more remote past and in the new nations of Africa, Asia and Australasia. At the same time, he presented the fight to restore the ethnic language, which has been successful even after centuries of decline. In England (or rather Great Britain), which Liah Greenfeld regards as the oldest nation of Europe, 20 percent of the population of Wales have preserved, or re-acquired, knowledge of Welsh in the twentieth century. As many as two-thirds of the population regard it as indispensable for the preservation of national identity (Lapierre, 1988, p. 22), but three-fourths are in favor of teaching English in school. Similar data are important for comprehending the nation as a community of mutual communication. These survey data show the complexity of people's attitudes, but also the hard-to-comprehend nature

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of various aspects of nationality. The linguist Joshua Fishman believes that language is the central element of all components of ethnic experience: behavior and the way of looking at the world specific to a given ethnic community. That is why he recommends bilingualism wherever small groups within a larger whole request it (Fishman, 1983). This matter requires further consideration. However, the acceptance of bilingualism or the preservation of dialects does not eliminate the problem of the language community as a factor of a developed or just emerging nation. In both cases we have to do with the influence of the differentiation of the social structure, which expresses itself in unequal participation in the process of the formation and expression of the cultural community. In addition to Bloch, many authors are of the opinion that the upper circles of the intellectual and knightly elite did not play the main role in the formation of European nations. The principal actors in this process were the middle knighthood, the lower scribes, the townsmen, the lower clergy, and all the social categories less attached to the universalism of Rome, knighthood as a whole or Christianity, and closer to the life of the masses. In thirteenth-century France postulates were put forward to use French as the official language despite regional differences. These seeds fell on the fertile soil of admiration for the beauty of the French language and the growing feeling of a supra-regional, national, but not universal, familiarity. According to Zientara, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, "French national consciousness unquestionably went beyond the body of state functionaries, the knighthood and the clergy" (1985, p. 197). Anthony Smith, a sociologist and art historian, in connection with this problem distinguishes two forms of ethnos, that is, of a cultural community preceding the birth of a nation. Lateral ethnos is uniform in respect to estate and represents the higher or middle social strata, while demotic, vertical ethnos is composed of all social strata and is closer to the principle of democracy (Smith, 1991). Whatever can be said of the more popular (in the "populistic" sense) sources of nationality and idea of the nation, the intellectual elites played the main role in the formulation and expression of this idea. In addition to France, one should cite the example of Italy, where the process of national unification was especially difficult and full of setbacks. Nonetheless, the works of humanist scholars and the writings of poets display early manifestations of national consciousness and patriotism. Erasmus of Rotterdam himself suffered an affront in Florence when he wanted to communicate in Latin with

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humanists from the Orti Orichellari circle (Nolhac, 1888). In Machiavelli one can find an especially eloquent appeal to adopt a national language and a very fervent declaration of love for the great, pan-Italian fatherland, Italy. In his Discorso o dialogo intorno all nostra lingua Machiavelli appeals to Italian poets and writers to accept the Florentine dialect as the highest form of the national language of Italy (Machiavelli, 1938; Kloskowska, 1954). Despite the repressive reaction of the church, the influence of Machiavelli and the tradition of the early Renaissance inspired the Italian national tradition until the times of the Risorgimento and throughout the twentieth century (Gramsci, 1950). The shift in Machiavelli's dialogue from praise of the regional or, so to say, ethnic dialect to the issue of the national language is a good example that shows the role of smaller and earlier ethnic units in the genesis of nations. To be sure, the formation of entire national cultures was not a single act, but was a process and a function of many factors. Lestocquoy, who is cautious in his judgment of the antiquity of French patriotism, does admit, however, that the Crusades, The Chronicle of Saint Denis and the royal retainers represent the "embodiment of the entire country" (1968, p. 25). The emerging nationality drew even more nourishment from a more complex set of factors—in addition to language, tradition, history, the sense of a common destiny, the authority and attractiveness of the city of Paris, which according to fourteenth-century sources constituted the expression of the common fatherland "like a second Rome" (ibid., p. 39). In connection with the multiplicity of factors that gave birth to nations, special attention must be paid to the role of the king. The matter here concerns not so much the role of the royal power, its organs and influence, as the attitude of the king himself and kingship as a symbol and embodiment of the national community. Authors who hold that the nation-state precedes the ethnic nation and that relating patriotism to the ruler denies the existence of the nation (Greenfeld) fail to consider, or do not understand, this second function. On the other hand, an investigation of national symbols shows that symbols of common values play an especially important role in the formation of the cultural community (Czarnowski, 1956b). Those symbols are not only heroes and saints but also rulers, who, into the bargain, may also be heroes and saints, or both one and the other, like Saint Louis. They may also be mediocrities, like Charles VII. Not he, but Joan of Arc embodied the national charisma of France during the Hundred Years' War. Not the king but France was the source

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of this charismatic force and its power of attraction to the Maid, which endured among the French for many centuries and inspired the imagination of many writers and artists. The symbolic role of the king as the personification of the unity of the nation must be distinguished from the political realities of the function of royal power as an important factor in some historical periods determining the cultural, and hence national, unification of the state. No one denies this function. One may admit that in the age of French absolutism patriotism was concentrated on the person of the king (Church, 1975), although this does not exhaust, and does not limit, manifestations of patriotism in the literature of the Great Age. One must remember the intensification of the expression of love for France in the literature of the sixteenth century. Some French historians with a liberal slant, such as Henri Hauser and Paul Hazard, are of the opinion that patriotism as a developed form of national consciousness is incompatible with absolutism. On similar grounds Liah Greenfeld denies that pre-revolutionary France was a nation, for she identifies the nation with the civic society. Taine represented a different stand. He argued that the royal power forms the national community. That position is entirely compatible with the culturalistic conception of the nation, if it assumes that a state based on existing ethnicity, which has only certain features of the organism coming into existence, strengthens and expands the internal and external boundaries of this ethnicity. Often this is mainly the ethnicity of ruling groups and circles organizing the state. On the other hand, this may also be a more syncretic synthesis of several ethnic elements supplemented with the universalistic influences of former powers—Rome, the declining empire. Zientara devoted a lot of attention to these processes in his description of the genesis of European nations. On the other hand, the culturalistic approach to the nation must also consider the sociological aspect of this phenomenon, that is, the distribution and prevalence of ways of action characteristic of members of the national cultural unit and their national consciousness. Hence the culturalistic approach must relate the national culture to the structure of the population of representatives and carriers of this culture. The definition of the nation as a cultural unit (p. 23, 32) also stated that it forms gradually, in a long historical process, by expanding the range of the cultural community. This community is never complete and identical in all strata, classes and social categories. The state and its educational and cultural policy from a certain moment of

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development unquestionably contributes to the expansion of the community, but that does not mean that the state is identical with the nation and that it forms the nation without some earlier ethnic foundations (Armstrong, 1982: Smith, 1991). In other words, culture determines the existence of the nation. More precisely, the enriched and enlarged universes of the culture or cultures of ethnic units that gain an ever greater influence on a given society perform this role. This entire process takes place through the actions of people who create, pass on, accept and promote culture in their internal experience and external actions. The universe of national culture was defined as identical with the fatherland in the broad sense, which extends beyond the narrower scope of purely territorial references limited to the country of origin. The example of the writings of Polish poets may illustrate this expanded concept of the fatherland. Most often there is no contradiction between the large and small fatherland. The country of a person's childhood usually is contained within the large fatherland. Naming and describing it may be a synecdoche of the imagined fatherland of the nation. That is the case in Mickiewicz, who placed the center of the Polish fatherland, or Polishness, in a small nobleman's manor located in ethnographic Lithuania—more precisely, in Belarus. Polish national customs and Polish patriotism are cultivated in this manor. Its real location is not important for those whose private small fatherland was actually in another region of Poland. For them it is only a symbol and a part of the symbolic national universe. Another Polish poet, Julian Tuwim, called Polish traits his fatherland, having in mind mainly language and literature, because he placed his feeling of national roots and his title of national citizenship in this field. The concept of fatherland is closely linked with the history of European nations. However, it has old, unquestionably ancient origins in both its meanings: small fatherland and large imagined community.

3. "Patria "—Fatherland, Homeland— as the Correlate of the Nation

This chapter is devoted mainly to the formation of Polish culture and nationality, understood as a rather individual process in the context of most countries of Western Europe but still fitting into the general type of nation building processes. For this reason attention here is focused not on the end of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century as periods commonly recognized as the beginning of the history of modern nations. The analysis goes back to earlier periods, to the Middle Ages, which some scholars, including Polish ones (Zientara, Gieysztor, Samsonowicz), regard as the age of the birth of the nations of Europe. Especially important were the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when alongside Renaissance universalism drawing on ancient sources, ideas of the modem nation sprouted from diverse ethnic soil. The works of Stanislaw Ossowski occupy a prominent place among the writings of Polish sociologists devoted to problems of the nation. These works owe their renown not to their bulk but to theoretical precision and profoundness of thought. These subjects were close to the author's heart, but—like Braudel—he never permitted value judgments to distort the reality studied. During the occupation at the beginning of the forties, Ossowski wrote a monograph on the subject of the fatherland. However, the manuscript was lost, and all that is left from it is a short sketch re-created after the war. Ossowski called the concept of fatherland a conceptual agglomeration, which is composed of the image of the place of one's birth and the country of one's childhood years, of the national territory, of its history and of its art, which dresses this history and land in artistic forms. This is national culture in general, the counterpart of what was above called the "symbolic universe", although Ossowski concentrates mainly on the country as a metonym for the

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fatherland (Ossowski, 1967b). Ossowski's study also contains very important conceptions for the differentiation between the small, private fatherland and the ideological fatherland. No documentation is attached to this sketch so there is no indication of how far back into the past this cognitively heuristic distinction with numerous antecedents goes. In accordance with the assumptions of the culturalistic approach to the nation, the condition for its emergence is the formation of a sufficiently extensive body of content and values that comprise the symbolic universe of the national culture. A different and common name for that universe is fatherland, but the great, ideological fatherland. It is indispensable as a principle of the "imagined" community of the nation. Many historians speak of the genesis of nations in the Middle Ages. Zientara defined the Middle Ages as an epoch "of the dawn of European nations" (Zientara, 1985). However, it is not unwarranted to raise the question of whether the nation can be traced as far back as classical antiquity. One cannot expect a close correspondence there to developments in France during the Revolution, or to German, Italian, French or Polish Romanticism or twentieth-century nationalism. On the other hand, there are certain similarities or analogies. There is no question, however, that in the writings and literature at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire the concept of fatherland appears in both of the varieties to which Ossowski referred, because consciousness of it already started to crystallize at that time. The greatest Roman poets of the time of Caesar and Augustus glow with pride at being citizens of the Roman Empire, Romans, whose "national" art and calling is to rule over other nations, even ones richer in science and artistic creativity, such as the Greeks (Virgil, Aeneid). Horace, in Carmen saeculare, praises Rome, over which there is nothing greater under the sun, and in his Odes he says that it is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland. The concept of fatherland appears with a different understanding in Virgil's Eclogues, where a fugitive from native parts speaks to a resident of a peaceful region of Italy resting in the shade: Nos patriam fugimus. Cicero made these two understandings of the term patria the subject of theoretical reflection. As far as we know, he was the first to distinguish between fatherland defined by place of birth, especially if this is a city with the nature of a municipality, and the wider fatherland, determined by citizenship (Zientara, 1985, p. 26). One may regard the second understanding as an identification of the nation with the state, or at least as a manifestation of participation in the nation-state.

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Unquestionably, the statehood of republican, and later of imperial, Rome plays a role here. However, I believe that it involves something more. In the mind of a Roman of the Republic, that fatherland of all citizens is not just the framework for the regulation of legal and state relations. It is the object of pride expressed by poets, but also felt by the people of Rome, who set themselves apart from others, whom the Romans called nationes. The term is not what is important, but the concept. The Latin populus, when it did not have the features of an estate but stood for all the Romans, had all of the features of a nation in its early form. It referred to such a large fatherland of compatriots and such numerous citizens that they could not be encompassed by the direct experience of everyday contacts in the small fatherland. Thus, it had to be mediated by symbols. These symbols were largely religious: sacerdos maximus, virgo vestalis, the holy fire of the Capitol, but also state, and military and artistic symbols. Marcel Mauss expressed the opinion that Rome was the first nation in the history of Europe (Mauss, 1969, p. 733). Zientara does not share this opinion, but other authors entertain the possibility of acknowledging the ancient Greeks as a nation. Irrespective of the correctness of his stance in respect to Rome, Mauss contributed valuable observations to the general characterization of the phenomenon of cohesion or the social bond {la cohésion sociale). His conception, from its starting point in the bond of archaic societies, was expanded to complex social bodies subject to foreign influences and discovering the modern individualism of a community of organic solidarity. Such solidarity required an imagined community (Anderson), namely, a common symbolic universe (Porçbski, 1990; Prokop, 1993). This is a later and more academic term for the large fatherland, whose name European culture and all its heirs owe to classical antiquity: the Latin patria. The name was immediately accepted with its original connotation, together with the church and official language of the enlightened strata of the Middle Ages. As national languages developed and took root the term became nationalized, sometimes not without resistance, coming up against counterparts with a similar etymological origin but different reference: fatherland—a term coming from "father", but with another understanding. A characteristic example is the Polish word "ojczyzna", which stems from Latin in a process that can be traced by lexical analysis. In Old Polish writings and sources there are as many as eight versions of the term "ojczyzna", including "hocczyzna" and "otszyzna" (Siownik Staropolski, 1965). In those

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entries going back to the end of the fifteenth century the term is used predominantly in the sense that Linde, and after him Ossowski, on the example of Petrycy of Pilzen, noted in reference to the seventeenth century. That fatherland is the later—and today's—patrimony, property, and legacy of the father—patrimonium. In Slownik Staropolski, entries relating to that understanding of fatherland occupy three columns of print. There is only half a column of examples in which "ojczyzna" is the equivalent of the term patria. This may be a native country, but also a "heavenly fatherland". The term unquestionably has a meaning, not always connected with a nation but sometimes eschatological and universal in nature. A characteristic and significant change took place in the sixteenth century. A new concept of fatherland began to spread, though not without some resistance. The Polish enlightened classes, especially the intellectuals of that age who were fluent in Latin and expressed their political and social conceptions in that language, had available a Latin term for fatherland. In the middle of the century Lukasz Gornicki, in The Courtier, published a small, interesting dissertation on the subject of language. He recommended the use of borrowings from foreign languages where necessary, but softly opposed the fashion of the time for Czech language and literature. He spoke as a defender of the Polish language, provided that it met the conditions of serving as a means of intercourse. However, he regarded the Polish language as not yet fully developed, and hence, in addition to contemporary borrowings, he recommended keeping Latin words where they had already put down roots in Polish language and literature. Among these Latin words he included patria, arguing that the Polish "ojczyzna", as he wrote, "most often is understood as the land bequeathed to someone by his father" (Gornicki, 1954, p. 84). This opinion is consistent with conclusions drawn from an analysis of Slownik Staropolski. However, a turning point was reached in the sixteenth century in the wake of the writings of Kochanowski, Rej, Sarnicki, Szarzynski, Klonowic, and many political writers and historians, especially Father Piotr Skarga. In the sixteenth century (in Slownik Polszczyzny XVI wieku) the original meaning of "ojczyzna"—"ojcowizna"—occupies less space (two and threequarter columns). The primary sense of "ojczyzna" is native land, country of origin and its inhabitants (10 columns). The context in which "ojczyzna" is used indicates that it was an emotionally laden word. Words like the following were coupled with the term: pleasant, holy, famous, generous, longing,

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unforgettable, exile (from the fatherland), mourned (in misfortune), the place to which one returns, for whose freedom one fights, which one serves. Fatherland is linked with king and religion and opposed to private interests. Rej, and especially Skarga, often use the metaphor mother/fatherland. The concept of other family ties is often associated with the image of the fatherland. Jerzy Bartminski (1993) presented the various ways of understanding fatherland in Poland in different historical periods. The word "nation" in the contemporary sense is also extensively used in the writings of the sixteenth century. It is coupled with the names of countries that had appeared for several centuries in chronicles and historical accounts. Similar processes in countries with a richer and older national literature did not match the consolidation and development of the semantic field of the word "ojczyzna" in Polish. However, in those countries as well the use of this term intensified. Lestocquoy regards the spread of the concept of fatherland as important evidence of the fusion of French patriotism. "Nothing is of greater importance than the appearance of this word; it becomes indispensable for shedding light on the new state of consciousness." To this he adds: "The entire Pléiade uses this word. There is no writer who did not use it around 1540-1545" (Lestocquoy, 1968, pp. 46,47). One of the most well known descriptions of the French fatherland that comes from the Pléiade is the apostrophe of Joachim du Bellay: "O France, mother of arms, the arts and law". In this way the poet draws the outlines of the universe of national culture, in which he also includes language, thereby enumerating what was most precious and most characteristic of the French fatherland. Du Bellay devoted an entire treatise to the defense and glorification of the French language. In comparison with this encomium Rej's opinion of the Polish language seems modest indeed. The example of Rej, unassuming in its theoretical reflection but supported by extensive practical work, du Bellay's eulogy and Machiavelli's propaganda in support of accepting the Tuscany dialect as the national language of Italy are similar in nature. These examples are evidence of the formation of national consciousness in the people of the sixteenth century and of the recognition of the role of language in the national culture, hence also of the nature of national culture as a community of intercommunication. Emotional attitudes intensified as this process advanced. Ronsard called the homeland a mother, as did Polish writers of this epoch. Lestocquoy, who is very critical of the premise of the earlier genesis of the nation as distin-

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guished from the state, stressed that, notwithstanding growing national feelings in the declarations of writers, the fatherland was often put in second place after the king. On the other hand, in the wider social circles I 'esprit de clocher (literally "belfry spirit"), which means attachment to the parish, to the vicinity demarcated by the range of the sound of church bells, still predominated. The first argument on the role of the king supports Greenfeld's stand, but one does not have to accept this argument. The king, as the symbol of the state as a whole, was simultaneously a national symbol, and in his Regrets du Bellay longs for France without referring to the king. The second argument is more potent, however. The first recorded case of a crowd shouting vive la France! took place in Marseilles in 1585. It was also accompanied by shouts in honor of the king, but this does not alter the fact that the cult of the fatherland was expressed (Johnson, 1993, p. 44). It so happened that nearly two hundred years later the residents of Marseilles were also the first to sing allons enfants de la Patrie. Despite the spreading attachment to the great fatherland, it coexisted with the small fatherland. Michelet also wrote about this in reference to the French Revolution. So the "belfry spirit" continued to exist. At various times and in various places it expressed itself not only in the sound of bells, but also in the sound of tom-toms or any other sound or visual sign summoning the small group together and limiting its scope. This spirit did not disappear from numerous local social groups, nor from certain categories within large collective bodies, even when better-educated circles more interested in wider contacts and more refined means of expression had already started to live within the ambit of wider symbolic communities. From this it may be concluded that nations did not arise at once in the form of large, only symbolically mediating social bodies. Their community did not embrace entire large state societies at the start. Rather, national unification was a slow process. For centuries it sometimes rested on only a few common characteristic features, which were not identical but similar: on a language that tolerated dialects, on a religion replete with local variants, on the memory of numerous heroes or only one, and on the cult of a common holy place. The intellectual circles creating the embryos of national culture perceived the forming unity of the nation and the developing symbolic wholeness of the fatherland before the masses did. However, the ethnic resources of folk culture provided the materials for erecting the entire edifice of national culture. This culture was composed not only of deeds extolled in chansons

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degeste and also in the spoken language, at least in some districts. It included customs, rituals, daily work and holy day celebrations, which poets made the subject of their works, as well as the tales of pilgrims and especially the experiences of simple soldiers who had marched through the country in the service of the king ever since war had ceased to be the business of knights alone. Esprit de clocher, which in English may be called spirit of the parish, was an emanation of the small fatherland, which may be both the foundation of an exclusively ethnic bond and an element of the large ideological fatherland, a link in the bond of the imagined national community. Joachim du Bellay, in his Regrets, expressed both his love for the great culture of France and his attachment to the river Lyre. There was no antithesis between these two fatherlands. Nor was there any for the Polish poet of another century, whose attachment was to the river Niemen and for whom the embodiment, and synecdoche, of the Polish great fatherland was a manor house on the geographical peripheries of the national culture. As historians claim, in Poland before the noble class acquired final structure, there were many common features of national culture in the language and the country way of life, perhaps many more than after this had happened (Gieysztor, 1972). In this manner a "code facilitating recognition of members of the community" was formed on ethnic foundations, which already had been present in the Middle Ages in everyday communication between people (Samsonowicz, 1992). This code showed itself most clearly and permanently in the books of historiographers, the writings of poets and reflections of politicians. The survival of the elementary, ethnic foundations of the national culture made possible its renewal in case the intellectual life of the upper classes was destroyed, as happened in Bohemia and Moravia after the military defeat of 1620 and the resulting destruction of the social and intellectual elites. However, developed nations place their representative culture in a canon constituting the kernel of the set of patterns of behavior and values that was called above the syntagma of national culture. This canon may be described as an expression of the collective identity of the nation. From the outset, and for a long time, the Polish canon was characterized by a predominance of rural, rustic elements. Numerous elements of primitive ethnicity from the culture of the peasant strata also entered this canon. These elements may be transformed into artistic forms, as they were, for example, by poets of the Renaissance and Romanticism. They also entered the daily customs and manners of the upper classes and strata, and later also the middle classes, by

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various means of everyday contact, especially with servants of the manor who influenced the most important period in the upbringing of children of the gentry. The process of "downward filtration" of cultural threads to the lower social strata (Bystron, Bujak) was matched by the upward filtration of folk threads (Burszta, 1974). Together these processes already in an estate society created a certain community, a universe of national culture, a common fatherland. On the other hand, in the special case of Poland the nobleman's estate was the co-creator and controller of this fatherland-culture to a much greater degree than the other estates. In describing the Poles Diugosz speaks both of the gentry and the peasants and is very critical of both estates. What is significant, however, is that when he describes cities he presents them mainly as seats of the secular and church administration and says nothing about their residents. This absence of the townspeople in the chronicler's stereotypical picture of the Poles is due to the foreign origin of significant numbers of city dwellers, especially Germans, who were dominant in the crafts, and Jews who were dominant in trade. The aversion felt in the Middle Ages towards homo mercator, whom God likes but little or not at all (Lestocquoy, 1968), was associated with dislike for foreign elements. The politically inspired hostility towards people who differed from "one's folks" by use of another language broke out during the suppression of the uprising of magistrate Albert at the beginning of the fourteenth century in Cracow. In the fifteenth century it manifested itself in the political writings of Jan Ostrorog, who was deeply offended by the saying of Mass in German in the main nave of the Church of St. Mary (Ostrorog, 1978; Brückner, 1974). The encounter with foreigners is an important factor crystallizing the national feeling. Benedykt Zientara shows how the mechanism forming the national consciousness worked in Poland in as early as the thirteenth century. Among the lower clergy this mechanism was manifested in the fight for benefices and the income derived from them, as well as in the struggle to "rule over souls" and to communicate with parishioners in the native language. Transferred to the upper hierarchy of the church this dispute became a fight "for the Polishness of the church and all Poland" (Zientara, 1989, p. 73) and was interpreted on the outside as an expression of the fight with the German nation doing wrong to the Polish nation. The complaint lodged with the Roman curia after the synod in L^czyca contained the expression gens

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Polonica as opposed to gens Theutonica, hence a declaration of the existence of the Polish nation. Both earlier and more recent Polish historians almost unanimously acknowledge the crystallization of the Polish national consciousness towards the end of the Piast epoch as a fact (Gawlas, 1990; Samsonowicz, 1989; Geremek, 1989). Zientara sees the catalysts of this process not only in the activities of the more enlightened strata, the clergy and the knighthood, both ill-disposed towards the foreign push from the West. He also singles out the role of the peasants. Under the pressure of a foreign culture "they not only managed to withstand the sudden impact of the new forms inundating them [...] but succeeded in diverting them into the mainstream of their own life [...] without losing their own ethnic character inherited from their ancestors" (Zientara, 1989, p. 69). However, this does not mean that these peasants then already had a Polish national "identification". The function of foreigners in the formation of national cultures was not as one-sided as may be inferred from numerous unverifiable accounts of resistance against foreign pressures and influences. Zientara, in numerous detailed studies on the birth of European nations, emphasizes that as a rule they did not arise from one ethnic group. He made a comprehensive study of this problem in an analysis of the formation of the French and German nations. Amalgamation processes did not take place in a vacuum through the action of some abstract idea of nationalism that came from thin air. The processes were set in motion by the nation-creating ethnic element. That element was dominant not necessarily by all elements of its culture, but by its myths of origin, its legends, and its tradition. Tradition in this case really can be discovered or, in the stronger of the senses that Hobsbawm has suggested, invented. Notwithstanding this origin, it did not cease to work in reality and to form a real social group sharing common collective ideas. This is also the picture that emerges of the crystallization of the Polish culture of the Polish nation coming into existence. And from the outset that culture of uniting tribes absorbed many external elements brought in along migration routes mainly from the dynamic West. Jan Stanislaw Bystron (1936) described the influences of the oldest amber trail, the diffusion flowing through the Moravian Gate, the settlement of Silesia, which pushed the Slavic population further east or down the Notec valley. To those channels of flow should be added the trail of the Cistercians and the trail of the Franciscans. At certain times Burgundians, Frisians, and Dutch people poured in along all

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those trails, but mainly clergymen, artisans and rural settlers speaking German. The process of foreign infiltration lasted until well after the nineteenth century. Polish historiography and tradition regarded this process mainly as a dangerous Drang nach Osten. However, in Bystron's view it was an important, creative factor in the formation of a more advanced civilization and social organization, but one filled with Polish symbolic culture. In the fifteenth century this culture demonstrated great vitality and in the sixteenth century exploded in a profusion of artistic and intellectual works, legal and political theories, and a variety of literary forms. The process of the polonization of German settlers moved forward in the countryside, but in the cities the foreign ethnic element survived for a longer time. So Dhigosz had certain grounds for omitting townspeople in his characterization of Poles in the middle of the fifteenth century. A similar attitude among writers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century was less justified. Jerzy Jedlicki (1991) cites numerous examples of descriptions of Polish rustic culture, in which—as Mochnacki wrote—the townsman is an outsider. Even Libelt was very cool towards the townspeople, whom he did not identify with the intelligentsia. Such opinions did not take into consideration processes of assimilation, which accelerated in the nineteenth century but which had been taking place earlier. The Polish cultural community at the same time suffered demographic losses to German culture in Silesia and in Prussia. These losses were offset by territorial and cultural gains in the east. According to Polish historiography, the Polish push to the east took place in a manner different from the German pressure on Poland. Leaving to historians controversies over the tenability of this assertion, it cannot be denied that the Polish Drang nach Osten checked the development of Ruthenian culture. That development was still visible even after the first acts of union in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and expressed itself especially in legal codes and cultural creativity (Bardach, 1988). In terms of their language Lithuanian statutes were Ruthenian/Old-Belarussian. Their codification was more advanced than the codification of the laws of the Kingdom of Poland. It is hard to deny, however, that their content and spirit defined the features of the form of government of the Kingdom of Poland rather than the traditions of Lithuanian statehood before the union with Poland.

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So an amalgamation of ethnic legacies and threads took place in the Kingdom of Poland that was not only a suppression of one of them, but was also an interesting synthesis. The fruit of this amalgamation was the type of borderland Pole, a literature that drew its inspiration from Ruthenian and Ukrainian motifs, from Klonowic's Roxolania and Adam Czahrowski's soldier's ballad singing the praises of Podolia, up to the Ukrainian school of Polish Romanticism. Stanisiaw Orzechowski (1513-1566), ahumanist theologian, occupied an important place in Polish Renaissance political writings as a result of both his excellent prose and his range of subjects dealing with the most important problems of the entire Polish Crown. The multiethnic, federal First Polish Commonwealth is a sociologically very interesting example of cultural polymorphism, but subordinated to the dominant Polish culture and not only to the Polish state. Orzechowski, who recognized hierarchical dependency in his identification of the tribe and nation calling itself gentes Ruthenes, natione Polonus, is an example of one of the typical solutions of the characteristic Polish arrangement of national and ethnic elements. By no means was approval of such a dependency the only solution, because at the same time rebellion was spreading in Ukraine. It was directed against the suppression of the collective national identity and Ukrainian aspirations to build a sovereign state. Contemporary Ukrainian historiography, which after the regaining of national independence, in conditions of complete freedom of publishing and research, strives unnecessarily, and sometimes beyond measure, to augment native accomplishments by claiming Orzechowski as a Ukrainian writer (Sas, 1991). Orzechowski himself described his ties with Ruthenia, he expressed his unequivocal option for Polishness through the language and perhaps even more the content of his political writings. There he put forward the idea of the inseparable wholeness of the Commonwealth of Poland under the rule of the king and at times came close to megalomania in his praises of the Polish nation (Tazbir, 1986, p. 17). Poland unquestionably derived intellectual gains from its expansion to the east, but at the cost of the potential of the eastern areas. Through polonization it extracted the creative intellectual sap from them and also suppressed the active recalcitrant element, which was in favor of independence and against the villein service system. It is hard to deny that Orzechowski and a whole host of prominent writers and artists, politicians and activists from the eastern territories of the Commonwealth of Poland would not have acquired such a cultural character had they not entered into the circle of Polish culture—Lat-

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in and Western—and into the orbit of the Polish State with its political liberties. On the other hand, Poland, in its eastern expansion, lost certain active demographic elements to Ruthenian elements. Many Polish peasants, fugitives to Sicz or other eastern territories, were assimilated into Ukrainian or Ruthenian culture. Even the gentry migrating east sometimes underwent national conversion. A very interesting late example is Waclaw Lipinski, a descendant of noble émigrés from the Polish Crown and a fervent ideologue of the Ukrainian nation at the beginning of the twentieth century (Lipinski, 1909). There also was no lack of descendants of the Polish gentry in the Ukrainian national movement and among political activists for a free Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For understandable reasons the ethnic borderland of Slavic elements was more conducive to diffusion and osmosis than the western border with its language barrier. In the opinion of Janusz Tazbir, the characteristic type of Polish culture that clearly separates it from the West came into existence in the seventeenth century as a result of the influence of eastern elements (Tazbir, 1978). He has in mind not only Ruthenian elements but also oriental ones—Tatar and Turkish. This applies rather to certain fields of customs and manners, attire, house furnishings, and weapons. On the other hand, it does not apply to political institutions, which in their form and spirit were far removed from the eastern authoritarianism that became the legacy of Moscow. Nonetheless, after the unions with Poland many elements of Ruthenian culture or of the tradition of Lithuanian statehood continued to exist in the symbolic or semiotic culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The break-up of those elements to the advantage of Polish and Western ones passing through Poland (Latin and German) is visible in the history of the origination of Lithuanian statutes II and III (Bardach, 1988, p. 30). The spirit of Roman law, an organization of society closer to the society of the Kingdom of Poland, and terminology suitable to this society grew ever clearer in these successive editions. The progress of cultural amalgamation did not diminish emphasis on the legal autonomy of the Grand Duchy, even of provinces incorporated into the Polish Kingdom, nor did it dislodge Ruthenian languages from common use. According to Tazbir, until the seventeenth century a significant part of the Ruthenian gentry did not know Polish, or knew it poorly (1986, p. 188). It is hard to determine which part this was and whether this concerned rather the

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use of Ruthenian at home or the impossibility of communicating with the Polish-speaking majority. Similar developments took place in the western countries during this period (Lestocquoy, 1968; Braudel, 1986). In any case, according to Tazbir, in the seventeenth century a considerable unification of language and culture took place in the Commonwealth of Poland. To be sure, it occurred in the estate of the gentry. Peasants on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania continued to use their own ethnic language, but that language could not develop into a national language. So, even as late as the 1930s some 62 percent of the peasants in the Second Republic of Poland defined their language simply as "local". According to the account of Tadeusz Lepkowski, after arriving in central Poland a certain Polish landed proprietress expressed surprise that in this district the peasants did not speak Lithuanian (Lepkowski, 1989). The Polish nation of the gentry was a unique historical phenomenon that resulted from the weakness of the middle class, which was unfortunate for the development of the country, and from the long-lasting and painful serfdom of the peasants. On the other hand, this historical formation met all of the criteria of a nation set forth above. As has been argued before, the birth of a nation is a process. It would make no sense to name a date, starting from which one can speak of a Polish nation that meets all those criteria. From the end of the thirteenth century, and especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were ever more signs testifying to the internal identification of the Polish nation on the former tribal base. The evidence for this is the ever more widespread use of the concepts "nation" and "fatherland" as self-identification and, at the same time, as terms that foreigners used for identifying the Polish nation. During this period the universe of national culture takes shape and adds to its substance. This means that the concept of fatherland becomes filled with legal contents, political and historical theories and, especially, artistic works. For the Poles, Latin was the cradle of thinking about the great ideological fatherland. Polish culture retained this fact for a long time in grateful memory. In the sixteenth century, however, the Poles' own language liberated itself from the dependency of childhood, and poets, political writers and historians began to write about their fatherland ever more often in this language. The addresses of King Sigismund August to the Diet were famous for their beautiful Polish style.

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Yet writers could not forget the multiethnicity of the Commonwealth of the Jagiellons. Under their pen fatherland sometimes significantly changed into the state, which supporters of the conception of the nation-state emphasize. An analysis of Piotr Skarga's second sermon to the Diet leads to the conclusion that this beloved homeland-mother is also the state but something more as well. It is the mother "who gave birth to us and brought us up, who endowed us and uplifted us [...] from whom you have your name and everything that you possess, who is the nest of all mothers and relationships of all and is the receptacle of all your goods" (Skarga, 1957, p. 18). When, in Bielski's Satires, Poland says to Lithuania that "it has citizens of not one nation", this highlights the national complexity of one state (Slownik Polszczyzny XVI wieku, vol. 16, pp. 156-157). Sarnicki, on the other hand, places the emphasis on unity being the result of the state community: "The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania [...] are not diverse or twofold, but are one Commonwealth, which is united together into one people from two nations" (ibid., p. 171). At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sarbiewski declared a similar position when preparing to write an epic poem on Poland and a Latin treatise describing the customs of the Poles: "We also give the name Poles to all those who only in the recent past were admitted to, or joined, the organism of the great state" (Sarbiewski, 1979, p. 126). Sarbiewski's definition clearly contains the concept of the nation-state. However, a further characterization of such parts of the nation contains the same idea that Stanislaw Sarnicki expressed in his assertion on the fusion of the nations of the Polish Commonwealth into one nation-folk. Here I obviously do not examine the correctness of these theses or their consistency with the feelings of the nations and ethnic communities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. I am merely stating that representatives of the dominant culture had strong convictions about the wholeness and specificity of the Polish nation, which was supposed to embrace the entire estate of the gentry of the Commonwealth. In stating that Polish culture was dominant in the Commonwealth of the Two Nations one should not forget that this does not mean the exclusivity of the threads emanating from one national ethnic tradition and the developing Polish nation as a whole. Although enriched and inspired by Latin, Italian, French and Ruthenian factors, Polish culture clearly dominated over them and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created a uniform whole of humanistic culture. Scientists of German origin made the major contribution

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to the natural and exact sciences that developed on the territory of the Commonwealth. These scientists came from Gdansk, Koenigsberg and Wroclaw (Breslau). Some of them had been educated at Cracow University, others only at foreign universities. Including their accomplishments in the history of Polish thought may raise the same kind of objections as calling Orzechowski a Ukrainian writer and Sarbiewski a Lithuanian poet because he was a professor of the Academy of Wilno. It is not really justified to pin a national label on the natural sciences. Witelon called himself a son of Thuringia (Domanski, 1978, p. 5). Representatives of the exact and natural sciences characteristically have middle-class or plebeian origins. The weakness of the middle class in Poland is reflected in the ethnic composition of scientists of those specialties within the Polish state. On the other hand, it is difficult—or perhaps not worthwhile—determining whether their contribution to scientific output in this field was Polish or non-Polish in character. In any case, the first criterion for defining a nation in accordance with the culturalistic approach was unquestionably met in the Renaissance and the Baroque Age. The universe of national culture crystallized and, as a symbolic whole, constituted the set of values defined as fatherland. Consciousness of the affinity with the fatherland made possible the fulfillment of the second criterion, namely, national identification, the feeling of the specificity of one's nation and its culture. Such a state of collective ideas at the same time draws the boundaries of one's own sphere and strengthens the intention to preserve it. Talcott Parsons called these factors of the social system the principle of its integration and boundary maintenance. These factors also may be called elements of the collective national identity. This identity is expressed in numerous ideas and images common to members of the community that mold them into a cohesive, emotionally distinct whole—hence a community. This is obviously an imagined community in keeping with Anderson's definition. It is a real community but mediated by views and convictions, which by no means have to be real in order to exert a real influence. The myth of origin, which was a source of pride and a factor drawing the boundary between one's own estate and lower estates and separating it from other nations, was one of the strongly rooted beliefs and was widespread in the estate of the gentry. The myth of origin from Shem, the son of Noah, from the noble Sarmatians, from Lech, the older brother of Czech and Rus—and perhaps their father (Dlugosz)—was a source of pride and even of national megalomania

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(Bystrori, 1936). This attitude was coupled with an extensive stock of national stereotypes, one's own and foreign. Anthropologists investigating primitive societies are constantly discovering ethnic and national stereotypes, which unquestionably have formed since the most ancient times in popular thinking. In historiography they have taken root since the times of Herodotus. Dhigosz portrayed the national character of the Poles, but he was very critical both of the peasants and the gentry. In Florence as a diplomat, Machiavelli, for practical purposes, described the characters of foreign nations. He ascribed both positive and negative traits to them, but the result nevertheless was a stereotype (Sarbiewski, 1979) that, by comparison with other stereotypes, he combined into an overall picture of the nations of Europe. An extreme example of the national megalomania of "Sarmatism" (the myth of origin from the ancient valiant Sarmatians) are the views of Wojciech Dembol^cki, an adventurous chaplain of Lisowski's irregular light cavalry and doctor of theology of the University of Rome. Dembol^cki called Poland the "only true" and the first state of Europe, and recognized the Poles, descended from the Scythians, as real ancestors of Greeks and Romans (Dembol^cki, 1979). If these and similar notions of Dembol^cki were an isolated phenomenon, they could be regarded as the aberrations of an individual mind. Similar fantastic notions on the origin and splendor of one's own nation appeared not only in Poland. In seventeenth-century England the belief was trumpeted that the English were descended from a lost Hebrew tribe, and the sixteenth-century English theologians cited by Greenfeld stated outright that God was an Englishman (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 60). Similar attitudes are conclusive evidence of specific, clearly formed national consciousness in some circles, hence one of the proofs of the existence of a nation. There is no question that in the sixteenth century an already clearly formed, though peculiar, Polish nation existed. There is also no doubt that this feeling of collective identity went hand in hand with actions to separate this community from foreigners and to maintain boundaries in the literal sense and to expand both territorially and symbolically. The latter tendency manifested itself in the progressive polonization of the literature and public administration of the country, which radiated to Lithuanian-Ruthenian territories. In the special case of the formation of the Polish nation the application of the third category of criteria presents a problem: internal uniformity. Diversity of ethnic elements has created difficulties in the process of forming cultural and political unity in the history of all European countries, as well as in the

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most recent history of the birth of new nations in post-communist countries. An example of this problem in the second half of the twentieth century are the tragic, bloody tribal battles in the new African states, on post-Soviet territory and in the bosom of Europe itself—in the former Yugoslavia. France, so perfectly separate in its hexagonal shape, has been called a heterogeneous country. That diversity was a problem for the eminent historian Braudel. His beloved France, perceived in the long historical perspective, seemed to him to shatter and disappear into the diversity of regions (Braudel, 1986). The problem of regionalism may be overcome in the theory of the nation, but the problem of the reality of the Polish nation consisted in something else. It was argued above that the growth of a nation is also a process of the internal unification of culture. This process must overcome, or at least reduce, barriers of estate and class, if only in the dissemination of the essential contents of the canon of culture. The precondition for that, in turn, is recognition of the national union of all classes or estates. The First Polish Republic was characterized by poor development of that factor. The example was cited of Diugosz, who completely omitted the townspeople in presenting the stereotype of the Poles. Although they themselves were of middle-class origin, Gomicki and Klonowic also manifested dislike for the middle class, not necessarily for ethnic reasons. Although acknowledged as Poles and presented in the picture of Polishness, peasants played only a marginal role in public life. Sometimes a defense of them was offered, as in Modrzewski, but more often they were an object of reproach and criticism, not a subject and equally important topic of the reflection of theoreticians and writers on the subject of the nation. In this respect the Czechs outpaced Poland in Central Eastern Europe in the development of national consciousness and unity. The Czech national feeling developed more strongly in cities than did the Polish consciousness on account of the greater degree of urbanization in Bohemia and the resulting conflict with German immigrants. Stanislaw Bylina writes that in the Hussite period the unity of the land, language and Czech nation was accented in university circles (Bylina, 1990). The Czech historian Frantisek Smahel uses the term protoconscience nationale to describe the Czech national feeling in the fourteenth century, a feeling that combined elements of national identification with political aspirations. As in Poland at this period, ethnicity and the nationality growing out of it formed under the influence of hostility towards foreigners—Germans—but, in contrast to what happened in Poland, it had

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wider estate foundations. The self-identification "we Czechs"purus Bohemus characterized the townspeople as well as the knighthood and clergy. As in Poland, England and the invented tradition of many nations, this self-identification was coupled with the idea of a nation chosen by God: The name "Bohemus" was derived from "Boh" (Smahel, 1985, p. 87). In the fifteenth century that conception was associated with the idea of Hussitism and the Hussite movement. According to Smahel, the result of this connection was "the spontaneous xenophobia and unthinking nationalism" of rather wide circles of the society (p. 91). The reflection and not only the stimulator of this national reality was the statement of Master Hieronymus of Prague, who, on the eve of Hussitism, wrote that the "sacrosancta communitas bohemica embraces all estates and social ranks: king, knight, vassal, peasant, canon, presbyter, councilor and artisan" (Bylina, 1990, p. 93; Smahel, 1985, p. 173). It would be hard to find a similar position and definition of the Polish nation until after the end of the eighteenth century and the age of Romanticism. Just as Plato's Republic was wise with the wisdom of a handful of its philosopher kings, so for a long time the Polish nation was a conscious nation through the collective national identity of the gentry—10 percent of the population of the Commonwealth. Against 'the background of the mass of the culturally Polish, ethnic peasantry of the Kingdom of Poland and the gradually polonizing middle class, this self-consciousness, the "only true", ethnocentric and xenophobic nation of the gentry was marked by characteristics that make it an interesting, important object of sociological study. This was not only a nation in the sense of cultural specificity and separateness, but also a genuine civic nation that was exceptional in Europe. The expression of Greenfeld, speaking of a nation sovereign through the participation of individuals in power, individualistic and civic, applies more to the nation of the Polish gentry than to the English state of the Tudors and Stuarts (1992; 1994). The difference between Poland and England was so fundamental that in Poland such a nation was only one social estate. In England the nation extended beyond the gentry. It also embraced the middle class, though not the entire society, and was sovereign more in theory than in practice, as Greenfeld also admits. The Polish gentry gained its habeas corpus right in the form of neminem captivabimus already in the fifteenth century. This right was certainly often violated, as was the similar law of the English, but it constituted the legal foundation for settling relations with the government. The gentry, who in political literature and parliamentary practice had been awakened to the threat

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of absolutum dominium, stubbornly—and to the detriment of the state—defended its liberties. It did not overly flatter its kings and did not make kings the symbol of the national community. Greenfeld regards absolutism and the conferring of the role of national symbol upon the ruler as incompatible with the idea of nationalism. For this reason, according to her, England and not France is the oldest nation. In England, in comparison with the Polish Commonwealth, the position of the king was very high. The election of the monarch in Poland gave the estate of the gentry a feeling of power such as the English people under the Tudors did not have. Even later, after the Glorious Revolution, the symbols of monarchy characterized England. This symbolism was not as clear in Poland, despite the grand ceremonies of the coronation and burial of kings (Gieysztor, 1978). Bitter criticism of the king resulted in the murder of Bishop Szczepanowski, described in successive lives of the saints for three centuries (Rokosz, 1980). Dlugosz, in particular, with great passion and hatred attacked Boleslaw the Bold as a murderer, rapist and sodomite (Dlugosz, 1944). Saint Stanislaw—as no king had done—became the symbol of hope for the unification of the state both during the territorial disintegration of the fourteenth century and the partitions. For centuries the leading national symbol was the Mother of God, who was crowned Queen of Poland. The song in Her honor served as the first Polish national anthem, while in England, Austria and Russia hymns lauded kings or emperors. The customs surrounding political relations in Poland also were characteristic and differed from those in countries of the East and the West. The Polish king was not endowed with the gift of healing illnesses by the laying on of his hands. The disputes of Sigismund August and Henry VIII over their socially unpopular marriages followed an entirely different course. Janusz Tazbir cites the response of a deputy whom King Stefan Batory had insulted in the Diet by calling him a buffoon. The nobleman reminded the king that he was a citizen who had the right to elect and overthrow kings (Tazbir, 1978, p. 61). Nothing like this could have taken place in the countries of sixteenthcentury Europe. This was an expression of the national culture based on the dignity of the citizen. However, this picture also had a reverse side. The Polish gentry created a form of government that pushed political individualism to the limits of anarchy and beyond, to the detriment of politics. Long before the French Revolution the gentry had discovered its later catchwords and had made them the foundation of the Polish ideology of the

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nation: freedom, equality and brotherhood. The more this nation of the gentry became attached to its freedom, the more it turned away from universal equality, without which there is no really modern nation. On the other hand, the Polish nation of the gentry, like no other nation of past centuries, was not, and by definition could not be, a modern nation. The gentry part of this very non-modern Polish nation as a whole manifested attachment to its class freedom in everyday practice in the Diet, in regional councils and courts, in neighborhood and local relations and in artistic creativity. Analogies to the glorification of this "golden" freedom may be found in western countries only at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example in the apostrophe of the revolutionary song of the French—liberté, liberté cherie!; and in the nationalistic verse of Ernst Moritz Arndt from the times of Napoleon's invasion of the German fatherland—Gott Eisen wachsen liess, der duldet keine Knechte. The purpose of the historical perspective in studies of the nation is not to show the secular immutability of this social phenomenon, but rather to present its historical changeability, its possible variants. However, within this changeability certain features are preserved that justify using a single concept for the separation of a whole subject to historical modifications. In its catchword of brotherhood the nation of the gentry manifested one of those features characteristic of a national collective body as a community. Glinski's battle cry to the knights—"Follow me, brothers!"—quoted in Stryjkowski's chronicle served as a patriotic appeal on the battlefield. A similar apostrophe to "brothers of the noblemen's nation" was supposed to encourage them to pay taxes to the treasury (Slownikpolszczyzny XVI wieku, vol. 2, p. 379). Rej very often uses the word "brotherhood" in various writings. Such a function of the concept of brotherhood confirms the power of the emotional appeal of this term, which has been empirically studied by contemporary sociobiologists (Johnes, Ratwick, Sawyer, 1987, p. 54). The use and abuse in political and parliamentary rhetoric and in writing of the terms "brother", "brother nobleman", and "dear brother" express the community attitude, which contemporary sociobiologists studying aspects of nationality point out. This declared brotherhood did not mean real equality between a mighty lord and an impecunious yeoman, but the former, at least at times, had to solicit the favor of the latter to gain votes in the Diet and support in a rebellion or a foray.

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The gentry also were a community in the field of symbolic culture and customs. Here, as well, unavoidable variants appeared resulting from differences in wealth and from obvious individual differences, especially education. However, the system of values was quite homogeneous and embraced the cult of freedom, honor, gallantry, and recognition of the good of the fatherland as the highest value, for which the sacrifice of one's life is sweet and honorable, in accordance with Horace's maxim. It must be strongly emphasized that these were unquestionably recognized values. They were also largely felt values, but they were not necessarily adhered to in practice, or were freely interpreted conveniently to suit individual interests. Recognized and felt values (Ossowski, 1967b) are the characteristic determinant of closely knit communities, especially of those whose boundaries extend beyond a group based on direct contacts. However, special purpose groups, among them the state and the civic society, must be guided by values that are carried out in practice. The state, which is an institutional, special purpose organization, does not arouse sentiments if it is not treated as an apparatus for preserving and safeguarding the fatherland and the symbolic universe of the culture of the nation. That is how Skarga understood this when he wrote of love for the country but spoke of the state. Earlier political writers also understood the nation in this way. In his remarks on Dhigosz, Stanislaw Kot wrote: "Their patriotism, though very state oriented, is closely connected with the ethnic understanding of the Polish nation" (Kot, 1938, p. 19, emphasis added). The purpose of this chapter obviously is not to make a thorough study of the formation and early form of the Polish nation. Such a work would have to go back to the original sources and would require historical as well as sociological and cultural-anthropological skills of a high order. This is a task that deserves to be taken up, because it could contribute important alterations to the existing stock of theoretical reflection on the nation. That theoretical work in Western countries is on the whole carried out without making any real effort to become familiar with the development of nations in Eastern Europe. The example of Russia in Liah Greenfeld's extensive work must be deemed as not best suited for this purpose. An interpretation that puts the birth of the Russian and French nations on the same historical plane seems questionable, even in light of the author's own assumptions. Soon after the end of World War I, the prominent Durkheimian scholar Marcel Mauss gave a lecture on the sociology of the nation and nationalism

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that contained many profound thoughts about the nation. He enunciated a clear opposition between the nation and king in France as early as the sixteenth century (Mauss, 1969, p. 574). As a condition for the existence of a nation he stipulated the existence of a collective spirit, a conception of the fatherland and patriotism, the faith of the nation in itself, in its race, language and national culture. He wrote of the Slavic nations as follows: "The Ukrainians never were a nation, at the most at certain moments a society, a state. The Poles did not have an independent existence for more than four centuries, and their boundaries were always characterized by great fluidity" (p. 596). Mauss himself did not publish this essay. Before submitting it for print he might have asked for the opinion of someone who was more knowledgeable of the history of the eastern regions of Europe, such as his colleague Stefan Czarnowski, also a member of the Durkheim school. The kind of ignorance displayed by Mauss with respect to the affairs of Eastern Europe was rather the rule than the exception in the West. At the end of the twentieth century as well, among authors from this circle writing about problems of the nation one can find, apart from references to Russia, at most some mentions of Hungary. Even Gellner, instead of using the authentic example of the history of Bohemia, resorted to the heuristic fiction of Ruritania, but that did not affect the accuracy of his conclusions and general assertions. The possession of a good knowledge of such cases as the Czech, Polish and Ukrainian nations and a careful comparison of those examples with the history of other nations would not only make it possible to avoid factual errors. It would also provide a keener insight into the nature of the national bond, and of what today is called the national identity. The culturalistic approach is better suited theoretically for such a task. This approach searches for the sources of nations in their previous ethnic forms. However, it does not confine itself to the historical perspective alone, but aims at a global, macrostructural understanding of the nation. When one considers the historical perspective in sociological studies of the nation, which in fact are oriented not to the past but to the more immediate social situation, one principle must be strongly emphasized, namely, the aim is not to find arguments to buttress the age-long past, hence the timelessness or perhaps even perpetual duration of the nation. Rather, the intention is to document the changeability and diversity of the phenomena that are called the nation and national culture. While recognizing them as phenomena of a certain type, at the same time this approach tries to point out the error of

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treating them stereotypically. Consideration of the historical perspective is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for this purpose. The national cultures of Central Eastern Europe from the nineteenth to the twentieth century were characterized by great diversity of cultural features. There, a mixture of Polish, Latin, Roman, German and Austrian influences collided. Polish culture at one time was dominant on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania-Ruthenia, at another time it succumbed to the domination of Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Czechs emerged as a nation quite early, but they soon fell under the influence of Austria. Hungary dominated over Slovakia but not over Austria. For a long time Ukraine and Belarus aspired to independence from Russia and Poland—until rebirth after the fall of the Soviet Union. Towards the end of the twentieth century new separatist tendencies from the established national states in Western Europe appeared. European nations or ethnic groups in Central Eastern Europe imitated, as it were, the revival of ethnicity in countries of the West (Hechter, 1985), following the example of Scotland, even Wales, Catalonia and the land of the Basques in Spain. The problem of the nation must also be related to the internal, deepest aspect of this phenomenon, to its roots. It must delve into the experiences of people participating in the life of the nation, creating the national culture and living in this culture. I call such an approach an individualizing reduction in the study of aspects of nationality. This approach is close to phenomenological sociology in the wide sense, as defined by Edward Tiryakian (1989), who, as its representatives, mentions Weber, Znaniecki and Parsons. Znaniecki's sociology had a significant influence on the selection of the empirical materials and on the type of analysis presented in the subsequent parts of this book. The problem of the nation approached historically must also be related to the consciousness of people experiencing the national culture. This should not be understood as an ontological opposition of cultural facts and the sphere of consciousness. According to the theory of symbolic culture subscribed to in this work and set forth earlier (Kloskowska, 1981), symbolic meanings not experienced by anyone (enclosed within walls, books, musical scores, etc.) do not fully belong to symbolic culture. They are only potential culture. Such an understanding ought to be obvious in respect to the syndrome of symbols and values that is called the fatherland and contained in the canon of national culture. This is not a sphere of unchanging objects, but the sphere of phenomena that someone experiences. Hence they are subjective as well

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as intersubjective. In other words, in the changing, dynamic process they are in some degree common to the "nation". When I use the term "intersubjective", I do not venture to ascribe this position to phenomenology or to some other particular philosophy. I use the concept as an obvious and methodologically necessary basis for individualizing reduction. That calls for the investigation of aspects of national culture in the experiences of people (various real persons in different social situations). That approach may also be called the perspective of social psychology as it was defined at the beginning of this work. However, that does not mean reliance on any psychosocial orientation, whether it is behavioristic, psychoanalytical or even cognitive. It is merely a heuristic principle for investigating the domain of intersubjective phenomena in a controllable and controlled manner. "Individualizing reduction" does not assume the isolation of human beings. Rather, it consists in the investigation of aspects of national culture at the grass roots of their direct, individual realization.

In our remarks we tried to shed light on the problem of human multiformity from different sides. We took into consideration conflicts between the recognition and the feeling of values, and the diversity of the scales of values recognized and felt by one person, which values require separate and mutually exclusive mental attitudes [...] Given the great role that the collectivity plays in forming our mental attitudes,' the polymorphism of the human mind is in a causal relationship with the complexity of the social structure, with the multiplicity of the knot of social relations among which the individual lives [...] Also involved here is the greater complexity of the culture of individual social groups, the larger stock of various traditions. STANISLAW OSSOWSKI, Problems in Social

Psychology (in Polish)

For we deal with a problem located in the core of the individual, and yet also in the core of his communal culture; the process which establishes in fact the identity of these two entities. ERIC ERIKSON, Youth and Crisis

4. The Complexity and Diversity of National Symbolic Communities

The culturalistic approach to the nation, which unavoidably contains the historical and anthropological aspects, leads to the sociological position. As pointed out at the end of the last chapter, that position must also consider the individual, subjective factors in how national cultures function. This necessity stems from the understanding of national culture as a communal universe for a certain collective social body, a universe that cannot be known and understood without considering the individual process of how members of that entity experience it. For national culture is an inter subjective phenomenon taking place in a subjective dimension and related to objective facts—to the syntagma of culture and its core, which is the canon. This summary expression needs to be expanded and supplemented. In accordance with Diagram 1 on page 27, national culture is a syndrome or syntagma of interrelated elements constituting a specific variety of systems typical of human culture in general. That specific national culture is a result of individualization and duration. The "embodied" forms of that culture (Popper, Eccles, 1977), which are also called correlates (Ossowski, 1966)— written literary and scientific texts, musical scores and recordings, works of art, etc.—ensure its duration. I call such permanent forms "potential culture", because when separated from the experiences of people such as artists and writers and the public these objects would lose their specific character and would become only a material substance lacking meanings and values (Kloskowska, 1981). As the content of symbolic culture they always must be someone's objects, in accordance with the conception of the humanistic coefficient (Znaniecki, 1988). Hence they must be signals that people receive and understand. The

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ways in which they are received and invested with meaning are not up to individuals, although as a result of the most extreme individualizing reduction we perceive their content as transmitted and received by individuals, hence subjectively. However, the way in which they are realized is not confined to the subjective dimension. It is always related to some human social entity. It is the form of intercommunication within this social body, and hence it is intersubjective: it comes into existence and is cultivated in contacts between subjective experiences. These contacts in turn are mediated by culture. The embodied forms preserve the patterns of social contacts and furnish them with foundations and content. However, social collective bodies constitute the frame of intersubjectivity. There are various ranges of intersubjectivity, that is, of sets demarcating the network of such contacts. Collectivities of national cultures belong to especially important communities of intersubjective culture. National culture so understood must be approached from many angles. By no means should one think that it will be washed away and lose its cohesiveness through such an approach. On the contrary, this approach will prevent a stereotypical treatment of this culture. The assumption according to which national or ethnic cultures are treated as certain wholes is a categorical assumption. The assertion of the syntagmaticness of national cultures, that is, the quasi-syntactic ties of their elements within the consciousness of the national group, will be examined in more detail in the subsequent parts of this book. Some theoreticians, such as the previously mentioned Margaret Archer, are critical of this stance. Armstrong (1982), Anderson (1985), and Smith (1986; 1990; 1991) develop, or at least accept, the ethnic conception of the genesis of the nation. Anderson argues that nationalism should be related not to the category of reflective political ideologies but to "the large systems of culture that preceded it, from which it emerged, and, also, in opposition to which it emerged" (p. 19). Here he has in mind rather the religious and political systems of previous epochs. However, in analyses based on empirical materials he often refers to the ethnic foundations of later "new" nations. He also shows what very complex mixtures these foundations are. This is true especially of England, or the United Kingdom, which Greenfeld regards as one of the oldest nations. To be sure, her stance is possible only from the angle of the political, rather than the culturalistic conception of the nation. Anderson, as the motto of his book, quotes the satirical verse of Daniel Defoe, saying how "pure English blood" was distilled from a British-Scottish-Saxon-Danish mixture,

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and in the bargain ploughed with a Roman plough. Thus he emphasizes the complexity of the ethnic foundations of nations and their long period of formation. Deriving modern nations from earlier ethnic forms is warranted not only on account of the objective process of the emergence of a nation, which is hard to explain in another way. Tracing back such a genealogy is also consistent with popular views and practical human experiences. In addition to land and blood as criteria of collective national identity in the popular sense, there is also the criterion of time as an important factor for identifying, or even justifying, the existence of a nation and of its rights—to territory, to political independence, and to respect and recognition by foreigners. The collective, national "we" that functions in popular thinking rests on this criterion, because the feeling of continuity is an indispensable factor of all identity. In analyzing the concept of fatherland we emphasized the role of myths of origin, which are so widespread in the cultures of various nations. These myths and their related symbols usually reach far back into the past of the community, to its ethnic forms, which sometimes are adopted, and usually imaginary. Anthony D. Smith devoted a lot of space to showing the process of the transformation of small primitive and homogeneous ethnic groups into complex "ethni", which, however, are still not mature nations. Only in the last form is there full awareness of group membership, that is, identification with an extended and diverse community. In entities regarded as ethni this awareness may extend only to one social strata or estate. In such a case this is a horizontal ethnos. Smith unquestionably would include the Polish nation of the gentry of the First Commonwealth in this category, if he knew of this example. However, this would not be an entirely proper classification, because Smith does not ascribe to an ethnos elementary cultural uniformity (e.g. language) and a high level of development of the national culture over a long time span, such as were characteristic of the culture of the Polish gentry. Smith also distinguishes the vertical, "demotic" ethnos, whose culture extends to all estates and has a populistic tinge. It is hard to distinguish this category from a nation, and the examples mentioned by the author, for example Ireland, are of little help. It must be stressed, however, that in his conception the boundaries between ethnos and the nation are fluid. The same is true of the "protonation" in the terminology of Hobsbawm, although he is less willing to admit this.

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The culturalistic approach leads to the conception of nation constituting a complex entity of estates or classes with a far from homogeneous culture. Hence it is necessary to investigate the internal complexity of nations in order to distinguish their different types. So we have to do first and foremost with the consequences of the pluralism of ethnic sources and external influences on forming nations, with the complicated relationship between the social structure and the assimilation of the national culture, and even with a different degree of national identification. We leave in the background the individual differentiation of national participation. We save this problem for later not because it is less important, but, on the contrary, because the main part of the book based on empirical materials will be devoted to this problem. Relating the phenomenon of the nation to the social structure, as is required in sociological analysis, leads to divergent opinions. Anthony D. Smith, who is more a humanist than a social scientist, regarded the cultures of contemporary nations as considerably uniform organic wholes, firmly preserved in their continuity, giving the feeling of barricade that portends their permanence. That stance was put forth in a discussion on the processes of the globalization of culture, and that doubtless is why emphasis was laid on the organic nature of national cultures (Smith, 1991). On the other hand, sociologists and political scientists put greater accent on cultural differentiation within the modern societies of the twentieth century. In this context they often study national phenomena in categories of social elites and non-elites, or the cultural center and peripheries. However, that differentiation should not be generalized to all situations of the life of a modern nation and the nature of its culture as a reality experienced by its members. H. Meadwell aptly points out that the separation of elites is warranted in conditions of generally limited social mobility. On the other hand, in a situation of large-scale mobility of the masses, stimulated by, among other things, national catchwords, such a division ceases to be very important (Meadwell, 1989). Polish experiences of the Solidarity social movement of the eighties corroborate that opinion. National phenomena, as a rule, are conditioned by situations. This is one of the cardinal assertions of this work and will be verified and documented in the course of the empirical analysis. Hechter's theory, which operates with the conception of "internal colonialism", has been popular since the seventies in studies of the functions of national cultures. Hechter is of the opinion that culture is an important

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condition of life chances in contemporary societies, and so he treats culture instrumentally. From this it follows that unequal participation in culture breeds nationalism among the disadvantaged, if they are categories ethnically separate from the dominant group, for example the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh in Great Britain, Blacks and Latinos in the United States (Hechter, 1985). Certain similarities may be found between Hechter's conception and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural (educational) reproduction. Although Bourdieu relates the differentiation of cultural capital correlated with inequalities of economic capital to the class/occupational structure, he also treats culture as a stratifying factor. The instrumental conception of culture is more convincing in relation to the class structure. In relation to ethnic differences, however, the functions of culture are not solely instrumental, at least not only economically and politically instrumental. Deutsch and Anderson take such a stance. The influence of an ethnically conditioned motivation on the fueling of nationalism is a rather complex phenomenon. Although they take Hechter's position as their starting point, Rogowski and Nevitt also allude to this. Tiryakian and Nevitt analyze the nation and nationalism as its ideology in its contemporary setting and make this analysis in categories of elites, that is, of the social center and peripheries. They distinguish four types of nationalist principles of action and practical activity: (1) affirmation of the national state by elites in external and internal relations, (2) the nationalism of peripheries, their identification with the state of the dominant nation, (3) the nationalism of the peripheries, their withdrawal from modernity, (4) the nationalism of the peripheries striving to move ahead of the backward center in development and to revive their own ethnic culture. This typology may also be applied to a longer time span by interpreting modernity as all tendencies directed to development, or at least change. Then an analogy comes to mind between the first type of nationalism mentioned and the nationalism directed by the state in Charles Tilly's conception, while the fourth type resembles the nationalism of a nation in search of a state. The second type of nationalism fits in with the historical phenomena of the polonization of social elites in the Polish eastern borderlands, manifesting itself in that "cracknel" characteristic of Polish culture created over centuries by eminent artists and leaders from the ethnic peripheries of the Polish Commonwealth. With a certain modification the peasant strata of Belarus could fit into the third type of nationalism, and in the fourth type—also with

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an alteration—the nationalism of Ukrainians in the Second Polish Republic. However, this would apply only to local, regional relations, not to overall social and state relations, because only in rural regions can one speak of stronger modernization tendencies in Ukrainian villages than in Polish villages in the borderlands. The usefulness of this conception is not restricted to historical applications. This conception is not intended as an interpretation of the past, but rather of the general process of national movements, which, contrary to the hopes of theoreticians of globalism, have not been abating in the contemporary world. The works of Tiryakian deserve attention for yet another reason. Alongside the analysis of national phenomena from a macrostructural angle, he introduced the problem of the subjective aspect, which corresponds to approaches based on the individualizing analysis of the phenomena of national culture. In his earlier, methodological considerations Tiryakian deemed it necessary to consider in sociological examinations both social facts apprehended as things and their characteristic nature as phenomena belonging to the world of human experiences. So he reached the conclusion that it is possible to combine the positions of Durkheim and Husserl (Tiryakian, 1989). The examination of national culture in particular requires a method that permits operating with objective facts that are embodied elements of the syntagma of a national culture, and also relating the facts of this potential culture to human cognitive, judgmental and emotional attitudes. The objects of these cognitive attitudes are no longer "hard" objective facts, but values. Without such reference to values as the content of the national universe, that culture would be only potential, possible, but not yet realized. Consistent with Tiryakian's phenomenological inspiration, scrutiny of the nation assumes tying the features of culture that distinguish a nation and determine its individual nature, with a relation grounded in the attitudes of the nation's members, who choose this culture for their own, appropriate it, believe in it and also create it and are created by it. Tiryakian and Nevitt allude to Renan, Mauss and Weber in developing such a conception of a nation separated by culture that in fact is created by the attitudes of participants in the national community. Mauss's position was described above in connection with his conception of social cohesion {cohésion). Weber's theory permits a many-sided approach to problems of the nation. In his studies the nation appears in the context of large social structures—the state and society—but is not equated with them.

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In contrast to Tonnies, Weber apprehends the nation as Gemeinschaft, as a community of values. Reference to attitudes establishing these values is inseparably linked with these values (Weber, 1968). The earliest, widely known expression of an even more categorical position of this type is Renan's thesis defining the nation as a daily plebiscite (Renan, 1934, p. 88). According to his own words, Renan attached less importance to full cultural unity, which the France of his epoch did not have. On the other hand, he underscored consciousness of collective historical experiences and the will to continue them. The nation as a spiritual family was supposed to emerge from memories of past glory and the hope that this glory would continue (p. XI). The internal bond of the nation is not a question of race or homogeneous ethnic sources, whose interpretation is often mixed with politics. The nation is autotelic. Renan rejected the identification of the national bond with material interest, using the clever aphorism: "Zollverein is not the fatherland" (p. 77). According to Renan's poetic definition, the nation is a soul and a spiritual principle hitched to the past and the future, almost as in Mickiewicz's Improvisation. By comparing the nation with an individual, Renan emphasized its continuity and permanence, as well as the common will to endure. Recognition of this union was supposed to express itself in that daily plebiscite. It is worth comparing this expression with Norwid's earlier assertion that the nation is a universal obligation. The principle here is similar—apprehending the nation as the outcome of individual attitudes. However, the axiology is different. Renan's definition, which is often repeated in reflections on the nation, has numerous advantages, but it also raises certain doubts. Is the nation supposed to be the memory of past glory only, and not of defeats and infamy as well? To be sure, Renan himself spoke of the need to forget as a condition for the endurance of the nation. This very astute observation applied to differences separating the categories and groups making up the nation. The memory of these differences must be suspended, at least occasionally, for the affirmation of the national community to be fully realized. We will return to this point in the examination of the empirical data. It is not only a matter of such forgetfulness. Renan's essay is an expression of the patriotic feeling aroused in France after the defeat of 1871. In such a mood, what Braudel had in mind when he wrote that he loved France with all its faults and fully accepted everything

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that was a part of its history was eliminated from the collective memory. He loved France in spite of everything, but did not approve of everything. A Polish historian expressed a similar thought as a general thesis on the subject of the nation, in writing about heritage and responsibility (Jedlicki, 1993). Renan, in his essay, did not raise this problem. One more fundamental objection must be raised to Renan's main definition of a nation: what does he mean by a daily plebiscite? Since a plebiscite is a conscious choice, it must be related to an act of identification with a particular nation by a verbal declaration or some other act testifying to the intention to define oneself. Direct identification in words, thoughts and deeds takes place only in special social situations, about which more is said below. On the other hand, if the scales of a plebiscite choice are supposed to be everyday behavior consistent with the customs and characteristics of a given national culture—for example, speaking the native language, availing oneself of the surrounding, and often only available, values of the national culture—these kinds of behavior are not the result of choices. Like speaking and thinking in the best known, and sometimes only known, language, they are almost, or completely, automatic. It is hard to call these actions a plebiscite choice. Although these actions do not result from biological necessity, they are statistically dominant in a homogeneous environment, or nationally uniform in average situations of normal, everyday life. In light of objective criteria of action, behavior or appearance, a person is a member of a particular nation not as a result of voting in a plebiscite, but almost automatically, surely without thinking about it. The reflective feeling of nationality, which goes together with self-knowledge and internal mental or external active national self-identification, is situational in nature. It depends on the individual's life course, which crisscrosses with the destinies of the national collectivity. In compliance with these factors, it may be intense, weak or suppressed. Consciousness and self-identification also vary individually. Some persons react to "plebiscite" situations that others do not perceive. A knot of various factors determines the threshold of national reactions. The objective way of being a member of certain nations also is differentiated individually and according to the situation. The problem arises as to whether this differentiation is progressive, and whether it can be expressed in the form of a scale. As it turns out, the last question must be approached with the greatest caution. Besides, it is not the most important matter. What is important is to determine

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the diversity of manifestations and varieties of being a member of a particular nation. That diversity manifests itself when one moves from a general overview of a nation and its culture to the observation of individual cases. The historical-anthropological and sociological approach to the nation and its culture led to the conclusion that the forms of this phenomenon are varied and complex. The individualizing approach, which considers the subjective/intersubjective aspect, opens up a new perspective. The general conclusions resulting from the application of this perspective were suggested above. Let us return to it by referring to other theoretical foundations and to the results of empirical studies. Consideration of the historical and anthropological perspective led to the conclusion that nations and national cultures are not monolithic, uniform and unvarying sets of features that in different nations have a different content, but are always determined by the same criteria. Naroll's conception defined such criteria for primitive cultural entities. However, even in this type of simple ethnic forms the importance and clarity of individual criteria varied. Karl Deutsch expressed this in the statement that national cultures are composed of building blocks, which in various nations may change and be converted into the role of basic elements. Sometimes such a main element is language, sometimes religion or the structure of the bond holding together the main parts of the social organization. The investigation of ethnic communities in a contemporary pluralist society, for example in Australia (Smolicz, 1987; 1990), confirms this thesis. Consideration of the individual, subjective perspective tends to support the hypothesis of an even deeper factual internal differentiation of national cultures. Not only as a potential world, but also as a practically experienced symbolic universe, every national culture is a specific community composed of a multiplicity of experiences. That hypothesis will be subjected to validation. Another supplementary, rather than competing, hypothesis is put forward. According to this hypothesis, thanks to their cultures nations are indeed imagined communities, but communities acting in reality, communities of intercommunication. France, whose disturbing diversity Braudel confirmed as a solid researcher of its history and observer of its present, was nevertheless, for him, an identical whole and unity, the object of a demanding and difficult love.

5. National Stereotypes and the Concept of National Identity

The concept of stereotype is part and parcel of critical reflection on the nation and national cultures. The term "stereotype" entered into circulation in various disciplines of the social sciences with the publication of the first edition of Walter Lippmann's.Pw6//c Opinion (1946). The concept most often, though not exclusively, refers to popular ideas about ethnic groups and nations. The critical treatment of stereotypes is prevalent in professional sociological and psychological thought. They are the subject of numerous studies, but are not an instrument for generating ideas that scholars apply in their investigation of social and psychic phenomena. The commonplace nature and durability of many stereotypes, especially of those that come into existence in the wake of contacts between nations that are alien to each other, calls for a closer examination of this concept. Andrzej Wejland (1991) made a more thorough methodological examination of the concept against the background of the wider subject matter of the process of building images and prototypes of social phenomena. This analysis deserves attention, although it raises doubts in respect to Lippmann's interpretation, which was influenced by W. Mantz. Other materials contributing to the discussion of this problem come from the circle of Polish sociologists (Chlewinski, Kurcz, 1992). Only some aspects of stereotypes will be considered here, namely, those most closely connected with the problem of national cultures and the creation of images of the carriers of those cultures. Additional comprehensive studies and theoretical reflection are necessary on the source of stereotypes, their conceptual foundations and their diversity. So far no careful theoretical study has been made of the relationship between the origination of stereotypes in popular thinking and the taxonomic practices

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of various scholarly disciplines. Taxonomies are also a valid research tactic of the natural and exact sciences, whose cognitive rigor is unquestionable, in contrast to the reservations raised in respect to the humanities. However, taxonomies in the natural and exact sciences also give rise to certain doubts. The periodic table of elements (Mendeleyev's table) is a taxonomy, as is, in zoology, the classification of animals that has been worked and re-worked since the time of Linneus but still has a formal form. These taxonomic approaches are classifications, or at least have such ambitions. Methodologists of logical empiricism have emphasized the differences between a classification and a typology. The classical publication of Hempel and Oppenheim (1936) alludes to the theories of Cassirer, Horkheimer, Jung, Lazarsfeld and W. Stern, hence reference to philosophers, sociologists and psychologists shows the field of possible applications of the taxonomic approach. According to Hempel and Oppenheim, types understood as rows of characteristic features (Reihe von Merkmalen) have the strict form of a classification. The boundaries of types are regarded as rigid. In fact, however, the phenomena of the mental and social world smoothly pass from one into another. Their types are not classes with clearly defined borders. One can, and should, apply to them the principle "either-or", "less-more". Carnap follows this course in his reflections on the theory of probability (1962). Taking examples from linguistics, Carnap demonstrates that the original description of observed facts in categories of classificatory concepts must be supplemented with comparative categories. These categories enable the researcher to grasp the phenomenon referred to above as the smooth passage from type to type. Tegtmeier, who carried over the discussion on taxonomic problems to the physical sciences, made a critical analysis of comparative concepts (1981). In the light of his observations, this sphere of reality also furnishes no grounds for an unequivocal definition of classes of objects in respect to, for example, the graduation of magnitudes, temperatures, tones, etc. It must be added that the origination of isotopes disturbs the univocal nature of the categories of the periodic table, and doubts appear in the zoological systematization concerning the inclusion of concrete specimens in a particular family or group. So, even in the natural sciences doubts arise in the application of classificatory procedures. Physical and cultural anthropologists conducted a discussion on these subjects at the beginning of the sixties. It confirmed the

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justifiability of distinguishing between classifications and typologies (Bielicki, 1962; Wiercinski, 1962). Social and cultural phenomena submit to classificatory operations only at the cost of simplification. Applying typologies to them as forms of generalization is widespread both in scientific analysis and common practice. Generalization is necessary to prevent the human mind remaining empty after each experience, as Bertrand Russell put it, and to allow a person's actions to accumulate generalizations permitting predictions and guiding subsequent practice. However, these statements do not remove all the problems connected with the use of typological concepts. In application to studies of society and culture it is also necessary to introduce two concepts of related types—model and pattern, and eventually also norm. Borrowing from aesthetics and the history of art one can also refer to the theory of style (Schapiro, 1953; Wright, 1978). Style is a typological category, but it does not only serve for the description and categorization of phenomena. Since it applies to the products of conscious, purposeful human activity connected with the sphere of values and judgments, it is also a model, a norm to which the artist or writer must conform. Whether this is the Gothic style defined by Abbot Suger, or the poetic style codified by Boileau, it is a canonic model. However, when the creator who realizes the stylistic canons is an artist and not an artisan, every example of a work fitting within the style has specific, individual features. In France alone there is a wealth of cathedrals of the Gothic style! So, a theoretician of aesthetics or descriptive poetics, in constructing a model or type of style, makes generalizations. He abstracts from many creative details and from the mass of empirical data, and skeletonizes what, in accordance with the cognitive principle accepted, is essential for the style. A sociologist using the conception of ideal type as a research tool (Weber, 1968) proceeds in the same manner. However, that procedure requires great discipline precisely because it gives the researcher a lot of apparent freedom in the choice of criteria and the selection of the features creating types. A real person as the subject of study in his complete individuality is like a work of art. He constructs his identity only partially under the influence of biological necessity and the influences of social situations (e.g. Weber and Znaniecki exclude the former from their considerations). He completes and crowns his creation out of free, or at least ever more endogenous, choice, succumbing to the teleological models of member of a race, profession, nation. Weber expresses his view on this process by stating that the freer a

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person's actions are, "the more clearly in the end appears the concept of personality, whose essence consists in the constancy of its internal relation to particular final values and life meanings" (Weber, 1968, p. 132). According to Weber, the main part of this process is teleological and individual. Naturally, this individualistic approach to the "essence" of the human being does not make it impossible for Weber to apply a typological conception, which is one of the important elements of his theory. However, that conception has given rise to reservations; it has been called a methodological "utopia", not a classification scheme for complete empirical data. In his philosophical sociology Dilthey had, even earlier, applied the typological conception on the foundation of the principle of individuality, stressed just as strongly, or even more strongly, than Weber. Every individual is a "closed, specific reality" of will (Dilthey, 1924, p. 113). "Closed" (geschlossene) does not mean "isolated" from society and culture. "Delimitation" appears in social bodies and cultural communities joining individuals to them through practical dependencies and symbolic ties of recognized and mutual influences (ibid., p. 114). Creative individuals capable of influencing others fascinated Dilthey in particular. He made biographical studies of people who were famous in different fields: St. Augustine, Goethe, Novalis, Frederic the Great, Rousseau. His method was to use these real individuals as examples of a type. So, this was a method of empirical types. The individual is "the point of intersection of cultural processes" (Rickman, 1961, p. 251). The scientific use of biographies is possible thanks to this and only to this. So, Dilthey's typological method brought into relief individuality even more strongly than Weber's approach, and stands in opposition to the treatment of human social categories as aggregates. On the other hand, through an analysis of individuals, Dilthey strove to discover the general mechanisms of life. Florian Znaniecki was the first to treat biographies and autobiographies on the basis of a strictly sociological theory. However, he did not follow Dilthey's example. The use of biographical material in The Polish Peasant of Thomas and Znaniecki was not accompanied by the presentation of the method of analysis of the autobiography of Wladek. The text itself was published with only minor abridgments. Using the biographical method on a wider scale in People of the Present, he alluded not to Dilthey but to Weber's conception of ideal type, which he defined as a conceptual pattern serving for the mental arrangement of concrete reality (Znaniecki, 1974, p. 7).

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The emphasis on the role of the influence of social circles characteristic of Znaniecki's position does not negate individual differences within social types. Znaniecki writes that, under social influence, the individual learns to organize his personality purposefully, and to form himself as a social being (ibid., pp. 105, 113). So, the social adjustment of the individual is an active and individual process. From this follows first, differentiation of degrees of adjustment, and second, the possibility of rejecting actual personality models and creating new forms of civilization. Znaniecki did not apply his conceptions to national differences, but it is possible, and fitting, to apply them in this field. In this brief sketch of what a well-founded sociological analysis does not do with the conception of types of people participating in particular cultures and epochs one can find plausible grounds for presenting practices of generalization in popular thinking. An expression of these practices is the creation of stereotypes relating to various fields of social life, but manifesting themselves in especially intense form in notions about foreigners and one's own ethnic and national groups. In the third part of his study on public opinion, Lippmann, basing himself on John Dewey's social psychology, presented the conception of stereotype as a mechanism permitting economy in the description and perception of phenomena. Here, an opinion on which a description is based comes before experience of the real object and causes it to be perceived in a selective and simplified way. It suffices for the observer to notice a feature of the object belonging to a fixed stereotype to include this object in some known category without further analysis of its characteristics. Stereotypes, as pictures that "we carry in our heads" (Lippmann, 1946, p. 67), give us the feeling of familiarity and emotional confidence in relation to the world, because that world is filled with objects known to us and expected in advance. By providing an abbreviated, simplified method of cognition, stereotypes also make people more complacent. They feel themselves masters of their social world. They impose their own image on it, their own system of values, the belief in their own competence and capacity to master reality, which is so well known and so confidently evaluated. Lippmann criticized stereotypes on account of their anti-intellectualism—their use precedes the use of reason (p. 73). He also found fault with them on account of their effect, which in fact insulates people from reality

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because it blocks them from perceiving facts that are incompatible with the stereotype (the effect of a "blind spot"). However, Lippmann also mentions the positive effect of stereotypes from the point of view of the mind of the individual, his frame of mind, albeit leading to errors of cognition. He sees the remedy for these errors in the application of mass statistical studies that reveal the falseness of stereotypical pictures. Sociologists and psychologists who perceived the usefulness of the conception of stereotypes in studies of relations between groups laid special emphasis on the connection between stereotypes and prejudices. Jozef Chalasinski educed the role of stereotypes from propaganda materials on Polish-German relations during the plebiscite in Upper Silesia. He thereby supplemented Lippmann's conception with a stronger accent on the function of stereotypes as a factor that not only affirms a person's own worth but also disparages the enemy. He introduced the concept of the "defensive function" of stereotypes (Chaiasinski, 1935, p. 61). Many sociologists and social psychologists, such as Gordon Allport, Gustav Jahoda, and Henry Tajfel, have studied the connection between stereotypes of foreign groups and negative biases. The discussion among Polish sociologists, initiated but not completed at the beginning of the nineties (see Chlewinski, Kurcz, 1992), seems to bear out the conclusion that stereotypes are cognitive rather than evaluative in nature, which diverges from Lippmann, who combined these features in his concept of stereotype. However, one can substantiate such a view, especially when the concept of stereotype is extended beyond the compass of relations between ethnic groups. For example, professional stereotypes are not necessarily linked with biases. Neutral stereotypes can function in relations between nations that are not in conflict with each other. The question of the connection between stereotypes and biases—negative or positive—is still open. Returning to the general methodological problem, it must be stated that the understanding of stereotypes as a classification category, and not only a typological one, is of cardinal importance in order for them to function cognitively and practically. The main cognitive error and serious practical danger are related to this. Lippmann touched on this problem when he spoke of the "blind spot" in looking at reality through stereotypes. Classification is based on the principle of economy and separateness. Objects included in one class must fit within it completely and be excluded

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from other classes created on the basis of the same taxonomic principle. Otherwise, the classification would be incorrect. Large-scale sociological studies strive for clear classifications of responses, and for a description of the features of the object studied. Questionnaires are designed so as to contain formulations that cover all possible reactions, boiling them down to clear-cut categories (yes; no; I don't know), or at least enclosing them within the "menu" of suggested responses. Investigations of stereotypes, and attitudes toward national groups in particular, are replete with formulations that not only bring to light the existence of stereotypes in the respondents' minds, but also induce them to express stereotypes, and perhaps even confirm them in stereotypical thinking. Such actions can be provoked by requesting respondents to describe what the members of a given nation are like, instructing them to choose from a list of features the ones that they regard as characteristic of the group in question, or asking them to express their attitude towards the entire group (I like—don't like). The possibility of such effects can and may be prevented by changing the way of asking questions and wording sentences. The above remarks do not imply that sociological or psychological studies are mainly responsible for the origination and spread of stereotypes. The stereotypes of a person's own and foreign groups have been formulated ever since man started to live in social communities, as materials from the studies of primitive cultures and traditional societies seem to indicate. Many observations gathered in everyday experience and in systematic studies, including ones not using questionnaire methods, confirm the nature of stereotypes as classification categories admitting of no exception. In studies of national minorities in Poland I discovered characteristic examples of the functioning of stereotypes as rigid emotional-cognitive structures not susceptible to direct experience. One woman, who remembered with emotion Jews—neighbors from Brôdno, murdered during the occupation—at the same time nursed a strong but latent aggressive prejudice against Jews in general. She was unaware of the internal contradiction of her stance and did not experience cognitive dissonance on this account. A similar situation arose in a case described later in the autobiography of a young Ukrainian from Poland. Large-scale studies of attitudes indicate that Ukrainians, in addition to Gypsies, are a group that in Poland quite often arouses antipathy (Jasinska, 1992). Many examples of the rigidity and hardness of national stereotypes may be cited.

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Let us return to the problem of the differences between a classification and a typology. The enclosing of entire, internally differentiated human collectivities in tightly sealed classification compartments leads to a false picture of social reality. On the other hand, certain general ideas about the type of national groups fulfill the useful function of "maps in our heads". These maps make it easier for us to move about in the unfamiliar terrain of foreign cultures and to find our way in their system of values. However, they may mislead rather than inform us. That is why the data they contain should be treated as hypotheses, in the awareness that they are a product of our own, group or individual, construction. Stereotypes do not fulfill this condition on account of their arbitrariness. On the other hand, an ideal type by assumption is based on precisely such a principle. It is a conscious construction of the researcher (or practitioner). A reservation should be expressed here, however. Weber's ideal type also has arbitrary characteristics. Yet it is based on abstraction, on the idealization of essential features of the researcher's choice. The researcher decides which features to recognize as important, and he decides about the degree of abstraction. However, the researcher is aware of the differences between the conceptual apprehension and the figurative presentation of reality (Weber, 1968, p. 3). By calling an ideal type a Utopia he implies that real facts approach this reality in varying degrees, but never completely agree with it. Such caveats and awareness are absent in the popular construction of stereotypes. The scope of the concept of national group outlined by the conception of ideal type is open, in contrast to the closed category of stereotype. Tegtmeier, in his commentary on the theory of Carnap and Hempel, reminded that a concept is not composed of objects, only of objects as a graduated sequence falling under the concept (Tegtmeier, 1981, p. 6). The graduated nature of features is important for an analysis of aspects of belonging to a nation and national characteristics, or, in other terms, national identification and appropriation of the national culture. That is why in the argument that follows we must distinguish between national identification and the identity of the individual, as well as group national identity. The concept of group identity applies to entire nations or other communities understood collectively, not as a collection of individuals tied together by interaction, but as an organic whole, a social body. Such a literal approach

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to social groups was characteristic of the advocates of the social organism theory in the nineteenth century and was rejected by later sociological theories as naive. No one today looks for a close analogy between the tissues of a living body and social institutions. However, certain echoes of organic theories may be found in twentieth-century theories and even in contemporary notions. For example, the old idea of a common sensorium of the social organism has been revived. Pitrim Sorokin, who opposed the one-sidedness of quantitative methods of objectivistic sociology, singled out the weakness for fads and foibles to which the social sciences are prone (1956). The widespread use of the term "identity" in the last decades of the twentieth century has certain hallmarks of a fad. In studies on the nation the concept of identity today replaces the earlier conception of national character. The latter conception was used and abused for many centuries, often without even using the term itself. Reference was made earlier to the picture of Poles painted in the first book of Dlugosz's History of Poland and to the portraits of nationalities in Machiavelli's diplomatic reports. Herder's conceptions exerted a strong influence on the views on national characteristics held by members of the Romantic movement. In Polish Romantic poetry the characterization of Polishness appears very often, but not always in the form of an unmistakable stereotype. Apart from belles-lettres, it is worth mentioning Polish ideology of the beginning of the twentieth century: Antoni Choloniewski, Artur Gorski, and Feliks Koneczny painted a picture of Poland and the Poles in their writings on the spirit of Polish history and on the Polish logos and ethos, and spoke of the literature of Romanticism as Monsalvat, as the Holy Grail in Polish embodiment. This entire literary output and part of early Polish sociology and social psychology idealized the image of the Polish nation by constructing a positive national stereotype (Kurczewska, 1979). In contrast to such an orientation, objectivistic sociology made efforts to construct a value-free picture of national characteristics. It conducted questionnaire surveys, used measures of characteristics and scales, but confined itself almost exclusively to ethnographic descriptions. On this basis, sociology and cultural anthropology investigating primitive cultures moved quite close to each other. This approach to social-cultural wholes, in the intention of the authors, was supposed to exclude value judgments and provide only objective descriptions or create typological constructions. However, even

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here it was not always possible to prevent the spawning of stereotypes. As a result of the convergence of anthropology, sociology and psychology, a line of studies on the dependency of personality on culture sprang up in the school of Franz Boas (Kloskowska, 1969). This was an attempt to move away from generalizing theories of national character. Yet even this typical version came under severe criticism by later researchers, especially when the investigations were transposed to developed modern societies. Margaret Archer generally criticized this approach for its use of the "myth of the system" of culture. The concept of national character rarely appears in studies conducted at the end of the twentieth century. Peabody's book National Characteristics (1985) concerns the ideas of members of various countries about their own or foreigners' national characteristics. In fact, this is not an investigation of features that the researchers ascribe to a given nation, but a study of the stereotypes of this group in popular thinking—a person's own and that of others. That field of research also has been widely developed in Poland. It reduces methods of studying cultures and nations to a distributive approach. It sums up individual attitudes and opinions and on this basis makes an assessment of the xenophobia or openness of the society and depicts the stereotypes of others or of oneself that societies create. The concept of national, social, group and professional consciousness was the dominant category for a long time in those studies. The concept of identity is now replacing that category. Contrary to widespread practice, it must be stated that "national identity" should not serve as an analytic category if it is to be applied to a nation in the distributive approach. In the next chapter I try to explain why this is an improper use of the term "national identity" in respect to the attitudes of individuals. The concept of the national identity of entire nations in the collective sense may be warranted, with numerous provisos, but it should not be understood as an equivalent of the term "national character". Consistent with its theoretical source, the concept of identity stands for a reflexive relation of the subject in relation to itself. The national identity of a nation is its collective self-knowledge, its self-identification, the creation of its own picture and the entire contents of self-knowledge, but it is not a picture of the character of a nation constructed from the outside. When the nation is taken as the subject of its own self-knowledge, the question arises as to what the subject of this consciousness is. The nation is not a psychic entity to which cognitive, social and judgmental functions can be ascribed as

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a whole. It is not homogeneous in respect to the social and demographic features of its members, their life situations and their mental properties. Attributing self-knowledge to such an entity leads to the problem raised in connection with the conceptions of the proponents of the social organism theory. It is a question about the common sensorium—the organ of consciousness or gwasz-consciousness. The second question concerns the shape of this group identity, its contents. The answer to the second question is easier, but by no means explicit. The aforementioned early-twentieth-century ideologists of the Polish nation saw in the spirit of Poland the quintessence of noble-mindedness, generosity, courage and sublimeness. The Romantic bard who perceived the angelic soul of Poland imprisoned in an uncouth shell did not conjure up such a uniform vision of Polishness. Imitating Slowacki, Lechon, a contemporary of Choloniewski and Gorski, referred to Poland in a youthful verse as "the parrot of all peoples in a red crown" (Herostrates). However, this was only a passing moment in Lechon's otherwise different attitude towards Poland and Polishness. On the other hand, Gombrowicz was an uncompromising critic of Polish culture. He called for the rejection of the fatherland in favor of the "together-land" (synczyzna). Towards the end of the sixties, a satirist, who was vexed by the official nationalism of the People's Republic of Poland, lampooned the national tradition enshrined in Mickiewicz's poetry (Mrozek, Death of a Lieutenant). Gombrowicz and Mrozek are part and parcel of this tradition no less than Slowacki and Lechon. They are children of it, and without knowledge of this tradition they cannot be fully understood. However, a fuzzy picture of the national identity emerges from these examples, even in its selective form, which the conception of national identity adopted here defines, at least the core of this identity: the canon of literary and artistic output. The national group identity is understood here as the entire body of texts of the national culture, its symbols and values comprising the universe of this culture, creating its syntagma, especially its canonical core. However, this theoretical conception may give rise to reservations, because the elements selected above as an example of determinants of the national group identity were mainly or exclusively drawn from the domain of higher culture, "cultivated" culture (Bourdieu, Passeron, 1990). Besides this, the examples applied to the center and not to the peripheries of the national group identity. This repertoire or symbolic universe earlier had been recognized as equivalent to

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the concept of ideological fatherland. So one can say that the fatherland is the embodiment of the group identity of the nation in its collective sense. This is one, but not the only, understanding of the national group identity. To this reservation one can respond by saying that such a scope of potential culture is the sum of the contents that not fully, and not everywhere, are binding on the members of the national community. However, it is the repertoire from which the members of such a community must draw certain elements in certain situations. Another formulation of the term "group identity" may allude to Durkheim's conception of collective ideas. Durkheim had in mind primitive societies with a relatively simple and uniform social structure and culture. In respect to this subject, it was more warranted to speak of belief in the homogeneity of one's own picture and of one's assessment of oneself as a society—hence a common collective identity. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Bernard Giesen, in taking up Durkheim's subject matter, emphasize the opposition between the identity of a primitive group and the identity of a modern nation. The second community must be based not on the spontaneous relation of uniform, though cultural, patterns, but on intimate knowledge of the rules of action and tradition. According to these authors, the feeling of cultural community or group identity of the United States came before the political unification of the country. In Germany, on the other hand, Bildungsburgertum furnished a cultural code that shaped the German national identity, but the practical influence of the Napoleonic wars spread and disseminated this identity. Here we must return to the question of who may be regarded as the subject of group national identity in a complex national society? There is no doubt that culture, as defined by the examples cited, does not reach all members of the national group of developed societies in equal measure and every day. Its creator and addressee are mainly certain categories, which can be called the cultural elites of the nation. They are, so to speak, the counterpart of the sensorium in the conceptions of the proponents of the social organism theory. However, if one rejects the fiction of society as an organism or the nation as an organism, one cannot be content with such an analogy and such an answer. Its acceptance would be almost tantamount to replacing the Old Polish nation of the gentry with a modern nation of intellectuals and artists. Such a solution cannot be accepted, if only on account of common, intuitive knowledge of the facts of national life.

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Hence the concept of group identity first must be extended to numerous phenomena that are not so closely connected with the center of the cultural canon. We need to bear in mind the notion of building blocks as component elements of the nation and their partial interchangeability in various nations and at various moments in the history of these same communities. According to Stanistaw Ossowski, fatherland, which I propose to stand for the entire body of the contents received as group identity, embraces the entire symbolic space—the native land (Ossowski, 1967b). Mieczyslaw Por^bski (1990) also begins his characterization of Polishness by mentioning "places"—phenomena constituting the main factor of the nation. This factor may be regarded as the most universal, and may appear in two variants: as the main element of the small, local fatherland and of the imagined, ideological fatherland. Limitation of the feeling of bond with the national culture to the small fatherland is a sign of peripheral national consciousness. This type of attitude, which generally is regarded as a characteristic closer to ethnic groups than to mature nations, does not disappear even in modern, developed societies. In the approach based on the conception not of objective national features but of the group national identity as self-consciousness of the emanation of the community, the role of the center and of the leading national values and symbols as identifying and designating factors cannot be ignored. Remaining on the Polish national stage and anticipating the later, empirical, thoroughly documented conclusions, the circulation of the motifs of the higher, definitive culture between levels must be pointed out. The scope of their reception may expand, especially when a travesty is made of these motifs. The themes of the national mystery play of a modernistic poet may provide material for television cabarets. A popular bard of Solidarity sang a song whose refrain, echoing one of Lechon's poems, became a catchword even beyond the borders of Poland ("may Poland be Poland"). The words of an esoteric poet, whose name was not a household word, were engraved on the cross of the fallen shipyard workers. Finally, we cite a fact whose juxtaposition with previous examples may sound discordant, but the culture of large nations is composed of discords. The feeling of group national identity manifests itself most widely when a Polish soccer player, draped in a national symbol, scores a goal in an international match. Then "Poland" has scored a goal. At such times collective ideas of great carrying power and purely autotelic nature are manifested.

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In conclusion, it must be stated that, if it is not reduced to an ordinary stereotype and if it is not identical with the content of the national culture, with its symbolic universe, the concept of group national identity turns into a hypostasis. Then the question about its subject ceases to be important, but then we also leave the solid ground of empirical cognition.

6. Personal Identity as Related to National Identification and to the Appropriation of National Culture— the Valence of National Culture

We pass from the conception of group identity as a stereotype, a heuristic fiction or hypostasis, to the main problem of this book, to the question of the varieties of nationality among the members of every nation, especially the varieties of Polishness and nationality within Polish society. Questions should not be raised here concerning the "Polish identity" of Poles, nor should questions concerning Poles "in general". For "Poles in general", apprehended from the point of view of identity, are only a theoretical, ideological, or merely political fiction. This does not mean that the existence of the Polish nation or nations in general is questioned. The previous part of the book should leave no doubts on this score. However, a nation is understood as an important social entity, but only one of many: a wide and complex community of intercommunication imagined and realized by culture. Participation in the nation does not absorb and exhaust the entire person. That person is also a member of other communities, for example the family, many other entities, special-purpose groups and communities. Some of these are many-sided communities, tied to common values by an autotelic relationship. Others are only selective associations based on common interests. Some of them may have a mixed character—instrumental/autotelic. The individual is placed, or places himself, within these various associations, but does not spend himself entirely in connection with any one of them and draws certain elements of his self-identification from each and every one of them. The identity of the individual is composed of all these elements, drawn from various associations, together with other mental factors. That is why it is wrong to apply the term "national identity" to the individual. On the other hand, one can and should ask about the place, role

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and function of national identity and the appropriation of the national culture in the entire, total identity of the person. In the contemporary world this is still a very important question that deserves attention for its own sake. The above assertions are not the starting assumptions of the empirical investigations and data educed from the materials on which this work is based. Rather, they are conclusions, or, more precisely, they represent some of the conclusions resulting from the author's own studies and the theories of others. Putting them at the beginning of the presentation of the empirical investigations has the aim of making it easier to follow the arguments, in which the tangle of various threads obscures the clarity of the problems presented. Returning to the beginning, first we have to go back to the sources of the conception of identity and explain its meaning in accordance with the interpretation accepted. Relating the concept of identity to the individual leaves no doubt as to the subject of this phenomenon, or rather process. Identity ought to be understood as a process, like personality or self in Mead's approach. For identity is a subjective, self-reflexive aspect of the personality, differing from group identity, where the content of identity is a debatable problem. The concept of identity is applied widely to various sides of factors of human self-knowledge. So, people speak of identity connected with professional life, with gender, with political involvement or "political identity" (Chabel, 1986). In such an approach a person has many identities, and as a consequence this concept becomes the counterpart of the conception of social role rather than of personality. With such an understanding we lose sight of the important intention of using this concept in the intuitive deliberations on identity in the works of William James. In the stream of consciousness directed to the subj ect itself James perceived an unquestionable whole and gave the following answer on the nature of this phenomenon: "What then is this common whole? Its natural name is 'I myself [...] specific knowledge of my own states: warmth, intimacy and immediacy [...] I and what is mine, subjective life [...] I, now the same I as yesterday" (James, 1968, pp. 32, 33, 69). At least some theoreticians and researchers who apply the concept of identity and extend its range of applications are prone to accept such a universal approach to identity (Bokszanski, 1989). However, the unity and sameness of identity raise problems not solved by James's reflections, which were expressed simply, with strong conviction

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based on introspection. The positivist Durkheim and the psychoanalyst Freud both profess the internal break-up of man. Representatives of later philosophical anthropology and cultural anthropology take up the problem of knitting together identity. For Plessner, a certain reference of identity as a whole is the human body, which is not conceived as a biological organism but as an instrument of the person concealed inside. The body does not confine the person and therefore does not define him. Identity must be looked for in culture, both in one's own and in the one that draws its boundaries (Plessner, 1988). Schutz, Merleau-Ponty and Waldenfels take up similar problems connected with the functions of the body or corporeality (Coenen, 1989). All of these analyses have the aim of bringing into relief intersubjecti ve phenomena; hence they concern a sociological, if not strictly cultural, problem. Lévi-Strauss emphasized the fact that identity is taken from the outside by pointing out its dual social source—microstructural and emanating from the wider community and its culture. This second system itself is complicated and imposes the tasks of an individual synthesis. Moreover, the person is suspended between his individual specificity and the universality of human characteristics. His identity is supposed to manifest itself in this dynamic field (Lévi-Strauss, 1977, p. 99). Eric Erikson earlier, and with great consistency, developed the problem of individual identity. He started from psychoanalytic assumptions, but assigned such an important role to social-cultural influences that his position may be regarded as fundamental from the point of view of the conception of identity accepted in this work. Erikson repeatedly formulated this conception, which posited four aspects of identity: (1) the conscious feeling of individual identity, (2) the unconscious striving to preserve continuity of individual character, (3) tacit realization of a synthesis of the ego, and (4) the preservation of internal solidarity with group ideals and group identity (Erikson, 1960). Erikson, a psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was interested in phenomena called "the changing course of libido transformations" and development phases, in which identity crystallizes or disperses in a specific manner. The fourth of the above-mentioned factors is the most important for the sociologist and researcher of nationality. Erikson stressed that when we speak of identity, we have to do "with a problem situated in the core of the individual, but at the same time in the core of his common culture". He wrote that here we touch upon a process "which in essence determines the identity of those two identities" (Erikson, 1970,

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p. 22). He considered the roles played both by the individual and earlier communities, which "endure in us for ever" (ibid., p. 24). He did not reduce identity just to social roles, as is the case in "oversociologized" conceptions of personality, or to the "intersection of social circles", as Simmel did. Erikson at the same time emphasized the influence of social-cultural identifications strongly enough for his theory to become a useful sociological instrument for the investigation of individual aspects of nationality. The question of duration in time with simultaneous changeability raises problems in the theory of identity. James unequivocally stressed the principle of duration and continuity, which the passage quoted earlier illustrates. Erikson focused special attention on the problem of changes in duration. According to him, youth is the most important period in the formation of identity. This is a period in which the problem of the crystallization or diffusion of identity is resolved. This process consists not only in the maturation of the synthesizing functions of the ego in the psychoanalytic sense, but also in more intimate acquaintance with history, and recognition of the ties of an individual's personal biography with the social process and culture (Erikson, 1965, p. 75; 1970, p. 28). The many-sidedness of Erikson's studies and their acuteness, coupled with his profound psychological knowledge and extensive clinical practice, have given his work the status of a classic of the theory of identity. The study of famous creators of culture, for example the young Luther, and the conviction that an analysis of the biographies of famous persons may contribute much to the general theory of identity bring Erikson close to the humanistic approach to aspects of identity and multifarious identifications. Fundamental to his theory is the concept of identity as a unity of a procedural nature (as in G.H. Mead), developing, but enduring and preserving continuity in the course of development. Malek Chabel also took up the problem of the development of identity. He analyzed the formation of identity by using the metaphor of a spiral created by specific identities characteristic of successive phases of life but joined together by a common axis, around which successive rings of the spiral turn. Here, as in Erikson, it is assumed that basic stability or crystallization of identity occurs after a certain age is reached. Chabel calls this state the achievement of "basic identity" (Chabel, 1986, p. 29). This position is one of the arguments that prompted the author to take the category of young people as the main subject of the research carried out and presented in this book.

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Erikson, Chabel, and the empiricist Weinreich, accept the conception of identity as a whole. Such a conception is also unquestionably necessary from the standpoint of an analysis that has the aim of identifying elements of the whole and situating the factors singled out for study within this whole. Operating with the concept of many different identities breaks up this unity and makes it impossible to define the functions of individual identifications and roles. Thus it is incompatible with the internal feeling of the human subject, of man himself. James expressed this feeling not only, and not mainly, as a professional psychologist, but as a person experiencing his own identity. Among more recent empiricists Peter Weinreich quite consistently distinguishes the entire identity of the individual from his partial component identifications. He calls this the "situation" of the individual. Yet he did not avoid an interchangeable treatment of identity and identification when he wrote that: "A person's own ethnic identity is defined as part of the holistic self-construction composed of dimensions in which continuity is expressed between the construction of original origin and aspirations as to future ethnicity" (Weinreich, 1991, p. 12). Here he introduced the noteworthy problem of a possible change of ethnicity or national identification while retaining the unity of identity. Despite terminological inconsistency in the passage quoted above, he distinguishes an essential holistic identity and diverse identifications as its factors. Paul Ricoeur delves most deeply into the process of individual identity. He singles out two approaches to the concept of identity: identity as idem, namely, that which is the same {même, gleich), and identity as ipse, namely, the self {soi, selbst). The first refers to numbers, to the multitude of forms and the duration in time of the person. It corresponds, or is related, to our aspect of identification, of which there may be many. On the other hand, ipséité, or "sameness", is the total unity of identity (Ricoeur, 1988). The use of the concepts of professional identity, gender identity and national identity prompts us to ask how many identities a person has, and what happens to him as a subject in the face of this multiplicity that atomizes and breaks up his essential unity? The individual peculiarity of this unity is determined by various identifications, by the appropriation of manifold cultural content tying the individual with the outside world. This content constructs the bridge of intersubjectivity, but it is always a specific realization of common cultural elements and their specific configuration characteristic of the individual.

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Inclusion in the national community could be acknowledged as part of socialization. In part, at least, this inclusion takes place unthinkingly, usually during childhood, by imitation and direct contact with mature members of the community. This is the way most people acquire their native language, which in many other cultures, although not the Polish culture, is called the mother tongue to stress upbringing in contact with the first person who influences the child in the family. Language definitely is a very important element of nationality, but, consistent with the concept of nation as an imagined community, participation in the nation cannot be reduced to direct contacts and the contents conveyed through them. The nation here is by no means an absolute exception, because participation in a large modern society and state also requires mediation of imagined meanings and the action of various semiotic factors. However, the process of communication or semiotic contact in social groups and social and state institutions is instrumental in nature. Socialization is an instrument for introducing neophytes into this process, which in itself is an instrument for fulfilling the practical needs of existence. Language also plays such an instrumental role in social, economic, political-state relations in the strict sense. Transmitting knowledge of language and the entire socialization process serve to make novices ready to perform social roles, to appropriate the habits, knowledge and other attributes of social positions foreseen for the individual or constituting the object of his aspirations. Language has another role, however. It serves as the material for artistic creativity and as a tool for personal expression and communication with others in order to arrive at common emotional experiences. For most people only the "native" language, constituting an element of national culture, can perform these last functions. The nation is a community of autotelic values and the symbols that express them. The symbols and values constituting the culture of a nation, not in traditional but in developed societies, cannot be appropriated and experienced only in direct contacts between the sender and the receiver. Their role is not reduced to an instrument of adjustment. For these reasons I suggest separating the process of the formation of national participation under the term "culturization" (Kloskowska, 1985b). Culturization is the initiation and entrance into the universe of symbolic culture in general, including national culture. In a certain area this process, like socialization, takes place through direct contact with members of social

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groups and institutions—the family, school, and institutions for the dissemination of culture. The personnel of these groups and institutions play only the role of "gatekeepers", according to the expression of researchers of communication processes. These gatekeepers, in various ways, control the inflow of cultural content and access to this content. However, that is a preliminary, external function, albeit not without significance for shaping later criteria of independent choice and assessment made by the individual. Contact with the contents of culture, with artists, scholars, thinkers, performers of theatrical and musical works, is of cardinal importance for the process of culturization. To all intents and purposes, this contact may lack the context of direct social contacts. Thanks to the preservation of symbolic messages in writing, paintings, films, musical scores or electronic recordings and their transmission in pure space, the sender-creator communes with the recipient, who by the act of active reception of the work becomes a co-creator of values. The pure space of such symbolic communication is the national culture, its canon, the fatherland as the embodiment of the symbolic universe of national culture. But not only national culture. Culturization may introduce elements independent of proximate contacts and of a structurally defined life situation into the experience of the individual. The possibility of choosing values, hence the freedom to shape one's identity intentionally, is greater here than in societal conditions of socialization. A person carries in himself not only the results of the real behavioral course of his life, but also symbolic messages coded in his consciousness, messages previously found, decoded, interpreted in intellectual and artistic works, in the description of history and in literary fiction. These messages may open before him an immense world of other people's experiences and the values of many different national cultures. Appropriation of a particular national culture, for example Polishness, by way of culturization, does not exhaust the possibility of developing the sense of an imagined community through culturization. A symbolic community based on experiences derived from reading Dostoyevsky and Proust, from listening to the music of Beethoven and Lutoslawski, from looking at the paintings of Leonardo, Chagall and Braque, will be a wider, European, perhaps even global community, and even more diverse. One also cannot forget about communities of rock and blues, of detective series and soap-opera melodrama. The possibility that such communities may come into existence cannot be rejected out of hand. That eventuality is only hypothetical for

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the time being, because the audience of higher or popular culture lacks other numerous determinants characteristic of a nation and constituting the broader basis of identification beyond similarity of certain tastes and experiences of a limited scope. National culture is a system composed of very many kinds of elements. This system was previously called a syntagma on account of the interdependence and connection of elements suggestive of the contiguity of units of linguistic utterance. Even if the appropriation of this culture by a particular community is not complete, it does nevertheless encompass numerous diverse factors. This process, as a rule, is accompanied by a stronger or weaker feeling on the part of this community that this culture lies within the ambit of its own values and that this community belongs to the category of its inheritors. On the other hand, that feeling is not as universal and as strong as the votaries of extreme nationalist ideology would believe. However, it is hard to deny its existence and force in certain people and in certain situations. This book is devoted to an investigation and analysis of its nature and scope. Among the hypotheses accepted in connection with this task is differentiation between the attitude towards the culture of a person's own community and towards the cultures of foreign communities. This differentiation, which was formulated by William James and paraphrased by Alfred Schütz, defines the attitude towards one's own culture as "knowledge of acquaintance", and the attitude towards foreign cultures as "knowledge about" (Schütz, 1960). The individual knows the culture of his community "first hand", as it were, at least in part from early childhood and often from sentiment and a feeling of certainty and familiarity resulting therefrom. To these expressions could be added a comparison that follows the same line of argumentation. A person knows the culture of his own community like the works of authors that he has read by himself, but he often knows a foreign culture in the same way as someone is acquainted with works described in a textbook, critical studies or an encyclopaedia. Sometimes this is really "knowledge about" a given phenomenon without actual familiarity with it, without having any experience of it that leaves a trace of emotion and the feeling of authenticity of contact. However, even if the elements of a foreign culture provide the most moving experiences and feeling of closeness, they function as though they had been removed from the context of their origin. Wide and intimate knowledge of the entire national culture constituting their source does not accompany their

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reception. This limitation extends to many fields of a foreign culture, to the sphere of customs even more than to literature, art and music. The said differentiation seems convincing, because it conforms to popular ideas and observations. However, this differentiation should be treated with caution, for stereotypes come into existence from commonplace observations. So, one must look for methods to determine what one's national culture consists of and how it actually functions at the grass roots, in the experience of individual members of the nation and in comparison with attitudes toward elements of a foreign culture. For in individual cases, in respect to selected elements, these attitudes could stray from the previously accepted differentiation pertaining to one's own and someone else's culture. Only an empirical analysis may shed light on this problem. The investigations presented in the subsequent parts of this book serve this aim. The concept of "valence" as a cultural factor of individual identity will be defined and spelled out more precisely in the course of the analysis. Already now it can be stated that in light of autobiographical materials the clear-cut ascription to only one national culture is more problematical than could be gathered from the definitions of "own culture" expressed above. The definition of the national identity of an individual appears to be relatively more simple. Identification may be expressed in the form of a point-blank declaration as a response to a direct question about nationality. It may take on other forms close to what Renan understood as a plebiscite. However, this is not a daily plebiscite. In light of a careful investigation the question of national identification also turns out to be not as simple and clear-cut as might have been expected. The place of national identification in the total identity of the individual not only is individually differentiated, but also depends on the life situation of the person and of his entire nation. In extreme cases identification undergoes a radical change. Examples of its uncertainty are numerous. Sometimes identification is in a state of latency, but despite this it can manifest itself clearly in changed circumstances. In keeping with what has been stated, studies of nationality should consider two aspects of this phenomenon: national identification and the appropriation of culture, henceforth called valence. Both of these factors are subject to situational changes and are gradated. The following parts of the book are devoted to documentation of that statement, resulting from the empirical studies conducted. An extensive presentation of the biographical materials will acquaint the reader with the direct, living testimony of human experi-

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ences connected with culture, with nationality and with supranational communities emerging against the background of the polyvalence of cultural experiences. All of these considerations apply first and foremost and directly to aspects of national cultures and nations viewed through the prism of individual experiences and actions constituting the core and roots of national and cultural reality. The materials used for this purpose and the analyses made are, at the same time, a contribution to the theory of personality as an objective manifestation of systematic human actions and to the theory of identity as a subjective construction of self-knowledge and feeling of self. Valence or culture and national identification, appropriated and acknowledged as a person's own, is a part of, and factor of, global personality and identity, which is a whole and a unity, but composed of many parts, changeable and sometimes full of conflicts. An analysis of identity based on empirical materials may contribute to discharging these tensions, but first and foremost to bringing them to the surface.

7. Empirical Materials—Concepts and Methods

When making a study of nationality in the individual aspect, we enter an area that touches upon social psychology. On the other hand, in the "individualizing reduction" proposed above, the culturological-sociological approach to the phenomenon is also marked by a certain peculiarity. It is not only theories that are important for the qualification of its features, but also the method associated with these theories. When passing from the collective to the distributive approach to the nation, individualizing reduction is applied here, which means that phenomena described as a "nation" and "national cultures" are investigated at the level of the experiences of individuals, members of nations and participants in national cultures. Best suited to this approach is the most personal and complete material from the subjects of the study themselves and constituting the most faithful and spontaneous registration of the course of their lives, their value judgments, opinions and emotions. It is very difficult to meet all of these conditions. Autobiographies can fulfill them better than other materials. Interest in a person's own life as a subject of reflection, and the description resulting from this reflection, are not recent products of modern individualism, although they appear more strongly connected with European culture with Greco-Roman roots than with any other cultural tradition. Old biographies passed down orally, which have left no traces, must be excluded from consideration. Famous written biographies date from antiquity and the Middle Ages. The bibliography of Georg Misch (1949-1955) is an indication of how many there are. Here we recall only the De se ipso of Ovid and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. In Latin-Polish literature Klemens Janicki followed the footsteps of Ovid, and the Memoirs of Jan Chryzostom Pasek

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are the most interesting nobleman's example of this genre, of which the English diary of Samuel Pepys is a Western example. Romanticism greatly invigorated the personal form and often literary creativity at the same time. The works of Dilthey provided the theoretical inspiration to use such materials in the humanities, although humanist scholars have not appreciated this as much as they should have. Dilthey's methodology, which is individualizing but strives to make generalizations, found expression in his analysis of the Renaissance through construction of the type of Renaissance man. While it is true that Dilthey was generally interested in describing life, he did not limit himself to autobiographies. This sets him somewhat apart from Znaniecki. What was important for Dilthey's philosophy of life was searching for documents of the life process in biographical description in general, and the objects of his studies were famous people, men of action and writers and artists—Luther, Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, Goethe, Novalis (Dilthey, 1927; 1982; Rickman, 1961). The lasting importance of Dilthey for the sociological theory of culture stems from his approach to psychic life as a historical phenomenon expressing itself through various systems of culture (Dilthey, 1982, p. 29). The analytical categories that he used apply rather to historical periods than to nations. However, his conception of representative individuals may also be used to study the individual reflection of national cultures (Dilthey, 1924, p. 236). Dilthey introduced to his sweeping humanistic theory several categories of analysis that have special importance for the sociological biographical method. These categories are the following: generation, event, practical experience (Erfahrung) and emotional experience (Erlebnis). Differentiation between the last two concepts may be especially useful for the autobiographies of writers and artists. In his interpretation of the concept of emotional experience Gadamer concludes that this phenomenon is teleological in nature, as with Husserl. It is a part of the life process separated from the ordinary course of experiences on account of its special significance, and crystallizes in recollection (Gadamer, 1993, p. 92). In accordance with this conception, the researcher of an autobiography has to do with a deposition of emotional experiences, always to some extent subjected to processing in memory and, ex post, expressing the subject's hierarchy of importance. Some autobiographical accounts seem to contradict this interpretation, because through memory they extract from the past details that on the surface have no life significance (Lem, 1968). Generally speaking, however, autobiographical

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materials that present the entire course of life seem to confirm the usefulness of Dilthey's conception for an analysis of the phenomena of identity and identification. Also important for biographical analysis is the conception of world-view (Dilthey, 1987). For Dilthey, an especially valuable form of individual expression, which never leads one astray, is not the autobiography but the artistic work, which is the source for laying open the personality of creative people (Dilthey, 1977). This is the reason for his interest in artists and other sources that can provide additional material and serve as a control of conclusions drawn from autobiographical studies. The sociological approach naturally must not, and cannot, limit itself to one source. It also draws from related sociological inspirations. Thomas and Znaniecki, in The Polish Peasant, stated that the world of the individual should be apprehended not from the standpoint of his drives but from the standpoint of attitudes that correspond not purely to individual but to social values. That approach to the problem has its basis and continuation in Znaniecki's theory of cultural reality and in his conception of the humanistic coefficient. The use of the term "world of the individual" brings this position close to the phenomenological conception of the experienced world (Lebenswelt). The phenomena of the nation and nationality are elements of the human experienced world. More profound cognizance of this world requires going back to people's emotional and practical experiences, which are separated in accordance with Dilthey's definition cited earlier. Practical experience is defined as reactions to everyday, ordinary facts, to which the individual's consciousness does not ascribe particular life importance. Emotional experiences refer to events—facts of special life significance, which have evoked strong reactions and left a permanent trace in the individual's consciousness, strongly influencing his personality. Both of these elements comprise the totality of human life, in the course of which identity is formed and in which it is expressed. The authors of The Polish Peasant regarded biographies of individuals as excellent material for studying all the problems of changing social life. In their opinion, suitable representative cases, but not representative in the statistical sense, should be selected from this heterogeneous material. An analysis of the course of life of selected individuals reflected in autobiographies provides the basis for a construction of types. A type that is close to the facts is supposed to manifest the relative universality of selected features.

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Despite the specific "genetic direction" characteristic of every individual, namely, the development tendency resulting from individual attitudes, a certain standardization of types occurs under the influence of the environment stabilizing values. Two polar types were presented in The Polish Peasant: the Philistine type and the Gypsy type. After some years Znaniecki returned to the conception of personality in People of Today and the Civilization of the Future and presented a more elaborate typology, but he did not explain in detail the materials on which it was based, norhow it had been constructed (Znaniecki, 1974). Herbert Blumer, in 1939, leveled severe criticism at the theoretical conceptions of The Polish Peasant, and postwar sociology returned to more precise methods based on a statistical analysis of large numbers of standardized data. However, the use of biographical materials in the social sciences was not rejected entirely, and from the eighties it has been experiencing a definite renascence. Later scholars waved aside some of the objections of the methods of The Polish Peasant. However, new ones were raised (Ferrarotti, 1980). In the new phase of popularity of autobiographical studies, research techniques have changed and methodological consciousness has become more sophisticated. Autobiographical materials cannot constitute the sole basis of sociological studies. They surely are more suitable for investigating problems that require not so much a broad inspection of social structures as a more in-depth psychosocial analysis. Daniel Bertaux mentions two categories of reference for studies using autobiographical materials. The first are social-structural phenomena; the second, symbolic phenomena. In the second case the researcher, through the form and content of biographical accounts, attempts to acquire knowledge of the layer of values and representations that were shaped on the collective level in order to reach the subject nature of the individuals studied (Bertaux, 1980). This second category of autobiographical materials seems to be the most appropriate domain for the application of autobiographical materials. Aspects of nationality, examined from the angle of their place and functions in the entire identity of individuals, are an especially appropriate field for studies of this type. Here personal biography intertwines most closely with the history of the symbolic community—in accordance with Erikson's thesis. Operating with the concepts of identification, attitudes and values, requires delving into the most personal experiences of the persons studied.

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We spoke earlier of the danger of stereotyping responses and imposing suggestions, associated with large-scale surveys using over-compartmentalized questions. Starting from an autobiographical account preceded by a proper introduction should not impose anything on the subject and allow him to place the problems being studied in a context of his own choice. This context would be more natural and closer to his ordinary, original way of thinking, experiencing values and manifesting attitudes. Although such an approach would entirely omit problems of special interest to the researcher, it would also provide grounds for important conclusions. However, the optimism of researchers expressed in the position presented here requires some critical comments, which will be set forth in connection with the description of the origination and collection of the data. An autobiographical story alone is often insufficient for ascertaining many assertions essential for the subject matter of the investigation. It then becomes necessary to conduct an additional questionnaire interview with open-ended questions that are as general as possible and not suggestive, constituting a supplement to the biographical facts. This is obviously possible only in respect to actually living authors of the responses or the autobiographical account and to whom the researcher has access. This method has been used in the section of empirical studies, which were conducted by means of interviews recorded on a tape-recorder. They constitute the main material of the subsequent analysis. The general category of personal materials of an autobiographical nature includes many varieties. First and foremost, these can be existing materials, which originated in various circumstances without the researcher's participation. Most often these are written materials and come from different historical periods. Autobiographies or biographical notes of this type are divided fundamentally into diaries and memoirs. Memoirs or diaries written with varying degrees of orderliness and at various periods in a person's life differ in their time perspective from autobiographies in the form of memoirs. A researcher who acknowledges a memoir-diary as truly authentic, hence as the best form of material, ought to be aware that "a diary in the strict sense of the word", as Bronislaw Malinowski put it, is not a simultaneous description of reality. Only a film camera could provide such a recording, but that would be a purely behavioral recording, bereft of the testimony of the considerations and reflections of the observed object.

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The diaries of Samuel Pepys, Benjamin Constant, Stanislaw Ossowski or Jozef Chalasinski are not simultaneous recordings of events taking place. The entries came into existence, as a rule, after a delay of several hours, sometimes a few days, following a temporary interruption. They are accounts from the past, but this is a past with a short time perspective. Thanks to this, individual entries are closer to the mental states of the author, to his knowledge, value judgments and emotions in that period or even in the moment of relating them. For this reason a diary ought to be regarded as ideal autobiographical material, serving as the basis for both sociological and psychosocial studies, especially of studies using the conceptual category of the identity of the individual. The above remarks pertain to a simple understanding of the time interval between the real experiencing of events and the verbal relation of those events. This problem applies to Ricoeur's conception of distancing taking place by way of a text that belongs neither to the author nor to the reader (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 100). This is a conception from a different methodological system and theoretical level. It is taken into consideration here because it opens up a view on more complicated and sophisticated analyses of texts. However, it is a perspective that we will not be able to delve into more deeply here; rather, we will stay closer to an empirical approach. Within this perspective, close to empiricism, it is simply asserted that a person has only one life course and a memoir-diary is close to this course, though it is not this course itself (Dobrowolska, 1992). It is, rather, only a small fragment of this course, filled in with written accounts from the day lived through. Only a short time interval separates it from other emotional experiences. However, it differs from them in that it is not a part of immediate interactions with other people. It can be only an instrument of delayed semiotic interaction, when readers-recipients appear. Even only relative closeness to the life course may, ceteris paribus, constitute an advantage with respect to the diary as research material. On the other hand, from a certain position the presentation of the author's experiences in almost raw, practically unprocessed form may be regarded as a disadvantage. A retrospective autobiography in the form of memoirs written down or recorded as a discourse originates sometimes in a situational perspective very remote from the facts presented. Thus it is subject to the influence of the situation in which it is written, which is different from the situations described. Besides this, it is subjected to manipulative constructions by the

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author, which the researcher may regard as making his work easier or as the source of additional data. For in this picture of his life the author-respondent may present constructions that Alfred Schütz called "models of the first degree", which can serve not only as an object of analysis but as an element of the synthesis created (Schütz, 1970). According to Daniel Bertaux, who in this connection refers to Polish competitions for the best memoirs, no other method compares with the act of stimulation by writing of the "reflective consciousness". On the other hand, an oral interview, involving temporary contact between two persons, leaves no time for the formation of such reflective consciousness on the part of the respondent (Bertaux, 1980, p. 216). The materials used in our investigations confirm this opinion in respect to respondents with a lower level of education, although even here the lack of reflective consciousness in the interview is not the rule. In respondents with a higher level of education this consciousness is very evident even in the recording of an oral interview. However, this also is not universal. The assessment of methods must depend on the goal and subject of the study. If a researcher is interested in the system of values and attitudes of the author of an autobiography, he must acknowledge the usefulness of "models of the first degree" as the material for his own conclusions, and the need to allow time for the respondent's reflective consciousness to form. On the other hand, the faithfulness of the respondent's account in respect to the objectively observable facts may be of secondary importance. The researcher can, and should, seek knowledge of these facts in various additional sources, if that is possible and if it is important for the topic studied. One cannot accept Znaniecki's indifference to the "material truth" of an autobiographical story in respect to every problem. Without certain knowledge about the relationship between facts and their description or interpretation on the part of the respondent it is not possible to acquire proper knowledge and to determine attitudes in certain diaries. Moreover, it should be remembered that the construction of the course of a person's life contained in a retrospective biography is always subjected to the situational contexts in which it was created. Although having only one life course, a person can present many different autobiographies, which are not a result of deceit but of specific selection and interpretation. Even more so, an individual may have many biographies written by different persons from different points of view. It suffices to recall the hagiographies of saints, heroes or political leaders written by their followers and supporters, and the

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diametrically different pictures painted by opponents or historians professing objectivity or other criteria of evaluation. While emphasizing the role of situational factors in the writing of retrospective biographies, it should be added that diary entries, with their short time perspective, also are not free from similar, even stronger, influences. After the Soviet authorities abandoned Lvov in June 1941, Stanislaw Ossowski, in his diary-memoirs, presented a picture of the Polish and Ukrainian prisoners murdered in the prison in L^cka Street before this evacuation. This entry probably saved his life when, shortly afterwards, he was arrested by the Gestapo. However, this experience, together with the underground code of conduct, influenced him to delete part of this entry after the war and to cease writing his diary after returning to Warsaw in 1941, where he was involved in the underground movement (Ossowski, diary in manuscript form). Maria D^browska likewise passed over in silence her underground activity in her diaries of the war period. The conceptions of diaries and their purposes also exerted a clear but different influence on the shape of the diary entries of Gombrowicz and Lechori, written after emigration and intended for publication. A researcher analyzing autobiographical materials—both diaries and memoirs, both those already existing and those in whose writing he has been instrumental—must take into consideration the situation of the author, his manifest or presumed motives, and the probable principle of selection and interpretation of the facts. The author of this book has attempted to take them, at least partially, into account in the analysis presented below of the individual aspects of national problems. In addition to the situational context of an autobiography, another factor unquestionably is no less important: the situational context of the life course, which also needs to be considered. Norman Denzin, in connection with this problem, distinguished between a "life story" and a "life history". The former is immanently analyzed, homogeneous material that comes from the life experiencing subject. The latter must be a compilation or synthesis that draws on many sources and various individual testimonies concerning the subject of the study and the documents of his life (Denzin, 1970). These two concepts are close to the differentiation between an autobiography and a biography. A multiplicity and variety of sources are required from the latter. However, it is also advisable that the analysis of an autobiography be buttressed by as wide a range as possible of supplementary information about the author and the

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context of his life. Denzin called the principle of such a many-sided analysis the application of triangulation, which means looking at one object from several points of view. The monograph about the Sanchez family is an example of specific triangulation. There, the situation of a father and children from a Mexican village emerges from a listing of recorded descriptions of the life of the individual family members (Lewis, 1964). Many different versions of triangulation are possible. The basic method, which is not always conscious and adequately explained, is a confrontation between the immanent point of view characteristic of the author and hero of the description, and the point of view of the author of the analysis and report. Schütz called this construction a model of the second degree. A written autobiography is always a text. This statement applies both to memoirs-diaries and to recollections, to materials presented in written form by their authors or copied from a magnetic tape. Analysis of recordings or spoken texts alone, or of a discourse, is not widely used. On the other hand, reference to passages of a recorded discourse provides access to important paralinguistic forms of expression or to the phonetic characteristics of the respondent's language. Thus it is indispensable for treating some subjects. The manner or method of analysis gives rise to particular doubts. Investigations of personal materials do not rely exclusively on the statistical techniques that were developed for the contents of the mass media and polls. Bearing in mind that autobiographies in written form are texts, it seems appropriate to apply textual hermeneutics, in the widest sense of the term, to their study. In this regard, the problems that Ricoeur's hermeneutics present to researchers cannot be omitted. This applies especially to the analysis of discourse. The main part of the autobiographies analyzed in this book came into existence in the form of a discourse that was recorded and then taken down word for word. Ricoeur does not take into consideration such facts, and draws a line between a discourse and a written text. According to him, a discourse, as a long-drawn-out utterance, is an event. It is temporal in nature, takes place in the present, and, most importantly, refers back to the person who pronounces it (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 104; 1989, p. 227). Ricoeur underscores this grounding of discourse in the subject by opposing it to language (langue) as a code. In this approach a discourse does not stand in opposition to a text. Ricoeur cites Jakobson's functions of presentation and expression, and hence also refers to the function of the subject's manner of speaking. The author, or

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"lyric subject", is another matter. In the argumentation against Dilthey and his Kantian orientation directed to the person, Ricoeur very strongly opposes to personal discourse a text as a fixed sediment of the content of what is spoken, and as an autonomous object. He is inclined to accept the phenomenological reference to being in the world, but he rejects Dilthey's psychologism. At the same time, however, according to Ricoeur, individual identity is most fully expressed in a narrative description. "Consciousness of self is an interpretation; and an interpretation of self in description finds the form of mediation privileged among other signs and symbols" (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 295). The problem of textual hermeneutics goes beyond method and enters the domains of epistemology and ontology. Penetration of this problem exceeds the possibilities and needs of empirical sociological analysis. By tying the autobiographical texts analyzed with their authors in the approach used here we surely come closer to Dilthey and his Kantian connections. This hardly means that we accept all of the epistemological foundations of this position. Neither does our approach involve making psychological speculations. The autobiographical texts are related here to the authors of the discourse and are not depersonalized. That is why these persons are called authors rather than "respondents". The assertions are ascribed to them and not indirectly to the texts, although interpretations have been attempted in the analysis. It is easier to relate the concept of values, rather than attitudes, to a text, but the latter term also has been considered in the analysis. Although no attempt was made to probe into the mind of the authors, their social situation was considered. That is due to the sociological nature and tasks of the work. The direct subject of the analysis was mainly the copied texts, more rarely the discourse, which also was recorded on tape. The use of expressions referring to the text ("the text says", "the text presents") instead of to the author seemed artificial and complicated the manner of presentation. Thus the author as subject remained present in the text. However, the recorded object was the focus of the analysis: its declared values, options of national membership, and the attitudes expressed towards others, towards foreigners and towards the symbols of a person's own cultural community. Many other conclusions that were omitted here can be drawn from the autobiographical texts analyzed. The full identity of the authors showed through very clearly in many cases. The attitude of the authors towards the task of a spoken autobiography and a dialogue on its subject varied—from

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resistance and sarcastic aloofness, to the spontaneously expressed need for defining and expressing oneself in relation to the researcher/recipient of the communication. However, these problems were omitted or considered only to a minimum degree. The method of analysis also departs from the kind of hair-splitting linguistic studies of each unit of the text conducted by some sociolinguists. Lengthy quotations of passages of the text serve to document the ways of analysis, and at the same time they are a partial repayment of the debt to the actual authors of the autobiographies. In short, when autobiographical materials are used to study the national aspect of identity, one must treat the expression of the author-subject selectively. This expression leads to more general national processes materializing in individual experience. These processes are shaped by the participation of the individual in the life of his ethnic or national community, by contact with the cultural universe of this community or with the universes of other communities whose culture the individual chooses voluntarily. In the last case the individual crosses the borders of national uniformity—of cultural univalence. Thus an autobiography is also a piece of evidence that indicates the social-cultural situation of the individual, and the analysis of the autobiography focuses on the presentation functions of the text. This combined principle of interpretation is accepted in the analyses of the materials of this work. National experiences and individual experiences interest us as the material from which, in fact, in the truest sense, the nation as a cultural unit is composed, not as an entirely uniform community, but with features and functions that dovetail but do not completely overlap. This is the task of hermeneutics in the sociological form of this method applied here, which goes to the grass roots of national cultures. The goal of the study is to define both the method of analysis and the selection of authors whose autobiographical texts are its subject. This selection, as a preliminary act, needs to be presented in connection with the topic of each chapter. In Part I of this book the diversity of the nation was stressed in its long historical duration and multiplicity of regional varieties. Wolker Connor takes a similar position when he argues against both the supporters of the very remote genesis of nations and the proponents of the theory of its sudden but late appearance. He accurately describes the formation of a nation as a process, but he is not consistent in his remarks on the date of its conclusion (Connor, 1994, p. 220). Meanwhile, one can probably accept the statement

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that it is not so much that this process ends very late, as that, very probably, it does not end at all. It waxes and wanes depending on the situation, on the social category of the persons participating in the process, and even on their individual features. The historical perspective makes it possible to show this process only from a remote viewpoint, as a phenomenon viewed through a telescope, as it were, providing a wider but not very sharp picture. Individualizing reduction operating with personal materials is supposed to bring problems of national reality, examined in the experiences of concrete people, closer to us, and to illuminate them in greater detail. However, the application of individualizing reduction needs a diversity of objects of study in order to avoid narrowing the problem. The task of the analysis here is supposed to be not only "getting to the subjectivity" of the author in accordance with Schleiermacher's advice (Ricoeur, 1989, p. 197). Through the individual practical experience and national emotional experience of the individual it also is supposed to reach possible types in which national values have manifested themselves in history and in the social structure. This stance is compatible with Dilthey's historicism and with Znaniecki's culturalistic sociology, and by reference to intersubjectivity it comes close to certain approaches of phenomenology (Grathoff, 1989; 1991). The theoretical diversity of sources of inspiration could be interpreted as eclectic vacillation. I would be disinclined to accept such a charge. Understanding and explaining social phenomena need not be treated as a kind of intellectual game, as the task of creating a theory that is elegant in its stylistically uniform structure. The theory ought to be, at least sometimes, also close to the facts explained and subjected to interpretative analysis. And in this way it also ought to come closer to the emotional and practical experiences of the recipients/readers, who sometimes with difficulty search for their own national self-identification, sometimes in everyday life forgetting about their own national problems. For these reasons such persons are unprepared to solve these problems in crisis situations or in conditions of the constant tension of national emotions. Here the functions and nature of ties with the national culture examined at the grass roots manifest themselves clearly. They show themselves in the individual bases of its formation and materialization in concrete human actions, in concrete declarations of emotions and judgments. For understandable reasons it is not possible to base autobiographical studies of cases on a representative sample, which is a condition of large-scale

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questionnaire surveys. The number of cases chosen must also be considerably reduced on account of the costs and laboriousness of the analysis, as well as the difficulty of enlisting the cooperation of all persons selected. Thus the material for analysis must be all the more carefully selected and explained. The starting point in this work were those kinds of situations in which national membership plays, or could play, an especially visible role in the total identity of people. A certain common category of such situations is an international conflict or a domestic crisis. Some of the autobiographies analyzed below have wartime events as their background—the severest form of crisis. This applies to authors of the older generation. A national conflict is present in the background of most of the materials presenting the phenomenon of conversion or the situation of minority groups. In those cases the tension is not as intense as war but it is more permanent. The processes of national conversion and minority status are associated with a situation that activates the feeling of nationality. In general terms that situation may be called a borderland category. In the literal and common understanding, a borderland is a territory located between two states or regions and characterized by movements of ethnic or national populations due to spatial proximity. In the broader meaning accepted here a borderland consists of all of the neighboring national cultures that can stem from nationally and ethnically mixed genealogy and marriage, from membership in a national or ethnic minority on a territory dominated by another national culture, and from emigration and individual national conversion, that is, passing from one national self-identification to another, but without severing all previous cultural ties. So, this is a borderland in the psychological, non-territorial sense. The concept of borderland, both in the spatial and psychological sense, will function especially in the analysis of empirical materials pertaining to the question of national and regional minorities. All of the aforementioned varieties of borderland national situations will be represented in the further course of the analysis. It must be stressed here that these are not pure, distinct classification categories. They are types, within which various factors characteristic of a borderland situation can crisscross. The materials illustrating cases of national conversion simultaneously come from an ethnic borderland and/or a mixed genealogy. The situation of émigrés is analyzed in connection with the wartime crisis of the position of the nation, and in one case is an example of a genealogical

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borderland. Finally, three minority groups depict different kinds of minority position (Belarussian, Ukrainian) and a gyaW-minority constituting a regional ethnic rather than national community, oscillating between two nations but located at a certain distance from the state border (Opole, Silesia). Through the Opole materials one grapples here with both the problem of regional differentiation and the problem of Germans as "foreigners" par excellence. The problem of the borderland is closely bound up with the problem of extraneousness. In sociology this problem has been described as a relationship between an "in-group" and an "out-group". However, for Simmel and Schütz this distinction appeared in an individualized perspective, but with reference to the general category of a "stranger" standing face to face with other social and cultural groups. The stranger examined by Simmel has contacts with an alien culture that are limited to precisely defined social roles, for example trader, merchant. Such a person's adjustment to the group is narrow in scope, so it is easier to accept him within these boundaries although he always will remain a representative of the general category of "others". Schütz, on the other hand, is interested in permanent contact and full participation in the group, which has more stringent requirements for entering the inner sanctum of "one's folks" (Simmel, 1975; Schütz, 1960). Basing his arguments on sociological and ethnological studies, Znaniecki asserted that the gradation and changeability of the feeling of strangeness depend on the circumstances (situation). In his analysis of materials from a competition on the subject of Poznan he pointed out the change in the attitude of Polish residents of Poznan to their German neighbors. After Poland regained independence the local Germans—who were now neighbors—began to be perceived as less alien, in a certain respect, than newcomers arriving from other areas of Poland (Znaniecki, 1990). The dialectics of familiarity and strangeness characteristic of a neighborhood situation has attracted the attention of phenomenologists. Richard Grathoff examined neighborhood from the phenomenological point of view. He defined a neighbor as the most familiar stranger. This definition stems from the essential feature of intergroup relations characterized by uncertainty and duality (Grathoff, 1991). In my opinion, on account of borderland functions neighborhood may perform a disintegrating role, expressing itself in the feeling of strangeness in relation to another: "they—neighbors". However, due to closeness it may also give rise to a sense of community: "we—neighbors". In the first case, this is disintegrating neighborhood; in the

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second case, integrating. Acceptance of the first or second interpretation is subject to changes in the situation. In the autobiographical materials analyzed we often found evidence of such changes, consisting in the passage from excluding to integrating neighborhood between ethnic neighbors. The category of "internal" others here comprises representatives of a minority. From the standpoint of Polish tradition Belarussians and Ukrainians are such minorities. On the other hand, Jews, who traditionally were the main category of people regarded as "internal strangers" in Old Poland, were not considered. The problem of attitudes towards Jews was considered, however, as an important indicator of the openness or closedness of national attitudes. However, the nature of the materials is not uniform. The process of conversion illustrates one historical case analyzed in detail, presented in existing texts, autobiographical notes and the works of Wojciech K^trzyriski. Autobiographical texts from the same borderland of Polish and German culture were examined in less detail, serving rather as elements of the context of the problem. Autobiographical materials in the form of diary entries (Lechon) and a diary and memoirs (Gombrowicz, Czapski) were used to investigate types of Polishness in three specific emigrants, who were famous creators of culture. The materials that emerged in the course of the study as an outcome of the research process are the basis for an analysis of the nationality of members of minority groups, of a regional group and of a dominant group. These materials consist of taped interviews, taken down word for word, that were conducted with seventy persons from among the three aforementioned groups and Poles representing the dominant culture outside the borderland territory in all of the meanings mentioned. The last category acts as a control group, but at the same time it is a subject of interest in its own right. A very extensive autobiographical discourse (lasting eight hours) was analyzed on the basis of a tape recording. Daniel Bertaux, who characterized the methods of autobiographical studies, aptly expressed the principle that applies to the number of cases selected. According to him, the optimal magnitude of the material is not any arbitrarily set number, but "saturation", which means reaching a state after which additional materials do not provide the researcher with any new, significant information. In the studies of Bertaux (1980) and Helling (1982) on the process of professional development, the criterion of saturation was stand-

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ardizing data on entering the profession. The goal of the research was to standardize the picture. In our case the goal is to grasp variants of nationality. Thus we are aiming at an opposite goal: to draw a picture of differences. Even here the criterion of saturation seems useful. Hypothetically at least, the possible combinations of indicators of nationality can be predicted. On the other hand, empirical facts sometimes surprise the researcher by appearing in the course of the research in new, unexpected types. That is why final conclusions as to the possible configurations and kinds of features making up the isolated types must be formulated with caution. The autobiographical materials provide a multitude of data. Their use must be subordinated to the goal of the analysis. If this goal were the acquisition of knowledge of total identity or personality, the research procedure would have to be different. It would have to be more complicated than in the case where the object of cognition is only one aspect of identity, even one as complex as the feeling of nationality. In selecting such a subject of investigation here, we focused on two categories of indicators defining nationality: on national identity and national valence. In many of the cases studied that come from a national borderland in the previously defined meaning, the text of the spontaneous autobiography sufficed for a basic characterization of the aspect of identity investigated. However, this was not the general rule. For this reason, and also to get more complete data, the free autobiographical utterances were supplemented with an open-ended questionnaire interview. Information concerning the materials of the empirical part of the study are provided in the Note on page 170. A questionnaire in the strict sense obviously could not be applied to existing personal materials, but in them as well an attempt was made to find responses similar to those obtained in the interviews. All of the materials were examined from the point of view of the two previously mentioned criteria, that is, national identification and valence. Valence previously was defined as not only the appropriation of a certain essential, including canonical, part of national culture, but, above all, as the acknowledging of this culture as one's one, as familiar, as satisfying hubristic needs (that is, the need for self-worth, personal dignity, and a feeling of participation in the community). Taking into consideration the different degrees and levels of appropriation, depending on education, occupational specialty and family tradition, it was necessary to consider the complementarity of some elements of culture. Perhaps this was not done to a sufficient degree in the study itself. Pawel

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Boski's study is an example of a clever investigation of valence (without using that term). He used a test of reactions to selected motto/symbols characteristic of the culture of origin of Polish emigrants in the United States and of the culture of their new homeland (Boski et al., 1992). The use of personal materials does not admit such possibilities. Even the interview used as a source of supplementary materials in respect to the sample of Polish students cannot fulfill the conditions of this experiment, which, among other things, involves control of the reaction time. The use of autobiographies is similar to case studies. This is also the case in this work. These cases, treated as empirical types, rather nicely arrange themselves into a picture that conforms with the logical scheme of variants that could have been drawn up after an analysis of the first several examples (Kloskowska, 1993). This does not mean standardization of the materials collected. Certain doubts remain as to whether saturation was attained. Nonetheless, already in the preliminary phase of the analysis a table could be constructed that presents the basic variants of convergence between indicators of nationality relating to national self-identification and to the type of cultural valence (see Table 1). First of all, the analysis does not attempt to control all of the information obtained. Given the large amount of data, that would be impossible and it is not necessary. Besides this, as one case shows, certain essential data can crop up even after "saturation" supposedly already has been reached. For this reason a generalization of the results must be limited by the conditions of the study. No conclusions may be drawn on the frequency with which the types Table 1 National identification versus cultural valence (assimilation) National identification

Cultural —--^valence

Integral Dual Uncertain Cosmopolitan

Univalence

Bivalence

j**

2**

3

6**

1**

8*

10** 14#*

j j**

12*

15*

16*

5 9** 13

** relationship confirmed by empirical data * hypothetical relationship Fields 3, 5 and 13 will probably remain empty categories.

Ambivalence

Polyvalence

4**

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presented appear. To obtain at least partial data for such conclusions, two small questionnaire studies were conducted among Polish students covering a total of 300 persons. On the other hand, the conclusions pertaining to the diversity of pictures of nationality examined in an individual perspective, to the possibility of various configurations of complicated national self-identification and to manifold cultural valence are rather firm. National identification and valence are preserved in an autobiography as a text that has originated in the circumstances of particular situations. Even if the researcher exerts no influence at all on establishing the circumstances in which the texts come into existence, as was the case with the existing texts used in the study, he ought to be familiar with the circumstances in which they were produced. The present author has attempted to obtain such knowledge. The texts elicited—that is, the interviews—originated in conditions arranged by the interviewers and defined as precisely as possible by the instructions. The main principle of the instructions was not to give suggestions to the subjects and not to direct their attention to national matters in the first autobiographical part of the interview. However, it was impossible to prevent some of the persons from suspecting that they had been selected for the interview on account of their national membership. Not all of them reacted in that way, however. In the second part of the questionnaire interview, the responses of the subjects were intentionally directed to nationality problems by questions about contacts with persons of a nationality different from their own, about the canon of national culture and the concept of fatherland. Obviously, no specialist terms like "canon", "attitude" or "value" were used in the questionnaire. On the other hand, values were the main subject and main concept of the analysis. In the introduction to the interview the subject was asked to tell everything that was important in his or her life, with the emphasis on the word "important". This request fulfilled its intended role in respect to most of the respondents, who spoke about the values of their life sometimes indirectly and sometimes directly, even using this term. It turned out to be surprisingly widespread in popular speech, at least in groups with higher education, which were the main subject of the study. The point which brings the entire subject matter of the study into focus is the nation and national culture as a value. The texts of the autobiographies expressed many different values, among which national values sometimes manifested themselves spontaneously and with great force, but sometimes revealed themselves only in the second, questionnaire part of the interview.

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The analysis of the texts respected these differences and brought them into relief by using the conception of focal values of the text, values dependent on them, and values not connected with the focal value. National affairs were not the focal value in all of the autobiographies. Moreover, many of the texts contained no elements that could be regarded as focusing the entire text, except for principles of chronological order. The utterances of less-educated people in particular were simply a narration of the facts of their life and their actions. These persons did not even clearly accentuate what could be called an "event" in the previous understanding. Such interviews should be called narrative interviews in the more precise sense and in contrast to a clearer construction of the picture of a person's life around selected values. Such narratives run in a chronological order marked by the frames of social institutions: preschool, school, higher studies, work. Some authors spontaneously tried to recall their earliest memories from childhood. On account of their having been fixed in memory so early and strongly these facts should be recognized as events of their life and assigned special importance. The diversity and very different weight of these facts according to objective measures make a clear-cut classification of them difficult. Stanislaw Lem formulated perceptive insights about the unpredictable mechanism of a person's early memory by comparing memory to the chaos of particles swirling around in a kaleidoscope (Lem, 1968). Czeslaw Milosz, on the other hand, pondered on what shape to consciously give to one's memories (Milosz, 1990). There is an obvious connection between identity and memory and recollection, because identity in all of its complexity is based on duration through changes of personality with the simultaneous preservation of the conscious feeling of one's identity. Creators of the conception and investigators of this phenomenon have pointed this out: William James, Eric Erikson in the conceptualization of phases of development, Peter Weinreich in the conception of the "location" of identity. The feeling of duration requires memory and remembrance. That assertion applies to the conception of both individual and group identity. Historical-anthropological studies devote a lot of attention to the second form of identity in particular. The previously cited collection treating "invented" tradition, and the newer volume having as its subject the process of "remembrance" as an instrument of national identity policies belong to this trend of thought. Remembrance takes place through rituals and ceremonies

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symbolizing persons, places and events of the collective national past (Gillis, 1994). There is an obvious connection between the national identification of the individual and collective memory. Individual memory made objective in autobiographical discourse or a text is not detached from collective "remembrances". On the contrary, the part of national identification that is the subject of this study is constructed from them. This is an element of culturization, whose role fluctuates depending on the nature and level of education, on inspirations and family traditions and the influence of the present environment. This comes to light in the autobiographies examined. When emphasizing the subjective nature of identity, some researchers see in it an imagined entity and sometimes an unreal entity. It is hard to agree with this. Nationality in the Polish understanding, that is, not as formal citizenship but precisely as an element of identity, has objective, perceptible signs. In this book nationality is made operational through identifications and valences expressed in autobiographies at the instance of memory. Theorists of autobiographies have suggested various typological approaches to autobiographies as works of memory. Bertaux distinguishes between the structural approach and the symbolic approach to what is emotionally experienced. He points out that the autobiographies of non-advancing peasants and workers are not really descriptions of life, because for them such a task has no sense. Rather, they are a collection of descriptions of their villages and anecdotal facts recalled from the past (Bertaux, 1980). The texts called "simple narratives" here have precisely such features. W. L. Howarth rejected the often-encountered practice of grouping autobiographies according to the occupation of their authors. He distinguished three suitable types: (1) "preaching" autobiographies (oratory), serving to promote certain values (St. Augustine, John Bunyan, Edward Gibbon), (2) acting (as drama), whose authors show off—sometimes in a satirical way, (3) poetic—being a constant search for the self in an effort to grasp one's own identity (Howarth, 1974). All of these types, in various ways, correspond to the conception of a focusing autobiography, that is, they assume that highlighting a certain central value and presenting other values, or at least some of them, is connected with this central value. Such clear autobiographical schemas were discovered especially in autobiographies from the ethnic borderland, in which the focal value was the nationality of the authors. This value was also looked for in less clearly focused autobiographies or those focused on other principles.

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Jan Szczepanski, a sociologist who consciously constructed his autobiography, in the published fragment reaches back to the roots of his childhood embedded in the family and the rural traditions defining the small fatherland. But he also showed the role of the book—the main instrument of that time for symbolic transmission opening up vistas to the entire world.

The Polish Eagle with the arms of Lithuania waves on a banner From the fields of Grochow, where my grandfather stood; From the fields of Grochow, from the ramparts of Warsaw I have safe conduct of the bloody legacy For a drop of my German blood. ARTUR OPPMAN - OR-OT, For a Drop of My German Blood (in Polish)

I am a Pole for the simplest, almost primitive reasons [...] A Pole, because in my parents' home they told me so in Polish; for I was nourished there with Polish speech from infancy; for my mother taught me Polish verses and songs; for when the first tremor of poetry came, it vented itself in Polish words; for what became the most important in life—poetic creativity—is unthinkable for me in any other language, even if I spoke it perfectly. [...] I am a Pole, because that suits me. May the rank of Jew Doloris Causa be given to the Polish poet by the nation that produced him. JULIAN TUWIM, We, Polish Jews

8. National Conversion as a Borderland Phenomenon

The treatment of national identification as something that is automatically and fatalistically predestined is becoming ever less suited to the prospects of the contemporary world, which is characterized by spatial and social mobility. To be sure, most people, including those in the developed countries of Europe, for their entire lifetime retain the nationality handed down to them by their family. However, that is not an absolute necessity but the result of cultural influences that are subject to change. The intensification of national movements, referred to as ethnic, in many countries of Europe are in part a process of transformation of traditional groups of the small ethnic fatherland into imagined, ideological national communities. Numerous individual, voluntary national conversions are part of this process. These conversions or acts to change the national self-identification of individuals may lead from the politically dominant group and its culture, for example Spanish, British, Russian, to previously subordinated groups, that is, Catalan, Basque, Welsh, Belarussian, Ukrainian. Polish culture, which was dominant in the Commonwealth of the Two Nations and later, was the focal point of numerous conversions: voluntary in the higher estates, more compulsory in the lower social classes. This compulsion stemmed rather from conditions of existence than from legal-administrative measures, albeit the latter form of compulsion also was applied during the Second Polish Republic. On the other hand, during the partitions there were numerous acts of total or partial depolonization—germanization, russification—which were not always coerced and unavoidable. In Polish historiography little is remembered of this process and little space is devoted to it (Kieniewicz, 1990). Historiography and popular memory focus on the heroic

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resistance of Polishness, which deserves attention but which was not a process without exceptions (Lepkowski, 1989). For scholars of national cultures and national identification, an especially symptomatic phenomenon was the magnetism of Polish culture. During the partitions, when this culture had no support and protection in its own state, it gained converts in the politically dominant cultural groups and among minorities, including the Jewish group. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the religious conversion of Jews, which also pushed them to polonization, at least in some cases was rewarded through administrative channels (Goldberg, 1986). That situation changed radically after the partitions, when polonization did not bring such benefits. The frequent selfless acts of national conversion during those times should give Polish anti-Semites food for thought. The complicated cases of people from the ethnic borderland call for reflection. Contemporary Ukrainian historiography, which is by no means chauvinistic (Sas, 1991), claims Stanislaw Orzechowski (1513-1566) for a Ukrainian writer. Orzechowski signed his name to his works with the expression gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus. It is not clear, and definitely impossible, to explain whether the word natio for him meant a nation embracing the ethnographic, regional category of a descent group (gens), as it is understood today, or whether natio was a political category embracing the common Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia, a state of various nations. Orzechowski unquestionably served this state as a Roman Catholic who wrote in Latin and Polish. The search for pure and absolutely clear-cut categories of national identification may lead to surprising conclusions. When independent Ukraine, in 1991, celebrated the anniversary of the victory at Chocim over the Turks (1621) by honoring solely the leader of the Cossack army, Hetman Piotr Konaszewicz-Sahajdaczny, the Polish consul recalled the role of Polish forces under the command of Chodkiewicz. The intention of this reminder was to reclaim the Polish title to this victory. However, Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, who belongs to the Polish pantheon of national heroes, was descended from a house of Lithuanian boyars who had been partially ruthenianized (Lowmianski, 1983) and finally polonized. Someone who, on the basis of genealogy, wanted to define the nationality of the unquestionable Pole Jozef Czapski, artist, soldier of two Polish wars and author of the concentration camp and prison report/« an Inhuman Land,

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would find themselves in difficulties. The type of Polishness of such an eminent Pole as Jozef Pilsudski, who did so much to revive and unite Poland, deserves a separate and in-depth study. Pilsudski called himself a Lithuanian and expressed a great dislike of Poles "from along the banks of the Vistula, from Galicia and Posen" (Skladkowski, 1988, pp. 376-379; Lepecki, 1989, pp. 219, 283). Towards the end of his life, when he was in conflict with the political opposition, Pilsudski attacked certain sides of Polish culture with a ferocity that stemmed from the opposition between ideal postulates and Polish reality, the contrast between ideal and real Poles. An examination of individual cases may make plain how complicated a phenomenon like national identification is, both in the past and in the present, and how risky it is to pronounce judgments on who may be acknowledged as a genuine Pole. This does not mean that the search for criteria for Polishness, Englishness or Germanness (das Deutschtum) should be abandoned. However, such a search requires penetrating and methodical studies, which are made very difficult by all value judgments assumed in advance, dictated by national emotions and leading to the construction of stereotypes instead of typologies based on sound scholarship. The conception of a "genuine Pole", to whom a homogeneous, purely Polish genealogy and particular cultural features are ascribed, is only a stereotype. This stereotype may only serve as a postulate, but in this function it does not have to be expressed in the same way by all real Poles. The "law of blood" as a metaphorical principle defining national identity in fact means genealogical continuity, which—statistically speaking—is the chance to pass on the collective cultural heritage. On the other hand, this is not an absolute and necessary condition for accepting such a heritage or for enriching it creatively. A consistent advocate of the purity of this principle would have to abandon many characteristic, precious works of Polish culture, because their creators had French, German, Ruthenian or Jewish elements in their genealogy. Some of them called themselves Poles, out of love and their own free choice (Hemar, Tuwim), while some emphasized the role of Europe in their family genealogy (Czapski, Milosz, Parnicki). The reasoning that appeals to genetics as a principle of national ascription was completely discredited by Nazism and rejected by scholars and scientists. It would not even be worth mentioning if it did not keep being revived in popular thinking.

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The principle of territorial ascription to nationality expressed in ius soli was never conclusive in ethnically mixed territories. Its significance is weakened even more in the conditions of growing spatial mobility among citizens of the contemporary world, although the "country of childhood years" often retains an emotional value for even the most cosmopolitan types. However, all principles of ascription in the field of culture lack features of fatalistic necessity. In the course of history these principles weaken, without being eliminated, in favor of the voluntary actions and decisions of individuals. This also applies to the choice of fatherland, contrary to Kazimierz Wierzyriski's statement: "Whoever you are, you have no country." With the increasing mobility of the contemporary world, more and more people are crossing national borders in many directions. Many descendants of people who were separated from Poland by war and postwar trials and tribulations, changes of borders and deportations to the West and East are returning to the Polish fatherland. At the same time, we are going to see a departure from the Polish fatherland to take up German or Ukrainian, Belarussian or Lithuanian national identification. We call these processes "conversions", by analogy with changes of religious denomination and religious value systems. These national conversions and transgressions do not necessarily entail a complete break with the culture of the former identification. Some biographies that I studied carefully indicate that it is possible to maintain double culturality and even double nationality. This may even turn out to be useful in the value world of the new homeland, on condition that the individual and his new surroundings accept it and that it is not a source of disturbing ambivalence. Throughout its history, Polish culture has assimilated many eastern and western ethnic elements, thereby becoming richer and more attractive. From this stems, among other things, the cultural diversity of varieties of real Poles. On the same principle, some of the elements of this culture today may become part of the identity of individuals and groups choosing Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, England and America as their homeland. However, this process will take place in the context of growing European consciousness and perhaps even of global, universal ties. Real Poles are going to live in such a world and should be aware of these facts. These facts should be investigated for this reason and without yielding to nationalistic emotions or anti-national phobias. The study of individual aspects of individual biog-

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raphies shows that the feeling of national affiliation and ties with the national culture often, but not always, play an important role in the total identity of contemporary people. However, it must be remembered that these aspects do not exhaust this identity. Years ago Norwid, in a poetic aphorism, noted what he regarded as the harmful domination of nationality over humanity in the Poles of his time. To be sure, this could apply only to some of the Poles that he saw before him on the streets of Paris. Some of today's ideologists of nationalism in turn postulate reducing people's identity exclusively to the national dimension. That would impoverish human identity, and—in any case—it is not possible. National identification may undergo a complete transformation during the lifetime of the individual. Here such a change is called national conversion. It may have various motivations and there may be different degrees of internalization of the transformation of values resulting from conversion. The above assertions are not a priori speculations. They are based on an analysis of a series of individual cases of the formation, and chiefly of transformations, of the national identification of individuals. A more detailed analysis of cases examined in the context of comparative materials will be presented later. One of the purposes of the analysis will be to reveal the need to distinguish between the concepts of identification and identity. A further purpose is to consider the consequences of national conversion for the transformation or preservation of elements of symbolic culture and values, in reference to which the total identity of the individual is realized. Conversions of various types create cognitively heuristic situations for studies of the nature of the role of individual identity and of the role of national consciousness in its entirety. At the same time, these situations make it possible to acquire knowledge of aspects of the nation in a way that permits a discriminating analysis of this complicated social-cultural-mental sphere of reality. The concept of conversion rather than assimilation was used here to stress that this is a process and not a final result, and that this result does not have to consist of complete absorption by another culture—whether chosen or imposed. The concept of conversion is primarily and most often refers to religious beliefs (Halas, 1992). This understanding suggests a return to the right system of values. That suggestion is even stronger in the Polish word for conversion (inawrocenie).

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The English word "conversion" (from the Latin convertere, to turn wholly, change) is more neutral and in general means a departure from one system of values and the acceptance of another system of values in the same field and in the same scope. This scope is quite broad, because conversion entails a change of essential convictions and the course of human life. So conversion is called a change in a believer's religion or the abandoning of atheism for faith, as well as a change in national affiliation. However, it does not refer to a change in artistic development or even of political party. One can speak of a conversion related to a philosophy of life, if the ideological change is coupled with a significant and broad transformation of the proselyte's world of values. It is worth distinguishing between individual and collective, voluntary and coerced conversions from the angle of social conditions. Collective religious conversions, like the Christianization of Poland in 966, the Christianization of Ruthenia in 988 or the Christianization of Lithuania after 1387, were conversions imposed on all the subjects by the ruler. So were changes of religion in the German Reich, after the Peace of Augsburg, on the principle cuius regio, eius religio (Dowiat, 1969; Lowmianski, 1979; Ochmanski, 1982; Ranke, 1852). Such conversions in fact are never immediate and complete in relation to the entire social collectivity. They are usually accompanied by intense social conflicts and individual suffering. Examples of evidence for this are passages from an eleventh-century chronicle relating the overthrowing of the pagan god Perun in Ruthenia by Vladimir the Great (Gieysztor, 1982, p. 53); information on the implementation of the Union of Brest (Chodynicki, 1934); and later—paradoxically—the defense of the Union against a forcible return to Orthodoxy (Smolenski, 1891; Moscicki, 1928; Wasilewski, 1918). Polish hagiography devoted a lot of attention to collective and forced processes of germanization and russification on ethnically Polish lands. However, it treated polonization processes on ethnically Ruthenian or Lithuanian lands differently. According to Janusz Tazbir, there were no administrative polonization pressures in the Commonwealth of the gentry. Such plans did not appear until the end of the eighteenth century (Tazbir, 1987). However, immigration to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the forces promoting polonization. Another was the fact that the incorporation of Volhynia and Podolia into the Polish Kingdom after the Union of Lublin strengthened the position of Polish large landowners. The

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Second Republic carried out a polonizing administrative, educational and military policy. The complexity of the course and diversity of motivations in collective national conversions make it very difficult to analyze them. This is especially so because they are usually phenomena that stir up hard-to-control national emotions in historians. If they are adequately documented, individual conversions furnish much safer material for analysis. William James left an example of a fruitful interpretation of selected individual cases of religious conversion (James, 1958). The case of Albert Winkler/Wojciech K^trzynski was chosen here as the main case study of a national conversion. The selection was made from amongst numerous similar processes of the passage to Polish national identification and national culture from neighboring groups and cultures. This case study is the first of the analyses made here of conversions taking place between national communities: Polish, German, Jewish, Ukrainian, Belarussian and Lithuanian. These conversions go in different directions, that is, they also consist in moving away from Polishness to identification with other national communities. Each of the ethnic boundaries appearing here creates specific conditions of conversion, and differs additionally in respect to the historical moment that determines current relations and the mutual position of the "disconnecting system" and the "connecting system". For other motivations may activate the passage to a politically dominant, economically stronger and culturally more attractive community than those that activate the passage to a subordinated group. A high barrier of cultural differences creates different conditions than those created by affinity of language and tradition. A stronger or weaker tradition of intergroup conflicts may play an important, but not always unambiguous, role in the conversion process. All of these factors must be considered in a sociological culturological analysis of individual conversions based on biographical and autobiographical materials. These factors are connected with the previously underscored multiformity of phenomena of the nation, whose investigation requires a variety of analytical perspectives. Consistent with the assumptions of the theory of culture and national cultures developed here, the emphasis is laid on distinguishing those cases of conversion in which autotelic, not purely instrumental, motives for changing national affiliation play a special role. Instrumental acts of conversion are not excluded from the investigation,

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because their practical importance is unquestionable. However, these cases rather provide a background for a comparative analysis that attempts to probe the most characteristic phenomena of national identification and culture. The case of Albert WinklerAVojciech Kçtrzynski, chosen here for analysis, fits within the multiformity and multidirectionality of conversion processes going on for centuries across the Polish-German ethnic border. One can find pressures for assimilation by both sides, albeit more sporadic and less systematic on the Polish side (repressive acts after the rebellion of magistrate Albert in Cracow) than on the German side. One can point to many acts of partially or completely voluntary individual conversion on both sides: the Silesian and Pomeranian Piasts, some of the population of colonized cities of the First Commonwealth, thousands of Polish families with the surnames Miller, Szmyt, Szulc, Tyc and Szyc. In keeping with the principle of avoiding uncontrolled emotional judgments, "germanization" and "polonization" are treated as value-free descriptive terms. Germanization processes were especially evident in the nineteenth century, during the period of increasing national consciousness on both sides of the ethnic border, with the simultaneous political advantage of the German side with all of its consequences. In Prussia, Pomerania and the Grand Duchy of Posen the entire administration became germanized to varying degrees. At the same time, resistance developed, which was especially evident in the last of these areas. The autobiography of Jakub Wojciechowski (1985) is a valuable personal documentation of such resistance. It describes the mechanism by which the germanization of a worker started and was halted. Such persons from outside intellectual circles more often consciously defended their national identification. The case of Wojciechowski will be analyzed separately. This is a case of the checking of conversion, which is also valuable for the investigation of national processes. In certain respects the conversion of Kçtrzynski is closer to the acts of polonization of numerous Austrian sons, and no fewer German officials, who, on the territory of partitioned Poland entered into contact with a Polish environment, married Polish girls and founded Polish families. Their descendants often achieved eminent positions in various fields of Polish cultural life, which they served with dedication and enthusiasm. Out of the many of them one can mention the names of Estreicher, Kolberg, Wincenty Pol, Artur Oppman, Wladyslaw Anczyc and Aleksander Brückner. Their activity and

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works, of varying degrees of brilliance, are so strongly embedded in the output of Polish culture, and so effectively preserved and expanded Polishness, that they constitute especially strong proof of the limitation of genealogical justifications as a title of national citizenship. The above examples of conversion, however, had a specific intergenerational nature and took place mainly in nationally mixed families, in which the mothers, who play the main role in earlier socialization, inculcated Polish habits, customs and values. The case of K^trzynski stands out against the background of a different set of conditions, especially the conspicuousness of the act of conversion. Moreover, this is a valuable set of documented materials of various kinds coming from the subject of the study. The latter conclusion in particular argues for selecting this subject for analysis, since in nineteenth-century Prussia this was not the only known case of the re-polonization of a member of a germanized family (Chojnacki, 1952), but it is a very well documented one. K^trzynski left behind two autobiographical sketches in manuscript form. Much personal data, and especially declarations of attitudes, can be found in his historical and historical-ethnographical works. Besides this, his extensive poetic output provides especially valuable materials that document various aspects of his emotional experiences and axiological reactions (K^trzynski, 1883; 1973; 1980). All of these sources are treated in the approach applied as texts that can be examined in a manner similar to content analysis, semiotic and hermeneutic analysis. The personage of K^trzynski and his works were the subject of numerous historical studies, especially after the last war when his small fatherland of Masuria found itself within the borders of the Polish state. This analysis also draws from those studies and does not pretend to supply any new factual information based on investigations of original sources. Its task is to subject K^trzyriski's autobiographical documents to repeated sociological and psychological analysis in order to shed light on national processes examined in their individual and cultural aspects. The focal point for investigation of all the monographs of K^trzynski is the very act of national conversion, whose suddenness, expressiveness, and spectacular nature, led researchers to contradictory interpretations. This controversial problem is also taken up here.

9. The Polish Conversion of Albert Winkler

A thumbnail sketch of the fundamental objective, genealogical and biographical data is necessary in order to understand the situation in which the national conversion of Winkler-K^trzynski took place. According to information from Wojciech K^trzynski himself, the K§trzynskis, a family of gentlefolk with the Black Grouse coat of arms, settled in Pomerania in the sixteenth century. The grandfather, whose first name was also Wojciech, a patriot who always wore Polish attire and was buried in an ancient Polish nobleman's robe, died in the year of the battle of Leipzig. He left behind three sons, who were registered, according to their birth certificates, exclusively under the Polish family surname. However, an additional birth certificate entry of 1821 introduced a supplement to the surname: Winkler. In the first volume of a book of verses that he published in 1883 (Aus dem Liederbuch eines Germanisierten), the younger Wojciech called himself "germanized". In fact, it was not he, but his father, born in 1801, who underwent germanization. Orphaned at the age of thirteen and deprived of the family estate, Jozef, through a Prussian military career, found a way to maintain his social position at least partially. From the time of joining the army he used the name von Winkler. After he left the regiment of hussars as an officer or non-commissioned officer, he became a gendarme in Masuria. He married a German girl without any traces of Polish ancestry. His son was born in 1838 in Lotzen (or Lec, now Gizycko) in Masuria. Adalbert, who was known in his family as Albert, attended a German primary school in Lec. His childhood coincided with the period in which the teaching of Polish was eliminated in schools in Masuria. He lost his father in

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1846, after which he lived for a year under the care of a German family. Then, in 1849, he was admitted to a military school for orphans of military men in Potsdam. When he returned to Poland, after a year and a half he completed the five-year lower grammar school in Lec and then the gymnasium in nearby Rastembork (now K^trzyn). His act of national conversion took place there in 1856. In 1859 he enrolled at the university in Koenigsberg, still under the name Winkler, but for matriculation in 1861 he supplemented the entry with the Polish surname "von K^trzynski". He was sentenced in Moabit and imprisoned for assisting the 1863 uprising in Lithuania. In 1865 he served his sentence in the fortress in Ktodzko, where he translated his doctoral dissertation on Boleslaw the Brave's war with Henry from German into Latin, and translated Wincenty Pol's Song of Our Land into German. He received his doctorate in Koenigsberg in 1866. From 1868 to 1873 he was a librarian in Kórnik and prepared the Acta Tomiciana for print. In 1873 he became secretary of the Ossolineum library in Lvov, and from 1876 to his death in 1918 he was the director of Ossolineum. In 1875 he married a cousin from the non-germanized Klinski family from Pomerania. Wojciech K^trzynski wrote more than two hundred historical papers and published several volumes of sources for Polish history. He devoted many studies to the toponymy of Masuria, re-creating the Polish nature of place names and the Polish genealogy of germanized Polish families from Prussia. As a social activist he initiated and supported the development of the Polish press in Prussia. He was also interested in the Polish origins and customs of Silesia. He was a member of numerous Polish and foreign scientific societies. Biographers of Wojciech K^trzynski differ on whether his option for Polishness was a one-off decision close to sudden religious illumination (Serwanski, 1955; Wakar's introduction in K^trzynski, 1980), or whether it matured gradually on the basis of national elements that were always present (Jasinski, 1970). The documents and biographical notes that K^trzynski himself left behind seem to bear out the first hypothesis, although they are not unequivocal. However, the main aim in a sociological culturological analysis is not so much to answer this question as to present the motivations for a change of national identity, and its role in the entirety of the life experiences and value system of the individual. K^trzynski left behind two short strictly autobiographical texts: From the History of My Youth (30 pages) and From My Youth

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(3 pages) (K^trzynski, 1977). Fragments of historical studies, especially collections of lyric poetry, provide additional important information (K?trzynski, 1973; 1980). These materials taken together make it possible to apply the technique of analysis that Norman Denzin (1970) calls triangulation, namely, the examination of a social phenomenon from various reference points. Even in respect to an author of such high intellectual stature and self-reflection as K^trzynski a researcher cannot rest content with the assertions of the author himself, which Schütz called models of the first degree. These models sometimes turn out to be deceptive and, as a rule, are insufficient to explain the behavior and reactions of the subject under study. In this regard Kenneth L. Pike (1967) suggested distinguishing between the "emitic" approach (from "phonemic") and the "etic" approach (from "phonetic"). According to his definition, in the emitic approach actions are studied from inside the system itself, from the standpoint of the subject of the actions. The etic approach studies actions from the outside, as a system that the researcher examines objectively and relates to outside data. Young von Winkler's national conversion, understood in categories of his own, explicitly expressed interpretation, was a sudden and decisive act. In 1856, when he was an eighteen-year-old grammar-school pupil in Rastembork, he received a letter from his younger sister informing him that, according to family papers that she had found, their family name was "K^trzynski", that they had a coat of arms and were Poles. K^trzynski wrote: "After reading those words a sudden radical change took place in my mind and heart. Once again I recalled my Polish surname, my father's tales and his wish that I learn Polish. In short, I felt that I was a Pole, and the poem that I wrote after receiving my sister's letter shows how sudden that change was" (K^trzynski, 1977, pp. 19-20). This entire passage, coupled with the fragment of the poem quoted, occupies a lot less space in the autobiographical sketch than the detailed account of an episode from school years. That episode, and the long poem accompanying the description of that episode, telling of the social misfortune of a local beauty at a school party, are only loosely connected with the question of nationality. This example shows how untrustworthy formal quantitative content analysis can be as the basis for determining the hierarchy of importance of the themes of a studied text. K^trzynski never spoke at length on the course and

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motives of his national conversion. When, many years later, as the director of Ossolineum, he was asked about his decision to change his name and nationality, he said that this decision had been sudden and had raised no doubts (Lempicki, 1948). On the basis of the cited passage of memoirs and other references, it can be stated that in childhood K^trzynski was conscious of his Polish roots. However, these elements were only vestigial; they boiled down to a certain interest in references to Poland in German readers for children, the names of Warsaw and Gdansk, Polish signs on the roads of Masuria and the cries of Polish fishermen in the marketplace. Only German was spoken at home, although his father sometimes hummed "Poland is not yet lost", and for some time had an old servant, a former soldier of Kosciuszko's, who spoke Polish. After K^trzynski lost his father at the age of eight, and especially after he went to Potsdam, these Polish echoes died out completely. K^trzynski himself does not ascribe any role to them in the process of his sudden change of national identification. He repeatedly states that at the moment of his conversion he was a German and felt himself to be German (K^trzyriski, 1977, pp. 18, 19). In a poem written shortly after his act of conversion K^trzynski called the German nation mein Volk (K^trzynski, 1973, pp. 12, 14). In other poems he called upon Germany to awake, and "to the melody of his fathers" he sang a song "to a son of the Rhine" (pp. 3, 20, 22). In searching for the motives for such a sudden and complete transformation of nationality from the emitic approach, attention should be paid to the role of the surname, to which K^trzyriski attached almost magical importance. For him the discovery of his exclusively Polish family name and coat of arms was most clearly identical with stating the objective fact of his Polishness. In his later years he remained interested in genealogy and heraldry. As a historian he applied these fields in searching for the roots of germanized families of the Polish gentry in Prussia, for example the family names Rogal, Szpot, Jaski, Morsztyn, Kurowski, Pruszyriski and many others. From this it may be concluded that K^trzynski implicitly accepted the principle of using names as the basis for ascribing national membership. In his mind he was convinced that the national bond was predestined and objectively unbreakable. That is why he could write in his poem: Glaube, Sprache, konntet ihr mir nehmen [...] doch mein Herz nicht aus dem Busen reissen undmein Herz blieb immer, immer polnisch ("You could take away my faith and speech, but you could

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not tear the heart out of my breast. My heart remained always, always Polish") (K?trzynski, 1980, p. 90). And before the court in Moabit he could say with sincere conviction: "There is no legal regulation on the basis of which the prosecutor could decide who should be a Pole and who a German [...] I always felt myself to be a Pole, even when I did not understand and did not speak Polish. I always have belonged to the Polish nation through my father, through my family, through my name" (Wakar's introduction in: K^trzynski, 1980, p. XXV). The principle of ascription to a nation recognized by K^trzynski explicitly ignores important cultural indicators of national membership (e.g. language). It acknowledges the criterion of ius sanguinis, not in the biological but in the genealogical understanding. That principle also embraces ius soli, because K^trzynski felt and declared strong attachment to his small fatherland, and in fact to two fatherlands: family Pomerania and individual Masuria. However, he left both of them, although he did not cease to serve them by trying to place them within the framework of the ideological fatherland—Poland. It is characteristic that when alluding to the Polishness of his family he omits the tie with the purely German family of his mother. By no means did this stem from dislike of his mother, to whom he was strongly attached until her death. Genetic factors obviously played no objective role in the act of his national conversion, but they had crucial importance for this act as something he was convinced of in his own mind. Thus subjective conviction acted as an objective fact, albeit in a certain sense only as a pretext. This example demonstrates the inadequacy of a solely emitic approach to the interpretation of human behavior. K^trzyriski treated his Polish self-identification as an act of re-polonization, a return to the metaphysical and mythical essence of Polishness, to which he was entitled on account of the tie of ascription. In fact he was not a germanized Pole during his childhood and youth. Rather, he was a German child and teenager, the son of a German mother and a germanized Pole. For many years the traces of Polishness in the behavior of his father and the ethnically Masurian, largely Polish environment of the small fatherland did not suffice for K^trzynski's polonization. They did not make themselves felt any more strongly in his mind than similar motives in the interests of his compatriot Siegfried Lenz, or of his Pomeranian countryman Giinther Grass. None of those writers or their heroes (Sigmund Rogal, Oskar Matzerath and Walter Matern) became Poles due to interest in those traces.

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The germanization of Józef K^trzynski had understandable instrumental reasons. From the time of his military service he used the name von Winkler exclusively, and used his knowledge of Polish in order more effectively to coerce the Masurian peasants to obey Prussian law and order. The career of a Prussian gendarme became the sole foundation of his existence. On the other hand, the polonization of young Albert took place contrary to obvious practical considerations. This conversion threatened his career as an official and a teacher. In fact, after his trial and sentencing in 1864 he was unable to take a position as a teacher in Prussia. So for an explanation of the motives for his conversion it is necessary to go back to all of the documents of his life that permit triangulation and examination of the crucial moments of the trajectory of his life. In using the concept of trajectory I reject the limitations that, in the theory of Anselm Strauss and after him of Fritz Schütze, associate a trajectory solely with sufferings that disturb the life course of the individual (Riemann, Schütze, 1992). Referring back to the original meaning in physics, a trajectory here stands for the course of the life path, its track marked by the mass and vector of the impetus, by the known dimensions of the original position—location. By using this concept one can avoid the speculative argumentation ("what would have happened, i f " ) criticized by some historians, and consider the possibilities facing the individual irrespective of their actual realization. The young Albert von Winkler, in the final period of military school in Potsdam where he was an outstanding, prize-winning student, was promised a scholarship to enable him to continue his education in a grammar school and in the "Pepinière" in Berlin. He was at the beginning of a trajectory, whose course would have bound him forever with a purely German environment, opening up the path to a career suitable for this environment. During this period Albert wrote poems praising the greatness of Prussia (K^trzynski, 1977, pp. 163-164) and—albeit with less enthusiasm than his colleagues— sang patriotic German songs {Ich bin Preusse, kennt Ihr meine Farben). However, he reproached himself for this. He went for confirmation as a Protestant, even though Prussian legalism made it possible for him to choose Catholicism as the faith of his father. However, the protector promising to support him in his subsequent career died and Albert returned to his native Masuria. Here the culturization factors influencing the formation of Albert's identity—or, more precisely, the cultural aspects of this identity—must be exam-

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ined. Young von Winkler had earlier become acquainted with German Romantic literature. When he was less than eight years old he read Körner's play Zriny. Later he became familiar with the poetry of Schiller, Heine, von Platen and Lenau. (He also translated and imitated the poetry of Anacreon.) A content analysis of the main themes of his poetry, coupled with a content analysis of his autobiography, will be presented below. His poetry displays a considerable diversity of themes and moods reflecting the Romantic ideology characteristic of the literature and political movements of his youth. The poem in which he called the German nation his nation was dedicated to Kinkel and Freiligrath, two German writers and political activists sentenced to exile. This verse contains a sharp condemnation of King Wilhelm IV as a perfidious tyrant (K^trzynski, 1980). In another poem the young poet extolled the heroes of national liberation movements of various periods and different countries—the ancient Greeks Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the Sipoys in rebellion against the British Empire, the Caucasian mountain peoples fighting the armies of the tsar (K^trzynski, 1973). Among the writers inspiring his poetry were the authors of Polenlieder, although the degree of familiarity with this collection is not confirmed in the documents. The verses of Romantic German poets collected under the title Polenlieder included the song of Julius Mosen Die letzen zehn vom 4. Regiment, which was widely known in Polish translation as Waleczny tysiqc (The Gallant Thousand); Hebbel's poem dedicated to Mickiewicz and ending with the words "Poland is not yet lost"; and verses by von Platen, Grillparzer and other lesser known poets. In this way Poland showed itself to young Winkler anew, and in a different way than in the fragmentary mentions of his father from childhood and in the voices of the Masurian fishermen and peasants in the marketplace of his native town. This was a heroic, though tragic, Poland, praised by his favorite poets and embodying to the nth degree the values most precious to him and impressing him with the tribute of the authorities of German poetry whom he held in high regard. That ideal Poland, which existed for him only in the world of poetry and imagination, could not be flawed by any imperfections and blemishes such as those with which K^trzynski, in his passionate verses, reproached Germany, which at that time he still regarded as his fatherland. He rebuked Germany for having departed from the ancient virtues of Hermann- Arminius,

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who fought against the power of imperial Rome, and for having ceased to be the champion of liberty. The letter of his sister revealing the Polish origin of his family made Winkler aware that he had a right to this ideal national heritage manifested only through the prism of symbolic values. The discovery of this right may explain the suddenness of his conversion. But this act had been prepared by acceptance of the system of values drawn earlier from German literature. In this case the change of national identification took place through the pure process of culturization in the meaning used here, that is, through the influence of factors of symbolic culture not supported by any real, direct contacts and social influences. This interpretation of Winkler's conversion is implicitly contained in his autobiography, in which the principle of genealogical ascription to Polishness is accepted. The culturological mechanism of conversion also explains its suddenness and resoluteness, whose expression was the verse Entschluss (Decision) (K^trzynski, 1980), written in November 1856. In this verse the young author-poet promises that he will no longer sing the praises of the beauty of Prussian girls and the charms of nature, but will direct all his powers to fighting for the honor and freedom of his regained fatherland—Poland. When they mention the change of his first and last name, K^trzynski's biographers correctly point out the analogy of this symbolic act with the scene in Konrad's cell. K^trzynski at that time was unfamiliar with Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, because he did not read or write Polish. (He knew a few score words and expressions and could count to twenty—a skill that came in handy in contacts with Mazurian peddlers in the marketplace.) His firm and consistent identification with Polishness preceded his cultural polonization, which also started without any direct Polish social contacts through the study of a dictionary and grammar book, and, later, Polish books. As he himself later clearly stated, he had the first occasion to speak Polish at the University of Koenigsberg, with a group of Polish students (K^trzynski, 1977, p. 30). All of his patriotic verses from this school period after 1856 and in the first period of his university studies were written in German. They include the poems "Polonia", An "Polen", "Weisser Adler", "Krieger s Abschied" {To Poland, White Eagle, A Soldier s Farewell) and finally the passionate verse u Rachengesang" (Song of Vengeance), recalling Konrad's song of vengeance on the enemy (K^trzynski, 1973). K^trzynski also translated many Polish

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patriotic works into German: "Poland Is not yet Lost", "7o the Polish Mother", Ujejski's "Chorale", Pol's "Song of Our Land ". He never wrote any verse in Polish, and soon after this, during his university studies, he ceased writing poetry, to which he returned only once in special circumstances. The interpretation presented here of K^trzynski's national conversion underlines the role of German Romantic poetry and journalism, which were friendly to Poland and created an image of a heroic, combative, noble and attractive fatherland of soldiers and great poets. This was a much more attractive vision than the sight of poor Masurian peasants and fishermen speaking a language that in the houses of the Prussian Junkers and Burghers was used only to communicate with servants and farmhands. K^trzynski himself commented upon this in his sketches on Masuria. The ennoblement of Poland in K^trzynski's eyes could trigger a motivation to act that psychologists call the hubristic motivation (Kozielecki, 1987). In this conception one can see a continuation of Adler's theory of the striving for self-confirmation that results from an inferiority complex. There were many reasons in K^trzynski's childhood and youth for suffering such a complex. After his father's death he lived off the charity of others or of a state institution. Thanks to hard work he was able to complete secondary school, but even at the start of his university studies he experienced hunger and had to take advantage of the free meals given to him out of mercy. In the petty-bourgeois German society entering the path of intensive industrial development, poor von Winkler, the son of a provincial gendarme and a midwife, had a low social position. By becoming a Pole he risked throwing away a career as a Prussian official, but by his act of conversion he entered the circles of the intelligentsia, the strata of Polish creators of opinion and values. Although these circles were economically deprived, they regarded themselves, and to some extent were regarded by others, as the leading force, the elite of the nation. Here K^trzynski could turn his Polish nobility to advantage and did not have to feel ashamed of losing his estate. As a convert to Polishness he won affection and approval. At the university he received information about the non-germanized part of his family, established contacts with it and found himself at the center of the pre-uprising Polish national movement. His initial act of conversion straightaway opened up the road to the imagined, symbolic national community. It unquestionably would have been difficult to stay exclusively in such a community. It would not have rid him

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of the feeling of isolation and suffering, to which he gave expression in his youthful poetry. That poetry in part probably was an imitation of the Romantic ethos of Weltschmerz—it was an imitation of Heine and a presentiment of some verses of Nietzsche (Vereinsamt). But it expressed K^trzynski's situation, that of a boy torn away from his family and his native region, a pupil who with difficulty made up schoolwork in arrears, and later a hungry student who lacked the support enjoyed by his Junker colleagues. His conversion to Polishness immediately made him the object of scoffing in the circle of his school peers, but it also opened up a new prospect for solving the problems of his life. Albert von Winkler, as Wojciech Kftrzynski, entered upon a new, previously unforeseen trajectory, which led him along the track of Poland's destiny in that epoch. Participation in the underground, risks, danger, trial and prison—albeit not too burdensome—and certain administrative restrictions that compelled him to leave his small fatherland, were the orientation points along this track. The course of this track determined the concentration of all of his later intellectual work on Polish themes and national problems. During the 1863 uprising K^trzynski three times crossed the Prussian border bringing organizational instructions and attempting to smuggle weapons for the rebel forces in Lithuania. Detained and then tried in the so-called Polenprozess in Berlin he was sentenced along with a group of co-defendants. He later called this sentence an "official brevet for being a Pole" (K^trzynski, 1977, p. 32). In memoirs describing his experiences during the uprising he wrote that he came out of it "with the most passionate resolution to devote the rest of my life to the cause that had gilded my youth" (ibid., p. 36). That was the specifically Polish system of values that he adopted together with his Polish national identification. The case of K^trzyriski illustrates the complex motives and process involved in becoming a member of a particular nationality as a result of choice. This was a choice, even though the subject of this process regarded the nature of the national bond as predestined, ascribed. The analysis of this case not only illustrates the course of national identification in an especially complex situation, but also permits one to draw conclusions as to the essence of nationality, its real varieties and attempts to determine its scale. On the basis of several criteria K^trzynski could have been placed as a "great Pole" on the highest level of the hierarchical scale considered by me. However, among K^trzynski's contemporaries such an opinion would not

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have been universal. Some professors of the Jagiellonian University, who were against giving him a chair at that university, did not share this opinion (Barya, 1948). In light of the autobiographical documents and other objective facts of K^trzynski's biography, his Polish identification through national conversion was definite and unquestionable. Does this mean that his original ties with German culture were severed or fell only to the level that is possible in relation to every foreign culture located outside a person's own national syntagma? A search was made for the answer to that question in a partially formalized content analysis of autobiographical materials. Fifteen main subjects (commonplaces) were distinguished in the autobiographical sketch devoted to recollections of youth, and the frequency of their appearance was determined. However, the number of lines of text devoted to them was not considered, because this last indicator turned out to be misleading from the point of view of the importance in the author's life of the problems presented. These topics are mentioned in order of decreasing frequency of appearance: Polishness; school; the author's poetic writings; German affiliation; country of childhood years—the small fatherland; germanization; family surname, coat of arms; personal contacts with Germans; father; mother; contacts with Poles; the Polish language; sister; contacts with his more distant Polish family; religion; the German language. Some of these topics appear in the text explicitly and are named as such by the author. This applies to Polishness, germanization, father, mother, sister. Others that the text only implies are given names in the course of the analysis. This applies to German affiliation, whose indicator was reading books by German authors and listening to the stories of his mother. Such an analysis does not lack arbitrariness. For this reason it was not even subjected to a test of validity. It was not intended as a strictly quantitative content analysis, which in turn would leave out completely the implied topics. These threads, which may be grasped using an approach close to hermeneutics, are especially important for explaining a problem that is crucial for the wider subject matter of the mutual relations of nations and their cultures. It is also of consequence in determining the place of national identification in the entire complex of individual identity, which that identification does not exhaust. Including the poetic heritage in the analysis of texts makes it possible to gauge the complexity of K^trzynski's personality as an intellectual and a poet. He published some of his poetry himself in the already cited collection Aus dem

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Liederbuch eines Germanisierten, which the Austrian authorities confiscated right after its publication (1883). A part was published from manuscripts in 1973. These verses were written under the influence of Anacreon, Romantic German poetry and the liberal and democratic ideology connected both with the phase of German national identification and with the act of national conversion. In connection with this one can find in them three categories of threads/commonplaces: 1. Lenz, Lust, Liebeswonne, Rose, Freude, Freunde, Glück (spring, passion/desire, the bliss of love, rose, joy, friends, happiness); 2. Einsamkeit, Schmerz, Tod, Grab, kalte Herzen, Verzweiflung, Jenseits (loneliness, pain, death, grave, cold hearts, despair, the hereafter); 3. Freiheit, Freiheitslust, Heimat, Vaterland, Ahnen, Väter, Volk, Fesseln, Tyrannen, Rache (freedom, desire for freedom, homeland, fatherland, ancestors, fathers, nation, bonds, tyranny, vengeance). I omit here the first thematic type of youthful verses devoted to love and the charms of Prussian girls. At the time of his national conversion, the author decided to abandon this subject in the poem Entschluss (Decision). In another verse he apologized to Poland for having devoted himself to the transient pleasures of love and promised to devote everlasting love only to his fatherland (K^trzynski, 1973, p. 26). Leaving these threads aside, attention should be paid to the third category of themes and threads concerning national matters, which are present both in K^trzynski's poetry and in his autobiography. A content analysis of these commonplaces shows that Germany and German culture appear in the texts studied in a threefold character. Originally they appeared in connection with K^trzynski's own nation, whose criticism is conducted from the inside, combined with appeals to the nation to liberate itself from the tyranny of power, and with expressions of sympathy (mein armes Volk). After the change of national identification the commonplace of Germany functions in connection with the subject of germanization. That is explicitly expressed in the autobiography and in connection with charges of tyranny now made not in the name of the German nation but of suffering Poland, the enslaved Silver Eagle, the land of Polish ancestors, the oppressed Masurian folk. In contrast to positively evaluated Polishness, germanization is a definitely negative concept. On the other hand, the German character appears in K^trzynski's youthful poetry in two forms. The first form is the tradition of the German love of freedom manifested in the fight against Rome and in the

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activities of contemporary liberal democrats. In the second form it expresses itself in the tyranny of power against one's own nation and in the rapacious actions of the Hohenzollerns against Poland. (However, this is an accusation against rulers, not against the German nation.) This second aspect of the German character or of things German is implied, but not called directly by name. In the autobiography it has a clearly named equivalent in "germanization", but in the text a German character of a different sort is implied. It has been emphasized that contrary to his own declarations K^trzyriski was not a germanized Pole. In childhood and youth he was a German in respect to culture and consciousness. In light of a critical sociological standpoint there are no other criteria for defining nationality. Young von Winkler spoke, read and wrote in German. He thought in German and wrote poetry only in that language. A tenuous bond of Polishness linked him only with his father. But even his father, a germanized Pole, spoke to him exclusively in German. When asked before the court in Berlin about his native tongue (Muttersprache), K^trzynski mentioned German, adding that he was a germanized Pole. K^trzynski's mother, like Goethe's mother, had a "propensity for spinning yarns" {Lust zu Fabulieren) and in part he owed his literary inspirations to her. His mother's tales introduced him to the world of German legends and fantasies; he could communicate with his beloved mother only in German. She probably would have found it difficult to pronounce his new Polish first name and surname. In the family of his birth he continued to be called Albert (K^trzynski, 1973, p. XXIII). The entire period of school and university studies confirmed the German nature of K^trzynski's culture, and this took place in just as natural a way as it did in all German youths. In K^trzynski's autobiography, written in late old age but with full intellectual powers, there are no traces of a national conflict with his school environment. Even in the military school for orphans he was singled out and favored as a good pupil meeting all of the requirements of the school. In K^trzynski's poetry there are traces of the feelings of isolation and homesickness of a boy taken away from his home, but this is not connected with national strangeness. K^trzynski owed much to his university professors, among whom was the eminent historian Wilhelm Giesebrecht. The liberal University of Koenigsberg did not make trouble for him in the defense of his doctoral thesis, which he undertook right after his release from prison. The young national convert dug his way into Polish culture on his own with great efforts but with great enthusiasm. In later years, as a historian, he

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became very fluent in Polish and also in Old Polish. However, he never achieved phonetic correctness. As director of Ossolineum he mispronounced the Polish work for books. The imperfection of his Polish was mentioned in Jozef Szujski's opinion in connection with K^trzynski's efforts to obtain a chair at the Jagiellonian University. Besides, the Cracow political conservatives were troubled by K^trzynski's ostentatious admission to having participated in the uprising. He never did obtain the chair that he sought (Barya, 1948). K^trzynski was an introvert and not inclined to confidences. It is not known how he took this rebuff and criticism of his Polish. Yet there is no doubt that it did not shake his firm Polish self-identification. His way of thinking, in the figurative sense, was permanently and decidedly Polish. However, one may doubt whether, in later years, the Polish language also became the only language in which he thought in the literal sense. In Lvov, in the Ossolineum library, he lived in an entirely Polish environment and the family that he started was purely Polish. When he was forty-five years old he lost his beloved youngest son. The elegy that he wrote on this occasion, after years of poetic silence, was in German. The German language for him apparently remained the only language in which he could express deep feelings in poetic form. The example of K^trzyriski clearly indicates the theoretical need, and the fact that it is empirically possible, to differentiate national self-identification from the nature of participation in national culture. That is also the contention here, despite the fact that the nation previously was defined as a cultural community and a community of communication based on it. However, there is a possibility of ambiguous identification and cultural ambivalence in borderland areas in the geographical and psychic sense. The possibility of intimate communicative contact exists not within one, but within two communities. That situation must enrich the domain of people's emotional experiences and contacts, often giving rise to uncertainty and a feeling of having no roots. Many such examples may be cited among European Jews and other nations living in a Diaspora (Bauman, 1995), among Silesians, and among Poland's neighbors across the eastern border. Wojciech K^trzyriski was not a victim of ambivalence. After his national conversion he experienced no doubts as to his own identification. He was a Pole and only a Pole. Yet he could not, and did not have to, lose his earlier acquired and deeply assimilated competence in the field of German culture. He also assimilated Polish culture strongly and with conviction. So his case

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represents a solution other than ambivalence. I call his case dual culturalism or bivalence. The example of Wojciech K^trzynski is by no means dated, or limited to its historical importance alone. His situation may be compared to the position of many millions of members of national minorities, peripheral groups, people of the ethnic borderland of the countries of Europe, Asia and of the entire contemporary world of accelerated development or postmodernity. A borderland situation in the above sense may give rise to strong nationalist tendencies, and the striving for separation from neighboring cultures in order to preserve one's own culture and national separateness. However, in connection with the drive towards supraregional integration, it may also lead individuals and groups to relinquish their own national identification, resulting in the disappearance of ethnic diversity. This last solution releases people from the troublesome state of ambivalence, but it is not good from the point of view of the creative possibility of a global consciousness of culture, which develops through fertilization with a multiplicity of traditions and threads. This solution also blocks the satisfaction of the hubristic needs of the individual. Possible variants of relations between forms of national identification and the areas and nature of participation in the heritage of various national cultures must be examined in the search for better solutions. Based on empirical examples and partially on hypothetical relationships, a matrix can be constructed of relations between national identification and the assimilation of cultures regarded as one's own. The model for this term is the concept of ambivalence, for which the common meaning of a state of psychically negative uncertainty has been reserved. Cultural valence is the feeling of affiliation with the ethnic or national culture recognized as one's own, constituting the cultural heritage of one's own group not only in the sphere of competence acquired through education, occupational specialty or participation in wider, supranational communities, unless in the self-identification of the individual these communities replace the national community or are added to it as a community of a higher order that does not reduce earlier, more intimate national ties. The progressive universalization or standardization of culture causes an ever stronger penetration of the content beyond the syntagma of a person's own national culture within the circle of the experience of individuals. However, this does not decide the fate of individual national cultures. Some

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competent scholars of contemporary affairs are skeptical of the notion of a global culture that supposedly will oust and replace national cultures (Smith, 1990). This problem requires empirical verification. The investigation of cultural biographies is one of the methods that seem especially suited for this purpose. When four types of attitude towards national identification and four types of national cultural valence are distinguished, the result is a sixteen-field table of hypothetical relations between these categories. Some of these logical relations are unquestionably empty categories. Some already have been documented empirically, while others are still awaiting documentation (see Table 1, p. 118). The four possible types of national identification are defined as follows: (1) uniform or integral, (2) double, (3) uncertain, (4) cosmopolitan. In light of previous studies simultaneous identification with two nations is possible, but it does not seem possible to cross this boundary. After it is crossed we have to do rather with cosmopolitanism that is a negation of actual identification with particular national groups. Ambivalence here denotes the vagueness of the national situation and the uncertainty of the tie. The four types of assimilation of national culture defined as cultural valence are designated as: (1) univalence, (2) bivalence, (3) ambivalence, (4) polyvalence. In a given moment of his life and situation every individual can represent more than one national identification but a limited number of categories. On the other hand, various types of valence may always appear together in the mind of the same individual. An example of wide polyvalence is the case presented below of Józef Czapski, which at the same time integrally represents the Polish national identification. The sixteen-field matrix originated at the intersection of two classification principles (identification and valence) and lays out the direction of further empirical studies for verifying the soundness of individual categories not yet confirmed by research. Polyvalence, for example, as the feeling of a tie superimposed on a person's own national culture (but not dislodging this feeling from his inner experiences), may be the expected state denoting the future "Europe of fatherlands" based, for example, on the communities of Mediterranean civilization (Valéry, 1924; Gadamer, 1992). However, this is also a problem for empirical verification. Polyvalence may also take the form of universalization that leads

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to the loss of all ties with national cultures, which are reduced to the level of traditional ethnic "small fatherlands", or even forgotten cultures. In this chapter we have presented a detailed analysis of a case that shows the possibility of combining a decidedly uniform and consistent national identification as the result of conversion with bivalence—cultural duality. For it is the assertion here that, after he became an out-and-out Pole, Wojciech K^trzynski never rejected, and never could have rejected, the influence of earlier German acculturation, which through the selective assimilation of its values even facilitated his national conversion. Some contemporary cases indicate that converts to German nationality who were brought up in Polish culture or Germans growing up in Poland but expelled, displaced (Vertriebene) or emigrating after the last world war retained many elements of Polish culture. This applies both to quasi-folkloristic popular culture, especially religious, and to higher literary and intellectual culture. A characteristic example of the latter is the academic circle of the Deutsches Polen Institut in Darmstadt. Some of the members of that circle, who are out-and-out Germans, are not only knowledgeable experts on Polish culture, but are also culturally bivalent or even polyvalent (Dedecius, 1995).

10. German Conversions: Arrested or Realized

In the Polish-German borderland German national conversion, that is, the passage to German national identity, must be acknowledged as explainable in many cases on practical grounds. This applies both to the times of the partitions and to the period of the last war, and to some extent also to the postwar period, especially the last decade of the twentieth century. This most recent period will be left for later studies. The two cases examined here are from the times of the Duchy of Posen at the end of the nineteenth century and the period of World War II. The autobiography of Jakub Wojciechowski has never been used before as an example of a peasant worker's biography from Prussian-occupied Poland at the turn of the nineteenth century. In my opinion, it is the best authentic autobiographical document in Polish literature of a representative of this social category. The work was entered in a competition held by the Polish Sociological Institute, announced by Florian Znaniecki in 1921, and published as a 500-page volume in 1930. Wojciechowski was born in 1884 in a village located a few score kilometers from Poznan and until the age of fifteen was brought up in this vicinity. He spent the next twenty-five years of his life in the Reich, working first in a brick factory and then in a cement factory near Brandenburg, in coal mines and various factories in Westphalia and Saxony, and on summer trips with a traveling merry-go-round reached as far as Hamburg. He served in the German army in World War I at the western front. Towards the end of his stay in emigration, before he returned to liberated Poland, he was a ticket collector and tram driver in Brandenburg (Wojciechowski, 1985).

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The period up to the sixteenth year of his life was crucial in terms of the started and arrested national conversion of the author. The discussion of this period takes up 40 percent of the text, and this part is the main subject of the analysis. The autobiograhpy was written by a man who only during one year, and for one hour a week, learned to write Polish in a Prussian school. His language is filled with slang expressions and syntactical and lexical Germanisms. However, the latter increase in number only when he writes about his stay in Germany. There are fewer of them in the description of his childhood. Jozef Chalasiriski, who edited the first edition of the biography, counted only a dozen or so commas in the entire text. Periods appeared every few pages, while vertical lines rarely separated paragraphs. However, the biography is written fluently and is rich in facts and details relating to the author's conditions of life and his fortunes. The entire autobiography was the work of a mature man, who had many life experiences behind him. It is impossible to decide which of his later experiences influenced the self-interpretation of the early phase of his life, with which we are mainly concerned here. This illustrates the methodological limitation of the retrospective autobiography as a source in comparison with the diary-memoir. In Wojciechowski's case this limitation is not so important, because his autobiography relates facts arranged in strictly chronological order. Self-reflections expressing the maturation process of identity are more frequent in relation to the later period of his life than to childhood and early youth. The facts described, which are a testimony of experiences sunk deep in the memory, are nevertheless a sufficient basis for reconstructing values, and the attitudes resulting from them. Although the author himself does not explicitly create a "model of the first degree" of his experiences, a hermeneutic reconstruction of the model does seem incorrect. The facts related are a result of choice, albeit guided to a certain extent by the competition instructions and the author's later experiences. The length and detail of the autobiography prove that independent choice definitely dominates in it. This autobiography does not concentrate on one value, as do the memoirs of K^trzynski written for a specific purpose. Three main "genetic sequences" (Thomas, Znaniecki, 1976) may be distinguished in this autobiography: the motif of work, the motif of national identification and the motif of sexual experiences. These three threads appear explicitly in the description—obviously, not all of them from the beginning. Nor does the author separate any

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general reflections. They follow one another, mixed up like beads of different colors and shapes strung on one thread or like pictures on a reel of film, the indiscriminate recording of whatever moved in front of the camera lens. I call such personal biographies simple narrative autobiographies. For this reason a hermeneutic analysis must dig below the surface of the relation of facts and cull the "etic" or implied motifs. For example, the early manifestation of the motif of cognitive curiosity combined with rationalist tendencies of a sort is implied. The motifs of personal dignity are clear but are not commented on reflectively. In a later period these motifs are tied with the national thread, but, earlier on, rather with a motif that can be distinguished as a class thread, which is not called so explicitly but which is implied by the facts described. On account of the subject of the present analysis, the emphasis is placed on national values, but in the text of the biography they obviously are combined with other values. Only in the later parts of the autobiography may they be regarded as focal, after the author becomes an activist in the Polish community. On the other hand, from the very beginning the motif of work shapes the character of the narration. Wojciechowski's family belonged to the poorest of the poor. They were rural tenants making a living from service and from day labor for wealthier farmers or squires. Jakub Wojciechowski wrote as follows about his birth: "I landed up very unlucky: to such a hard up mother and father" (p. 34). That is why his first experiences of differences and social boundaries were connected not with national differences, but with differences in property and status, for the farm children in the neighborhood called him a "miserable half-breed" and he wasn't allowed to play with them. In such circumstances from the very outset work was a dire necessity and was also the source of his dignity. The author was thirteen when for the first time he brought home better wages than his father, who had fallen into alcoholism and no longer properly carried out his duties as head of the family. Neither this opinion, nor pride on account his achievement, is explicitly expressed in the text, but it is implied from the facts. Young Wojciechowski's eagerness to learn and raise his status is expressed in many pithily described reactions to the efforts of his father to postpone Jakub's schooling so that his mother could leave him in charge of his younger brother while she went out to work as a "day laborer". Going to a Prussian school after a year of anticipation caused no visible reactions in the text to

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the German language and an imposed foreign culture. Both of the author's parents were completely illiterate, and for him school was an opportunity not to be a "workhorse" like them, but to be able to sign his own name and read an official document. So the problem was not a strange nationality, but how to get a few score pfennigs for notebooks and a textbook. Without a textbook Jakub was unable to prepare for class and was beaten by the teacher. The advantage of Wojciechowski's biography as a document for research is that the author does not project his later experiences in emigration, as an activist in Polish organizations, onto the years of his childhood. During this period, for him and for the rural population of his social standing, the German character of the school and of Prussian offices had been something natural for generations. The state of consciousness of the more affluent peasants who sent their children to town schools and read the Polish press may have been different. The rural poor, on the one hand, were immersed in the Polishness of language and customs in their entirety. On the other hand, compulsory contacts with German institutions left a deep impression. Jakub's grandfather fell in the battle of Sadova, when the Posen regiments rushed to the attack roused by the music and the catchword "Poland is not yet lost". Knowledge of this fact was part of Jakub's family tradition and did not result in opposition between Polish and German culture. It rather tended to erase the differences: one didn't have to pray for that grandfather because he had died in war and so had been saved. The first glimpse of awareness of a national contradiction was noted in the autobiography in connection with an apparently minor episode, which, embedded deeply in the memory, must have been a powerful emotional experience. The father decided to spend the money saved from Jakub's wages to buy him his first new suit of clothes. When they were selecting a red tie to go with the outfit, a certain stranger, only called "mister", criticized their choice and bought Jakub another one with a tie-clip decorated with a white eagle and told the boy to always wear ties in the national colors. At more or less the same time, Emperor Wilhelm II issued a decree that permitted children in the next-to-last grade of primary school to learn to read and write Polish once a week. However, Jakub's mother refused her consent for these lessons, fearing that she would have to pay a higher tax on this account. One of Jakub's colleagues wrote the required consent and signed it in the name of Jakub's father.

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So at the instance of an unknown gentleman and a colleague the battle started for Jakub's Polish consciousness. However, there were more hindrances than advantages on this road. Once, when he was working for another farmer, he tried to read a book he had come across somewhere by chance— Thaddeus in Lithuania. The farmer took the book away from him, and Jakub's mother burned it so that "he wouldn't play with a book instead of work". A more fortunate contemporary of Jakub, born in a Galician village, was able to read Mickewicz's Master Thaddeus without interference while feeding cows and so developed a life-long love that led him to a chair of Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University (Pigon, 1983). The text of the autobiography at least, written after many years, contains no testimony of this kind. If an explicitly expressed declaration of national identification is acknowledged as the fundamental element of national selfidentification, Jakub Wojciechowski took such a step towards national conversion in the next-to-last grade of primary school, in his geography class. Coached earlier by a colleague on how to reply to the teacher's first question, "Who are you?", starting a series of questions on the provinces of the Reich, he answered that he was a German. However, this was an automatic answer, part of the school ritual dictated by the textbook. The author himself does not comment on this answer. The context of this information places it not within national problems but in the framework of general cognitive interest in geography as a source of knowledge about the world. The main identity-shaping factors in this autobiography, and fundamental in this life course, belonged not to school but to the world of work. This passage into the ambit of another culture was simultaneously a crossing of the border between the vestiges of feudalism and modern industrial society. From then on Jakub no longer wanted to go to neighboring farmers and estates to work from dawn to dusk, the target of curses and the steward's whip. For, according to his autobiography, that is how rural farm hands were treated in the years of his childhood. The Polishness of the local landowners, whom, with a touch of irony, he called "their lordships" in his autobiography, was inaccessible and rather repulsive. He never dared go near their homes, and when he met one of them in the field it was as his boss, a man no more kindly and generous than his steward. These individual experiences may not have been typical for the entire rural population in Posen province. However, such experiences by no means helped him to form an early conception of Poland that encompassed various estates. Nor did they

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protect him against the attractive picture of German life. So he felt no inner resistance (or at least did not note any in his autobiography) when a kindly forester encouraged him not to sing Polish songs while tending cattle at pasture but to learn German songs. He was given a whole mark for learning to sing a German song, Ich bin ein deutscher Bursche (I am a German lad). Soon after this the school-leaving examination took place that would decide whether the compulsory schooling requirement had been met. For the second time Jakub acknowledged German nationality to the school inspector. He also did not comment on this in his autobiography. Instead, he wrote that he had been praised for his knowledge and for his pluck and that "he had a lot of honor" from that (p. 111). However, this second unpremeditated act of national apostasy evoked reactions from the rural environment. The village administrator regarded this declaration as deceiving the teacher. Wojciechowski quotes the village administrator word for word: "Well, there you German, you were supposed to say that you're a Pole and not a German." But a woman neighbor was of a different opinion: "Then all of them mulled it over and in the end they also didn't know whether they were Poles or Germans" (p. 112). The process of germanization presented in Wojciechowski's autobiography deviates from the literary pictures of suffering and heroic resistance of the children of Wrzesnia, and from the historical analysis of striking school pupils in Posen and Pomerania several years later (Kulczycki, 1993). Jakub's susceptibility to the impulses of a foreign culture was connected with his social isolation as a country pariah, whom even his schoolmates did not like. It was a product of poverty and the resulting sensitivity to material incentives. The out-and-out Polishness of his family and part of his environment was still more ethnic than national. For a long time he did not encounter anyone on his life path who could perform the role of a "significant other" guiding him to Polishness, except for the single encounter with the donor of the "national tie". On the other hand, he did meet many apostles of germanization, which appeared to him first and foremost as a way to get ahead. The turning point in Jakub's national consciousness took place during his first period of emigration, when he was working at a brick kiln near Berlin. In his autobiography he also notes that when he took leave of the parish priest and his teacher, a Pole, they enjoined him not to lose his nationality and faith. The influence of emigration on national consciousness has been emphasized and observed many times in the memoirs of Polish emigrants and in other

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sources. Wolker Connor states that only after a long stay in America did emigrants from Holland acquire a feeling of national membership (Connor, 1994). Benedict Anderson, in connection with a similar thesis, argues with Gellner by quoting Lord Acton: "Exile is the cradle of nationality" (Anderson, 1994). Jakub's expatriation should be described as emigration rather than exile, but the effect was similar. On the other hand, this was not a sudden, one-off turning point, as K^trzynski described his Polish national conversion. To be sure, when Wojciechowski left his native country, he was not yet a full German convert. He was just starting on this path, perhaps not with full consciousness. When he found himself in Berlin, for the first time he was clearly aware of a feeling of strangeness such as he had never experienced at home, where the school and government institutions were obviously German elements. In keeping with the way of thinking characteristic of the text, the author speaks more of behavior than of inner reactions. However, he emphatically expresses the difficulty of communicating with people speaking a dialect and not school German, the subdued conversations of Polish emigrants, and finally the critical and sneering comments of strangers about his language and faith. Here the relation of religion to nationality needs to be recalled and commented upon. Religion belongs to the category of "building blocks", elements of nationality that are optional. When separated from the national feeling, religion may also become a supranational factor joining together people of one faith. Such functions of Catholicism can be observed nowadays among the German minority in Upper Silesia (p. 246). However, in some cultures religion plays a leading role and is a specific factor of integration. In all of the folk cultures of Europe, religion, even "universal" religion by assumption, undergoes a process of "ethnicization". This is very obvious in Polish Catholicism, which places a strong accent on the cult of local or adopted saints and the Mother of God, Queen of Poland. In his autobiography Wojciechowski often writes about "our Polish faith" and does not accept the explanation given by Germans that his religion is Catholic not Polish. "Deutschkatoliken", especially some of the priests sent by the authorities, are represented as enemies of Polishness trying to break up group solidarity. In the first period of his stay in Germany Jakub still did not feel capable of defending himself against criticism of Polishness. He put it this way: "My spirit was still too weak". However, he was coming closer and closer to a

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conscious form of national identification. As soon as he turned sixteen, he wrote to the Society of Polish Catholic Workers of Saint Isidore. This was tantamount to an official declaration of Polishness. On the other hand, his national valence was limited. He subscribed to a Polish newspaper and listened to it being read aloud, but he wrote that "our beautiful Polish speech" in the intellectual, press version was hard for him and his comrades to understand. Yet in every place to which his changes of job brought him he sought out contacts with Polish organizations, recruited members for them, and in the end, after World War I, became president of a Polish association in Brandenburg. During his peregrinations and through his contacts with émigré organizations he met many Polish workers from Galicia, the Kingdom of Poland, and as far away as Wilno. Through these experiences, and also through reading, his vision of his fatherland expanded beyond the borders of small rural and provincial Polishness to the big ideological fatherland, "which had been wounded" like India. In the autobiography, which is not very rich in metaphors, the vision of the ideological fatherland was depicted very figuratively in a description of the soldier's oath that he had to swear in the Prussian army. Initially, he had learned the words of the oath reluctantly, but during the ceremony, when he raised his fingers up before the flag with the black eagle, he mentally switched himself off from the situation, which he described very penetratingly. Later he remembered a picture that he had once seen. It showed "a Polish eagle on a big stone pillar, and on the sides those three foreign eagles that wanted to destroy it, and at the bottom a small group of people and the legend: 'The last partition of Poland'" (p. 382). Wojciechowski 's autobiography provides a lot of valuable information for studying the passage from ethnic to reflective Polish nationality. Here, however, we are examining only the first part, which is also interesting as a document of the initial process of the abandoning of Polishness. In his wanderings in emigration Wojciechowski often met germanized Poles, whom he called traitors. The motives for their national conversion were very likely similar to those to which he had succumbed in his early youth. These conversions were influenced not only by the pressure of the Prussian school and the policy of denationalization, but also by the powerful attraction of the values of German civilization, which made an especially strong impression on the most economically deprived categories of the rural population.

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In childhood Wojciechowski only had contacts with those categories of Poles whose level of civilization was obviously lower than that of Germans. He also experienced the inconveniences of a quasi-feudal order, in comparison with which German economic and social relations had unquestionable advantages. Since Wojciechowski was capable and hard working, his German employers treated him kindly. Their method was praise and reward, not brutal repression. They also encouraged him to adopt German culture. In short, this was a picture of germanization that deviated from the stereotypical picture of a repressive Prussian system trampling the universal and determined patriotic resistance of Poles. As long as Wojciechowski remained in his native village and vicinity, no social force working in the name of Polishness was effective in checking his gradual conversion, even though the reactions of his social surroundings may be treated as a critical commentary on his gradual national apostasy. Neither did any Polish educational activity reach him to counterbalance the not only coercive but also prestigious German culture. This does not mean that there were no such activities in the Grand Duchy of Posen. A copy of Master Thaddeus even reached one of the farmers who employed Jakub, but not all categories at the bottom of the social ladder were affected by such actions. In Wojciechowski 's case, the atmosphere of emigration definitely arrested the process of his conversion. The influence of numerous and active Polish workers' organizations played a role in this (Kulczycki, 1994). To be sure, later the repressive and anti-Polish regime of military service put his Polishness to the test and confirmed it. Thus the trajectory of Wojciechowski's conversion was broken off in its initial phase, but it is an example of a certain type of conversion to German culture characteristic of the time of the partitions. Despite the fact that Wojciechowski did not undergo a complete conversion, German acculturation exerted a permanent influence on him. During his stay in Germany he was a conscious Pole active in national émigré organizations, caring about Polishness in Silesia, and opposing the views of German adversaries at numerous workers' political meetings. He always fought there for the dignity of Poles. However, his return to Poland in 1923 was not voluntary. He lost his job and had no prospects of getting another one on account of his political opinions. Wojciechowski himself did everything he could to stay in Germany, because in that environment he had satisfactory material conditions and a certain social position as an émigré activist. The émigré environment was the social niche in which he felt well adapted as a

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Pole, and as a Pole who was accorded social importance. He could not expect to gain a similar position in Poland. His cultural bivalence gave him a higher status in the country to which he emigrated than in the liberated country of his origin. Similar situations appear today in the minority communities in Poland that we have studied. These situations are a continuing problem in the contemporary world. Today people often willingly leave not only their small fatherlands but also state fatherlands. However, at the same time they do not want to give up participation in the symbolic community of the imagined fatherland. This problem is present in Polish postwar political and Solidarity emigration, as well as among Poles caught up in the brain drain. It is also an issue for some Silesians, who in Germany are grappling with the problem of their national ambivalence/bivalence. In the nineteenth century the process of the germanization of the upper classes, which is illustrated by the fortunes of the K^trzynski family and of many other noble families in Pomerania and east Prussia, followed a different course. In his sketches of east Prussia K^trzynski mentioned twenty-three landowning families whose members had become, or were becoming, Germans, including the Gutowski, Niekutowski and Rogal families. Some of them retained memories of their origins and, at the end of the twentieth century, still had old Polish Protestant hymnbooks. Others erased these origins from their memory. A similar but reverse process of the rejection and forgetting of roots took place in the genealogical histories of thousands of Poles with German surnames, who passed from Germanness to Polishness. It is hard to explain these nineteenth-century conversions in terms of instrumental motives, but such motives cannot be ruled out in the conversions of Poles to German identification during the times of the partitions and today. The second strong wave in this direction after the period of the partitions passed through Poland during the occupation and after the Second World War. No thorough and objective study has yet been carried out of the problem of Germans and Volksdeutschen from Poland. The issue was confronted mainly in terms of national betrayal and viewed from the angle of the harm these people did to Polish society. These so-called turncoats, who knew the native language and local conditions and served the Nazi occupying authorities with absolute loyalty, especially harmed the Polish underground movement and Jews in hiding. However, that is only one aspect of the behavior of the German community and persons of German origin during the occupation. Besides

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that, there were many acts of faithfulness of Polish self-identification, which often required heroism on the part of persons whose German origin was known and from whom the occupation authorities demanded German selfidentification. A very conspicuous example of such an attitude was the stance of Pastor Bursche. Many other members of the German minority with unquestionable German national identification and at least double cultural valence held themselves aloof from the occupational order. There were cases of refusal to declare German nationality, even in the face of the severest punishment. Such cases of German conversion during the war varied in character. One of these cases, deviating from Polish stereotypes of national treason, will be presented on the basis of an autobiographical sketch of a German professor in the form of a farewell address at his alma mater before retirement. The case of Professor N., in comparison with the case of K^trzynski, may serve as an example of conversion going in the opposite direction. The professor was the son of a Polish official and social activist and of a German mother who hardly spoke a word of Polish. His family lived in a borderland town of Polish Pomerania. So the author, who was born in the twenties, was brought up in a borderland situation in a twofold sense. In early childhood he acquired German, but the influence of his father, of his Polish preschool and grammar school, made him bilingual and culturally bivalent, with the dominant influence of Polish culture. His formal German conversion was a result of the decision of his parents, who, after Pomerania was incorporated into the Reich, sent him to Berlin to continue his education. However, when the war broke out, the author, to use his own words, was "in his own understanding a Pole in every respect". Since he is a social scientist, his self-analysis is expressed in sociological terms and contains constructions of models that are models both of the first degree (emic) and of the second degree (etic). The text contains a synthesis made by the author that looks back to the moment when his professional life came to an end. The process of the formation of the otherwise unquestionable dominance of the German character of his identification and valence was not presented in detail. The text shows that after the war, after he returned from the army and after the fall of Nazism, he retired into himself, checking the full acceptance of Germanism. On the other hand, in the first years of his stay in Germany the picture of metropolitan Berlin, which contrasted sharply with his rather backward native

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town, was conducive to this Germanism. Just as in Wojciechowski's case, civilizing influences were the magnet, but they were of a higher order. Similarly conducive was the accepted men circle of schoolmates and even army comrades (to be distinguished from the commanders, though). Finally, after the war university studies and scholarly work shaped the fundamental values of the author's life based on German culture. What role did earlier Polish acculturation, the appropriation and mastering of Polish culture, play during professor N.'s entire life in German culture? These elements of identity probably existed in a latent form. They must have been strongly suppressed in the Nazi school and in military service at the front. However, their strong adherence is attested by the fact that when recalling the hills, forests and lakes of the land of his childhood years Professor N. quoted a passage of the invocation from Master Thaddeus. This appeal to "Lithuania, my fatherland" to recall to memory a Pomeranian childhood must have sounded strange in that German academic ambience. Here the author gave a partial answer to a previous question asked about the duration of Polish cultural valence in his German life: "Time and again I returned to them [to those strophes] after my ancestral world, my Polish 'frame of reference' had been destroyed." The author devoted a page to the picture of the destruction of that world, describing his observations of that time and his emotional experiences of the beginning of the German occupation of the Polish borderlands as "a nightmare". Like K^trzynski, who under the influence of deep pain returned to German poetry after many years, so Professor N. in moments of emotion referred to his Polish frame of reference, which had not been rej ected, despite his German conversion. Going back in thought to the landscape of childhood years is a typical characteristic of approaching old age, so it was understandable that this German professor returned in his memories to the "forest hills" of the area of Polish Pomerania. However, the need to express sentiment for that country in the lines of Mickiewicz's poetry shows that through all the years of his German life he carried some part of the Polish cultural heritage within him, just as K^trzyriski carried part of the German cultural heritage within him. Both of them remained culturally bivalent in their national conversions that went in opposite directions. In the case of Professor N. this was unquestionably accepted bivalence, not ambivalence, because he accepted and appreciated his Polish heritage. Years later he wrote that for him the encounter

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with Polish literature, especially with Mickiewicz, and earlier with Sienkiewicz, was important for his cultural initiation. After the last war huge numbers from among the German population of the eastern territories found themselves within the new borders of Germany, first as a result of the German evacuation, then mainly on account of Polish deportations, and finally voluntary resettlement. German sources estimate the number at three million. A considerable number of persons from the former Silesian borderland, and to a lesser extent from Mazuria and Pomerania, took with them their wanted or unwanted ethnic heritage, the regional variety of Polishness. The later the expulsion or resettlement, the greater the Polish acculturation through the educational system. These last elements taken together may be treated as traces of coercion that aroused deep resentment. Rather than accepted bivalence they were a source of unwanted ambivalence that made it difficult to adapt to the new conditions. In time, however, they fused together inseparably with the memory of childhood and youth. They became an element of the whole embraced by the concept of Heimat. This conclusion is borne out by three weeks of observation that I carried out at the center for displaced persons from Silesia set up in Westphalia in the town of Oerlinghausen near Bielefeld. The entire center was decorated with scenes of the Silesian landscape. Instead of numbers, the rooms were marked by the German names of Silesian cities and towns. Initially such features could have been an expression of revanchist sentiments, which would have suited the activity of the center. However, in the nineties this period belonged to the past. Polish visiting scholars are greeted there in Polish and with unfeigned friendliness. The center serves as a place of recreation and provides courses for displaced persons, especially "late expellees". Observation of two such courses led me to conclude that most of the participants willingly brought back to mind elements of Polish culture, especially connected with religious rites and folklore. When singing Polish religious and folk songs together with a group of Polish students they displayed good knowledge of the words, but when they sang German songs they had to rely on printed texts. Their behavior—holding hands and swaying rhythmically to the melody of the songs Szla dziewieczka do laseczka (A little girl went to the forest) or Karolinki—was evidence of satisfaction with, and sentiment for, these values. Most of the persons observed manifested such reactions. However, in the few-score-strong group there were several persons who ostentatiously left the hall or chapel during the common singing of Polish

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songs. The majority willingly established contacts with the Polish residents of the center and used the opportunity to speak Polish. Numerous persons also attend the church in Bielefeld that conducts services in Polish. The cultural bivalence that forms during the process of national conversion has content of various kinds, depending on the intellectual level, education and cultural interests of the "convert". It has been possible to show this using the example of Silesian displaced persons from the lower and middle classes and Professor N. The content of the abandoned and chosen culture, connected with the new national identification, also arranges itself in different configurations. There is a marked difference here between national and religious conversions. Religious doctrines usually follow the principle of orthodoxy. The neophyte and convert who want to retain some of the dogmas and rituals of the old faith and would like to introduce them into the system of new beliefs and practices would be accused of heresy. National culture is a much looser syndrome of principles and values. Despite the union of its elements, previously called the "syntagma", and despite the existence of a cultural core called the "canon" (a body of values with a strong binding force), no culture of a nation different from the original ethnic group is entirely independent. Every culture draws from many different sources flowing from the field of "affiliation", as shown in Diagram 1 (p. 27). Thus a national convert may introduce elements from his culture of origin into the adopted culture. He may even find such threads in the new culture, for example biblical themes in Polish culture. This does not mean that a neophyte is free to do whatever he chooses in this field. Representatives of the dominant culture are more or less inclined to show tolerance with respect to the contribution of converts to that culture. In particular, Polish Jews encountered hostility and suspicion on this score, which impeded their national assimilation and pushed them into the sphere of painful ambivalence instead of enriching Polish culture with the practice of bivalence. The autobiography of a young Polish nationalist (Y.P.8) is a characteristic example of distrust with respect to persons of Jewish origin identifying with Polishness. It is examined in the chapter on the Polish national center. Similar attitudes are manifested towards Germans, albeit less often and with less severity. The example of the difficulties that K^trzynski encountered in his bid for a chair at the Jagiellonian University shows the possible influence of such reactions.

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The historically shaped attitude towards the assimilation of ethnic Ruthenian elements had a different and specific character. While German surnames, including Jewish ones, are regarded as a mark of strangeness, Ruthenian surnames—Belarussian or Ukrainian—do not evoke such reactions. Original Ruthenian surnames ending in "icz" are regarded as typically Polish and, eventually, as originating from the nobility. It is not a question of the surnames themselves. "Kosciuszko", "Moniuszko", and "Popieluszko" are enduring symbols of Polishness characteristic of different times and different fields of the syntagma of national culture. Even the most vocal nationalists do not object to such a model of conversion to Polish culture. The explanation of this fact lies in the widespread conviction that the eastern areas of the former Commonwealth were separated not by a national border but only by a regional one. However, for many centuries such a conviction made it hard to understand the national aspirations of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians. As a result, as the national consciousness of Poland's eastern neighbors grew, it changed potentially integrating neighborhood into a borderland of conflict and hatred. The post-socialist democratic transformation opened up the prospect of possible changes in this field. Signs of an evolution in this direction can be observed in the empirical materials presented below.

Note: The materials used in this part consist of seventy autobiographical interviews recorded on magnetic tape and written down in the form of 3,182 pages of manuscript, and also two questionnaire interviews with 300 students of Warsaw higher education institutions. The studies were carried out between 1992 and 1994.

One's countrymen? Who to call one's countrymen and whose bandore to tune? I trust only a Polish word. JERZY HARASYMOWICZ BRONIUSZYC, For Whom Should the Bandore Be Tuned? That s the Point! (in Polish)

Then all of them mulled it over and in the end they also didn't know whether they were Poles or Germans. JAKUB WOJCIECHOWSKI, The Autobiography

of a Worker (in Polish)

11. Variants of Ukrainity in the Light of Autobiographies

When proceeding to a characterization of types constructed on the basis of studies of autobiographies, one should follow the methodological principle used in the history of literature. That rule enjoins us to bear in mind the situational context of the history and existence of each of the nationalities analyzed, and the passages on minorities in the previous chapters. A few words must also be said about the set of empirical materials. These materials differ somewhat for each of the three nationalities analyzed here—Ukrainians, Belarussians and Germans—but have a similar core, which is carefully examined below. The construction of types of Ukrainian identification and assimilation of culture is based mainly on the autobiographies of seven Ukrainians aged between twenty-two and twenty-eight, university graduates in the humanities and social sciences. The advantages and limitations of such a choice have been described in the methodological part. The number of autobiographies studied is small, but each of these case studies could be the subject of a separate monograph. A summary arrangement was chosen here, which is more useful for making an overall synthesis of the nationality problem of the ethnic borderland. In four cases the interviewer was a Ukrainian, a fact of which the respondents were aware. In three cases Poles conducted the interview, in two other cases the interviewer was the author of this book. The recorded texts were written down and analyzed. In one case contacts with the subject were repeated several times, which permitted acquisition of more extensive knowledge of the facts with which this study is concerned.

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The following main indicators of national identification and national valence were applied to the analysis of the texts: explicitly stated national self-identification, some independent values, significant other, significant institution, and labeling. In connection with the concept of focal value, it should be remembered that both the researcher and reader must bear in mind that the data examined are elements not of the life course itself, but a text that is a construction (one of the many possible). It is a description of the author's life produced by the author himself in specific circumstances and under the influence of motives that we do not fully understand. The understanding of focal value will be explained in the course of the analysis. The other criteria refer to well-known sociological and psychosocial conceptions, for example to Mead, Goffman and Znaniecki. In six Ukrainian autobiographies the motif focusing the narrative is nationality defined explicitly as a value and implicitly communicated. For example, Philologist 1, afterstarting his story, stopped and said that he would have to go back to the fate of his grandfather and parents, who had been expelled from the Bieszczady Mountains region during the "Vistula" action. He explains this by the fact that for him his grandparents had become "very, very important persons. They "kindled my pride", providing him with facts that could help him build "the consciousness of a Ukrainian" (Y.U.I). When recalling the native village of his grandparents the Philosopher said that it was "absolutely Ukrainian" (Y.U.2). The reading of Shevchenko and Ukrainian history had awakened in him "the feeling of a certain distinctness, the first searches in the dark for identity". In a Ukrainian high school "my national consciousness formed on a higher level". In addition to many implied declarations of Ukrainian nationality, the Historian writes: "My Ukrainian origin is always making itself felt" (Y.U.3). Philologist 2 clearly expresses the principle behind the construction of the description of his life, saying that he treated the subject matter "from the perspective of my national biography" (Y.U.6). An even more mature awareness of the constructive nature of the autobiographical statement appears in the interview with a twenty-three-year-old student: "I wanted this statement to have some order. I concentrated on one fundamental question, as it were, because I believe that it had a decisive influence on my life until now" (Y.U.7). The value to which he refers here is nationality.

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The last quotation explains clearly the meaning of the term focal value. In all of the autobiographies quoted nationality/Ukrainity is the point of reference for the assessment of many other values, persons, institutions, and the content of culture. For many authors the significant other is the grandfather. Grandfathers are the depositories of the ethnic tradition, preserving the memory of the lost small fatherland, rebuilding a destroyed home, and earning the respect of their Polish neighbors through hard work and resourcefulness. The parents, who in childhood had suffered the trauma of deportation, in some cases were afraid to, or did not want to, awaken national consciousness in their children so that they would not have trouble adjusting to their social environment. In one case, however, the parents played the role of guardians of the national tradition. Among the significant others was a Greek Orthodox priest. Religion, as a rule, belongs among the dependent values related to the values focusing the autobiography. This is especially true of the rite accompanied by liturgical songs and Byzantine pomp. At the same time this was a factor shaping the leading value whose presentation focused the life description. For many authors one of the Ukrainian high schools had a strong impact on shaping nationality. The lasting influence of teachers and educators, even after the completion of formal schooling, created the feeling of community joining the graduates and determining their national values. However, two of the authors rejected the Ukrainian high school either because they were reluctant to close themselves up in an environment isolated from the outside world, in a kind of ghetto, or because of their conviction that the school was not on a satisfactory level. Awareness of belonging to a national minority makes language a subject of reflection in most of the autobiographies examined. However, the place of language in the life course of the authors varies. In several cases linguistic polonization had already taken place in early childhood, in the course of playing with Polish peers from the neighborhood. Fresh Ukrainization took place either in a Ukrainian language school or under the influence of grandparents. In one case the parents exerted pressure on their son not to speak Polish at home. Another area of national pressure from the family is marriage alliances. There is one mixed marriage among the subjects. However, the principle of endogamy dominates. One of the authors quotes the instructions of his father on the choice of a wife: "Only not with a Polish girl!" (Y.U.3). Another, with

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a certain sense of embarrassment, tells about the united family opposition that forced his sister to break off her marriage with a Polish man (Y.U.I). All of the men mention Ukrainian wives, fiancées and girl friends. These decisions are by no means coerced. In addition to cultural affinity, the choice is influenced by the charm of black-haired and dark-eyed Ukrainian girls, whose beauty meets the main criteria of feminine beauty accepted by the authors. One of them even speaks of the ideal—"I don't know in which aesthetics, maybe national" (Y.U.6). Here, as in the Orthodox rite and in folk music, in the description aesthetic values are related to the focal value of nationality. It is highly probable that these construction points of the text closely match the life course itself and its related attitudes. Aesthetic considerations aside, the feeling of cultural affinity and sense of security emanating from staying within the circle of kith and kin, who do not offend by singling one out as a stranger, do not inflame traditional conflicts or apply traditional stereotypes, also play a role in the choice of a partner. According to surveys conducted on representative samples, at the beginning of the nineties strong feelings of dislike for Ukrainians still existed in Poland. Thirty-eight percent of those polled declared such attitudes, as opposed to 34 percent in relation to Germans and 48 percent in relation to Gypsies, who are at the top of the scale of dislike (Jasinska, 1992, p. 224). According to the previously quoted definition of a minority, and also applying to the understanding of a nation or ethnic group, membership in a minority group is determined by the feeling of cultural dissimilarity and by the fact that others, members of the dominant cultural community perceive this dissimilarity. The dominant collectivity constitutes the center, while minorities are regarded as peripheries. They may be more or less aware of such an evaluation of their place and position. The process of "labeling" described below reinforces this awareness. Labeling means using names in relation to a minority group that have the character of insulting epithets. The function of this mechanism will be elucidated in due course in the light of the autobiographies of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Opole Silesians. The term itself comes from Erving Goffman. In light of the autobiographies of young Ukrainians, factors of contradistinction played a role in shaping their national consciousness. "I strengthened my consciousness of being a Ukrainian with this contradistinction: 'Poles— Ukrainians', 'damned Pole', and many others. This was the beginning of making me aware of who I am" (Y.U. 1). The Historian commented as follows

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on the polonization of his mother's brothers and sisters: "That's terrible for me. It's awful. How can one do that!" (Y.U.3). The already quoted Philosopher also spoke about the feeling of distinctness. It should be stressed that in light of the autobiographies none of the young authors declared himself a rabid nationalist. Philologist 1, quoted at the start of this chapter, spoke later about the evolution of his emotional attitudes towards Poles as a result of the more liberal policy of the Polish authorities towards minorities and the tolerant attitude of the Solidarity movement. The same author cites the stories of his grandfather, a fervent Ukrainian patriot and Orthodox Church deacon. His grandfather told him that during the deportation in 1947 his family was treated kindly by the Polish soldiers who escorted them. These soldiers protected the family's property from being robbed along the way (Y.U. 1). On the other hand, another autobiography contains diametrically opposite memories of the "Vistula" action (Y.U.2). Facts that can be subject to different interpretations and a diversity of attitudes are characteristic features of the material. The abundance of material is an advantage, but also makes it difficult to draw facile conclusions and generalizations in the form of stereotypes. This heterogeneity also applies to attitudes towards nationalities other than Poles. Some of the authors express spontaneous dislike for Jews. The Historian, who refers to the past, acknowledged that Jews acted mainly as an instrument of the Polish gentry, but they themselves were "hardly innocent" and also "have a lot on their conscience" (Y.U.3). Another of the authors even states outright that the behavior of the Jews "somehow justifies that there were some pogroms" (Y.U.6). But the Philosopher, who from the beginning grappled with the feeling of his own ambiguous identification, found in Aleksander Wat's Diary without Vowels a confirmation of the possibility of being a Pole and a Jew at the same time (Y.U.2). Dislike of, and lack of respect for, Belarussians is also present in the utterances. Such situations, like the position of a minority, are not conducive to widespread friendliness and tolerance. The authors oppose such a tendency, albeit not entirely successfully. This is due to reactions of which they also are the objects. Most of the texts supply evidence of the negative reactions that the authors experienced, in the form of labeling, within the Polish environment, often on the part of colleagues and near neighbors. The Philosopher said that he felt "crushed" when, during childhood scuffles, he heard the epithets "you Ukrainian", and "you banderowiec" (a member of a Ukrainian national

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independence organization during World War II), and when, on the street, a woman passer-by reprimanded him, telling him that one doesn't say "szsz" (shcho) but "co" (tso), because "this is Poland" (Y.U.2). The Historian emphasized that he was not able to find true friends until he was in a Ukrainian high school. There he felt safe, because, even during quarrels, "the reproach 'you Ukrainian' was not used" (Y.U.3). This does not mean that relations with Polish neighbors and colleagues were always hostile. When they recalled life in their native village, several authors spoke of mutual assistance during work in the fields, mutual respect for religious holidays, during which no noisy farm work was to be performed so as not to offend neighbors. Relations with fellow students were good, especially during higher studies. In the light of the authors' descriptions, the higher education institutions of the eighties were marked by real tolerance and intellectual, and often political, rapprochement. The autobiographies of young Belarussians and Silesians contain similar testimony. The collision of inherited stereotypes with observations of real people in everyday relations is described eloquently in the narrative of the Student with respect to his schooldays. In primary school a Polish schoolmate, who wanted to make friends with him, asked himto say—contrary to reality—that he was not a Ukrainian. The Polish boy even referred to the Ukrainian boy's appearance, which deviated from the "Ukrainian type", or from the stereotype. This Polish boy could not reconcile the image of a Ukrainian passed on by his family and environment with the feeling of friendship for a fellow pupil whom he knew through direct contact. In acknowledging him as a Ukrainian he must have felt cognitive and axiological dissonance. He wanted to remove this dissonance by denying the evidence and the reality. Many adults on both sides of the national barrier separating Poles and Ukrainians must have experienced a similar emotional-cognitive situation. Parents of the authors of the biographies and their Polish neighbors in Pomeranian, Lower Silesian and Masurian villages, as well as the authors in their place of birth, in Polish schools and universities, must have felt the same thing. The real reason in this case was the inherited memory of facts and events that, in the feelings of each of the national groups, were associated with opposing values. The autobiographies of young Ukrainian intellectuals contain many exclusively positive comments on the Ukrainian Liberation Army. The ULA was described as a national liberation force and defense against Poles. It is a source

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of pride (Y.U.3). Recalling the stories of his grandparents, the Philosopher described the ULA as a defense against the Home Army (the Polish underground army of the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation), National Armed Forces (an extremist nationalist Polish underground military organization formed in 1942 to combat the Left) and the army. He says that he treated these tales as "abstract" stories resembling westerns. Right after this, however, he places in this context recollections of the Polish detention camp for Ukrainians in Jaworzno, where "some really terrible things happened" (Y.U.2). Reflecting on the bloody conflict between the two nations, Philologist 2 said, "Ukrainians killed in anger. Poles could kill in the name of ideas. They are people of ideas. That's why they are not authentic." Later the question came up as to whether the national interest could justify killing. He did not come to any conclusion. In his text there are also other apologetic accents relating to the events in Volhynia (a former eastern province of Poland, where in 1945 the Ukrainian Liberation Army carried out bloody reprisals against Polish peasants who refused to support the Ukrainian independence movement), which, he believes, can be justified or explained as "getting rid of the Poles so that there wouldn't be any demands for autonomy, as in Lithuania in 1990 to 1991". He described the ULA as a "people's liberation movement" (Y.U.6). On the other hand, the Historian, who also is proud of the ULA legend, said that this opinion cannot be extended to all individual units and that murders cannot be justified, even those committed in the name of a noble goal (Y.U.3). Philologist 1 mentioned his vacation pilgrimage in the Bieszczady Mountains to the hill near the village of Komañcza, "a place where the ULA fought with the Polish army, which was unable to take the hill". He referred to this hill as "a place where Ukrainian partisan arms are covered in glory" (Y.U. 1). However, later on he said that young Ukrainians have abandoned such excursions/pilgrimages in favor of trips abroad and have turned their attention to more practical matters. That information may suggest a certain way of resolving the conflict of values that is an echo of a real conflict from the past, if forgetting may be regarded as a certain and lasting means of removing cognitive and axiological dissonance. Numerous Polish autobiographical materials indicate that it will be hard to forget the tragedy of Poles in Volhynia and the loss of the Galician fatherland. For the most part these are wartime reactions of the passing generation, but it is hard to say with what force these attitudes may show

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themselves in the coming generations, unless they are changed by factors other than the passage of time. In the Ukrainian material examined here certain signs of such modifying factors may be found in the utterances of young people who are grappling with the past of their families and their nations, but who at the same time are looking to the future of the contemporary world. The term "value" appears often in these texts, and the concept of value is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the focusing point of the autobiographical statement. On the other hand, the term "fatherland" does not appear in the free narrative autobiographical part. This is unquestionably connected with the life situation of young people, the generation of the Diaspora caused by expulsion in 1947. None of the authors was born on ethnically Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Rusnacki or Bojkovian territories, from where their parents and grandparents came. These young people were born in, and have spent their childhood in, Western Pomerania, Masuria and Lower Silesia. Only one family returned permanently to the Bieszczady Mountains area, another visited a grandfather there, who had repurchased a farm from a new settler. The question of the fatherland in the last part of the interview was deliberately vague ("What does fatherland mean to you?"). It could be understood as a request to define the term or to give a personal definition and express an emotional attitude to the referent of the concept. All of the respondents followed the second course, although the question faced them, as children of the Diaspora, with a real difficulty, which they themselves admitted. All of the responses at first, or exclusively, turned around the concept of the small, private fatherland. Although this term was not used, one of the respondents used the very apt expression "shirt" (Y.U.6). It is significant that several versions of this "shirt fatherland" appear .in the autobiographies, even in the same authors. Of the Bieszczady Mountains, the land of his forefathers, one author said: "I know that there I am at home and I simply like to be there" (Y.U.3). Another said: "Komancza, the Bieszczady and the entire area beyond the Curzon line became this Heimat, the truest Ukraine, the Ukraine that is a shirt, closer to the body" (Y.U.6). All of the authors mentioned trips to the land of their forefathers as being an important factor in experiencing their nationality. For one of them, a chance student excursion to the Bieszczady Mountains became a catalyst for return to Ukrainity, which had been almost forgotten in his Masurian childhood and during higher studies in central Poland (Y.U.5). These trips/pilgrimages were

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connected with the search for traces of monuments, the recalling of history, the singing of Ukrainian songs together. They were an introduction into the universe of national culture, which, together with the symbolic landscape/territory, constituted the fatherland. According to the authors of the autobiographies, in the nineties interest in such vacation trips declined, but at the same time animosity towards "Poles" also has waned. In the past this animosity had been manifested during quasi-conspiratorial meetings at "highland shepherds' watch-fires". In addition to the small Bieszczady fatherland, the concept of the substitute fatherland, which young Ukrainians discovered in Podlasie, appeared in the texts. The intact villages of Bialystok voivodeship provide the children of the Diaspora with a living picture of the elements of folk culture, which in their opinion is synonymous with Ukrainian culture. In the landscape of Podlasie, in the shape of the cottages, and in the well sweeps, a Ukrainian from Zamosc voivodeship sees a living reflection of the picture handed down through the recollections of grandparents and parents. He wants to build his home there and have a hand in creating a Skansen museum (Y.U.2). (That stance has a basis in a wider movement, whose views are expressed in the periodical Nad Bugom i Narwoju, but that is opposed by the national movement of the Belarussian minority.) Finally, there is a third version of the small fatherland in the autobiographies. The Historian, who was born near Koszalin and who declared that he feels at home in the Bieszczady, went on to say that he is "no Boyek" (a Ukrainian highlander from the Biesczady Mountains), just a Ukrainian born in Pomerania. He stated: "I am building up nostalgia in myself for those places", for Pomerania, where his father built a house, for Legnica with its Ukrainian high school. "To tell the truth, I come not from Veremenia and Niskoho Selo but from Pomerania" (Y.U.3). All of these definitions of small fatherlands have a common feature: the values and picture of rural life. Philologist 2 speaks of the influences of childhood on his life: "There is a certain unbroken line between my character and my way of seeing the world from childhood until now. Some delicate sensitivity for certain matters" (Y.U.6). He also believes that this sentiment has been strengthened under the influence of Greek literature. The attachment to the Bieszczady, where he—alone of the respondents—was brought up from the age of seven is transferred here to a generalized attitude towards the beauty of nature. Another author, who is much more meditative than the others,

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speaks of the "bucolic spirit" (rural, pastoral) shaped in a family atmosphere. Later on, with a touch of irony, he calls this form of fatherland "a Skansen museum of the national consciousness" (Y.U.7). The general reflection by the authors on the concept of the fatherland is not confined to the small, rural fatherland. However, going beyond the scope of the "national Skansen museum" creates real difficulties. One of the sources of this uncertainty will be shown in connection with the problem of valence, that is, the assimilation of culture. The most important role should be ascribed to their situation as members of a minority living in a Diaspora. For centuries, until recent years, the members of this Diaspora were bereft of support not only in their own state but also in a developed national culture recognized as separate and having foundations in strong indigenous institutions. So this situation is very different from the position of Poles during the partitions, which lasted a shorter time ("only" 120 years). Besides, Poles, with a determined effort during the ages of Romanticism and Positivism, kept alive national institutions that cared for the survival of the rich cultural tradition, especially that of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It might have been expected that the re-emergence of a Ukrainian state after seven centuries would have a strong impact on the views held by the young Ukrainian intellectual elite in Poland with respect to the fatherland. All of the authors of the autobiographies made trips to the free Ukraine. The texts analyzed contain evidence of a strong emotional reaction to this first encounter. The Philosopher spoke of having tears in his eyes when he crossed the border at night in a train. He called this "a real emotional experience". But the descriptions of further observations show disappointment. The people encountered—apart from selected intellectual circles—are described as "completely empty inside" (Y.U.2). The cities seem strange. The Historian mentions Lvov (Lwow in Polish) as the first place where he saw the Ukrainian flag, but for him the city itself remained "a geographical concept [...] Without any emotions" (Y.U.3). He indirectly argued against calling Lvov a Polish city, emphasizing the role of Ruthenian, Ukrainian, German and Jewish elements. Another text also suggests the Galician character of Lvov, and only one text contains the statement that "in spite of everything, the spirit there is Polish" (Y.U.6). In short, the city arouses feelings of strangeness. The character of Kiev better suits their national expectations, as does, especially, Khreshchatik, a city with "a Ukrainian spirit". But even such opinions are accompanied by criticism of the inhabitants.

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In conclusion, it must be stated that in their autobiographical texts the real free Ukraine was not presented as a basis for an understanding the feeling of the big fatherland. Ukraine is seen rather as a country that one would like to visit, on which hopes for the future are nurtured, but not as a place of permanent residence. The names of Przemysl and Wroclaw appeared several times in the context of their plans for permanent residence. Przemysl is closer than Lvov, "because this is a Ukraine in Poland". In the same text the author speaks of a trip to the Ukrainian state: "I suppose that I wasn't in Ukraine, for that Ukraine no longer exists. Was I just dreaming of something?" (Y.U.6). What then is the big ideological fatherland described in the autobiographical utterances of young Ukrainian intellectuals from Poland? According to the author of the longest autobiography: "That is a Ukraine of dreams" (Y.U. 1). It is composed of the thrill of reading Shevchenko, a hazy memory of remote history and the still living tradition of wartime conflicts, and of church and folk songs. It comprises the feeling of injury suffered as a result of deportations, the destroyed churches, which it was forbidden to repair, abandoned villages, and hostile neighbors. These are elements of the "imagined community", perhaps more real than the community in the conception of Benedict Anderson and contained in dreams suspended between tradition, literature and unfilled hopes for the future. This fragile system of a symbolic universe is superimposed on concrete places, relations and people. Meetings with friends at campfires in the Bieszczady Mountains, and numerous contacts with fellow Ukrainians belong to the real system or syndrome. On account of such contacts there are many places in Poland where one can feel at home. "Ukraine is only in the Heimat, around Chelm, in the area beyond the Curzon line. All those Ukrainian lands in Poland are very dear to me. In fact, places like Lvov and Kiev don't have to exist as long as everything is good here" (Y.U.6). The quoted statements of Philologist 2 are the most extreme expression of a position that also appears in the other autobiographies of the Ukrainian group, although it is accompanied by expressions of strong affection for free Ukraine, coupled with hope for its positive future. For this group of young people, the present, which constitutes the frame of their life plans, is unequivocally bound up with Poland. Their consciously expressed position contains a definition of the place and nature of a minority that has a strong sense of its national consciousness, a minority whose members are also firmly anchored in the country of which they are citizens,

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and within which they seek to enhance their material status and pursue their national aspirations. That assertion leads to a direct analysis of the problem of national identification expressed in the autobiographies of Ukrainians. Nationality is the focal value of the autobiographies studied, with the exception of Y.U.5, where it does not appear at the beginning, nor with equal force. Apart from this text, national identification is defined in direct, spontaneous utterances, without the need for interviewers to ask direct questions about the national feeling of the authors. That statement might lead one to conclude that the type of self-identification, and perhaps even the type of identity and personality of the authors, were the same. Such a conclusion would, however, be wrong. Even in light of those texts focused by the situation, the identity of the authors obviously cannot be reduced to national identification alone. In the analysis so far we have omitted other values, unrelated to the focal value, but which were also expressed in the texts. Among them are subjects of equal weight and personal importance, for example youthful interests in sport, adventure and sexual problems, a passion for Alpine excursions, interest in religion leading to a universalistic philosophy of love. So a comprehensive analysis of the texts would lead to the construction of types of identity differing in respect to the nature and arrangement of the factors presented. It would have to go in the direction of a complete Ericksonian understanding of identity, together with its psychoanalytical aspects, or Ricoeur's concept of ipse. However, the concentration of attention exclusively on national aspects of identity does not rule out the perception of differences within the general category of national identification. On the contrary, the aim is to define types within this general category. In most cases the authors themselves clearly define the types of identification. Like all members of minorities, Ukrainians in Poland live next to Polish neighbors. Dispersal after 1947 has put the Ukrainian population in closer contact with their Polish neighbors than with Belarussians and Silesians. The authors of the autobiographies point this out, and characterize this association in various ways, for example in the family—but not in the native village, where only two Ukrainian families lived—and in primary school and at university. Only the high school in Legnica provided them with a purely Ukrainian microenvironment, which also had a strong influence on their self-identification. However, this unifying influence did not bring about complete uniformity of national identification. The following variants of

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self-identification were noted in the autobiographies, which in the authors' original words were allusive or direct. After chastening life experiences, the father of Philologist 1 "was cowed"; "He wasn't himself." He forbade his family from admitting to their nationality. "It was most important that no one would see that we are Ukrainians." Finally, when the author's confirmation took place in school, "my mother said that we are of the Greek-Catholic faith, that we are Ukrainians. That was very significant, because we all mustered the courage to act in accordance with our conscience" (Y.U. 1). The national identification of this author is unquestionable and unequivocal, as well as early, thanks to the influence of his grandfather. Philologist 2 declared his identification in the most direct way. He calls himself a "member of the Ukrainian nationality but somehow connected with the territory of Poland" (Y.U.6). When asked about the possibility of acknowledging himself as a member of two nationalities simultaneously, the author firmly rejected such a configuration for a Ukrainian and Pole, Belarussian, German or Jew. He regarded it as odd. The Historian did not reject the possibility of a double identification, but he himself said: "I am a Ukrainian from Poland. Definitely." "I am no Boyek, just a Ukrainian born in Pomerania" (Y.U.3). The identification attitudes of the Philosopher are more complex: "The moment of national consciousness, and who I am, is still something live. How much of me is a Pole, how much is a Ukrainian. It was a rather painful experience for me that some Poles wrote me off as a Ukrainian." When he was rooting for the Polish team during an international match, he decided: "So I felt equally a Pole." However, he experienced a painful feeling, when someone put this clear opposition to him: "You are either a Pole or a Ukrainian." He came to this conclusion: "In the end it makes no sense to ponder who I am. There are the terms 'Pole' and 'Ukrainian', and does this mean that I have to admit to and conform to one of them? I feel just as much a Ukrainian as a Pole. I became convinced of this when reading Wat's Diary without Vowels. I think that at this moment he is both a Pole and a Jew. That can't be separated. Now I wouldn't be able to separate what is Ukrainian in me from what is Polish" (Y.U.2). In response to a direct question, this author admits the possibility of double national identification. A juxtaposition of the last two statements once again shows the limitation of the informational value of the data that can be obtained

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from responses to categorical questions. The two authors equally accept the possibility of double national identification, but only the second one feels such identification. At the same time, he expresses the complexity of his feeling with respect to national ties and pertinently alludes to an analogy with the situation of Jews/Poles. He also expresses unease in connection with his state, which is exacerbated by awareness of rejection on the part of some Poles who do not accept his Ukrainity. In the end he protests against being coerced to make an unequivocal choice with respect to his self-identification. The second, third and fourth cases studied show a gradation of the relation between Ukrainity and Polishness: from definite rejection of Polishness, through emphasizing the status of a Polish Ukrainian, to affirmation of Ukrainity and Polishness simultaneously. In the other cases there is no wider, spontaneous presentation of the problem of identification. On the other hand, the theoretical possibility of dual self-identification is accepted. The question arises as to whether the texts at hand represent all the possible configurations of answers to this question. Referring to the methodological recommendations of Bertaux, one may ask whether they have provided saturation, after which no new information is likely to appear. The answer to this question must be in the negative. The theoretical consideration of possible configurations and the empirical material from the analogous Belarussian group indicate the possible existence of a type of identification defined as "Pole of Ukrainian origin". The female author of the fifth autobiography comes close to such a type, but only in the period of her early youth. The discovery of a group of Ukrainian fellow students at the university reawakened in her the feeling of Ukrainian national consciousness that had been suppressed in school and through membership in the Polish girl scouts. So in the material collected there is no variant corresponding to Orzechowski's old expression "gentes Ruthenus, natione Polonus". Studies carried out in the sixties among the generation of the fathers of the present respondents show considerable advancement of polonization among the Rusnacki folk (Kwilecki, 1974). However, the Rusnacki folk are a specific Ruthenian group; the research methods were different; and the generation studied, like the father of the author of one of the autobiographies, often expressed timidity. This may have had an impact on the responses that they gave in studies conducted during the sixties, when nationality problems in Poland were a politically sensitive issue. In the future, studies may be made of completely assimilated ethnic Ukrainians. However, the example of the

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Philosopher shows clearly enough the complexity of passing from one national collectivity to another given the history of mutual relations between the two nations, which are marked by a tradition of enmity or dislike between Ukrainians and Poles that has not yet been overcome. The emergence of a free Ukraine in 1991 heralded a change in this tradition in both countries in the society at large. According to the evidence of the autobiographies studied, on the microscale of individual personal experiences it has reinforced the attitude of minority members who feel themselves citizens of the Polish state and who are attached to their small fatherland—sometimes a traditional and sometimes an ersa/z-fatherland. In their feelings, this fatherland fits within this state and they seek solutions to their national problems relating to the revival of tradition and to the development of culture within this small fatherland. The national identification declared in the autobiographies is clearly gradated from out-and-out Ukrainity, "unblemished with Polishness" (Philologist 2), to explicit confirmation of dual Ukrainian-Polish identification (the Philosopher). In accordance with the conception accepted here, the second category of indicators of nationality is valence, that is, the appropriation of national culture in the meaning stated above. Generally speaking, it can be said of all the authors of the autobiographies that their Ukrainian national valence is based on the common, private use of language, on knowledge of folklore, and especially on love of folk songs that express emotional and collective feelings confirming the sense of community. Sacral elements of the Greek-Catholic rite, Orthodox churches or their ruins, crosses, cemeteries, and monuments to the last war are also elements of this common national universe. The only common element in the field of belles-lettres are the works, and especially the biography, of Taras Shevchenko, read with emotion and "striking the essence of Ukrainity" (Philologist 2). As for influences in Polish culture, a mastery of correct Polish in phonetics, syntax and richness of vocabulary is common. In connection with this, it should be recalled that the authors of the autobiographies were graduates or students of Polish universities. Although most of them had studied Ukrainian philology, they also had received Polish philological—or other Polish—education. Ukrainianisms rarely appeared in their utterances, although the interviewers always approved of them. Some of the authors admit that they did not learn to write or speak Ukrainian correctly until they went to Ukrainian

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secondary school. Every one of them during his/her school career, or in peer groups, passed through a weaker or stronger polonization process that also extended to the sphere of everyday life. This applies to Philologist 2, despite the fact that he spoke of his Ukrainity as "unblemished with Polishness". On the basis of an analysis of the texts it may be concluded that all of the authors have considerable competencies in the field of Polish culture. However, this is not sufficient reason to assert their national cultural bivalence. According to the definition accepted, this would have to mean not only instrumental but also expressive functions of Polish culture in their experience. In this respect the authors, or at least the texts of their autobiographies, vary. As regards the two philologists, it is hard to say much about the function of Polish culture, because their autobiographies do not provide sufficient material. Although they were educated at Polish universities and used Polish extensively, they majored in Ukrainian language and literature. The case of the Historian is different. The cognitive principles of value-free historical scholarship played a big role in his universe of leading values not connected with nationality. These attitudes were shaped in a Polish circle of scientific influences. The author himself admits that he is more familiar with Polish than with Ukrainian culture, although he regarded the polonization of part of his own family as something terrible: "How can one do something like that!" However, this was an objection to identification, while his cultural valence is dualistic. He admits this when he says: "Well, but I'm a Ukrainian from Poland brought up in this environment and know a lot more about Wyspiañski than about Kurbas." That knowledge is not only to do with competency, but is a factor shaping consciousness and the sphere of aesthetic and intellectual references. The author is pleased that when he speaks Ukrainian he thinks in Ukrainian, but when he speaks Polish he thinks in Polish. When he writes scholarly papers on the history of Ukraine, he wants to be even-handed in presenting the whys and wherefores of both sides. He emphasizes that there are many Polish elements in Ukrainian culture and that Ukraine's participation in world culture was realized through Poland. For this reason Ukrainian culture is derivative, but in the future it should be able to liberate itself from this dependency, basing true community on the principle of independence. Cultural bivalence in the autobiography of the Philosopher is exactly suited to double national identification. While being strongly attached to Ukrainian folklore and to the family-collegiate atmosphere, the author stated that in

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Ukrainian school literature he did not encounter "any important reading" that influenced his life. His attitude changed somewhat after he was able to read writers banned and persecuted in the Soviet Union, and writers of the twenties. However, he has difficulty in reading poetry in Ukrainian. He only became fully conscious of the writings of Vasil Stus in Polish translation. Commenting on his feeling of dual nationality, he stated clearly: "Well, then, one of the symptoms is that I feel a tie with Polish literature. To tell the truth, the most important writers for me, as I said, are Gombrowicz, Witkacy, Schulz." Such statements are irrefutable proof of cultural bivalence. However, this does not mean that this feeling extends to all of Polish literature. Like two other respondents, this author definitely rejects Sienkiewicz. In this connection he cites Brzozowski and Milosz. But his motives are at least partially different, specific to Ukrainian sensitivity and a feeling of the violation of the sphere of his value judgments. As in respect to the interrelated events of Polish-Ukrainian history, a conflict of judgments appears here. The same fact is judged differently than in Polish society. Other authors of the autobiographies also allude to a dissonance in the sphere of values in respect to lessons on Polish history and language in Polish schools (Y.U.3; Y.U.7). For this reason the attitudes of those persons who are closer to Polishness oscillate between bivalence and ambivalence, between a state of uncertain affirmation and ambiguous self-evaluation, as well as ambiguity with respect to the way they are reflected in the attitudes of others. Appropriation of the dominant, Polish culture clashes with the sense of its strangeness, even enmity. Positive inclusive neighborhood in the family village and in the housing estate, and comradeship in the dormitory may change into exclusive neighborhood, separated by a barrier of misunderstanding, a reversal of the relationship that Habermas called Verständigung leading to Einigung. The same problem appears in other borderland situations characteristic of a minority situation in the light of the autobiographies, even though it does not take the same form in all borderland regions. Not all members of minority groups react in the same way to these situations. The reaction of the Ukrainians is stronger than that of the Belarussians. Like the Silesian autobiographies analyzed below, the Ukrainian autobiographies contain comments on the need for tolerance of differences. This attitude manifests itself most strongly in the Philosopher. His interests turned around movements of counterculture and Solidarity. His philosophy of life was formed from reading Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, liberal Catho-

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lie philosophy, and from an affinity for the Laski circle, with which he became disenchanted after a while. The Historian recognized the principle sine ira et studio as the basis for his scholarly studies and hoped to put this principle into practice in studies of the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations. Philologist 2, whose autobiography expresses national attitudes unusually strongly, at the same time provides an example of characteristic evolution in the direction of cultural and ethical universalism. It refers to Heidegger's principle of being open to everything. The author himself says that he realized this principle through many different experiences, together with the use of psychodelic drugs, writing poetry, "absorbing general culture", going back to antiquity, and religious experiences, which, from denominations and church through generalized religion led him to a love of all mankind. The Student presented the principle of tolerance in another tone, in clearheaded and succinct words. Recognizing his nationality as a "great value", but simultaneously experiencing the feeling of "being different" since childhood, he had become aware of the need for tolerance. Seeing the difficulty of realizing this in Polish-Ukrainian relations, he even appealed to a sense of humor, which is a way of standing aloof from controversial matters. The political breakthrough of the eighties and nineties, "shake-ups on the map of Europe", bolstered the attitude that had formed earlier. Universalistic, European accents appeared in all those autobiographies whose authors did not approach their task in an exclusively individualistic manner, as did the author of the lengthiest autobiography, but which furnished extensive material for an analysis of identity (Y.U.I). Autobiographical studies are obviously a good source for studying individual varieties of the more general type of attitudes directed towards common but individually experienced values. Thus they are a useful tool for overturning stereotypes. The Ukrainian autobiographies analyzed here deviated from the picture of the Ukrainian as an unenlightened and savage peasant often encountered in Polish public opinion. They also differed among themselves even in respect to the common value, which, in all the autobiographies, is the focal but not stereotypical value around which the entire description is organized. The author referred to as the Student speaks most clearly of the focusing function. He presents his life in a summary fashion. He declares the need to put his statements in order and consciously constructs his autobiography. In the other autobiographies by young Ukrainians the focal value of

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nationality varies in force and distinctness. Analyzing these materials from the point of view of their presentational and expressive function, the differences between the course of life and its description must always be kept in mind. For a description is a situationally conditioned construction. It results not only from the spontaneous impulse to talk about oneself, but also from the purpose the author of the statement has in mind. The above recommendation does not stem from suspicions about the sincerity of the authors' statements in this study, but is a fixed rule of interpretative analysis. It is not the people directly, but their texts that are subject to these systematizing, typologizing operations. However, the connection between the texts and the actual attitudes and values of the authors of the texts is quite probable in a given case. The autobiographies may be arranged according to a scale—taking into consideration the expression of national feelings, the frequency or force of the connection between the leading values and the focal value, consistency in the declaration of national identification, and dislike for, or temporary hostility towards, "others" (Poles, Jews). The main bases of the systematizing scale are declarations of national self-identification, acknowledged as the first indicator of nationality. The degrees of this systematizing scale are types: out-and-out Ukrainian with a strong feeling of national separateness; Ukrainian from Poland, emphasizing ties with the Polish state and citizenship; and Ukrainian-Pole, rejecting an unequivocal declaration of one nationality. On this scale there is no ethnic Ukrainian with a solid, exclusively Polish national identification. When the criterion of valence is considered next in the field of national culture, it can be stated that all of the texts analyzed display cultural bivalence, especially if language is considered as an important indicator. In light of the relation to literature indicator, the representative of the second rather than of the third type of identification is most clearly bivalent. This indicates the incommensurability of nationality scales. That assertion is of cardinal importance for general theoretical conclusions on the nature of national cultures and the criticism of widespread stereotypes in this field. Several of the persons studied obviously do not represent a uniform national type, but the position of their nationality also appears differently depending on the indicator applied. A multiplicity of scales would have to be used to determine the place of each of the subjects studied in relation to others on the nationality dimension. Moreover, these scales turn out to be incommensurable. Here we

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refer back to Stanisiaw Ossowski's general theoretical conception concerning the incommensurability of scales of values. Lengthy autobiographical texts make it possible to probe deeply into nationality as attitudes experienced in relation to syntagmatic systems of values. Characteristically, these attitudes are strongly experienced emotionally. Young men cry when they read a national writer and for the first time cross the border of the finally independent state of their nation. It is one thing to wish this state all the best for the future, but quite another to want to actually live in it. National experiences are presented in connection with a hubristic motivation (dignity) that appears in several of the autobiographies. The concept of pride appears repeatedly in the statements of Philologist 1. It is present in other texts either literally, using this term, or by allusion. The characteristic changeability of national attitudes among borderland groups later transforms the situation that in childhood was something to be ashamed of ("I was ashamed of being a Ukrainian") into a feeling of pride ("I never imagined what a precious value this is") (Y.U.7). From the Ukrainian autobiographies a firm conclusion may be drawn as to certain significant features of the nation as an autotelic community. For many years in socialist Poland Ukrainian national identification, while it no longer led to repressive measures, came under increased supervision by the authorities and stirred up the mistrust, dislike or hostility of a considerable part of Polish society. Even now membership in the Ukrainian minority brings no real tangible benefits. The birth of an independent Ukrainian state does not open up any appealing material prospects. Attachment to one's own nationality, especially to the specific variant of the Ukrainian nationality of Polish citizens, has no instrumental determinants. It is a value in and of itself. It fulfills itself in the feeling of historical community in a fighting and suffering nation—and in the fighting that inflicts suffering; and in the feeling of satisfaction from social intercourse with countrymen—friends, persons who feel alike and appreciate the same values of folk singing, the Orthodox religious rite, the dark beauty reminiscent of the models of Byzantine icons. However, in the declarations of young Ukrainian intellectuals this selfless concentration on national values does not close the door to them in their search for a permanent place in the Polish state as its citizens, or in their acceptance of the wider European community and universal values. In reaching this

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conclusion it should be remembered that the case studies that we are dealing with here do not present a statistically representative phenomenon. They present attitudes and values characteristic of the group of young Ukrainian intellectuals, who—in the future—may be recognized as an influential category in their national collectivity. However, their attitudes are not free of incoherence and ambivalence.

12. The Problem of Belarussian Nationality in the Autobiographical Approach

The two main factors differentiating the national situation of Belarussians and Ukrainians in Poland work in opposite directions. Belarussians inhabit a compact, traditional area. As "a nation searching for its own state"—as Charles Tilly phrased it—in the course of their history they have shown less determination and activity than Ruthenian-Ukrainians. The different situation of the Belarussian minority opens the way to the use of two kinds of material: the autobiographies of young intellectuals, as well as those of the older generation of inhabitants of one rural commune with a preponderance of the Belarussian ethnic-national group. These persons were born before the war and many of them spent their childhood in the Second Republic. They also experienced the war personally. The analysis took into consideration only persons of Belarussian origin, established on the basis of the language used in the home and the participation of the family in the national folk culture. The students or graduates studied were associated with Belarussian cultural organizations. On the other hand, neither the leaders of those organizations nor nationally prominent artists and writers were chosen as the authors of autobiographies. This obviously has an influence on the nature of the material and on the typologies constructed on the basis of that material. So the autobiographies of six members of the new intelligentsia are analyzed here against the background of the wider autobiographical materials of the older generation of the village. All of the intellectuals studied, graduates as well as those still attending universities, are of peasant origin. Their autobiographies contain many analogies with the material in Jozef Chalasinski's The Young Generation of Peasants, although different times and changed social conditions have made it easier for the present generation to get an education. The

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reference to Chalasinski rather than to Marxist conceptions of the nation is not accidental or dictated by current affairs. The manner in which the authors of the autobiographies set down their life goals and their declared attitude towards life, especially in three cases, brings to mind the attitudes of the "would-be intellectuals" of the thirties, about whom Chalasinski wrote. In none of the autobiographies did Belarussian nationality appear forcefully as a value focusing the entire text or the main part of it, which distinguishes this material from the Ukrainian autobiographies. This is due not only to the different place of national issues in the authors' consciousness, but also to the different form of the autobiographical text. The authors composed most of the Ukrainian texts consciously. The Belarussian autobiographies, for the most part, are narratives in the strict sense of this word: a life story that does not specify events, does not separate them from everyday facts, and does not spontaneously spotlight national problems. So in the initial part of the open-ended response this is a story of school, family, and professional life. The basic values that appear are comradeship, the search for friends, and sport as a possible way to achieve success—a success which is not achieved on account of the conflict between the exacting requirements of the career of a school athlete, the family ethos and the demands of work. The motif of lack of personal fulfillment also appears in one autobiography in connection with law studies, which the author had to give up after failing the first examination (Y.B.2). Next, the Technician, who has started Belarussian-Ruthenian language studies, regrets that he did not choose technical studies (Y.B.I). The statements of these authors express indecision and lack of faith in their own possibilities. The Would-Be Lawyer is surprised that in school he received a prize for being an outstanding pupil. He did not know what to do with it. The Mechinist-Philologist was surprised that he got a good grade in Polish. The Engineer says that he dreamed of "taking the place of a leader", but "someone better was always found". He remarked that he achieved some athletic success, but he felt unappreciated. He showed acting talent "in the group of colleagues, but not in public performances". He speaks of his passivity, and his inability to organize his life (Y.B.5). The text of the Mechinist-Philologist in particular is filled with words expressing uncertainty and indecision, and features that the English call "understatement". "I never blew my own trumpet to anybody, because there was no reason to do so." "I don't know if there is any sense" (in the existence

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of poor technical schools). "It can't be helped, what will be will be." "I'll bring shame." I don't know what to do" (Y.B.I). The features appearing in the utterances of these three young Belarussians are accepted elements of the popular Belarussian stereotype. However, the autobiographies of the other three Belarussian intellectuals contradict this stereotype. Their responses express an active posture towards life, and—in two cases—the self-satisfaction of the authors. The preceding interpretation of the texts may be regarded as a departure from the rules of Dilthey's and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, which rules out delving into another person's mental life through a text (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 206). However, this analysis is not concerned with the individual psyche, but with searching for an expression of the historically determined cultural situation of individuals in their autobiographical pronouncements. This is close to the hermeneutical principles of these two authors. The sphere of reality that the analysis attempts to reach is not the general way of thinking and feeling of the authors of the autobiographies, but the nature of their declared connection with the national community and evidence of the assimilation of the culture of this nation. None of the Belarussian autobiographies examined here exhibits a concentration on that aspect of identity that would correspond strictly to the young Ukrainians' presentation of their "Ukrainity". The problem of ethnic features appears in the first part of the Mechinist-Philologist's autobiography, but it is limited to language use in a Bielsk school. "At home in the village we spoke in dialect. Well, then, I spoke in my own fashion, but my mates said I'd have to speak Polish" (Y.B.I). Polish is opposed here to a dialect, not to the Belarussian language. The author became familiar with Belarussian literature later, and called the home dialect closer to Ukrainian. For some time he studied Russian on his own, which later "simply went into the waste-bin", yielding place to Belarussian. The Engineer, who declared his dislike for languages in general, abandoned Belarussian—which was in principle compulsory—in school because, as he explained, "I got the letters mixed up" (Y.B.5). This author in particular expressed serious doubts as to his national identification. Between the first and second part of the interview the entire group took a test modeled on the Kuhn-McPartland test (Bokszanski, 1989), but scaled down to ten statements about themselves. Here again, the shortcoming of standardized, even projective, methods, like this test, came to light. A

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shortcoming does not mean uselessness, because there are no perfect methods, especially for such subtle problems as the feeling of nationality. A comparison of the test results with the open-ended, or nearly open-ended, autobiographical utterances confirmed the usefulness of triangulation—the application of various techniques and points of view. In the material of the Belarussian group the gradation of nationality is even more distinct than in the Ukrainian group. The term "Belarussian" appeared in two responses: once in first place (Y.B.I), once in sixth (Y.B.I). The Engineer described himself as "A Pole—maybe". The other authors did not use any definition of nationality in responses to the test. On the other hand, there are many thoughts on this question in the autobiographies, although they do not refer to all the values and life problems declared, and appear in the second, questionnaire part. From this it can be educed that nationality is not a focal value of the Belarussian autobiographies collected in the study. To be sure, this does not exclude the existence of written or recordable Belarussian autobiographies that would focus on this value and subordinate most other life values to it. The material gathered here provides sufficient grounds for affirming the multivariance of national self-identification and national valence. The Would-Be Lawyer defined his nationality more explicitly than the other authors did. When asked whether one could be a Belarussian and a Pole at the same time, he replied that this is impossible. He negated all double identifications apart from the European identification, but in the text he called himself "a citizen of this country" (Y.B.2). However, he did not return to this definition in response to the question about the fatherland. The identification of the Mechinist-Philologist expresses itself between two extremes: in an explicit response to the self-identification test ("Belarussian") and in information on his scholarship to study in Minsk, where he went in the belief that this would enable him to enroll in Belarussian-Ruthenian studies at the university. "Although I regard myself as a Belarussian, supposedly, I got over this. After two months I didn't want to be a Belarussian there, in Belarus. I am here in Poland the whole time. But I didn't want to stay there any longer, for in any case I am a Pole" (Y.B.I). It is difficult to interpret this response from the angle of its presentation functions, because it contains internally contradictory statements: "For the whole time I am a Belarussian"—"In any case I am a Pole". The situational factor, whose importance for the national problem is especially manifest here, sheds some light on this dilemma. The Would-Be Lawyer categorically

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rejected identification with Polishness: "One can't be a Belarussian and a Pole. That's impossible" (Y.B.2). He also negated all double identifications, except national and European. He referred to himself as "a citizen of this country". The autobiography of the Chemist, who represents intellectuals of the middle generation with higher education, expresses the complexity of identification problems in the borderland. This author focuses his open-ended biographical narrative around professional and scientific values. When asked about national matters, he says, "of course, I'm not a Pole", alluding to his origins from an "ethnically non-Polish" territory. However, at the same time he states: "It's hard for me to account myself a Belarussian." In the end, he includes himself "in the big Ruthenian nation", but he adds that when someone takes him for a Pole in the West, "I don't bother to correct him, for he wouldn't understand that anyway" (B.6). The example of a female student of Belarussian-Ruthenian studies, here called the Secretary for short, brings the influence of situational factors on national self-identification into even clearer relief. Neither in the test nor in the first part of a very lengthy statement did this author use any national identification. Only after the national problem was raised in the questionnaire did she address it in long responses. She stated: "I never felt myself to be a Pole, well a Pole—by nationality. Rather I felt myself a Belarussian by nationality and a Pole by education. After all, it would be hard for me to feel a Belarussian through and through, because I was born and brought up in Poland." When asked whether she could feel herself to be a Belarussian and a Pole at the same time, she replied: "Yes, because I am." However, in the earlier part of the interview she made comments on the state of her national consciousness: "A person feels so split in two." "No one [brought up in a Belarussian village] will ever feel himself to be a full Pole" (Y.B.3). The same author, the only woman in the group of this generation studied, says that she experienced labeling as a "bloody Russian", and that on the street in Bialystok she was the target of snide remarks when she spoke Belarussian. On the other hand, she did not experience this in Warsaw, where she and her colleagues were taken for newcomers from Belarus and where there were no manifestations of any discrimination. Her pronouncement contains the traditional self-identification of Belarussian peasants: "My grandfather doesn't say he's a Pole, but he won't say that he's a Belarussian. He is our familiar, he's ours" (Y.B.3).

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The representatives of the older generation with a lower level of education quoted below used similar self-identifications. The consciousness of the Entrepreneur presents yet another configuration of elements (Y.B.4). The author does not refer to himself as a "Pole" in response to the self-identification test or in subsequent statements. He likes the idea of being a "citizen of the world", which does not prevent him from expressing contempt and hostility for Gypsies and Jews. His Polish identification is indirect, but it is clearly expressed in the following statement: "As Poles, as a country, we have a beautiful history." However, his Belarussian ethnic roots and cultural features are undeniable. They constitute elements of the second indicator of nationality, cultural valence, which will be discussed in detail below. The nationality scale of the young generation, constructed on the basis of an identification indicator contained in the responses of five authors, at one extreme has the position of the Would-Be Lawyer as an almost out-and-out Belarussian, and on the other extreme of Polishness the Entrepreneur as an out-and-out Pole, but only in the light of this criterion. The other examples are cases of double or unclear identification. They confirm the situational character of national identification expressed explicitly in the declarations of the authors. These autobiographies, taken together, express psychic discomfort and cognitive and axiological dissonance, which was expressed most sharply in the Secretary's metaphor of "a person split in two". The authors reduce, or try to reduce, this dissonance by alluding to the separation between nationality and citizenship. However, the Secretary goes deeper, to its source, by indicating the role of education and the influence of Polish culture. The definition of nationality among the "older generation" comes from persons who were born before 1931 and who could be regarded—approximately—as the generation of grandfathers of the young Belarussians studied. Four of these persons live in a village situated south of Bielsk Podlaski. One of them (B. 1) lives in a large city and has higher education, which makes her autobiography somewhat different. However, the memory of the period of the Second Republic and of wartime events characterizes the entire "generation of grandfathers". The rural representatives of the generation of grandfathers were asked point-blank in the second part of the interview to which nation they belonged. A few of them gave not entirely clear-cut answers. The Pensioner, who had completed three grades of primary school before the war, began with a

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definition similar to the Secretary's grandfather: he said that he belonged to "his own, Orthodox" nation, but further acknowledged that he was a Pole, "because I was born in Poland. One can be everything. We are Poles, because this is Poland" (B.12). The Railroader, who had failed in his efforts to get a higher education, said: "As a citizen, I am Polish. Now, as to which nation I would include myself in, that I don't know. For I can't say that I'm a Belarussian. I'm Orthodox, so I more or less include myself in the Belarussian nation" (B.7). The Worker started with the declaration: "I feel myself to be a Pole. I live in Poland and am a Pole", but later he said: "I am of Belarussian nationality, but I am a Pole," for we have been living in Poland his whole life, from my grandfather, great-grandfather. He continued: "We supposedly are Belarussians, but we can't speak Belarussian." He describes his language as a dialect "similar to Ukrainian" (B.5). Only one person, the Regional Activist (B.3), declared a more clear-cut Belarussian identification in the group of this educational level. At the beginning of the interview he used the expression "We, Belarussians", but when asked directly he emphasized that not Belarus "but Poland is our state". In the end he called Poland the fatherland and concluded these thoughts with the following statement: "By nationality we are Belarussian, but we have to take into consideration that we are Poles." Later on there was talk of citizenship, but together with the understanding of fatherland the expression "being a Pole" meant more than a purely formal declaration of citizenship. This meaning appeared most clearly in connection with the general problem of the fatherland and minorities, discussed below. It is more complicated to determine the role of cultural aspects of nationality in the autobiographies examined than to interpret direct identification. The factors molding the Belarussian layer of the authors' ethnic culture are sometimes presented at the beginning of their statements in connection with the description of the family and the local, rural childhood environment. Sometimes it appears later in the text in response to the questionnaire on the history of the family. Despite the fact that the Belarussian language is obligatory, the school does not appear as a very important institution. On the other hand, such a role falls to Belarussian cultural unions and associations and to universities. This conclusion results from the "etic" rather than from the "emetic" analysis, because the authors do not express it explicitly; however, it. can be inferred from their accounts of their activities.

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In the texts the family appears as the transmitter of folklore, dialect and religion. It is this cultural layer that mainly determines the national valence of the young authors. In the oldest group, which represents the generation born in the twenty-year period between the wars, the dearth of information about Belarussian literature and history is hardly surprising. Even when the interviewer mentioned the names Kupala, Kolas and Taraszkiewicz, there was no response. Grave digging is the only national-religious symbol that evoked a livelier reaction. Even though a few people from this group remembered with nostalgia the games and celebrations of the neighborhood community, there is no detailed description of them and no information about rituals, customs, fairy tales and legends that they can remember. However, in interpreting these data the text of the autobiographies should not be equated with the actual experiences of the authors, which would lead to the conclusion that their lives in the sphere of customs is impoverished. In this respect the persons studied may not have been good informants for several reasons. They were all men, and age may have clouded their memory. The young authors remembered that their families had transmitted a lot of information about customs and folklore to them. However, amateur troupes and Belarussian cultural organizations played the main role in shaping the layer of their ethnic culture. The Belarus Social-Cultural Society was often mentioned. Together with student organizations it was responsible for the ethnic awareness evident in several of the autobiographies. Notwithstanding these influences, and the authors' philological studies, questions on the canon of literature, art and national history (e.g., What should a member of your nationality know?), as in the case of the Ukrainian group, brought answers indicating a divergence between the relatively strong folklorist layer and the scanty canonic layer of higher culture. Besides this, the Belarussian autobiographies showed a partial divergence between the type of identification and valence—that is, appropriation of national literary culture. The response of the Secretary contains the most information on this subject. Her knowledge stemmed from her professional and social activities. She mentioned the names Janko Kupala and Jakub Kolas, whom she put on a par with Mickiewicz. She also expressed the opinion that "had it not been for the forces of Balachowicz, Pilsudski would never have won and there wouldn't have been any miracle on the Vistula". Yet her autobiography contains much more information on the Polish than on the Belarussian cultural canon.

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A new element in the Belarussian autobiographies that did not appear in the Ukrainian ones is the inclination towards Russian language and literature. That phenomenon manifests itself most clearly in the autobiographies of the Chemist and the Humanist from the middle generation. The Chemist's allusions to Russian nineteenth-century classics have the features of valence, not only competency, because for him Russian nineteenth-century literary classics are a source of emotional experiences that are a medium of self-expression. This author, the most intellectually mature of the group, is the furthest removed from Polishness through his conscious stance. However, this does not mean that he is a full Belarussian in the sense of modern nationality related to the ideological fatherland. That concept did not appear at all in the Belarussian autobiographies analyzed. Four of the young Belarussian authors used only the concept of the small fatherland in their autobiographies, but they did not use this term. This concept is presented in eloquent and convergent statements in the pronouncements of authors with integral or double Belarussian identification. These texts are so characteristic, and at the same time significant as constructions of "models of the first degree", that merely paraphrasing them would impoverish their informational content. That is why it is necessary to quote them at length. The Mechinist-Philologist spoke as follows of the fatherland as being: "The Bialystok area, but not all of it. The vicinity in which I live. My fatherland is not Poland or Belarus, absolutely not. Someone might say: 'You are a Belarussian, so go to your fatherland', but that is not my fatherland. I don't feel myself to be a Belarussian there. I come home and this is my place." "For example, I feel nothing for Poland. Not because it is alien, because I live here. But I have my language, my culture, and just coexist with those people who live there. I don't even know whether I would want a separate state. Should I go abroad?—absolutely not!" (Y.B.I). The Would-Be Lawyer expressed a similar meaning very succinctly: "Eight years ago I would have answered you differently. Maybe not one hundred percent differently, but a little differently. [Now] if I were to answer in one sentence: It is the place where I was born" (Y.B.2). The Engineer also alluded only to the small fatherland: "It is the place where we live. The place where I would always want to live. For example, these areas here are my fatherland, for I want to remain here, I don't want to

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go anywhere else, either into the heart of Poland or abroad. I want to stay where my parents are, where I grew up, where I was educated" (Y.B.5). So, in short, the three young intellectuals, who have a more or less definite national or ethnic identification, do not express any need to define their "imagined fatherland", of which the young Ukrainians spoke. Their female colleague, studying Belarussian-Ruthenian language and literature and active in Belarussian cultural organizations, differs from them. The Secretary, who spoke of an internal national split and who devoted a lot of space to the Belarussian canon of literature, in reaction to the catchword "fatherland" rather unexpectedly completely transferred her remarks to Poland. This fact is connected with the context in which she placed her spontaneous statement on the fatherland. She first alluded to a verse of Wislawa Szymborska, and later recalled what she felt after she returned from Hungary and Sweden: "When I arrived here, in Poland, I felt at home. This was already mine. Familiar people. 'Listen, I understand what people are saying, because I am at home.' I could never live permanently anywhere else, I couldn't leave Poland. That I know for sure" (Y.B.3). In this case as well the text of the autobiography brings into relief the situational character of nationality, which is felt differently in relation to the neighborhood Belarussian culture and Polish culture, and differently in juxtaposition with countries culturally much more different, especially in language. Knowledge of Polish means that the Polish community in this second situation is felt to be the community of communication, but it becomes alien when its representatives react negatively to speech in Belarussian and use the insulting epithet "bloody Russian". Yet another tangled situation is presented in the Chemist's autobiography (B.6). This scientific worker, who travels abroad frequently, does not react in the same way as the Secretary to the affinity between Polish and Belarussian culture. His national experiences are suspended between the assimilation of Russian culture as the closest, to which Polish literature is somewhat disparagingly contrasted, and an attachment to the small folklorist fatherland, which nevertheless fits within the wider context of Ruthenian lands and Ruthenian culture. The main sphere of values behind the organization of this autobiography encompasses matters of science and a scientific career. Next to this the ethnic subject matter occupies a lot of space, but it is partially evoked by the interviewer. The author enters into these problems reluctantly. However, the

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text indicates that apart from professional affairs and the family his interests extend to the small fatherland, its folklore and monuments to its traditions, collected and preserved in the Skansen museum of the Belarussian, Ukrainian and Ruthenian borderland, as he calls it, that he helped to organize. The "Pan-Slavic" position of this last author differs from the opinions of the young Belarussian authors, whose statements contain anti-Russian accents and whose attitudes towards Ukrainians vary: from acknowledging the similarity of the dialects of the two groups in Podlasie (Y.B.I), to critical remarks on the exaggerated—according to the author—and ostentatious patriotism of the Ukrainians (Y.B.2) and the Secretary's opinion on altercations with Ukrainians concerning the ethnic-national character of Podlasie. In connection with this she rejects the possibility of dual Belarussian-Ukrainian national identification, although she accepts all of the other national dualisms considered here (Y.B.3). Notwithstanding the great diversity of opinions expressed in the autobiographies, the authors have in common their attachment to folklore. The scientific worker, a representative of the exact sciences; the students of Belarussian philology; and the entrepreneur from a construction firm, who has Polish national identification but is attached to the Orthodox rite and sings Belarussian religious songs with his friends during church services, all fit within this community. Orthodoxy is an element of folk culture in the Belarussian autobiographies. In the cases studied it is not a sophisticated form of religious reflection that leads to universalistic deliberations concerning the philosophy of the sacrum. Philologist 2 in the group of young Ukrainians represented such a case. There was no such case in the Belarussian autobiographies examined, although this obviously does not mean that it would be impossible to find in this ethnic group. In sum, a more traditional ethnicity than nationality is expressed in the autobiographies of the Belarussian group. Authors from this group often showed considerable knowledge of legends and folk songs, the large numbers of which were a source of pride. The Would-Be Lawyer referred to "wise fables" (Y.B.2). The Mechinist-Philologist praised Belarussian songs: "There are more of them than Polish songs. There are no buts about it" (Y.B.I). However, such affirmation of their own culture appeared in the autobiographies of the Belarussian group alongside very critical opinions as to the value of written literature and national art, and applied only to folklore. The term "pride" does not appear in these texts, and hubristic motives—with one

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exception—played no clear role in the national identification of individuals, in contrast to the authors of the Ukrainian autobiographies. The clearest difference between the analyzed autobiographies of these two nations appears in the conceptualization of the fatherland. One of the Belarussian authors (Y.B.2) stated that he would have answered the question on the fatherland differently several years ago. The unclear meaning of this statement may be interpreted as an allusion to hopes earlier cherished for the emancipation of the big fatherland. Formal liberation did not take place, but concordant opinions about the present condition of Belarus are very critical, especially after scholarships to Minsk or visits to Belarus for other purposes. In this respect the autobiographies of the Belarussian group are similar to the opinions expressed in the texts of the Ukrainian group. On the other hand, the Belarussian autobiographies lack a similar vision of the big fatherland, the imagined national community. In this group there is no Belarus of dreams, there is only the small local fatherland, the "shirt fatherland"—a region, even only a native village. For a few, it is a certain degree of knowledge of literature and of the historical past of the nation. These Belarussian intellectuals also represent the only one of the three groups studied in which the idea of Europe called forth no response as a way of solving the problem of borderland ambivalence. Even the conception of European and national duality was rejected in two cases, which did not happen in any of the other minority groups studied. The Chemist, who is older than the other young Belarussians and intellectually the most mature member of the group, presented an in-depth analysis of the borderland situation. The concept of Belarus as the ideological fatherland does not appear in his interview. He also questions the membership of this ethnic area in the Western European cultural community. He defined nationality as a certain kind of spirituality, which in his opinion joins the Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian borderland regions. The common culture of these areas is his spiritual fatherland. Differences separating it from Poland inhere "in the sphere of spirituality and mentality, and in Orthodoxy", although this culture also radiates through certain influences to Poland—for example, through Belarussian elements in the writings of Mickiewicz. Attachment to this land, albeit strong and genuine, does not furnish him with grounds to define himself in categories of any of the three elements—Belarussian, Ukrainian and Russian—which he regards as ethnic and not national. Neither does he feel any inner need or outward necessity for such

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identification. The Skansen museum that he constructed may be regarded as the symbol of such a stance and as a metaphor for a recognized community contrary to attempts to qualify it differently: "These cottages are from these areas, from near Bielsk. Some people believe that this is a Belarussian area, others Ukrainian, while Poles come here and say that these are buildings from the Polish borderland" (B.6). The author rejects such a differentiation and believes that it would be better "if we could do something with this together". Unlike Siegfried Lenz, the hero of Heimatmuseum, he wants to protect the museum of his native land from destruction, without defining what "his" means in terms of national membership—for it is without fear of the possible dangerous functions of this enduring memory. The thought arises that this author, who represents an entirely different level of education, professional qualifications and participation in the life of the modern world than the Secretary's grandfather, like him wants to remain a local inhabitant, one of us, but with the difference that he realizes his interests in the "spiritual life" of an educated person through Russian literature. When asked where his fatherland is, he replied "in the spiritual sphere and where I was born, that land is dear to me. In the spiritual and cultural sense that is Russia", but—in accordance with other statements by this author—this is Russia included in the Pan-Slavic Ruthenian whole (B.6). More than any of the others before it, this example not only sheds light on the problems of Belarussians in Poland, but it also makes it possible to probe into the mental and cultural difficulties of an independent Belarus, rebuilding and building its own symbolic universe. The quoted author says that Belarussians "are an emerging nation". But he sees no support for it in the expanding European community. With some hesitation he agrees to include Poland in this community marked by characteristics of the West. On the other hand, the countries "that developed under the influence of Byzantine culture in some sense are not European" (B.6). Problems connected with Europe also do not evoke any response in the four young ethnically Belarussian authors of the autobiographies, who only say laconically that one may simultaneously regard oneself as a Belarussian and a European. It may seem surprising that the idea of the European community appeals more to the group of older and less-educated respondents and that they also express clear definitions of the fatherland. But that fatherland is Poland. It is hard to say whether these are echoes of "state-building" education and schooling in the Second Republic, "here where all the time it was Poland",

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or of general memories of life, going even as far back as to the Commonwealth of the Two Nations. The respondent declaring Belarussian nationality spontaneously discovered the gauge of his Polishness in his reactions to watching sports matches: "When they play something, it's better if Poland wins. My son jumps up and down with excitement" (B.5). The Regional Activist, operative in the Belarussian minority movement, presented the most eloquent vision of his fatherland. The content and language of his presentation of the fatherland brings to mind Piotr Skarga's Sermons to the Diet (1597), although any conscious influence is out of the question: "The fatherland is everything. The fatherland begins from the family home, and it is the family, village, commune, voivodeship, state. And if we respect our parents and grandparents, we respect our fatherland. We are a minority, but our nation, our fatherland is Poland. And we have to care for our fatherland and do our best so that it won't be the worst state, so that we won't be laughed at. The fatherland for a person is everything that he can understand" (B.3). The next circles of community built on this statement by the author extend to Europe, for "modern man must live not only in the family, but must also live with others in the commune and in the voivodeship, in the state and also in all of Europe and with the entire world". From this response hermeneutic analysis draws out the process of amplification, which the author may not have consciously intended. Here, and in other "unenlightened" older respondents, the striving for supranational understanding and agreement stems from the feeling of solidarity with a "simple nation", which suffers and perishes when conflicts break out with the "somewhat degraded" minority through the fault of the political "top" (B.3). The Teacher, a representative of the middle generation and of the intelligentsia with higher education, also condemns the militant nationalism of states striving to build "political colossi" (B.2). His autobiography is one of the texts selected for abbreviated presentation here. Each of these autobiographies illustrates a different type of solution to the borderland situation from the same starting point of ethnic Belarussian culture. The assumption of the decidedly Belarussian ethnic character of the areas covered by the study may be called into question on account of the dialect of this region, which is close to the north Ukrainian dialect. However, so far other features of culture and other elements of national consciousness in this area justify calling it a rather Belarussian area (Pawluczuk, 1972; Sadowski, 1991).

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Three authors, the Lawyer, the Teacher and the Humanist, had completed university studies, but they represent different generations. The Lawyer was born before the war, and his social position is due to rapid class advancement as a result of the political policy of that period. The other two were born after the war and also achieved a higher status than their peasant families, but this was a less spectacular and more frequent occurrence in socialist Poland. The first autobiography, that of the Lawyer, is well defined in respect to language by the specific rhetoric of popular Marxism and journalistic propaganda. The description of the poverty of the prewar Belarussian village is given in this style, but it is consistent with the facts. However, when he sets about reconstructing his personal wartime experiences the author loses his socialist rhetoric. Information emerges about the deportation threatening his father as a "kulak" in 1941, from which he was saved by the arrival of the German army. Then he describes the gang rape of a group of Polish girls by Soviet soldiers in the winter of 1945. (When asked about the perpetrators of the rapes, he said it was "those who liberated us, well, the army", and even after many years he was reluctant to make a definite identification.) As the conversation proceeded, his recollections became more personal, and the question of nationality appeared in the context of the psychic needs of a private, non-public community. In response to the question of nationality he definitely declared Belarussian identification. The hypothesis is plausible that this identification was latent during a large part of his life. It is certain that in his autobiography this author accepts only one definition of the fatherland—the country of his birth. He rejects the possibility of all double national identifications—except European identification. His stereotypical image of Poles is negative. He regards Poles as nationalists, like the Ukrainians. Other Belarussians also pointed out this similarity. This socially mature and practically minded author regards as close to him not members of a particular nation but people who hold to certain moral principles. So in the sphere of identification he is close to cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the fatherland for him is not the entire world, but only his country of birth, the small fatherland. However, he does not express such strong sentiment for his native region as the Chemist through the building of a Skansen museum. In his opinion, the European community will resolve all problems of borders, and the place of residence will no longer matter, because it will be possible to find people one can be close to everywhere.

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The Lawyer, who had completed a public service career, declared a loosening of social contacts with his former Polish work environment. He makes up for this by contact with a minority social-cultural organization, which for him is a substitute for the small fatherland. This recalls the situation of an emigrant. But this is an example of double emigration: both from the small fatherland and from the sphere of Polish economic and political affairs, in which he was immersed during his active life. For these situational reasons nationality or ethnicity take on special importance as a basis for satisfying the need for community within the small group of regional fellow countrymen. The young Belarussians who live in their native region and who see the solution to their minority situation in opening up to the Polish state fatherland in all its aspects have a different orientation. This attitude is explainable and rational in light of their criticism of, and aloofness from, independent Belarus. The motivation for the representatives of the less-educated older generation of Belarussians remaining in their native villages seems less clear. In contrast to the Lawyer, they do not hesitate to recognize Poland as their big fatherland while retaining Belarussian national identification. The autobiography of the Lawyer may be regarded as focused on the national or ethnic value. It is quite probable, however, that this may be said only of the description of life presented in a certain phase of life (old age), but not to the course of life. The phase of active professional life must have separated the author physically and socially from his ethnic roots. This was due to his functions, which required party membership during the period of his late youth and maturity when the role of minorities in socialist Poland was restricted or officially negated. His Belarussian nationality found support in the region of his childhood, which he left after the war, and also in contacts with his parents, and especially with his grandfather, who was a significant other for him in his childhood years. Finally, in old age nationality—apart from the small fatherland—was based on affiliation with a Belarussian association. Nationality here has purely autotelic functions of a community nature, and binds together the experiences of childhood and the needs of old age. From this point of view the imagined, ideological fatherland does not completely satisfy many persons who feel the need for direct social contacts with people of a similar culture, the need for a real, and not only a symbolic, community. The divided culture is the background and instrument of such

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contacts. Only emigrants from their native country or region can find complete satisfaction in exclusively symbolic contacts. That explains the tendency to gather in ghettos or to look for centers of concentration such as those that Polish emigrants—artists and intellectuals—created after World War II. The most characteristic examples of this type are Kultura in Maisons-Laffitte, Wiadomosci in central London, and the not entirely comparable institutions of New York Poles. Minority social-cultural associations and their institutions in Poland play the role of similar concentrations, especially for members of ethnic communities living in a Diaspora, except for local concentrations (Belarussians) or minority members who have no authentic, traditional converging points (Ukrainians). In this situation minority institutions satisfy the need for a return to ethnic roots. They are significant institutions from the standpoint of national identification and the strengthening of cultural valence both for members of the older generation and for the young generation of Belarussian intellectuals. The Teacher, the author of the second autobiography, belongs to the middle generation born after the war. So for him neither the period of the Second Republic nor wartime events are a frame of reference for aspects of nationality. His entire life was spent on territory where the ethnic Belarussian population is concentrated. His autobiography, determined by such a situation, corresponds in this respect to the life course of the Regional Activist. However, in contrast to the latter, the Teacher declares Polish national identification. At the same time, he represents a very clear example of cultural bivalence. Both elements of national self-identification are expressed in his autobiography as follows: "I regard myself as a member of the Polish nation. I was born and brought up here, in Poland, I finished Polish schools, I am most proficient in..., of course I know the local dialect. I can express myself well in it, make myself understood, but I suppose that I express myself most precisely in Polish, so that simply binds me. I work here, this state pays my salary. I am simply a Pole" (B.2). What is significant in this declaration of nationality is that the author does not restrict himself to stating his citizenship and the fact that he lives in the Polish state, as did other representatives of the older generation who acknowledged Polishness. He puts emphasis on the Polish language community of communication. However, he regards language not as a purely instrumental tool of understanding, but as a means of expression. The author, who is not only a dedicated teacher but an artist, also has available another means of

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expression that binds him with Belarus or, more broadly, with Byzantine culture. He is also bivalent in the area of literature. He is affiliated, through dialect, with the tradition of folklore and speaks more about Belarussian literature than do all the other young Belarussians of the group, except the Secretary. However, he acknowledges that in his youth he did not want to study the literary Belarussian language. As a result, he is more familiar with the Polish canon. For him, Polish literature is the point of reference for the characteristics of Belarussian literature, not vice versa. When he speaks of Jan Kupala, he says that in Belarussian literature he plays the same role "as Mickiewicz does for us" (emphases added). An especially characteristic and interesting feature of this autobiography is the conscious acceptance of national bivalence in the field of culture. In many of the previous cases bivalence approaches ambivalence. It was the source of mental discomfort and cognitive dissonance. The Teacher does not experience such feelings. He does not feel "split in two". He calls the folklore culture and small fatherland from which his ethnic roots stem "closer to the body", like a shirt. Here he feels most at home. However, he defines the ideological fatherland, Poland, unequivocally and, like the Regional Activist (B.3), through the metaphor of circles widening, from the fatherland "closer to the body" out to the state. According to his definition, that fatherland encompasses both people and culture. This most thoughtful of the Belarussian authors analyzed also provides a characterization of his group of origin: Belarussians are "the only nation that didn't fight with anybody. Peaceful lads—maybe a bit browbeaten, as in the verse by Kolas". Other biographies contain a similar description of the national character of Belarussians. The Lawyer contrasted the Belarussians with the Poles and Ukrainians. According to him, "Belarussians are not like the Poles. They are not so obstinate, predatory and nationalistic. But the Ukrainians are also like that" (B. 1). However, the Regional Activist said: "We just live here, whether of the Orthodox faith or not. We have always managed to live in harmony." This author says that Ukrainian culture radiates to his area of activity; he states that although there are no Ukrainians, their influence is not harmful. "Here people are accustomed to that. A minority has to... well, it may be somewhat degraded, but it has to get along with others" (B.3). While noting the somewhat consistent portrait of the Belarussians presented in several of the autobiographies, it should be remembered that

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self-stereotypes are still stereotypes. Nonetheless, this picture corresponds to the self-portraits sketched in some of the autobiographies of young Belarussians, as already noted (Y.B.I; Y.B.2). The third autobiography selected as the subject of a case study deviates clearly from the Belarussian self-stereotype. Of all the Belarussian materials gathered it most clearly is focused on national values. At the same time, it illustrates the problem of Belarussian-Ukrainian relations in Podlasie, familiar from literature on the subject, from journalistic reports and from the previous autobiographies. The autobiography of the Humanist justifiably could be included in material for the analysis of national conversion processes. It has been included in the documents of Belarussian nationality to highlight the lack of clear division between phenomena occurring in a borderland area. The Humanist belongs to the middle generation. However, he is closer in age to the young generation of intellectuals than the Teacher and the Chemist. The regional origin and ethnic starting point warrant including his autobiography in the national or ethnic category of Belarussians. However, he oscillates not between two national cultures, like most of the authors presented here, but between four national cultures: Belarussian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. The first system of ethnic values stems from regional and family ascription, the last belongs to the category of achievement, and is the result of a personal decision and choice. The influence of the unclear national situation of the region and conditions of the borderland appear most strongly in this document. The author spoke of this with complete self-awareness, regarding his discomfort as a feature of the humanistic attitude: "The question 'who am I?' has bothered me since primary school and gave me no peace, that inquiring into the truth. I don't know why this is so important for a person. It seems to me that it is the most important question in a person's life, sometimes" (B.4). As the author himself admitted, he consciously searched for "his national identity" during studies of Russian language and literature, and among academic teachers he met many persons whom he acknowledged as important for this process. Another significant other mentioned in second place was his grandfather, who introduced him to the folklore of his native region and passed on to him an interest in Russia before the Revolution. His studies and his family heritage pulled him into a specific world of Ruthenian cul-

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ture—with Russian literature in first place. So this was an orientation close to that of the Chemist. However, the Chemist was not connected with any national culture through his scientific interests. As a philologist conducting linguistic studies, the Humanist, with the influence of his professors, had arrived at the conclusion that the dialect of his native region is not Belarussian but Ukrainian. That finding is consistent with the position of Polish linguists of the prewar period, especially Wladyslaw Kuraszkiewicz, who said that the north Ukrainian dialect, mixed with Old Belarussian, appears in the area between the Bug and Narva rivers. According to Wlodzimierz Pawluczuk, this fact did not stimulate a national movement of Ukrainians either before the war or until the seventies (Pawluczuk, 1972). There were certain impediments to this process which did not disappear or weaken until the changes of 1981. When analyzing the Ukrainian autobiographies, it was noticeable that the sentiments of the young Ukrainian movement, in its search for the landscape of the small fatherland, are turning to Podlasie. This discovery of the cognation of dialects is taking on new importance in arousing a feeling of familiarity with the traditional villages of that area. The region "on the Bug and the Narva" is becoming an area of expansion of Ukrainian folklore groups and the periodical press. The autobiographies of the Belarussian group speak of this, sometimes with antipathy and sometimes with approval. The Humanist stated that a Ukrainian youth club was a significant institution for him during his university studies. The feeling of affinity with the folklore cultivated there, and his field research there, led him to a conclusion that he describes as follows: "In the end, I came to the conclusion that I am not a Belarussian but a Ukrainian" (B.4). This act of national conversion was not as sudden as in K^trzyriski's case, but it was just as dramatic and had practical life consequences. The author, who before this had been closely associated with Belarussian circles, both socially and professionally, had to leave this community. He regarded this as a natural consequence of the independence of his judgments. However, he was conscious of the incomplete crystallization of his national consciousness and in documents from the time of his high-school graduation still called himself a Belarussian. The case of the Humanist furnishes very interesting material for studying aspects of national culture. The author, who has a talent and love for scholarship, as well as a capacity for self-reflection, on his own sought for

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criteria to define his nationality. He formulated the problem explicitly and provided arguments that he regarded as convincing to him. This does not mean that one can and should accept his criteria and reasons. He takes into account the language of his grandmother, who lived in Podlasie, as though this factor obligated a person to accept a particular nationality. He says that the literary Belarussian language that he learned in school always seemed strange to him. However, that can be said to some extent of all persons using Belarussian dialect as a common language in the area. In his philological studies he concluded that the Ukrainian consciousness also grows where the dialect already has definitely moved away from the Ukrainian model. The autobiography reveals, in the individual aspect, the conflicts between two minority groups known from observations of their political activity and from the journalistic polemics of the periodicals "Niwa" and "Nad Bugom i Narwoju". Echoes of these disputes could also be found in the already quoted autobiographies of Ukrainians and Belarussians. The Humanist felt this conflict in a very personal way, as an obstacle on the road to his own national identification. During this period he also felt himself to be the object of stigmatization, not from the side of Poles but from the Belarussian environment. However, he also accused the Polish socialist authorities of spreading a negative stereotype of a Ukrainian as "a butcher, bandit, ULA man". According to the author, student circles brought about the rise of the Ukrainian movement in northern Podlasie in the face of artificially supported Belarussian organizations. The circles and institutions of this movement became an important part of his life, and, as a result, an element of his autobiography. The same movement mentioned in the autobiographies of other Belarussians of the younger and older generation was described either as trouble-making (Y.B.4), or as something not to be taken seriously, or it was negated: "There aren't any of them [Ukrainians] here" (B.2). Taking into consideration the gradual and vacillating crystallization of the Humanist's Ukrainian consciousness, it might have been expected that he would experience cognitive dissonance similar to that of the young Belarussians oscillating between ethnic self-identification and Polishness. This would lead to a willingness to recognize dual national identifications as a general principle. That did not happen, however. The Humanist, in the last part of the interview, rejected all possibilities of double identification. What is very significant is that he also did not accept European identification. We will return to this problem at the end of the chapter.

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According to his autobiography, the Ukrainian consciousness of the Humanist crystallized during his first trip to Ukraine. This effect is quite different from the influence that their first encounter with the longed-for fatherland exerted on young Ukrainians from the Diaspora. However, the Humanist's criteria of judgment during all of his trips to the East were different. He was looking not for development, modernity and the complete domination of the national culture in new forms, but for traces of the traditional culture and language akin to his dialect, which he found in western Ukraine—in Volhynia and Galicia. National conversion in this case—according to the autobiography—was the result of a decision that was motivated primarily by the discovery of cognation of language with Ukrainian. The magnetic force of the dynamic and expanding young Ukrainian movement in Podlasie and Lublin also probably exerted a less conscious influence. The author spoke with admiration of the "unprecedented vitality" of this movement. Apart from language, the second factor of national self-identification, that is, cultural valence, played a secondary role in the autobiography. The author first attended a primary school in which Belarussian was the language of instruction, and then went to a Polish secondary school, although he could have chosen to attend a Belarussian one. In secondary school he became interested in Russian literature. In his autobiography he mentions the poets Mayakovski, Yesenin and Pushkin. Of Polish writers only Galczynski had a strong influence on him in this early period. There are also signs of interest in Norwid and Milosz, not as a poet but as a person defining his relation to a borderland situation. The Humanist's autobiography also contains traces of a deeper assimilation of Polish culture, especially in its more immediate, borderland elements. These influences are visible in the description of a trip to Pruzany and Lida in search of the traces of the history of his family. The strong emotional experience of visits to these places was described through the prism of his early school readings of Mickiewicz, through contact with traces of the past enriched with the aesthetic values of Polish poetry. There is little direct information in this autobiography about the influence of Polish literature and art. The autobiography shows more interest in journalism than belles-lettres. According to information from the questionnaire part of the interview, the author reads many Polish Ukrainian and Polish periodicals devoted to affairs of the borderland. Among general Polish periodicals he mentioned Wprost, Polityka and Nie.

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The ambivalent attitude towards Polishness is more understandable in the context of these interests and reading matter, because not only cultural reasons but—even more strongly—social and political criteria determine this attitude. The animosity towards Polishness manifests itself more strongly than in all the autobiographies of Belarussians, and even of Ukrainians, studied. Several general and individual factors described in the Humanist's autobiography comprise this animosity. The first one is contained in the stories of the forest battles of Polish units in his region. The author cites information about the burning of Belarussian villages by "Home Army bands". He uses the word "bands" sometimes with reservation, sometimes emphatically (B.4, p. 26). He also speaks of antagonism towards, and even contempt for, Polish "noblemen's villages". (The feeling was mutual, for the Polish yeomen's settlements in Podlasie also displayed contempt for the Belarussian peasants.) In his childhood the author experienced an aggressive reaction from a Pole, to whom he described himself as "Ruthenian". That emotional experience left a deep resentment, which for a long time he kept suppressed within himself. He also spoke of the stigmatizing label "bloody Russian" used by some Poles, but he was surprised that some Belarussians used the same expression in relation to Russians. Many elements arising out of the Polish-Belarussian conflict, which flared up with great intensity during the war and the occupation (Turonek, 1993; Wierzbicki, 1994), were passed down to him by his family and those he experienced personally were stored up in his memory. The revenge that some of the Belarussian population exacted against the Polish population after the entry of the Soviet forces in 1939 was a reaction to forced polonization and national discrimination in the Second Republic. In turn, the Poles reacted to this short but painful period, and to the postwar political involvement of many Belarussians on the side of communism, in frequent displays of animosity towards Belarussians in the Bialystok area. The odium directed against Soviet Russia also fell on Belarussians on account of their outwardly visible kinship with Russian culture. This is the origin of the epithet "bloody Russians" that so offended the Secretary and the Humanist. Their autobiographies show how wider and deeper historical processes often become intertwined with individual lives. On account of their individual, specific nature these personal materials illustrate that the influence of historical processes is complex and works in various ways, even though on the macrosocial scale these processes appear more uniform and are usually represented as such. In this respect the autobiographical materials have

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cognitive merits, which are clearly visible in the autobiography of the Humanist on account of its concentration on the issue of nationality. The Humanist in particular painfully felt the conflict situation with the Polish environment. On the other hand, his autobiography contains information on generally good relations with Polish neighbors in his native village. All of the author's close schoolmates were also Poles. The problem of Polishness returned on a wide scale in the definition of the fatherland. This author, in his intensive search for the concept of fatherland, took as his starting point his membership in the Ukrainian minority. He put his next fatherlands in his native village in northern Podlasie, which he called the spiritual fatherland, within the boundaries of Poland, and in Ukraine. Since he shortly thereafter concluded that it was not possible for a Belarussian or Ukrainian to simultaneously regard himself as a Pole, what he meant by the Polish fatherland needed further examination. As the larger fatherland he first mentioned the community of the Podlasie Ukrainian population with its "spiritual and material culture". Right behind that he affirmed his tie with all of Poland through citizenship and residence. However, in his case the tie with Poland unquestionably did not confine itself to formal legal/state aspects. In calling himself a person of the borderland, he added: "Polish culture also penetrated into my consciousness, feelings and so on. In fact, I think in categories of the larger fatherland in moments of some danger or historical catastrophe. Well, in the spiritual sense, Ukraine is unquestionably my fatherland." It is hard to demand precise terminological consistency towards the end of a several-hour-long oral interview. Certain ambiguities arise, for example, when relating the term "spiritual fatherland" to both the local community of origin and to the "imagined fatherland"—Ukraine. Despite this, the views presented in the autobiography of the Humanist are the best thought out in the Belarussian group, in which he was included on account of his original identification, notwithstanding later national conversion. His responses clearly manifest the feeling of his own cultural bivalence or even polyvalence. In this case bivalence does not appear to border on ambivalence. The case of the Humanist contains abundant information. It enriches the national scale constructed for the group of ethnic Belarussians with an additional variant by moving the highest point of the scale to a new point: Ukrainian identification. So, in sum, the scale of ethnic identification of

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Belarussians in the group studied, in terms used by the authors themselves, is as follows: Belarussian; probably Belarussian, born Belarussian, Orthodox; Belarussian and Polish; maybe Polish; Polish; Ukrainian. Such a variety of identifications go together with changing valence—that is, the appropriation of national cultures. Like the Ukrainians, the group from northern Podlasie was made up of persons brought up in the folklorist culture. However, the young Ukrainians had better opportunities than the young Belarussians to obtain a primary and secondary education in their native language. Not all of them took advantage of these opportunities (e.g. B.4, Y.B.5). The Belarussians referred to dialect as speaking "simply", or pointed out its similarity to the Ukrainian dialect. They remembered folk songs. Except for one person they did not show any pride or special reverence for this heritage, although memory of it demonstrated attachment to tradition even in the case of the woman who regarded herself as Polish. The Teacher, while declaring his Polishness, also devoted himself to Byzantine painting. Only one person, who was professionally involved in the field of culture and manifested dual national identification, possessed extensive knowledge of the names of Belarussian writers.. The attitude towards Polish culture assimilated in school was polarized. Some autobiographies stressed common values. One author (Y.B. 1) criticized the practice of claiming for Belarussian culture Polish writers and artists with Belarussian genealogy (Mickiewicz, Moniuszko). The autobiographies also displayed resentment against Poland going back to the interwar period and the postwar partisan battles in the area of northern Podlasie, which the authors did not differentiate from the actions of criminal groups. One of the authors with uncertain Belarussian identification stated laconically: "I feel nothing for Poland" (Y.B. 1). The previously cited female author, who at the same time had the greatest knowledge of Belarussian literature, took the exact opposite position (Y.B.3). In this group the lack of convergence between national identification and the strength of cultural valence is just as salient as in the young Ukrainians. On the other hand, Belarussians less often than Ukrainians expressed a belief in the value of their culture, whether folkloristic or literary. Wlodzimierz Pawluczuk observed a similar attitude in an earlier period in the countryside and called it cultural nihilism towards traditional culture. However, the young intellectuals who left the village feel nostalgia for the small fatherland, sometimes expressed reticently and sometimes with strength, inspiring them to actively defend the heritage of folk culture. However, our

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study had the purpose of choosing persons retaining a tie with Belarussian culture in an institutional form in the past or in the present (Belarussian school, minority association). That is why persons who came from the region studied but who showed no ties with Belarussian culture and ethnicity were not chosen for the study. On the other hand, we did consider persons with Polish identification who had such ties. This applies especially to the older generation. Next to polonization, which is also visible in the group of younger persons (Y.B.4), an interest in Russian culture was evinced in the autobiographies. However, Orthodoxy, which appeared as a value in several of the autobiographies, could not be a linking factor with Soviet Russia. The gravitation manifested towards Russia or the USSR and Russian culture, which took various forms depending on the historical period and generation, evoked the stigmatizing word "bloody Russian" on the part of Polish society, whose source and nature they did not understand. The second tendency already mentioned in the autobiographies pushed young Belarussians into closer contacts with the Ukrainian regional movement. That tendency manifested itself most strongly in the conversion of the the Humanist. A more general form of identification with the entire Ruthenian folklorist region appeared in the interview with the Chemist, who nevertheless, on the level of literary culture, accorded priority to Russian culture. The Chemist and the Humanist, authors of autobiographies on the highest intellectual level in the entire Belarussian group, had one more common feature connected with an orientation towards Russian culture. That was criticism of the European idea understood as a community of Western culture. Similar but weaker accents appeared in the utterances of other young Belarussians, who rejected the possibility of acknowledging themselves as Belarussians and Europeans at the same time—a possibility widely accepted in other groups in respect to their nationality and European affiliation. Opinions on the European ties of their nationality varied in the group studied. If this had not been so, one might have been concerned that saturation of information had not been achieved in an important area of contemporary aspects of nationality. However, in none of the groups studied were such strong objections to the participation of their group in the European whole encountered as among Belarussians. Already in the first part of his autobiography the "Pan-Slavist" Chemist expressed regret at the disappearance of the old values that had shaped the spirituality of the Slavs, and the replacement of these values by values coming from the West: "Maybe they are close to

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some people, but I believe that I am capable of upholding my own." These values are described as an element of Pan-Ruthenian Byzantine culture, and the countries that developed under its influence "in some sense are not European" (B.6). The Humanist expressed his opposition to the values of the West through reference to the culture of Ukraine. Historical arguments combine with a personal emotional reaction in the justification of his position. He asserted that for him Ukraine and Ukrainity are values "in themselves", "priceless and higher than European affiliation". He also remarked that the Ukrainian nation developed later than many European nations and in the face of threats from other nations (B.4). So he saw objective reasons (according to him) that separated Ukraine from Western Europe. The Young Mechinist-Philologist (Y.B.I) expressed the most important problem that the definition of European affiliation may pose from the cultural standpoint. In the self-identification test this author mentioned Belarussian nationality, but later he withdrew almost entirely from this identification and generally speaking manifested doubts and hesitations in his self-evaluation. Before this we referred to him as the personification of the stereotype of the Belarussian—to be sure, using this term as a rough approximation. This author was very critical of the overuse in journalism and politics of the concept of European affiliation. Recalling that every nation has its own specific culture and customs, he asked: "And does a European, as such a person, have such a culture of his own? Do all those people have some common culture, common features of character or something like that?" (Y.B. 1). He did not try to answer the question himself, but only showed lack of interest in wider discussions conducted in Poland on the subject of the European claims and rights of Central Eastern Europe. Paying special attention to the position of this Belarussian author does not mean acceptance of his cultural euroskepticism. However, it does serve to emphasize the role of the problems that he raised, not only in relation to the unity of Europe but also to the idea of cultural globalism. The response to this question is not easy at the end of the twentieth century and probably will not be unequivocal. Anthony D. Smith, a scholar of national cultures who is no less skeptical of cultural globalism than the young Belarussian philologist, acknowledged as his fatherland only the immediate vicinity of his place of birth, the country of his childhood years. Such far-reaching enclosure within ethnicity was not the dominant position even in the small sample studied. However, the concept of the small fatherland

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as an important value appeared in all of the autobiographies—obviously, without using that term. The Belarussian group, as well as the Ukrainian one, in this context used the metaphor of a shirt that is closest to the body. The Chemist, the most "worldly wise" of the Belarussian respondents, who had made many scientific trips abroad, was no less closed in his definition of the fatherland than the Mechanist-Philologist, whose stay in Belarus had stifled his desire to be a Belarussian but had not inclined him to opt either for the Polish ideological fatherland or for Europe. When the scale of national identifications of ethnic Belarussians was presented, a wide variety of positions was found. This led to the conclusion that even though the sample studied was small, saturation with data indispensable for comparing the main types had been achieved. Given the skepticism of most authors in respect to both the supranational European community and the young Belarussian state, the question arises as to the supralocal and supraethnic status connected with this borderland identification. The answer to this question was brought into relief clearly in a few cases. As with the young Ukrainians, this is the status of a national minority within the Polish state and society. It is an accepted and approved status, despite some bitterness arising out of a sense of a certain humiliation (B.3). Another young Belarussian, who "feels nothing for Poland" but who would never move abroad, states that for him "it's good the way it is" (Y.B.I). The most carefully considered opinion on this subject is the Humanist's. His response contains the largest number of political assessments of the situation of the countries of Central Eastern Europe in the nineties. He betrays a strong resentment against Poland in relation to the past. However, when he asked himself about his national membership—separately from fatherland—he did not refer either to Belarus or to Ukraine, even though he praised their policies. He said that on an everyday basis he was not absorbed with the problems of Ukraine, "with the life of that society, the Ukrainian nation, but I am a representative of a minority and I naturally am engrossed in Polish political and other matters" (B.4). The position of this author does not express ambivalence or cognitive dissonance. It may be interpreted as the result of thoughtful, rational grappling with problems of the borderland, of which he is very conscious, and of his resolving them not through cultural bivalence, but cultural polyvalence. The position of the Chemist may be interpreted in the same way, although his option in the non-pragmatic cultural field is not Poland. Some other young people, for example the Secretary, expressed

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ambivalence and insisted on tolerance for their position. However, in this respect their responses contain acceptance of the minority status as a solution for personal and group problems, not only of consciousness but also of practical existence. In principle this is a satisfactory solution, but there is no real alternative.

13. Silesian National Dilemmas: the Older Generation of Silesians

The residents of Opole Silesia constitute the third borderland, the third peripheral category in relation to the dominant Polish culture. Right at the outset the differences separating this community from the other two minority groups discussed above must be stressed. Silesians as a whole are not a national minority, even if this definition is applied only to the autochthonous population of the Opole region of Upper Silesia. In this understanding they may be regarded as a regional collectivity. The national character of this entire collectivity cannot be defined explicitly. As a borderland area this region is characterized by ethnic duality. No separate Silesian nationality emerged when the national communities in this area were forming. Nations, like biological species, are not the products of a one-off decision of a higher will, be it nature or Providence. They were not called into existence by a fiat of history, but emerged over its long and changing course. Benedykt Zientara, in his remarks on the formation of the state of the Franks, characterized the marginal territories that it was not possible to incorporate into this state (Zientara, 1985). He believes that in the sixth century a chance existed for a Breton state to arise that would have preserved the distinct culture developing on an ethnic base and having a separate church organization. Burgundy, the land of the Basques, Thuringia and Bavaria were also arising nations "searching for a state" (Tilly, 1994). The Saxons lost hope of political separateness only after the incursions of the state of Charlemagne. Zientara is of the opinion that linguistic unity did not play a significant role in the creation of divisions between states. However, it did increase in importance in the course of their duration, especially when the dominant side exerted pressures in this field of culture (p. 128).

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Silesian regional bonds, which were very strong, "prevailed over all-Polish consciousness", and hence cleared the way for the separation of these lands from Poland (Zientara, 1985, p. 335). On the other hand, these ties also opposed national assimilation with Germans and Czechs. At the same time, the Silesians did not create a stock of their own separate culture, especially higher culture, which could have developed into a canon underpinning separate national identification. Silesian scholars and artists had to choose the Polish option or—much earlier—the German one. During the period of medieval universalism, Witelon of Legnica, without any inner perplexity, could include himself in the natio or gens of polonica and germanica at the same time. During the period of nationalistic tensions, the national problem of selfidentification in this region became a sensitive issue and did not cease to raise doubts. For this reason, the initial intention to choose examples from the German minority in Silesia was dropped in favor of members of the regional community of "autochthons" in Opole Silesia. Their national identification was supposed to be determined as a result of the study, and not to serve as its starting point. Thus national identification became a category of dependent and not independent variables. That is precisely the goal of the analysis being carried out on the level of individual experiences presented in written autobiographies. Stanislaw Ossowski chose Opole Silesia as the subject of the first field studies conducted after the war. His brief monograph on the town of Gielczyn contains the notion of gradations of Polishness (Ossowski, 1967b). That study inspired the nationality scale developed here. Stefan Nowakowski, and later many other scholars, continued Ossowski's work in Opole Silesia. This subject was attractive cognitively, as well as in practice, because this region, which is adjacent to the former border of Polish Upper Silesia, retained the largest ethnically Polish population, or at least regarded as such, that was not expelled in the process of the ethnic cleansing of that time. The term used here was not in circulation then, but the Nazis during the occupation, and after the war the authorities of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland, practised "cleansing" by means of deportations. An example of these actions were the deportations of the Stalinist period, which often had the character of purely political repression but also applied to entire ethnic groups or nationalities. The policy of resettling the German population from the areas awarded to Czechoslovakia and Poland after the war was approved

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by the Allied powers at Yalta and Potsdam, and Allied commissions even supervised some of these actions. The resettlements took place in an atmosphere of retaliation and of the hardening of feelings caused by the horrific experiences of the war and occupation in Eastern Europe. Years later, a young Warsaw insurgent, a cultured person in the common sense of this word and later a sociologist of culture, admitted this. In his article Wysiedlalem Horsta Bienka (I Expelled Horst Bienek) he admitted that at that time his heart was hard (Krzeminski, 1988). It was impossible to observe, let alone carry out, sociological studies of these deportations when they were going on. Polish sociology, like all of Polish science, was just reconstructing itself after the wartime destruction. Besides this, from the outset sociology, which had no counterpart in the Marxist social sciences of the Soviet Union, fell under suspicion. Before it was abolished as a university discipline in 1949, sociology at least took the first steps in studying ethnic problems in Silesia and Warmia and Masuria. In contrast to western Pomerania and Lower Silesia, while deporting the Germans from Opole Silesia the authorities simultaneously conducted a verification action to separate the wolves from the sheep, understood as the genuine autochthonous, native Polish population. From the perspective of time and greater theoretical sophistication, it is easy to understand the subtlety and illusory nature of this task in relation to the population of an ethnic borderland that for centuries had been subjected to the pressure of changing influences of different national cultures. In practice this complicated operation was carried out not with a surgeon's scalpel but with a butcher's knife. Doctrinal aspects of class and the favoring of the Polish population coming to these areas from central Poland, and of repatriates from the areas incorporated into the Soviet Union, also tampered with this process. Finally, the greed of local administrators involved in the verification and deportation processes also played a role. Sociologists were aware of some of these events, but they had no way of interfering. When sociology regained its academic status after October 1956, sociologists focused their attention on community-building processes in the so-called Western Territories. "Integration" was a popular and almost obligatory term that defined the subject of those investigations and gave them a kind of alibi before the authorities. Nevertheless, everything in the findings that marred the picture of the harmonious integration of the native population

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(autochthons) and the immigrant population encountered official opposition and obstacles were placed in the way of the dissemination of the results. This is something that I experienced personally in connection with investigations into the national ideas and attitudes of Opole school children, conducted in 1959. These studies were part of a UNESCO international research project under the supervision of Otto Klinberg. The survey made use of a test of self-identification in answer to the question, "Who are you?". Those questioned could first choose any nationality; and a question on opinions about nations like and unlike their own; and thirdly they were asked for their attitudes towards those nations. The respondents were children of seven, ten, and fourteen years of age from Opole primary schools. After evaluating the results, which left many doubts but which were published (Kloskowska, 1961), I wrote a longer paper based on an analysis of selected individual cases, especially of children from the native population. That second paper, written for inclusion in a series of monographs for the Silesian Institute in Opole, did not appear in print. In analyzing the individual questionnaires treated as material for case studies, I discovered attitudes that at the time I called ambivalent. Among the children was a ten-year-old boy who explicitly called himself a half-German and half-Pole. Four boys mentioned German nationality as the nationality that they would like to choose. However, in the first self-identification test only one of them called himself a German. Two others said that they would like to live in Berlin, but as the prettiest cities they only chose Polish ones. The boy who called himself a half-German said that he did not like Germans very much, but did like Russians, "because they protect us against the Germans". A questionnaire survey did not permit deeper probing into the sources of such contradictions. The responses of the fourteen-year-olds were less spontaneous, and in some degree probably less frank than those of the ten-year-olds. In the fourteen-year-old group 90 percent defined their nationality as Polish. Three girls among those calling themselves Polish mentioned German nationality as the one that they would like to choose. They called the Germans a nation similar to their own, one they liked and which had a rich culture. At the same time, they were able to mention many famous Poles, and knew Polish verses and songs. Two boys not calling themselves Poles gave evasive answers to the nationality of choice, said little about Poles and gave no characteristics of Germans. An exception was the case of a boy belonging to the native category, but from a family of intellectuals, which was unusual after the

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period of expulsions and departures. To the question of the nationality of choice, this boy answered: "I am and will be a Pole, because I feel myself to be one." He demonstrated extensive knowledge of Polish culture and history and an emotional attitude towards it; he called himself the son of an old, noble nation. In his characterization of Germans he described their role in the last war, but he regarded the wartime events as a closed chapter of history that should not affect assessment of the present. He did not answer the question of whether he liked or disliked Germans. He either may have been unable to define his attitude, or wanted to avoid lying openly and feared telling the truth. His first, quoted response may have been a defense reaction. In 1959 the autochthonous population of Silesia still had vivid memories of the verification action of the past, and the children studied were under the strong polonizing influence of the school. The attitudes that I then called ambivalence were formed in this situation. This term unquestionably fitted some of these children, especially the last case. Some of the younger children, who in the interview were spontaneous and frank, also could have been classified as nationally ambivalent. Some of the older ones, who avoided direct answers, perhaps concealed their national ties with Germany and their dislike for Poland. The questionnaire data did not make it possible to verify the correctness of similar hypotheses. After this researchers concluded that questionnaires were of limited use in investigations of the ethnic problems of Opole Silesia. Scholars of nationality relations in Poland during the sixties, who failed to consider similar complexities in attitudes, reached the conclusion that no more than several thousand Germans were living in Poland. Such an opinion was expressed as late as the end of the eighties (Mariariski, 1988, p. 22). This conclusion resulted mainly from bending the facts to the doctrine of the complete national homogeneity of Polish society. However, it also had its sources in processes of conscious national camouflage, in the uncertainty of the population of the ethnic borderland about their own national identification, and finally in changes in self-identification similar to national conversion. In the complicated, often dramatic situation of the native ethnic population of Opole Silesia, one can even speak of processes of re-re-conversion in different directions. An analysis of autobiographical materials and a concentration on individual cases is a useful method for learning more about these cases, although even such a method does not guarantee that all problems of national identification can be solved.

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The present investigation used this method to study two generations of Silesians from Opole. The group of older Silesians (O.S1.) over the age of sixty was composed'primarily of persons living in a town near Raciborz and its environs. The group of younger a'dults was composed of university students and graduates (Y.S1.) from various villages of Opole voivodeship, born between 1961 and 1970 (average age 26.3). Differences in generation usually play an essential role in shaping the life course and character of people living in times of radical social changes. This applies to all the minorities studied. For several reasons, however, differences between generations in Silesia were especially strongly pronounced. Silesia was the border between the sphere of Slavic cultures and German culture. The separation of language and customs between neighboring communities was especially sharp here. It deepened in the course of successive historical phases of the political situation in Silesia. After Silesia was separated from Poland and became part of the Habsburg monarchy it was already a conglomeration of Polish, Czech and German elements. The Prussian annexation (1740) started a period of gradually intensifying germanization of Silesia. The term "germanization"-is used here in a strictly descriptive sense, analogous to the term "polonization" used below, and in a different sense from that used in the writings of Wojciech K^trzynski, who fought against the germanization of Masuria and Pomerania. • In' the popular understanding, and in Polish journalism, the concept of germanization obviously has a negative connotation, and the concept of polonization—as a rule—a positive one. Here we do not entirely forego an axiological qualification of both of these processes. However, the assessment derives from the characteristics of the methods and their consequences in the feelings of the persons subjected to this process, not from an assumption made in advance that the expansion of one's own nation is an absolute good, while the expansion of someone else's nation at our expense is an absolute evil. According to Polish historians, the Prussian germanization of Silesia by increased immigration, military service, German-language schools and the church had the character of oppression. It became especially oppressive during the times of Bismarck and-von Biilow.(Gierowski, 1980). Even then, however, some representatives of the German Catholic Church hierarchy (Bishop Bertram) recognized the need to provide the Polish population with "religious ministration" in the "language of the heart". The present bishop of the Opole diocese behaves in the same way towards the German Silesians.

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According to German sources, in 1910 some 65.2 percent of the entire population of the Opole district was bilingual, while the proportion in all of Upper Silesia (except for large cities) was 71 percent {Historia Polski w liczbach, 1994). In 1993 the percentage acknowledging Polish was only 6.3 (Kurcz, 1994). Under the Nazi regime the use of Polish soon was prohibited, and its use in public places was a punishable offense. Polish minority organizations and schools were shut down during this period, but even prior to this parents who sent their children to those schools were subjected to humiliation and pressures of various kinds. As Ossowski (1967b) stated, only a few persons dared to do this—richer peasants or artisans, not workers who faced the threat of losing their jobs. During the Nazi period many activists of former Polish cultural associations were sent to concentration camps. The group of older Silesians (O.S1.) included in the autobiographical study belonged mainly to the generation called the "Hitlerjugend generation" (Rosenthal et al., 1984). In Opole Silesia that generation was almost completely cut off from Polishness. Fear of neighbors, the watchfulness of the police and the school forced parents to stop using the Silesian dialect even at home. Only the generation of grandparents (mainly grandmothers who did not know German well) passed down certain rudimentary foundations of Polish, which helped some of the respondents to appropriate it more quickly after the war. Irrespective of this influence, all of those over the age of sixty in the generation studied should be regarded as germanized. The use of this term, instead of simply classifying these persons as being of German nationality, stems from the fact that after the war their parents, or they themselves, were verified as Poles, and at that time they were particular about that. During the course of this investigation their national identification varied, as will be presented below. Among those studied there was no one from the category of "great Poles", whom Ossowski mentioned in his study of the village of Gielczyn, using the local expression for persons who, during the Nazi times, continued to manifest strong Polish national identification. The motives of the persons studied here, or their parents' motives, for acknowledging Polishness after the war were mostly practical. They wanted to remain in Poland and feared the repressive measures that might affect them as Germans during the time of verification. Today, in accordance with the assumptions of the study of national minorities, they were chosen for study from among the native, autochthonous residents of Opole Silesia precisely because some of them regarded themselves as Germans, or for the most part

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as Germans. In the end, their national identification turned out to be not completely decided. For this reason they clearly are a borderland category. The position of the seven older persons may be defined additionally in categories of the world experienced by them as the borderland of "simple people". None of them has even secondary education. The values of the women's world are clearly focused on family affairs. The men subscribe to other, but also mainly local, values. However, the war burst into this, by assumption, closed world. As a result, wartime events are a leitmotif of the autobiographies and move the problem of national identification to the center of the autobiographical narrative, turning these events into little short of a focal value. However, this is a value imposed by the situation and does not have such a wide range of references as in the case of the young Ukrainians. More so than the other autobiographies, the autobiographies of the older Silesians are based on the autobiographical interview and not so much on free narration. The difficulty in evoking a pure narrative monologue stemmed mainly from the limitations of education and age. Linguistic awkwardness manifested itself in various ways, more in women and to a lesser extent in men. One eighty-year-old woman could hardly speak Polish at all. The interview was conducted with her daughter. Other women spoke in dialect, but in two cases this was Polish learned after the war with German insertions and a heavy accent. This was associated with the professional careers that required contacts outside their local community, and with greater spatial mobility. The main theme of the autobiographies of the women of the older Silesian generation centered on wartime events that started with forced evacuation by the German authorities in the face of the approaching front. In their own words, only then did the war start for them. The expulsion Odyssey leading through Czechoslovakia, and for some also through Bavaria and Brandenburg, is presented as a series of painful experiences—hunger, the death of loved ones, small children and old people, and separation from children. The authors of the autobiographies also tell about the usually unsuccessful attempts to hide from forced evacuation described in other sources (Bienek, 1993). As teenagers two men were mobilized and assigned to the Volkssturm. After these dramatic experiences they returned to a country already occupied by Soviet and Polish forces and to new dire circumstances—to burned or plundered homes, sometimes to camps, to an atmosphere of violence, and especially to hunger and the struggle for food.

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The description of these events occupies a lot of space in the autobiographies, and from the perspective of years unexpectedly takes on an almost epic quality. Women sometimes cried when speaking of their wartime and postwar experiences, and this was picked up on magnetic tape (O.S1.1; O.S1.5). On the other hand, in their descriptions they expressed calm reactions to contacts with foreigners and to their first experiences as young girls and boys facing the practical problems of national differences and conflicts. Attitudes of implacable hostility or hatred are rare or virtually nonexistent, even though in the time when the study was conducted people no longer had to suppress such feelings out of fear. The stories also present many ugly facts. The woman who spoke of the rape of women and the murder of nuns, as well as of the forced, shameful—in her opinion—sweeping of streets in white arm-bands, also said that "some Poles distributed bread" (O.S1.5). According to another woman, "The Russians shot all over the fields, they didn't look to see who was there, even children." "The Poles called us names, even beat us, but some of them were very good" (O.S1.2). Another woman said that there were bad and good Russians. They gave her daughter a doll that she still has today. They protected them against robbing Poles. "The Russians weren't bad to me. There is a black sheep everywhere, in every sheepfold" (O.S1.4). The evacuation and postwar experiences of the authors made them more conscious of the problem of German affiliation and placed it in a new context. A lot of space in their biographies is occupied by accounts of school, in which they express appreciation for the value of the German school system that provided free secondary education to bright pupils. Men mention the Hitlerjugend as an organization that enabled them to develop their interest in sports, and that provided adventures and an occasion for comradeship. That interpretation is similar to the reminiscences of young people of the Hitlerjugend generation that German sociologists studied in Germany. From the utterances of the Silesians it cannot be determined whether, and to what degree, they perceived the Nazi ideological indoctrination practised by that organization and whether it left any lasting marks. However, one of the female authors said that there were no Nazis among the teachers (O.S1.1). The author of an autobiography who has the strongest ties with minority organizations in this group and recently has been teaching German in courses recalled the strong impression made on him by the sight of passing concentration-camp prisoners being evacuated from the approaching front. Several persons from this group mentioned the presence of Polish forced laborers in

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their town. However, no one commented on—and all were probably unaware of—the fact that these people had been taken away forcibly "for work", and of their situation as unpaid laborers without rights and care. According to their own accounts, none of them took such a firm stand against the manifestations of the Nazi regime as a certain young German girl, whose autobiography was studied by a German sociologist (Paul, 1994). As that German sociologist wrote, this girl knew how to say "no", both to the obligation to belong to a Nazi girls' organization and to the bad treatment of Slavic women workers in her factory. There are no such accents in our materials. The female authors of the autobiographies examined here did not assimilate permanently the Nazi contempt for Poles. After the war several of these women married former forced laborers from their area. Except for one person, however, they did not stress the relationship between the situation of Poles during the occupation and the retaliation of Polish newcomers after the war. The exception was a person whose Polish husband lived through the Warsaw Uprising (O.S1.1). The reluctance to assume collective responsibility, which is explicitly rejected in some pronouncements, is all the more understandable because, apart from other reasons, these Silesian autobiographies display a weaker or stronger feeling of aloofness towards the Germans, at least in retrospect. At the same time, certain values important for their identity link them with German culture—language and school attendance in their early years, as well as work. The expressions "to toil", "to go to work", and "service" are repeated many times in the autobiography of the oldest female author (O.S1.3). She comes from a village and in her axiological stance one can see a more universal attitude towards the value of work, which is also often encountered in the memoirs of Polish peasants. The same woman relates this value to the German character. Of her husband she said: "He was a pure German, he was very hard working. That is how a German is." Another author put it as follows: "A Pole is not very hard working" (O.S1.6). Two men in this group recalled with approval the severe physical punishments and strict supervision practised in the German school in order to arouse "love of learning and discipline". "The Prussians, you know, that is discipline" (O.S1.6). "We liked that, that discipline, order" (O.S1.7). These two persons saw no connection between this model of social order and the march of the concentration camp prisoners that they had observed. Yet this picture imprinted itself strongly in their memories and returned in recollections of the war.

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A strong accented value in many of the utterances is the family—a universal value, but in specific Silesian conditions leading to complicated problems and entangled life situations, in the course of successive generations and various historical changes. Thus dialect—the home language of most of the authors—was expelled from their childhood. However, they remember that their parents were afraid to speak to them in dialect (the authors simply call this speaking in Polish), because they were summoned by the German teacher and had to pay a fine if their children spoke German poorly. Later, the situation turned around: Polish teachers summoned them to school and warned them not to have a bad influence on their children's Polish. "Well, it was the same story all over again" (O.S1.7). Numerous statements in the Silesian texts express the mentality of people who, in the course of their life, found themselves between two worlds, neither of which they accepted fully and each of which repelled them for one or another reason. Despite German upbringing, their existence among Germans during their wartime wanderings made the Silesians aware of their own difference and left the memory of rejection. Expelled relatives spoke of similar experiences during visits: "The Germans told them [after they came to Germany] that they were Poles. So they were very badly off from the very beginning" (O.S1.2). When they returned home to Silesia after the war, they were received with animosity and the stigmatizing epithets of "Huns" and "Nazis" from the Polish settlers, and "repatriates" who had lost their homes and small fatherland across the Bug River. Only after some time did the similarity of their fates start to bring these two categories of neighbors closer together. There was a gradual amalgamation of customs, of which the authors of the autobiographies are aware. A fine example of Silesian autobiographies of the older generation is that of a sixty-two-year-old woman, which will be examined in detail as a "real type" of the human condition of a borderland area. This author, whom we will call the "Intermediary", comes from a large family of weavers with a Polish surname, but without original Polish or dialect language heritage, even though the father spoke Polish. Suspected of communism, even though a member of the SS, the father was sent to Gross Rosen concentration camp before the war ended. The author, her mother and the rest of the children were deported to the vicinity of Berlin through Czechoslovakia and Bavaria. There they suffered hunger and the animosity of those around them. Since their name began with the letter M and had a Slavic sound, they were called Molotov.

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They returned to Poland on the summons of the father after he had been released from the camp. "Here it was even worse than in Germany. There we were Molotov, here, well—Krauts" (O.S1.1). Even after fifty years the memory of those experiences brought tears. The entire autobiography is a testimony of the author's efforts to come to terms with this experience in her mind. "I simply lived a double life: one there [in Germany], and another one here [in Poland]." Her marriage with a man from Warsaw who had lived through the Warsaw Uprising helped her to understand the wider circumstances of her lot, if not their sense. It made her aware of "what those people [the Poles during the war] went through". On the other hand, some autobiographies of German displaced persons written in Germany completely negate any mental connection between "Polish trespasses" and earlier "German guilt". These persons are full of resentment that borders on hatred (Slaska, 1995). The Intermediary understands this relationship. From this she concludes that the most important thing in life is for people to like each other, to live "one with the other" and be tolerant of other people's views and principles of behavior: "You have to be a person and do what you think is right." This author grew into the new conditions and accepted them thanks to the advancement of her sons, who obtained a secondary-school leaving certificate and thereby realized her dreams that had been frustrated by the war. For her, learning is the most important value next to the family. However, her aspirations do not reach too high and are easier to satisfy than those of the other Silesians. She is proud of the managerial position of her son in the center that he organized, and of his extensive collection of Polish books. But with great care she keeps German books. The "double life" of this person expresses itself in unquestionable cultural bilavence. This appears especially in language, just as with another woman author of an autobiography, who said: It's bad if a person can't speak two languages. I had two tongues" (O.S1.3). The Intermediary relates her bivalence primarily to religion. Like the rest of the group studied she said that Polish and German religious principles, prayers and many religious songs are alike. She recalled that the Polish saint Faustina Potocka founded the nearby convent. Only in moments of very deep religious experience is she unable to use Polish. She has to confess in German. However, she is pleased with "our pope" and approves of the Children of Father Kolbe organization.

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Her roots in contemporary Polish Silesia stem from her recognition of an identical, though replaced, small fatherland. The first time when they went there having returned after the evacuation, her mother entered church on her knees. Despite numerous visits to relatives in Germany and active correspondence with them, she says: "Today I would not change with anybody, with any fatherland. I wouldn't exchange it for anything." To this declaration, filled with pathos, she adds: "Maybe if they gave me a few thousand marks." But she would return with this money to Poland. Old girlfriends who come to visit from Germany confirm the correctness of her decision to stay in Poland. That confirms her in the sense of her own dignity and in the importance of her role as an intermediary. The author of these remarks was called the Intermediary, because she plays an important role in local contacts with relatives, visiting from Germany, of neighbors who stayed in Poland, and with former acquaintances who were expelled or who left voluntarily (Spataussiedler) and come to visit the former small fatherland. For them she is a source of information and a translator, and she helps them to understand local affairs. She proudly shows them the sports center built by her son. She values her role highly. She says of herself: "I'm somebody, I'm a pillar." Her feeling of importance among the former, native population and newer Polish neighbors, as well as among visitors from Germany, is coupled with strong attachment to her Polish family and to the place that is her small fatherland in its present shape. All of that together is a value that the political movement of the German minority could threaten. The motives behind her attitude are mainly personal. She has the feeling that if she became a member of the German minority she would have to renounce her own children, like a cuckoo. "I wouldn't want to spoil what I have built up." Her attitude also has a wider aspect. She expressed the fear that the activities of minority organizations could set at odds a community that already has forgotten divisions into "Krauts" and "D^browa Basin people". "That evil came from that minority. They want to have their minority, but the Poles want their nationality. These people lived in harmony for so many years, and so now why all of this? This is my brother, my neighbor and I would prefer unity" (O.S1.1). In this context this woman speaks with fear of the example of Yugoslavia. She believes that a minority movement may be contrary to her maxim for life—"like one brother with another" and unity in mutual love. "A minority is not necessary, soon this will be one Europe."

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The young generation of better-educated Silesians manifests even more clearly the European and universalistic approach to the Silesian nationality dilemmas of this woman. However, young people with a German orientation to the minority issue are different. The context of unification and reconciliation appears in the statement of the Technician-Teacher of German (O.S1.6). According to him, antagonisms in Silesia are artificially injected from the outside, because somebody is against reconciliation. Stereotypes have to be rejected and the saying that as long as the world exists a German will never be a Pole's brother must be contradicted, because "that's not true, it isn't so at all". We must "live not next to one another but with each other, together". This author has an interesting, well-formulated conception of the fatherland, which will be presented below. For him and for other members of this group, this is only the small fatherland, which in the mind, in experience and action is translatable into the German Heimat. Newly built houses, the careers of children in the new situation of the country, and the graves of the family are associated with it. Like the Wireman and the Intermediary, the Technician-Teacher has a clear awareness of the borderland situation—in the ethnic and psychosocial, not spatial, sense. The Wireman says that at home, contrary to accusations, they did not speak German but Silesian. "The Silesian tongue is common. We are borderland people here, aren't we?" (O.S1.7). The Technician-Teacher also speaks of mixed Polish-German language, and to this is added the Moravian dialect of the native region. However, these two persons belong to a generation that had to reject dialect under the Nazis and that only started to learn it again after the war, in addition to standard Polish required in school. This group was directly but cautiously asked about their national identification. ("People have different opinions on this subject. Of which nation do you regard yourself a member?") The answers were distributed along a scale, just as in the group of ethnic Belarussians—"German" (O.S1.2), (O.S1.7); "I am more a German" (O.S1.6); "I was a German, but now I'm both a German and a Pole" (O.S1.4); "German and Pole and a little bit of a Silesian" (O.S1.1); "Rather a Pole" (O.S1.5); "Well, a Pole, but a Silesian" (O.S1.3). The spontaneous self-definition of the last speaker is significant: "We, poor people." According to the assumption, the study covered not the active leaders of minority organizations but ordinary, sometimes poor people. In this age category the respondents' education was incomplete secondary schooling in

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Poland, and their contact with German was broken off when they were teenagers. It was hard to ask them about the canon of either culture. Ties with customs could measure their cultural valence only, or mainly their religious practices and elements of historical knowledge. In historical knowledge the Technician-Teacher leaned towards German culture and was more out-andout German than the others in this sphere. Customs showed a mixture of cultures. This was evident in their eating habits, for example in mixed marriages the substituting of Silesian meat dip with Polish Lenten fare on Christmas Eve for the adults, but retaining the dip, which they no longer wanted to eat, for the children. Bivalence against the background of Catholic universalism manifested itself especially in religion, which ties the Silesian group closely with Polish religious rites and practices. These ties were observed in the example of Silesians who remained in Poland. The observation of two groups of displaced persons or later emigrants in northern Westphalia confirmed the same phenomenon. During the religious services and meetings of two groups of emigrants in the recreation center, where courses were taught to strengthen their German affiliation, the members of these groups willingly and correctly sang Polish religious and folk songs. During a Polish religious service one of the leaders of the German minority in Poland was also moved by the recitation of a Polish religious text. These facts have been stressed here, because in order to understand cultural valence it is necessary to distinguish this phenomenon from ordinary cultural erudition. Strong emotional experience and the capacity to employ its expressive potency do not necessarily accompany knowledge of a foreign culture. Both valence indicators unquestionably became a reality in the cases mentioned. In the second case language itself was not the object of a religious experience, but on account of deep internalization it could serve as the medium of such an experience. German prayers did not perform such a function for Poznañ schoolchildren striking in support of the national resistance movement in 1906 to 1907 (Kulczycki, 1993) and before this in Wrzesnia. On the other hand, here one should mention the case of the Intermediary, for whom German was indispensable in confession as the "language of the heart"; and who, if there were no Silesian priest in her parish, would feel discriminated against in her religious practices. Generally speaking, the religious bond of the Opole Silesians with the Polish center brings them close to Poland no matter whether they feel closer

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to Poland or Germany in their national identification. That distinguishes them from Polish Belarussians, for whom Orthodoxy is a significant factor that sets them apart from the Polish dominant culture. On the other hand, the older Silesians, like the Belarussians, vacillated in their understanding and feeling of separation from Polishness. Those who "had two tongues" were eagerly and more quickly accepted by new neighbors thanks to their knowledge of the dialect (O.S1.3). The Technician-Teacher, leaning towards German literary culture, also manifests instability in deciding who is his countryman and who is a stranger. In relation to Germans arriving from Germany he identifies with the Polish or local Silesian "we" and is ashamed of the disrepair of the homes formerly belonging to Germans that the guests want to see: "That is a disgrace for Poland, isn't it? We shouldn't be surprised that they describe us like that in the West" (O.S1.6; emphasis added). This person, who calls himself "rather a German" and who boasts that he never lost "living contact with the German language", is the most ardent supporter of genuine reconciliation "not only on paper". He has a historical vision of Silesia as a country of many cultures "struggling between one master and the other". According to him, in this country people ought "to live with each other" not only next to each other. What is important for his idea of the fatherland is the house that he is building himself, "with my own hands, with sweat and blood", and he can build this house "only here, because I come from here and my great-great-grandparents came from here". The Intermediary spontaneously recited a favorite poem in German that she remembered from childhood, and then summarized it in Polish: '"Here is my Heimat. Here is my home. This is such a tiny place. [...] But it is mine. I live here, I love here, and I rest here. This is my Heimat.'' [...] This is the lesson of a woman who is sixty and was thirteen when she finished her German education. Only this German language stayed with her" (O.S1.1). Here as well the explicitly stated concept of the fatherland was limited to the Heimat, the small, private fatherland. There is no political conception of the Great Reich here, there is no "Germany above everything else", no big fatherland, nothing that could be called Vaterland either from the period of German Romanticism or from Nazi nationalism. Besides the external expression there is still the unnamed but culturally understood value of the fatherland of language, which was not forgotten and rejected, a language that can be understood as a synecdoche of national culture.

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A similar feeling of roots, of adaptation, but also of duality appears in the entire group studied, but it is not as eloquently expressed. This type of attitude could be recognized as characteristic of Silesians of the entire older generation. However, it should be remembered that large numbers of this generation also are leaving for Germany. And this is taking place at a time when people are free to leave. To be sure, many factors besides emotional attitudes persuade people to leave their country of birth. The ethnic situation of the Silesians differs from the Belarussian and Ukrainian minorities, in that the decision of the Silesians to leave is often motivated by the search for better material conditions of life. However, this motive is not clear-cut in its nature and influence for people of the borderland "split in two" by different identifications, valences, family ties, careers and choices of children, relationships with neighbors. In addition to the ties that had to be broken and the attractive prospects of prosperity, other factors were at work here in encouraging them to leave, pressures that were strongly felt during the period of socialism. Authors of autobiographies among the older generation spoke of the authorities "setting some people against others" and demanding that people inform against their neighbors, of being alienated from Polishness by the administration and by some of the new settlers. They also knew that former "great Poles" left Poland in defense of their Polishness in the most difficult conditions of national oppression during the Nazi period. It was repeated many times in the autobiographies that things have improved in recent years (O.S1.6), that "the times when one wasn't permitted to leave have ended", as have the times when one could not admit to one's nationality (O.S1.7). Two women repeated: "Now things are different" (O.S1.1; O.S1.2). As expected, the change in the form of government after 1989 was reflected especially in the attitudes of the second group of Opole Silesians selected for study: young Silesians.

14. Silesian National Dilemmas: the Younger Generation of Silesians

Like the young Belarussians and Ukrainians, the authors of autobiographies among the younger generation of Silesians were chosen for study in accordance with principles that would generate lengthy responses that were as reflective as possible. These are young adults with higher education or students of higher-education institutions. Like the two previous groups, they have peasant genealogy. In Opole Silesia most of the ethnic Silesians affiliated with Polish culture belonged to the peasant class, because the city population developed under the influence of immigrants from the heart of Germany, or was subjected to the strong influences of germanization among the local population. The Opole countryside, on the other hand, remained an enclave of Polish elements, only partially waning, despite the pressures exerted by successive phases of Prussian and Nazi policies. However, the situation of Polishness here was different and much more difficult than in adjacent areas of Katowice, and especially in the D^browa Basin. In addition to the specific features of the area studied, the education of the authors of the autobiographies must also be considered. When higher education is used as a criterion of selection, the group is not statistically representative of the Silesian population. According to the research of Danuta Berlinska, only 1.1 percent of the native Opole Silesians have completed higher education, in contrast to 6.3 percent of the extraneous population (Berlinska et al., 1993, p. 16). According to her, the low educational and occupational status in Silesia has been inherited over generations. The Silesians of the older generation studied here remember the educational incentives for talented pupils under the Nazis. However, the younger generation tends to make international rather than historical comparisons.

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All of the young authors have numerous experiences of foreign trips, especially to Germany, where they have friends and close relatives. On the other hand, they have in common the fact that they have remained in Poland. Their declared motives for returning and staying differ. One of the probable reasons that is not clearly expressed is the opportunity for advancement in Poland. They also explicitly mentioned, albeit not always in connection with their own personal decision to stay, roots in the small fatherland and the role of the political changes in Poland. One author, called here the Pragmatist, says that his grandmother, who was evacuated to Thuringia in 1945, returned not because "she was drawn to the Polish language and to Poland"—she even hoped "that soon Poland would not exist here". The main reason was that she felt out of place in Thuringia. Today, she is no longer thinking of leaving (Y.S1.10). Her grandson also does not plan to leave: Now, after "the fall of communism [...] one can say openly who one is and what one feels". A still unresolved problem for young Silesians is that they often do not know who they are—they often ask this question, which is of no little consequence for them. The autobiographies of the young Silesians are not as focused on national self-identification as the autobiographies of the young Ukrainians. Yet problems of identification occupy a lot of space in the autobiographies of the young Silesians, including in the first part of the interview, when they appear without the interviewer's prompting. National identification is mentioned fairly often in the test of ten definitions, but it always has to be supplemented with facts from other parts of the autobiography, without which it would be incomplete and misleading. Even in the test data expressing self-identification in the most direct manner one can find surprising ambiguity that is difficult to interpret. For example, in the Pragmatist's list, definitions three to six are the following: German, Silesian, European, Pole (Y.S1.10). Only a hermeneutic analysis of the autobiography as a whole enables one to understand how he reconciles the two extreme opposite identifications, and what function the two middle ones play in relation to them. The regional-national identifications scale is more complicated here than the scale for the Ukrainians, which was exclusively bipolar. On the whole it is also more complicated than the scale for the Belarussians, which only in exceptional cases had a third aspect, that of Ukrainity, and in which cases of gravitation towards Russian culture had no counterpart in the identifying, substantival definition. No one in that group called himself a Russian. That

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is why the Belarussians failed to understand the stigmatizing epithet "bloody Russian". The identification continuum of the young Silesians, like that of the older Silesians, stretches between the extremes of Polishness and Germanness. However, the members of the younger generation differ from the members of the older one in their clearer emphasis on Polishness and, in some cases, by a more thoughtful reflection on the essence of Silesian affiliation as a third term, often mediating between the two extreme terms and, paradoxically, sometimes accepted simultaneously—as in the case of the Pragmatist (Y.S1.10). Higher education and better general intellectual qualifications are the main source of this difference between generations, but—perhaps—they are not the only source. The scale of national and regional (ethnic) identifications among the young Silesians, expressed in their own words, is as follows: person with German orientation; Silesian-German, not Pole; more a German than a Pole (or German-Silesian-Pole); Silesian; Silesian-Pole; Pole-Silesian; cosmopolite. The expression most often used in this group is "Silesian-Pole". To be sure, the sample is not representative and no conclusions from this study may be generalized to the entire generation of young Opole Silesians from families of autochthons. However, an analysis of the autobiographies will provide information on how the authors experienced nationality and regional ethnicity. After examining all the autobiographical elements of the texts, not only literal declarations, the main conclusion that may be drawn is that the identity factors of the people of this borderland in particular are very complicated. The identity of Silesians obviously is not limited to national valences and identifications—Polish or German or integrally Silesian. A specific factor with a strong influence is connected with the situation of a national borderland in which an additional source of complication is the enduring feeling of regional ethnic separateness. This feeling is stronger than in the PolishUkrainian or Polish-Belarussian borderland. The category "locals" appearing in Belarussian areas before the war was defined more negatively than by the feeling of regional specificity. This is a difference that stems perhaps not so much from the nature of the ethnic category as from the degree of reflective self-knowledge connected with a higher level of civilization in Silesia. There was no such intermediate category between Ukraine and Poland. Rather, Poland and Russia treated Ukraine as a transitory ethnic region, in spite of the national aspirations of Ukrainians.

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The feeling of separateness from the two neighboring cultures appears in the group of Silesians studied and in other autobiographical materials (Krzeminski, 1994), but this feeling is accompanied by awareness of being influenced by both of them. The situation of an intermediate category appears in the accounts of the young Silesians irrespective of their final Polish or German option or rejection of both of these options and their adhering exclusively to integral Silesian affiliation (Y.S1.8). The notion of the separateness of Silesia appears with especial clarity in the autobiography of the Pragmatist, not as a political program but as a missed historical opportunity that can be embraced only in the sphere of culture and consciousness. In speaking of Silesia the author refers to Horst Bienek, saying that "Germans and Poles always built the power of this country". He also would prefer that Silesia "be a separate state and that without any of those [fears, misunderstandings] one could say that one is a Silesian [...] for this is such a mixture of different cultures: there is Austria, Bohemia, there is Germany and Poland" (Y.S1.10). In order to approach the feeling of this unity, history ought to lay more emphasis on what unites and not on what divides neighboring nations: Legnica not Grunwald. The tradition of the battle (1241) in which the Silesian Piast Duke Henry the Pious, the son of the German St. Hedwig, fell in defense of Christianity and the West stands for the symbols of Silesia as the keystone between Poland and Germany. The Integral Silesian (Y.S1.8) also lays emphasis on the need to know both German and Polish culture in Silesia. At the same time, he strongly emphasizes values regarded as specifically Silesian: for example, the cult of work. He is not interested in artistic culture, but "some rules of life, existence, drawn from the environment [...] home traditions". This Silesian explicitly rejects the possibility of being a Silesian and a Pole or a Silesian and a German simultaneously. In respect to being a German, "I would draw a very sharp line" (Y.S1.8). He became clearly aware of his separateness during a visit to Germany. When he was asked whether he was a German or a Pole, he answered that he is a Silesian. Going beyond the material collected in the study, one can cite the example of similar integral Silesian affiliation in an especially mature form in a press interview with the eminent Silesian photographer Fryderyk Kremser (Krzeminski, 1994). Kremser, who belongs to the older generation of Silesians, described Silesia in the same way as the previously quoted young Silesians did, but even more emphatically as "one pluralistic nation with a

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dual or triple composition". He rejected all other national identifications and declared his complete integration with Opole Silesia, the place dearest to him in the world. All of these three Opole Silesians had very similar genealogies, in which fathers or grandfathers and great-grandfathers were a mixture of members of the NSDAP and participants in Silesian uprisings; grandmothers knew German only from school and from periods during which only German or alternatively German and dialect were spoken at home. The language issue was very important for all the young authors of the autobiographies. Dialect integrated them internally with other Silesian autochthons in all phases of formal schooling and set them off from peers from "extraneous" families. The widespread use of dialect and not acquired "literary" Polish demonstrates that dialectal Polish has not disappeared in their families, despite the fact that their parents were brought up in families initially subjected to strong German pressure. The authors of the autobiographies encountered different degrees of misunderstanding and intolerance for dialect on the part of teachers and fellow pupils. Sometimes they received lower grades or other severe punishments in school. Sometimes their peers stigmatized them with such epithets as "Goebbels" or "stupid Hans". In the face of such reactions, when the authors were asked about pupils of other nationalities at school, they sometimes mentioned Poles, even though they had previously or later declared PolishSilesian nationality. The answers to this question, which were supposed to be projective, showed an instability of identification, which even appeared in some authors who had clearly declared their nationality in the self-identification test. For example, the author who, in the test, had called himself a "Silesian-German, not a Pole" later, after reflecting on the nationality of his family, said: "I don't know. I don't know who I am [...]. In fact, I really don't care" (Y.S1.11). However, it is difficult to remain indifferent in an ethnically mixed borderland environment in which people ask each other to define themselves and often pin stigmatizing epithets on one another. For most of the authors, irrespective of their national self-identification, the threshold separating them from their familiar environment was matriculation to secondary school. In primary school only some teachers who combated the use of dialect created the feeling of strangeness. In secondary school, however, in order to be accepted and to have status among one's peers one had to prove that one was

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not a "stupid Hans" (Y.S1.12 with German identification). The Integral Silesian spoke as follows about his experiences in technical school: "There one could really notice it: two groups of people, from outside of Opole and from Opole. We were from the countryside, one could say. One didn't feel at home, but strange somehow [...] a new culture." In this new culture the author felt stripped of his dignity, treated "not as someone, but as something after trade school" (Y.S1.8). Two important factors are most clearly combined in the last story of Silesian experiences—ethnic-national and class factors. The Integral Silesian is convinced that behind his difficulties in adapting was partly "the aspect that I was a Silesian". At the same time, his problems are typical of the passage from the village to the city in a society with still extant estate traditions. Similar examples of the cultural shock of school may be found in Jozef Chalasiriski's Young Generation of Peasants. In Silesian conditions ethnicnational differences made this shock all the greater. The feeling of division into "one of us" and "not one of us" also appears in authors with a definite Polish or Silesian-Polish identification. The Humanist, whose father had already clearly documented the Polish and political (socialist) option, believes, however, that the dialectal acculturation in the family hurt him in his school career (Y.S1.4). He also clearly distinguishes mixed marriages, including his own, from purely Silesian, autochthonous ones. So secondary school, in the stories of the authors' life paths, played the role of a critical institution, a phase of trial, in which the authors had to fight for their position, often against discrimination. This characterization of the school is not a description supported by a careful analysis of the facts, but is an account based on the authors' feelings and their definition of the situation. Authors with a German identification claim that in school they did not acknowledge their nationality but said that they were Silesians, and the Ukrainians behaved in the same way (Y.S1.11; Y.S1.12). The Silesian rooted in Polish tradition presents a somewhat different picture. However, when he went to secondary school, "the Silesian language was a certain obstacle to my adaptation" (Y.S1.13). After becoming familiar with his environment, he felt accepted. But he continued to suffer inhibitions on account of awareness of his dialectal habits: "I felt constrained [...] afraid that I would insert some word." This situation is similar to numerous stories of socially mobile rural youth, for example Stanislaw Pigon, who in his path from the village of Kombornia to a chair at the Jagiellonian University

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alienated people by his habit of using slang, and he remembered those slips until old age (Pigon, 1983). In Silesia, however, the hurdle to be overcome was unquestionably higher. Even the Silesian most rooted in Polishness, from the village of "great Poles", felt this: according to Stanislaw Ossowski, residents of Opole Silesia were conscious of Polishness and protected it carefully during German times. When asked about colleagues of other nationalities, the Rooted One first mentioned Poles, but later he added: "I never think of them as colleagues of another nationality" (Y.S1.3). The peculiarity of the Silesian dialect obviously was not the only barrier causing diversity and inconstant identification. The history of Silesia had been building up this barrier for a long time. The first decades of socialist rule in Poland made this barrier even more formidable. The first period of rape, abuses and errors of verification and the forced acceleration of formal polonization all had a negative influence. Besides this, the behavior of many of the more than half a million new settlers from central Poland and "repatriates" from beyond the Bug River harmed the processes of polonization and the centuries-old Polish-Silesian ties. It was hard for the newcomers to refrain from irrational actions in relation to the Silesians both in response to the atrocities of the German occupation and to being expelled from their native land by the Russians. Some Silesian authors of autobiographies—both older and younger—are aware of all of these factors. However, to understand does not always mean to forgive. Memories of 1945 kept returning in the accounts of young Silesians in response to questions about the history of their families. These tales are filled with animosity towards the Russians, sometimes very deep, causing a deep-seated hatred for the Russian language that was compulsory in school. Here it is not always possible to separate the actions of the Russians and the Poles. It is hard to determine whether it was the Poles or the Russians who sent a grandfather to a detention camp. There were good and bad people among both groups. This also is true of memories of forced new Polish neighbors and is borne out in the personal recollections of the older Silesians. Some of the calmly reported family stories are very dramatic. They speak of hunger, humiliation, robberies and rape. Only a radical transformation of Polish society could mitigate the influence of such memories, even if it did not erase them completely. The possibility of triple national-regional identification (Polish, German, Silesian), which the feeling of double, combined membership complicated

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still further, puts the problem of cultural valence in this area in a special light. All members of the group studied attended Polish primary and secondary schools, in which a national core curriculum (but no German) was taught. The German schools set up after the war were closed down after 1957 in line with the official position that the German minority had disappeared after the expulsions and departures. The transmission of German language and culture continued despite fears and external pressures. However, in comparison with the duration of Polish language and customs in Polish lands during the partitions, this was a much weaker phenomenon. Only one person in the group learned modern German at home. None of the other persons was steeped in a uniformly German tradition. One of the grandmothers was alternatively referred to as oma (granny in German) and starka (granny in Silesian). The young people also accepted the dialect as an important integrating cultural value that separates countrymen from strangers. On the other hand, it is impossible to base the entire canon of contemporary man on dialect and the home tradition. When they spoke of the history of their families and important events in their lives, the young Silesians spontaneously professed values that they held as their own and that were characteristic of their group. The main such value was work and industriousness. The older Silesians stressed this and so did the young ones, especially when they spoke of their parents. The Athlete said: "My grandfather was a workaholic. Work, work, all the time. He built his own home" (Y.S1.9). "I work the whole time", said the Universalist, who recognizes universal values, of his "drab life" (Y.S1.5). The mother of another author had to quit school and go to work; the father, in response to his children's critical remarks about their living conditions, said that he had to go to work a lot sooner [than they did] (Y.S1.3). "Oma can't live without digging in the ground" (Y.S1.10). Work as a value is connected with the family, with the home in the literal and symbolic sense. Several of the authors mentioned building a new home and said that this home could be built only here, in this specific village or town. These are interdependent values and are related to Silesian affiliation as the focal value. The cult of work is "an old Silesian tradition" according to the Integral Silesian, who called himself neither a German nor a Pole (Y.S1.8). In this sense, the autobiographies studied are at least in part constructed. They depart more from a simple narrative than the Belarussian autobiographies. However, they are similar to the latter in respect to their

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rusticity. All of the interdependent values (work, home, family) also bring them close to the Polish autobiographies of The Young Generation of Peasants of more than fifty years earlier (Chalasinski, 1938) and partially to the second series of peasant biographies of the sixties. The universe of oftenstressed values also includes independence and the effort to be the master of one's own fate. The author called the Rooted One spoke of himself as follows: "I had to seek out my own path"; in my office "I strove to make a good impression" (Y.S1.3). Others emphasized the life principles behind their actions: "industriousness, achieving success" (Y.S1.8); "I always marched to my own drum" (Y.S1.3); "to do your own thing, not to look at others" (Y. S1.5). That emphasis on self-dependence also in respect to the choice of an educational career, which is atypical of their social setting, may be connected with the educational advancement of this category rather than with their specific Silesian culture. One of the authors even reproached the Silesians for not having enough ambition and faith in themselves (Y.S1.10). Life successes are strongly emphasized in this group as a value. This sets the Silesian group apart from the Belarussian one, in which diametrically opposed attitudes were encountered: expectation of guidance and help from outside, uncertainty, confusion. However, no sweeping generalizations should be made at this point on the basis of small, unrepresentative samples. On the other hand, the Silesian group in the main is unquestionably success-oriented. The determination of valence of a specifically national or ethnic culture on the basis of such fundamental values as industriousness and independence raises doubts precisely on account of the cardinal importance of these values and their universality. When I speak of universality, I do not have in mind national stereotypes. Industriousness does not belong to the national stereotype of a Pole, or belongs to it in a lesser degree than to the stereotype of a German. On the other hand, it does belong to the stereotype, or perhaps to the social type of the peasant in Poland and in other countries with a traditional rural economy. As a consequence, it was necessary to look for the characteristic indicators of cultural valence in the more specific fields of symbolic culture expressed in literature and art. The indicators of valence will be derived from these fields. Valence is understood as the appropriation of culture that provides means for the expression of personal emotional states and attitudes, but at the same time gives the feeling of unity with the community that has at its disposal the same means for the expression of the same values. Even with such copious and

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personal material as that provided by autobiographies and open-ended autobiographical interviews, it is often hard to decide whether familiarity with certain cultural texts is an expression of erudition and of the mastery of knowledge required in school, or whether it really constitutes the personal appropriation of values and emotional experiences shared in the community. According to the conceptualization presented in the first part of this book, the domains of other cultures, which may be affiliated or incorporated into a person's own culture or excluded from it, stretch out beyond the syntagma of his own national culture. The excluded sphere in turn is divided into the area of ignorance and the area of rejection. The area of rejection constitutes the most reliable indicator of the border of valence, that is, the border of the sense of community. That border is difficult or impossible to cross. Knowledge of the substance of culture is the most reliable indicator of connection with the community, if it applies to elements of culture that are less closely related to compulsory teaching programs but are the result of more or less personal choice. Valence indicators may also be specially expressed responses applying to well-known elements of culture, especially to canonical values and works. The nature of the total body of erudition and valence depends on the channels of transmission, here chiefly schools, and on the capability, types of interests and attitudes of the consumers. It was necessary to recall and define more precisely the principles of the hermeneutic analysis of autobiographical texts before presenting the material, which is complex and has a triple frame of reference: Silesian affiliation, Polishness and Germanness. A comparison of younger and older Silesians shows differences connected not only with natural changes between generations, but especially with the young people's level of education, to which the older generation could not aspire. This is especially pronounced in the sphere of religion. The religiousness of the old Silesians was bivalent. A similar or identical cult of the saints, the divine service, an emphasis on rites, attachment to the local parish priest and church brought them close to Polishness. Religiousness is not strongly accented in the group of young Silesians. There is no identification here of the customary form of religion with region or fatherland, nor is there the intense inner religious feeling that manifested itself in the Ukrainian group. Apart from participation in national pilgrimages and ceremonies, one respondent vividly remembered taking part in foreign meetings of the Taize movement, but this was described mainly as an occasion to meet

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with young people of different cultures and races. Young Silesians and Poles from other regions took a similar view of these experiences, which did not integrate them with each other as the Cz^stochowa pilgrimages did, but which opened the window to a wider world—not particularly Silesian or Polish. The Humanist, whose close genealogy extended to Germans from the heart of the Reich not only from Opole Silesia, but who had definitely Polish identification, was the closest to local religiousness and once had even thought of entering the priesthood (Y.S1.4). Most of the persons from this group were not moved by religion, however. Direct questions about cultural interests and the canon of culture evoked reactions indicating that cultural capacities are not closely connected with the type of national identification, just as in the national groups previously characterized. The problem of attitudes that are important for determining valence appears differently, however. This problem appeared most clearly in the example of the rejection of some canonical Polish symbols expressing enmity for Germans. Two of the authors refused to sing or recite the Rota in school: "I stammered, I just couldn't say it" (Y.S1.10). "I said that I wouldn't sing that ['No German will spit in our face']. They threw me out of the choir" (Y.S1.12). The first of the authors described himself as a "Polish German", but in the self-identification test as "a German, Silesian, Pole"; the second one described himself as definitely German. It was he who studied hard so as not to be a "stupid Hans", and in the dormitory he taught a fellow student from central Poland to speak Silesian. Of all the authors he was most closely associated with minority organizations. At the same time, his attitude towards the canon of Polish culture and his political orientation rule out putting him within the stereotype of a "hostile" German. In examining the cultural valences of these cases less attention should be paid to the names of writers whose works are standard school texts, than to individual literary and artistic choices testifying to a more personal attitude toward culture. The authors of the autobiographies mentioned an entire gamut of writers from Gallus Anonymous to Milosz, sometimes adding that they plan to read these works someday. Two of the writers of autobiographies with more definite German identification were critical of Mickiewicz, expressing even a certain disrespect and dislike. But their personal choices within Polish literature were more individual than were those of the other members of the group. In one case this choice was Gombrowicz, Rozewicz, Lem, Mrozek, and Boguslaw Schaffer (Y.S1.11). The Pragmatist, who called himself a

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German Pole as well as a "German, Silesian, Pole", pointed to an analogy between Bienek's The Last Polka and Wyspianski's Wedding. Whether the comparison is apt is beside the point. What matters is that he spontaneously viewed Silesian writing that is dear to him through the prism of the canon of Polish high culture. That use of literature shows that it has been assimilated; it indicates valence and not just a certain amount of erudition acquired in school. The Economist, who is the most involved in the minority movement, also goes beyond the standard canon. He mentions Staff, Galczynski, and Rözewicz, with whom he was fascinated at one time, and Sienkiewicz, especially Quo Vadis and also the Trilogy, which he calls "fascinating reading" but also an expression of national megalomania (Y.S1.12). This author said that he was not very much interested in artistic culture. He mentioned more names of German than Polish musicians, which is understandable. His favorite composer is Wagner. When he spoke of Polish music, he did let slip that "Now we have Lutoslawski" (emphases added). That Polish "we" returned again in the review of some important historical events: "We were in Moscow as Poles." He himself remarked with some surprise: "Now 1 say, 'we were'. Characteristic" (Y.S1.12). His description of cultural handdowns from home and community naturally combine German, and specifically Silesian and Polish elements. The fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm were read to him in childhood in Polish translation, although his mother also recited them to him in German. His grandfather, who played a significant role in his German acculturation, told him the story "The Kestrel", called the "Räuber" in German but also the "Rouge" in Silesian dialect. The Christmas carols Bog siq rodzi (God is born) and the Latin Te Deum that is part of Polish tradition made a deep impression on him in church. He knew Goethe from Polish translation, because his family's German tradition did not reach the level of high culture, even though his parents were intellectuals. These facts classify the Economist as a case of cultural bivalence combined with uniform national identification. However, this example also shows how difficult it is to clearly distinguish bivalence from ambivalence. In the course of the interview the author of this autobiographical statement expressed surprise at the duality of his national attitudes, which he had not thought about before. It is not clear whether he accepted them or whether he felt dissonance on account of this discovery. Dissonance unquestionably stemmed from the juxtaposition of facts accepted in the second (Polish) culture with borderland

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facts, which offend and wound and which he cannot accept in his present state of mind and feelings. One such fact for him was the Rota, just as With Fire and Sword—which the Economist without any qualms includes in his favorite reading—was for young Ukrainians with even a leaning towards Polishness. These facts testify to the divergence between explicitly declared national identification and elements of cultural valence. This does not mean that among Silesians with definite Polish identification there were no examples of the extensive appropriation of the basic canon. One of these examples is the Humanist, but his knowledge is associated with his specialty and in light of the information obtained is more stereotypical (Y.S1.4). A fuller description of national valence requires going beyond high culture. In the small sample studied knowledge of folklore is not very comprehensive and there are no traces of such attachment to it as among the young Ukrainians and even the Belarussians. In a few cases strictly local legends from a given village or its environs are mentioned, but no regional ones, with the exception of the story "The Kestrel". Some of the Silesians also objected to translating the Sudeten Rubezahl (spirit of the Sudeten mountains) into the Silesian Liczyrzepa. Authors not declaring German identification mentioned their mothers singing Heimatmelodien and family sagas referring to children born out of wedlock, with some count or even Prussian king, and alongside these, tales of the grandfathers' participation in the Silesian uprisings, which was not regarded as a "stain on the family's honor" (sic\). So in the common cultural tradition there are many factors that make it difficult or impossible to determine attitudes unequivocally. To be sure, in some cases positions on various nationality identification scales do converge—on the scale of identification and on the scale of valence. The skimpy knowledge of folklore is characteristic. It is limited to what Dorota Simonides, after Bystrori, called the legend of local character. On the other hand, according to this author, there are no mentions of fairy-tales and popular anecdotes in the older generation in this area (Simonides, 1969). The difference between cultural bivalence or polyvalence and always mentally vexing ambivalence is a problem that the young Silesians are trying to resolve more or less consciously in various ways. Various strategies of reaction are visible in many points of the open-ended autobiographies or in the autobiographical interviews. Such strategies also manifest themselves distinctly in response to the question on the importance of the fatherland and on the possibility of a European self-identification. Owing to the extensive

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deeper or more superficial contacts with the German language, the Opole Silesians used separate terms to differentiate between the small and big fatherland: Heimat and Vaterland. That conceptual distinction is not indispensable for a perception of the phenomenon and its description in common language, as the previous Ukrainian and Belarussian examples show. However, this distinction makes it easier to express views and attitudes more precisely. The statement of the national or ethnic identity of the authors is important in a summary presentation of this aspect of nationality. For this reason the symbol G, P or S will be placed next to statements or quotations from their texts. Irrespective of this differentiation, most of the young Silesians clearly distinguished the small fatherland and placed an especially high value on it. The opinion of three authors who do not identify clearly with any nation and more or less literally call themselves cosmopolites differs from this position (Y.S1.1; Y.S1.2; Y.S1.3). They do not express attachment to the smallest, local fatherland, nor to a region. In accordance with the general assumptions of this study, the fatherland is the counterpart of the symbolic universe of the nation; it cements the national community with bonds of culture, making it a community of communication. This definition applies first and foremost to the ideological fatherland. The small fatherland is less of a cementing factor, but is based mainly on direct, physical roots in a particular place and setting. These roots, however, are often not only physical, they are also filtered through symbolic axiological reflection. When the authors were asked what the "fatherland" meant, some of the answers in part applied to the small fatherland: "For me at this moment the fatherland is our tiny Gielczyn" (Y.S1.3P). "Heimat... is what is most dear to me [...] my dad, mother and my family, and the fact that we speak Polish, people, our [housing estate]. It has become a part of me [...]. Here one simply feels good. That is the fatherland for me" (Y.S1.4P). "But my small fatherland could be [name of place], for I have put down roots here" (Y.S1.9P). The Silesian who cut himself off from both Polish and German identification expanded the scope of the small fatherland to the entire region of Opole Silesia and opposes it to the Dqbrowa Basin, Katowice. "Silesia must be identified with the people who stayed here [...] with pure Silesians [...] the system of values is somewhat different" (Y.S1.8S). The Pragmatist declared a stronger bond with the Heimat than with the Vaterland, for here in Poland "this is not

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really our Vaterland, is it?... Heimat is closer to the heart of every Silesian than Vaterland". This author observed that Silesians in Germany gather into ghettos and "chatter in Silesian, don't they?" He became aware of his own situation from the attitude of a fellow university student from Kazakhstan, who came to Wroclaw as a Pole on a scholarship and asked him: "Tell me who I really am" (Y.S1.10S). The two authors with firm German identification initially were closemouthed on the problem of the fatherland, saying it was a general rather than a personal problem. The Natural Scientist acknowledged that if the fatherland were the same thing as the state, one could have several fatherlands in one's life by changing one's citizenship. Silesians "consider the land on the Oder as their Heimatland ", but also "the environs in which they live and from which they come" (Y.S1.1G). In conclusion, this author on the one hand cuts himself off from national patriotism, for which there are no permanent models in German culture, but on the other hand believes that a Silesian may account himself a German, just as a Swabian or Bavarian, and like a Highlander may account himself a Pole. The author most closely associated with minority organizations from the outset began by distinguishing between the small and large fatherland, using precisely those theoretical terms, which he maybe picked up in studies of the social sciences. Later on in the text the definition of the small fatherland becomes strictly personal and emotionally laden. It is characteristic that this author links the discovery of his attachment to his native landscape, trees and land with reading the books of Horst Bienek, which made him aware of this bond. So in this case the symbolic culture in the form of literature was instrumental in giving the natural facts of his life course a symbolic dimension (Y.S1.12). The declarations of attachment to the Heimat are very eloquent, albeit not universal, in this sample. The responses to the question on the meaning of the fatherland often do not go any further. This brings the stance of the Silesians close to the attitudes of the Belarussians, for whom the state of Belarus was not a reference point in any of the cases. For the Ukrainians, on the other hand, this reference point was the imagined "Ukraine of dreams" rather than the real Ukrainian state. Thus the Silesians face the problem of the big fatherland in an especially difficult intellectual and emotional situation. They are suspended within a national-regional identification triangle. Other reasons should be added—the conviction of the distinct contrast of the two

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cultures between which they are placed, as well as the ambiguity and doubts associated with both of these concepts of the fatherland in the tradition and present day of Germany. A national concept of the big fatherland, which, to be sure, applied only or chiefly to the nation of the gentry, crystallized in Poland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The ideological unity of the fatherland encompassing the entire area of the Commonwealth was preserved in the consciousness of the intelligentsia even during the period of the partitions (Wapinski, 1992; 1994). The situation was different in Germany. Werner Weidenfeld, in a summing-up article, wrote that German historical self-consciousness searched hesitantly for its point of support. "The Germans made up for this incapacity to create an unquestioned and not crippled identity [...] by an extreme attitude towards their neighbors, by expansive aspirations to rule, by escaping into the world of ideas of political Romanticism, by excessive self-analysis all the way up to the madness of the National Socialist regime" (Weidenfeld, 1989, p. 15). In German liberal opinion especially the last form of affirmation of national consciousness caused a negative reaction to the very conception of fatherland, even to its regional and Heimat forms. The ideology and policy of the Third Reich "discredited so many things, including the regional movement (Heimatbewegung) not only because the small fatherland was tied in a bombastic way with the concepts of 'community', 'the peasantry', and 'the people', but because people's inclinations to identify with the small fatherland were exploited to strip people of their individuality. This small fatherland in the Third Reich was an important gangway to ram the individual [...] into the institutions of a lawless state" (Lipp, 1986, p. 336). When the dominant democratic and liberal German ideology turned its back on the heritage of that state after the war, this also aroused fears and distrust of the concept of fatherland in both its forms. The concept of Vaterland was even more strongly opposed in Western Germany. The lower the age of the persons surveyed, the more negative were the associations with this concept. A Polish author investigating the understanding of fatherland among German university students before unification even encountered the opinion that it was tactless to ask questions about the fatherland (Zmudzki, 1993). So whereas Silesian Poles had clear-cut ideas about the big ideological fatherland—Polish—it was hard for the Silesian Germans or German Silesians to find such affiliations even on the other side of the Elbe or Oder. The

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existence of the Gentian Democratic Republic until 1990 complicated this matter even further. On top of this there was historically grounded German regionalism that was a legacy of the duchies of the Reich. That legacy was even strengthened by the autonomy of the German Länder after the fall of Nazism. However, from what has been said it does not follow that Silesian Poles did not have any problems connected with acknowledging the big ideological fatherland. According to the assumptions of the study, all of them are "autochthons", hence they all come from families in which, besides regional, specifically Silesian elements, a substratum of German culture has been preserved. In the main, they employ the useful term Heimat, but—rarely— also Vaterland. The Humanist, for example, said: "This determinant of the small fatherland, which the Germans call Heimat, is what is the dearest to me [...]. Community, this localism [...] of my housing estate [...]. That is the most apt [term] [...]. And the big fatherland, the big fatherland that surrounds us, is simply superimposed on this. The fact that we speak Polish, that we live here [...]. That big fatherland even with Kochanowski, Mickiewicz and Slowacki. Maybe because I became familiar with them. It would be different if I had got to know German culture. The big fatherland has to be handed down from one generation to another, in the school, through the media" (Y.S1.4P). This author touched on a very important determinant of nationality: culture as a factor of community. However, he was unaware of the difference between competence and emotional appropriation that is called valence here. Perhaps he only did not express himself clearly, because learning German culture would not necessarily have made Germany his ideological fatherland. Rather, it might have outfitted him with the attitude of bivalence, just as in the case of the German, the Economist, whose extensive and strongly assimilated knowledge of Polish literature and history provides features of bivalence but does not strip him of his firm German national identification. The author whom we have called the Rooted One pointed out another important factor determining nationality. To the catchword "fatherland" he responded: "A serious question [...]. That word takes on special value in such extreme situations [...] when the fatherland [...] country in which we live is threatened. Then the word assumes meaning." In normal situations his "tiny Gielczyn, that area" is dearer to him. It obviously "finds itself in Silesia and finds itself in Poland" (Y.S1.3P). This author, who comes from a background

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of Silesian "great Poles", is a passionate reader of the Trilogy, whose volumes, worn by endless reading, are on his shelves. He returns every year "to these favorite books", especially to With Fire and Sword and The Deluge. His reference to "the fatherland in need" probably comes from this source. Irrespective of the source, he independently expresses an important criterion of the feeling of nationality, which in the theoretical-methodological part of this book was described as a situational phenomenon. Like the author quoted earlier, the understanding of the big fatherland, in this case as well, is mediated by literary culture, namely, the culture that is the carrier of the canonical traditional elements of the symbolic universe of Poles. Among the numerous cases studied there is no German Silesian whose German affiliation is based on an analogous foundation built on German literary culture. The polonizing pressure of the school does not fully explain why this author, the most well-read of the German authors of autobiographies, became familiar with the works of Goethe in Polish translation. The lack of strong motivation from the home environment in this and similar cases may be a result not so much of political control as of family peasant tradition, which did not link nationality with high literary culture and which placed a much higher value on the local group than on the imagined ideological community of the nation. In the case of Silesian Germans perhaps other mechanisms and a different way of maintaining ties with the big fatherland are at work. After the war Polish intellectuals brought polonization patterns to Silesia through the medium of the literary and historical canon. In the minds of the enlightened German burghers the canon of culture was more closely associated with the sphere of universal aesthetics than with the national community. This is true at least of the situation that existed, except for periods of a cresting wave of nationalism when everything—and everywhere—becomes ideological and political. In the group studied, German Silesians with a peasant family tradition, who eagerly or reluctantly imbibed elements of the inculcated Polish canon, did not seek any counterweight to it in the German canon. All of them were pragmatists to a greater or lesser degree. They insisted on conditions for a good and unrestricted life for themselves and their countrymen on the spot, close to the small fatherland. That is precisely the position held by the person most involved in practical affairs, the Economist, who organized assistance for old, poor people of German nationality. While feeling himself to be a member of this nationality, he at the same time emphasizes his Polish

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citizenship and cuts himself off from all German territorial claims against Poland. The situation that he favors is the unconstrained existence of Germans in the Polish state. In other words, like the Belarussians and Ukrainians previously cited, he accepts his minority status. He feels at home in the atmosphere of German academic centers, but when he is abroad he also feels strong ties with Poland and protested against the humiliating stereotype of Poles when he was in Italy. He said that he did not look for contacts with German culture on a daily basis, except for the press. Apart from his grandfather as a transmitter of German customs in the family, his significant others are Polish professors at the university from which he graduated (Y.S1.12G). Another author with German identification is strongly opposed to all canons (Y.S1.11G). The cultural determinants of the fatherland play a greater role in the pronouncement of the Pragmatist (Y.S1.10S). This author, who has already been quoted several times, cuts himself off from Polishness, but nor does he identify completely with German affiliation. In Germany he always calls himself a Silesian and has contempt for emigrants who repudiate their Silesian identity. His home culture in respect to language and tradition has a stronger German than dialectical substratum. His great-grandfather was a member of the NSDAP, his grandfather defended Monte Cassino, and four of his grandfather's brothers were killed at various fronts during World War II (for this reason their mother wanted to cast Hitler's bust into the rubbish bin). After his grandfather returned from the army he at first did not want to work as a railroader so as not to have to wear the Polish eagle on the cap of his uniform. In this autobiography the declaration of supraregional national identification is shaky, or, more precisely, it is explicitly rejected. This is yet another clear example of lack of convergence between various criteria of nationality. In respect to valence this author is more German than the declared Germans. The text of his statement expresses dislike and even contempt for the canon of Polish culture, and pride in the culture developed by the German Silesians. At the same time, he definitely denies his own German identification. While he firmly rejects Polishness, he calls himself a "German Pole". He explained the reasons for these doubts: "I am a German, because I feel I am more a German than a Pole" (Y.S1.10S). He regards the German history of Silesia as more objective. On the other hand, when asked about the canon of Polish culture, he declared that the Poles today ought to be proud of possessing lands from which so many eminent artists and scientists have come, including four

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Nobel Prize winners. When he described the Silesian-German canon, in addition to Goethe and Schiller he mentioned Silesian writers: Hauptmann, Freytag, Eichendorff and Piontek. In his opinion, all of Poland does not have a culture as rich as Silesia does. So German cultural valence most definitely could have been ascribed to this author, but on the other hand his German identification is vacillating. He rejects Polish national tradition as impractical. In his words, the uprisings were "falling upon tanks with pitchforks". As a pragmatist he recommends looking for a tradition in history that would unite and not divide neighbors in Silesia. The Solidarity movement aroused great interest and hopes in him. His recommendation for solving the problem of Silesia by establishing a separate state with two cultures hardly seems pragmatic. In respect to his own family situation, however, he is considering a very specific project for educating his future children. Since the mother of his future wife speaks literary Polish, he would like his child to speak with his parents in German, but with the family of his wife "purely in Polish". "That would be [a way to give the child...] enormous cultural riches. That child would automatically know two languages [...]. That is an optimal situation" (Y.S1.10S). The author of this sensible project, which is practiced in many mixed marriages and shapes cultural bivalence, failed to notice that as a result of this scheme, strictly Silesian culture, or at least the Silesian dialect, would disappear. That dialect is the language of his childhood and the language of his and his sister's oma, who is still called starka in Silesian. He was happy that fellow students at school and even at the university did not allow themselves to be weaned away from Silesian affiliation, and that, irrespective of their background, they "speak dialect to beat the band!" On the other hand, he observed that in Germany Silesian affiliation will disappear in several years, because young folks from Silesian families, for example in Bavaria, "yodel in Lederhosen". That conviction fits the picture of "young displaced persons" in Siegfried Lenz's Heimatmuseum. The Pragmatist wavers between affirmation of the richness of Silesian culture and the conviction that Silesia does not have its own culture apart from Polish or German culture. He puts himself in a no-exit situation when, at the same time, he accents his own exclusively Silesian affiliation. This author's text, which constitutes a critical look from the outside on the dilemma of Silesian affiliation, is interlaced with passages in which he probes

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into the Silesian experience and feels it with understanding as his own. So the discomfort of Silesian culture stems from the fact that "the Silesian was always so frightened. He simply sat in this shell of fear [...] like a turtle until he had to peek out and finally saw that nothing could threaten him" (Y.S1.10). The metaphor used in the last quotation expresses the situation of people of the borderland, which molds a closed national attitude. However, this separation of oneself from strangers is not the result of having been rejected, but rather stems from the fear of being rejected. Moreover, there is also the fear of the imposition of unwanted values and the destruction of one's own values. Such an attitude did not appear in all the statements analyzed, which still is no proof that their authors were completely free of it. Even persons most closely integrated with the Polish cultural community, the Humanist and the Rooted One (Y.S1.4; Y.S1.3) commented on difficulties at school on account of their dialect. Others spoke frankly of concealing their Silesian identity, boasted that "their language would not betray them", and pointed out the similarity of their situation with that of the young Ukrainians, who did not openly admit to their nationality. However, the expressive metaphor of the Silesian as a turtle hiding in its shell would be only a stereotype if someone wanted to treat it as a summation of the entire Silesian reality. After all, even in the small sample studied there was an example of the integral Silesian, who called himself an "outgoing person", not withdrawing but confidently treading his own path, striving for, and achieving, success. He was conscious of breaking the stereotype of the Silesian treated as an object, as something not somebody. Hence he also confirmed the existence of such a stereotype, but he himself was the negation of it (Y.S1.8). The capacity for breaking a stereotype imposed from the outside also depends on individual features, on the total identity of an individual, an element of which is national consciousness. On the societal scale at large, social transformations make it easier to break the stereotype. Younger as well as older Silesians many times referred to the political changes taking place in Poland as a factor alleviating their fear and fostering the hope of being able to manifest their nationality without restriction. That was especially important for persons closer to German national identification. However, it enabled all of the Silesians to look back at the native tradition and to distinguish Polishness from the abuses of the socialist regime in the earlier period after the incorporation of Silesia into Poland after the war.

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The political breakthrough in Poland coupled with the fall of the German Democratic Republic ushered in a period of intensified national conversions in Silesia. In our material we have so far not found a picture of this process, which could have a few varieties. The process might not be real conversion, but rather just openly admitting to previously masked German affiliation. It could also be conversion similar to the case of K^trzynski in the nineteenth century, but in the opposite direction. Finally, it could be a decision to change national identification dictated not so much by autotelic ties with German culture as by expected material benefits from embracing German nationality. Irrespective of their actual national self-identification (Poles-Silesians, Silesians, Germans-Silesians), the authors of the autobiographies have in common the fact that all of them, albeit for different reasons, remained in Poland and did not express the wish to go to Germany for good. So they had to look for opportunities in the domestic situation and solve the problems of their overall identity there. In the face of signs of disappointment in the first years of democratic changes in Poland throughout the country, it can hardly be expected that the post-Solidarity policy would allay all of the former anxieties and individual and collective problems of this group. The group studied coped in various ways with the ethnic-regional situation of the borderland. The last case described in detail is an attempt to transform disturbing ambivalence into accepted bivalence and thereby to weaken the long-lasting unclearness as to one's own national identification. Three other cases not discussed so far demonstrate an entirely different tactic. When we use the word tactic, we do not have in mind here a wellthought-out and deliberately implemented plan of action. To a greater or lesser degree the subject matter of the interview surprised the authors of the autobiographies. However, their life situation in the borderland made it rather easy for them to approach the problems posed in the second part of the interview, and in the first open-ended part they spontaneously connected the picture of their own life with the problems of nationality. In these three autobiographies, however, the national bond was not brought into relief but negated. The first author, the Cosmopolite (although he does not use that term), rejects identification both with Silesia and with the Polish fatherland. He regards patriotism as silly and states that "it's best to live where it is the best". He has an extremely negative stereotype of Poles, although he formally acknowledges Polishness. He likes Germans, but has contempt for Russians,

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even though he admits that their hatred for Germans was justified. This example may be called cosmopolitan by negation of the values of individual nations and not by acceptance of various national cultures (Y.S1.1). The second case, the "Pole and Silesian", is an example of a Positive Cosmopolite. He defines his homeland as the place "in which one feels best, no matter where it is". He explicitly refers to himself as a cosmopolite. He accepts all double national identifications and declares an open national attitude (Y.S1.2). This author is not very interested in his genealogy, even though he knows that his grandmother's brother, who immigrated to Polish Upper Silesia, died in Katyn. However, his grandfather fell on the eastern front as a soldier of the Wehrmacht. His closest family is a precious value for him, focusing part of his statement on important events. Yet, numerous foreign trips have expanded the horizon of his life references. The small fatherland does not play an important role in his story, although he emphasizes the enduring tie of his family with the vicinity and his early school years in a Silesian setting. The "strangeness" that bothered numerous authors going on to higher education is a source of fascination for him. On his first trip abroad he "drank in" this strangeness, but later he thought about it more critically. The author is a humanist by education, a reader of Milosz's Ziemia Ulro. He shows extensive knowledge of Polish and German culture. At the same time, he accepts the possibility of double German-Polish identification. This is a sign of the openness of his attitudes. He does not renounce Polish identification, but neither does he lock himself within it. "I place myself in this entire big picture of the world, in its entirety; not even European, but of the entire world, although Europe is the most familiar to us" (Y.S1.2). The Rooted One, an author more deeply rooted in Polish-Silesian tradition, presents a different variant of the "globalizing approach". The term "European" seems artificial to him as a national self-identification. The hierarchy of his frames of reference is as follows: "I am first a Silesian, next a Pole, and only later a member of the galaxy, of the Milky Way" (Y.S1.3). However, this author's perspective of opening up to the entire universe is rather abstract in comparison with the emotionally described rootedness in regional and national culture. The text of the Universalist contains a clear-cut declaration of openness. He put just as strong an emphasis on the small fatherland as the previous author did. While including himself in the category of "Silesian Poles", he also remembered the tragic moments of his family history from the postwar

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period: the death of his grandfather after returning from a camp—it was unclear whether Polish or Russian. However, he said that he "does not feel prejudice against anyone". "I like all people, but I just think that one has to have the right approach to people" (Y.S1.5). The fatherland for him is first the area where he lives, which gives the feeling of a bond that assures care, "a link of a chain binding individual people in a given country". But he does not want to completely enclose himself within the circle of such a community. He says that Silesian culture is composed of Polish, Czech and German elements and that "one ought to know them all". Outside the sphere of declarations this author does not demonstrate extensive knowledge of the Polish or German canon. He has a technical and economic education, so it is hard to expect him to know a lot about artistic culture. His autobiography is the shortest of all of them and boils down mainly to the interview. For this reason a critique of the text cannot remove some doubts as to things he might have left unsaid and inhibitions concerning bitterness stemming from his nationality experiences. On the other hand, he very probably did not leave anything out, because he spoke openly of injuries suffered after the war, of "mixed feelings in his community towards Poles and Russians". He also frankly expressed the opinion that the Germans treated the Silesians well, because they regarded Silesia as their territory. He has numerous contacts with colleagues residing in Germany, but his international connections are not restricted to that. His declared lack of prejudices stems from the experiences of his trips abroad, which have afforded him the opportunity to strike up friendships with people of different nationalities: Italians, Turks, French people. He also accepts the possibility of all double national identifications. The universalistic declaration of this author in response to the question about his fatherland is very spontaneous and personal in the final version. "I would like my territory, my fatherland, to be the entire world... so I wouldn't have to make divisions, that [...] that my fatherland is Poland or my fatherland is Silesia or my fatherland is my town. I would like my fatherland to be the entire world" (Y.S1.5). Julia Kristeva, who calls herself a cosmopolite, regards cosmopolitanism as something rare in today's world. By cosmopolitanism she understands a position that consists not in the denial of national determinants, but in moving from them to a transnational or international position, situated at the crossroads of borderland areas (Kristeva, 1993, pp. 16-17). There are no reasons

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to call such a position rare in the intellectual world of the end of the twentieth century, which professes the slogans of globalism. It is only that the old term went out of use for a certain time, but it is introduced here in Kristeva's meaning. The centuries-old tradition of the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism as a wide-open polis, and Voltaire's Enlightenment notion of equal friendliness for all fatherlands, is expressed in the three above texts as a project for taking down the borders of the Opole and Polish or German fatherland for the sake of wider ties. Not only the "cosmopolites" but also all of the young Silesians in this group tend to favor a similar strategy for resolving their national dilemmas. However, their point of reference is most often not the entire world but mainly Europe, and they do not negate ties with the small fatherland. In contrast to young Belarussians, there is no outspoken euroskeptic among the Silesians. Neither does anyone treat European affiliation superficially as the product of a conventionally geographical division of the Eurasian continent. Contrary to the initial hypotheses, the emphasis is not on the determinants of economics and civilization as criteria of European affiliation. Thoughts evoked by the question of whether one can regard oneself simultaneously as a European and as a member of one's own nation focus on the problem of the peculiarities and similarities of culture. The three authors who choose the Polish and Silesian option express a pro-European position that differs only in shades of argumentation. The Integral Silesian emphasizes the need to affirm separate national cultures, but acknowledges that when these cultures join they form a new whole. He is enthusiastic about this process (Y.S1.8). The Athlete, who has a firm Polish identification, cuts himself off from the position of his father and attaches a lot of importance to local roots. At the same time, he admits that the unity of European cultures already is a fact, for it stems from their similarity (Y.S1.9). On the other hand, the Humanist wonders whether Polish nationalism will not stand in the way of unification, but he is in favor of integration (Y.S1.4). The Economist, who has the closest German affiliation, takes a similar position, albeit—perhaps in order to be diplomatic—he does this in a more general way. He says that the Poles are proud of their culture, so they are unwilling to give up their separateness. He views this as a factor retarding the development of European consciousness, which is stronger among Germans—with the exception of "DDR-Bürger", who in fact are delaying unification with Europe (Y.S.I2). Two other authors close to German identi-

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fication see the problem of the European community in terms of regionalism. According to them, recognition of the principles of regionalism would remove the social disadvantage of smaller entities such as Silesia (Y.S1.10). In the opinion of the Natural Scientist, Poland may be regarded as a complex of regions with different cultures joined together by Polish citizenship and incorporated into the European community (Y.S1.11). The more skeptical Pragmatist acknowledges that the real border of Europe runs somewhere through Poland. Silesia unquestionably is on the European side of this border (Y.S1.10). Despite different shades of opinion, the idea of the European community is accepted in all the autobiographies of young Silesians as the answer to the dilemmas of the situation of a psychic borderland.

15. Open and Closed National Attitudes in a Borderland Situation

More than sixty years ago Jozef Chalasinski studied Polish-German antagonism in Upper Silesia during the period of the Silesian uprisings and the plebiscite of 1921. In the light of propaganda, official and autobiographical materials, Chalasinski defined the borderland as an area in which "expansive national-state tendencies concentrate and the entire group demands a more active and expansive national feeling from the borderland than from inhabitants of the central part" (Chalasinski, 1935, p. 78). Such an understanding of the borderland is inconsistent with some conclusions reached from the material analyzed in this book. However, this does not mean that there may not be an error on either side. For the borderland is not only a social space, but is also a historically changing social situation. Chalasinski's conception also takes these features into consideration. A situation determined by various factors, especially by the current state of relations between national groups on both sides of the border and by the international context, influences the role that categories of inhabitants of a borderland area adopt in relation to each other. The historical situation may stir up antagonistic stereotypes or activate other aspects of interpersonal relations. The borderland is the meeting point of cultures. In accordance with our conceptual apparatus, this could be integrating, uniting, disintegrating or antagonistic proximity. The democratic transformation in Poland after 1989 strengthened and enlarged the relaxation of tensions in Polish-German relations going on since 1970. This process culminated in the treaty of June 1991. The minority policy of the Polish government strengthens the role of Silesia

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as an integrating neighborhood. That is not the only outcome of these changes, however. For civic liberty also has brought conflict situations into the open. In characterizing these facts, people's instrumental actions must be distinguished from phenomena of the symbolic order underpinned by autotelic motivations. While this distinction is primarily analytical, since the tangled motives of human reactions are often hard to distinguish, it nevertheless gives us a clearer insight into the connections between different cultures of the borderland. This is especially important in the Silesian borderland of Polish and German culture. In contrast to Ukraine and Belarus, for people of the borderland Germany is a magnet also for purely instrumental reasons. Ethnic Ukrainians and Belarussians did not declare their minority identification because of expected benefits from contacts with the state of the national fatherland. Some Silesians who admitted German nationality may have had such motives. This must be taken into consideration in an analysis of data concerning political activities and responses to direct questions. A hermeneutic analysis of responses that are often hours long, which gets to their tacit and manifest meanings, indicates that most of the declarations of the authors contain many ambiguities and uncertainties. Four examples of extreme declarations of nationality in the Silesian group show how manifold the substratum of Polish or German nationality is. A young person with a Polish surname from a traditional Polish environment of a village studied by Stanislaw Ossowski in 1954, and a somewhat older descendant, declared themselves most emphatically to be Poles, compared to newer immigrants to Silesia from the heart of Germany (Y.S1.3; Y.S1.4). Both of them evince a strong grasp of the canon of Polish culture, but the second one insists on retaining the original German spelling of his father's first name. In turn, the young Silesian with the strongest ties with a minority organization bears a typically Polish surname, but also sticks to its German spelling. He has greater knowledge of the canon of Polish culture than of the canon of German culture and has personal preferences for the former (Y.S1.12). One person from among those most strongly declaring themselves as Germans has a similar cultural valence in the sphere of literary culture. Notwithstanding this, he expressed the greatest resentment over Polish rule in Silesia after the war and was full of praise for the legal and practical order under the German government before the war. On the other hand, his and his family's "natural" language is dialect—Polish Silesian dialect with German influences. He had investigated the genealogy of his family all the way back

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to the seventeenth century and said that it is composed almost entirely of residents of the region "expect for a few Germans" (j/c!) (Y.S1.11). This odd German-Silesian has Silesian characteristics fitting the metaphor of a turtle in a shell, for he admits that he often conceals his identification out of fear. On the other hand, there is much evidence that apprehensions of a national or political nature in Silesia had dissipated or at least diminished. During the parliamentary elections in October 1991, manifestations of antagonism welled up in Opole Silesia that bore a resemblance to the "poster war" described by Chalasinski, albeit it was less acute in form. The openly Nazi propaganda of Nationale Offensive imported from the outside found willing listeners in one of the communes of Opole Silesia in the autumn of 1992. Awkward moments in connection with the problem of civic loyalty arose during Chancellor Kohl's visit to St. Anna's Hill. The political relaxation of tensions between states became an occasion for the German minority to stage purely symbolic manifestations, which precipitated strong reactions from the Polish population. Features of disintegrating neighborhood became pronounced especially in the question of war monuments with German inscriptions and symbols of the nationalistic past. These monuments are an example of the collision of values with different meanings. They bring to mind the case of completely opposite Polish and Ukrainian estimations of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, although there is a significant difference between these two situations of axiological conflict. In this situation the axiological conflict is difficult or impossible to overcome. In the Silesian case, for the family and local community even a monument to a soldier of the SS could be understood as a symbol of the small group and local bond. And that is how it was usually presented. For the purely Polish part of the local community such a monument was a symbol of Nazi fascism, the invasion and terror of the occupation. It was a manifestation that was impossible to accept. However, people could appreciate the motives for erecting the monument on the plane of their own personal experiences. The Polish-German treaty examined on the plane of small-group neighborly relations and individual personal experiences created a situation with a double influence. On the one hand, it bolstered the chances of mutual understanding; and on the other, it enabled the unburdening of the resentments of the minority. A certain weakness of the sociological conception of the situation described here is the difficulty of deciding whether the situation

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creates the conditions for manifesting existing attitudes, or whether it also creates attitudes. In minority movements, and not only German ones, one can observe cases in which activists appear who in the past were operative members of the Polish Communist Party or other Polish pro-Communist organizations. It is hard to determine whether these are cases of non-self-serving conversion—like the case of Wojciech K^trzynski—or turnabouts with an instrumental motivation. To be sure, a combination of instrumental factors with autotelic national motivation is also possible. However, often underpinning both mechanisms is a passion to act in all of the circumstances that the course of history brings. According to the assumptions of the study, persons seized by a passion for politics and currently filling the role of leaders or ideologists of political movements were not chosen as authors of the autobiographies. For this reason, among others, the aspects of the borderland manifesting themselves in the "active and expansive" nationalistic tendencies that Chalasinski highlighted in his analysis of the plebiscite period did not appear clearly here. Neither did the study take into consideration many cases of extreme nationalistic behavior among members of the dominant Polish culture that could be observed during parliamentary and local elections in some political organizations, for example the Confederation for an Independent Poland, especially in the Katowice region. An analysis of the attitudes and experiences of rank-and-file members of borderland communities furnished a different picture of the state of their national consciousness. To sum up the detailed presentation of the variants appearing in these cases, it can be stated that these attitudes were more often open than closed. The authors more often expressed doubts as to their own identification than active national aims. However, this hypothesis must be validated on the basis of a more careful further analysis. In this connection, the Polish situation should be compared with other areas of confrontation between centers and peripheries of national cultures. There are many such areas in the world obsessed by the irredentist spirit of various ethnic communities and groups on all continents. Among various possible regions the Spanish-French borderland has been selected here for comparison. In the nineteenth century Lelewel saw an analogy between Spain and Poland, having in mind the First Commonwealth. The aim here is not to find historical parallels, which in relation to events on the macro scale must always be very remote. The reference point will be the characteristics of the members

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of two large regional groups living between Spain and France—the Basques and the Catalans. The ethnic complexity and regional divisions of Spain created a state unity with problems similar to, or greater than, those of the multiethnic federative Commonwealth of the gentry. Catalonia did not lose its autonomy until the Constitution of Philip V of 1716, and attempts at a federalist reform in the 1870s rekindled Catalonian and Basque separatism (Barton, 1993). Juan Linz studied the situation of the Basques in the light of data on political organizations and election results one hundred years later. He found differences between Vascongadas and Catalonia and highlighted the ethnic dissimilarity within the two regions (Linz, 1981). In conclusion, he warned against the aspirations of the two communities to gain political sovereignty. Authors writing about these regions emphasize their features that manifest an advanced level of industrial development. In alluding to this fact, Linz referred to Gellner's conception of nationalism as a reaction to the social consequences of industrialism. However, in his interpretation he failed to take into account the deep historical roots of the national tendencies of the Basques and Catalans. The strong ethnic roots and political will for independence manifested in both cases, often with violent means, should be acknowledged as nation-creating factors arguing in favor of the hypothesis on the ethnic sources of the nation (Armstrong, A.D. Smith) and the conception of a nation searching for a state (Tilly). These two characteristics of the French-Spanish borderland differentiate it more or less from the Polish borderland in the east and the west. Ukrainians for a long time have been expressing the wish for independence, but they have not used intense industrial development to their advantage. Opole Silesia, especially its indigenous population, also avails itself little of this. So there are no promising bases for comparison here. Comparison becomes more fruitful when we move to the level of ethnicregional-national consciousness, even if the research methods differ. Jeremy MacClancy and Oonagh O'Brien, in their studies of Basque and Catalonian nationality ("identity"), used the method of the ethnological interview and observation (MacClancy, 1993; O'Brien, 1993). Their results are similar to those obtained in the present study from an analysis of autobiographies. Ethnologists or cultural anthropologists relying on the testimony of credible informants pay less attention to individual variants, however. They simplify conclusions and generalize too much, which is a criticism already

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made of the Boas school. This simplification stems from the desire to grasp the general pattern of action of the community studied. As a result, researchers construct various scales, but fail to notice their incommensurability, which has been pointed out here. MacClancy, in citing Anthony P. Cohen, also admits that the researcher's interpretation of symbols may be arbitrary, because it is not controlled by evidence of the internal emotional experiences of the participants of the cultures investigated. An analysis of autobiographies is less open to such a criticism, because the researcher has to do with the interpretations of the authors of the autobiographies themselves, and their own models of the first degree, as Alfred Schütz put it (1970). This applies at least to explicitly stated values and ethnic manifestations of culture. Even with the use of this method, there still remains a sphere of indispensable but always risky interpretations made by the researcher himself of what, in the utterances of the respondents, is implied and etic. This fact was already pointed out in the analysis of Wojciech K^trzynski's case. Leaving aside, but not forgetting about, necessary methodological caveats, a certain similarity may be observed between the picture of the national consciousness of Basques and Catalans and the picture of the consciousness of the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Silesian-German borderland. Like most authors of similar studies, MacClancy uses the concept of ethnic identity, which without differentiation encompasses what is here called identification and valence. The key concept of Basque identity in this understanding is abertzale—patriot. That concept corresponds more or less to the title "great Pole" in the terminology of Silesian Gielczyn (Ossowski, 1967b), namely, a person with a strong and unambiguous national identification and high indicators of cultural valence, according to our terminology. The Basque abertzale is someone who actively participates in the fight for the independence of Vascongadas, who speaks the Basque language and is devoted to Basque culture. In light of the researcher's information, Basque nationalism and patriotism manifests itself in taking possession of all fields of culture that can have specifically national features, such as Basque literature, Basque cuisine, Basque sport, Basque video and even Basque rock and skinheads. The preferred national threads in all fields of symbolic and non-symbolic consumption appear to have the features of fundamentalism. Viewed in this light, Basque nationality would be exceptionally closed within itself, rejecting foreign cultural motifs, especially the features of the hated, but in fact kindred, Spanish culture in its regional Navarre variety. According

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to the researcher, the Basques believe that they constitute a separate race (raza) with national and class distinctions. Despite the use of the term race, that national category is not closed. On account of its high level of economic development, Spanish Vascongadas is an area of intense immigration. Workers from other parts of Spain are welcomed without reservation to the national community, on the condition that they appropriate this culture. "A person is not born as an abertzale. He can become one, though" (MacClancy, 1993, p. 86). So the Basque nationalists' understanding of the openness of their community boils down to a strict enforcement of national proselytism. Conversion is accepted, even required. On the other hand, this is not the tolerance of bivalence or polyvalence. This is how the researcher expresses the model of Basque "identity" after reading journalistic articles, hearing political pronouncements and observing behavior. This picture of the nature of a borderland group more closely matches Józef Chalasiñski's thesis on the intensification of nationalistic attitudes in a borderland area than our conclusions from studies of different variants of borderland autobiographies. It should be remembered that the Basque community was studied during a period of sharp political struggle that even resorted to terrorism. At the same time, however, only a very small fragment of the population was involved in terrorist acts. In commenting on the emancipationist aspirations of the Basques, Linz emphasized that a potentially sovereign, or even only autonomous, Vascongadas (Euzkadi) in fact would be nationally very heterogeneous and would also have its ethnic peripheries. At the opposite end of Europe, the situation of independent Ukraine and the Baltic States emancipated from Russian domination is analogous. MacClancy, in constructing the picture of Basque national consciousness ("identity"), does not skip over the problem of the ethnic heterogeneity of the Basque region. This problem crops up in the conflict with the pro-Spanish movement within the province of Navarre, that is, with Navarrism as a regional movement in favor of greater autonomy for the province but not its separation. That information leads one to doubt the unity of the national "identity" of the residents of the province represented by the model of the Basque patriot. It seems more probable that between the polar models of the abertzale and the Navarre independence seeker there stretches a continuum of mixed attitudes, as between the opposites of the "pure Pole" and the "pure German" in Opole Silesia. The statement of the scholar of Basque problems

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himself establishes grounds for such a supposition. He writes: "Identity and ethnicity cannot be regarded as ethnographic givens, since the Navarronians argue about who they are: Basques or Spaniards. Unquestionably, in this context ethnicity is a changing strategy grounded in historical conditions and not an unchanging datum anchored in some timeless ethnographic present" (MacClancy, 1993, p. 85). To call ethnicity a changing strategy is tantamount to affirming its situational character. Oonagh O'Brien even more clearly emphasizes the absolute necessity for the situational approach to ethnicity in a study of the French Catalans (O'Brien, 1993). However, that approach ineluctably leads to examination of the phenomena of the nation and ethnicity from the individual perspective (p. 102). O'Brien, in connection with this approach, alludes to the conception of rational choice made by the individual (Hechter, 1985), who strives to maximize his power, and to attain and enhance social status. However, that notion is subject to criticism in light of facts indicating that in the case studied by her the rational thesis in this understanding, that "it is good to be French", is rejected by some French civil servants of Catalan genealogy in favor of emotional ties with the regional fatherland. In her study of this group O'Brien discovered phenomena exactly analogous to the results of the analysis of autobiographies from the Polish borderland. These include double identification ("identity") and an insecure feeling of identification in a peripheral situation in relation to the cultural center. In the last case this applies to ethnic Catalans with double identification, who in Paris lost their feeling of French affiliation but also did not feel at home in Barcelona. This example is just like the case of the young Belarussian who stopped feeling Belarussian in Minsk, and young Silesians with a sense of German affiliation, who in Germany felt strange and could not adapt. There are also close analogies between the individual national problems of French Catalans and Opole Silesians. In both cases there is a constant feeling of being inferior to members of other groups, consciousness of being stigmatized by members of the dominant culture, and often efforts to conceal one's otherness. O'Brien calls these phenomena lack of equilibrium between two varieties of identification ("identity") assumed alternately. Inequality is a common feature of relations between the national center and borderland ethnic peripheries. Ethnographic materials from Wales, Northern Ireland (Ulster), Corsica and Tuscany (Macdonald, 1993), and studies of Quebec, Brittany and Friesland (Teich, Porter, 1993; McGarry, O'Leary,

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1993; Nationality Issues, 1993, vol. II) show the great complexity of relations between dominant cultures and varieties of national cultures in minority or regional groups with a not entirely clear state of internal cultural unity and external demarcation from neighboring cultures. To this should be added the problems of post-Soviet Asia and the independent states of Africa. Not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the West at large, the situation of ethnic peripheries is one of social inequality. This position does not stem exclusively and necessarily from the law. In his conception of the diversity of fields of social inequality, Michael Walzer alluded to the role of cultures as one of the factors determining the spheres of social domination and subordination. The problem of a fair division of values as a condition of freedom applies not only to material goods, but also to the right to participation, dignity, life—that is, to emotional acceptance (Walzer, 1983). The analysis of the autobiographical material from Polish minority areas confirms the correctness of this position. Dignity is represented as the sphere of national inequality very strongly felt by the Ukrainian minority but also by Silesians and Belarussians. Violation of the dignity of others is one of the indicators of the closedness of the majority culture. Acute sensitivity about their own dignity may also be a sign of the closedness of the minority. The imbalance of inner feelings of which O'Brien spoke is a reflection of the social-cultural inequality of the situation of a minority in relations with the dominant culture. In this case this is not formal inequality of legal status, but the feeling of social rejection by the majority, who accent their dominance in the sphere of the legalized culture and their animosity, contempt or distrust towards a different culture. The Belarussian, Ukrainian and Silesian authors described this situation eloquently. Their definition of the situation could fit the objective facts or could be an exaggeration stemming from excessive sensitivity. By itself their definition was a social fact describing the ways of coping with their real or imagined situation. Four model types of reaction were found in the material analyzed: (1) overt animosity and hatred, (2) withdrawal and retreating into oneself, (3) openness and overcoming the feeling of isolation, (4) relating to primary categories of ties common to the minority (region) and dominant community. The attitude described in the accounts of some Ukrainians, but referring primarily to the past, is an example of the first type. In light of the autobiographical interviews these attitudes were somewhat softened after the politi-

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cal transformations in Poland. The metaphor of a turtle hiding in its shell used by one of the young Silesians with a partially German affiliation best symbolizes attitudes of the second type. Young Belarussians described similar reactions. The withdrawal into oneself characteristic of this type does not stem from a person's rejection of the dominant culture, but from the feeling of being rejected by the dominant group. This is evidence of disintegrating neighborhood. In this situation a person is unable to cope with his cultural bivalence, which as a result turns into ambivalence and is felt as a source of dissonance and not as an enrichment and enlargement of the field of emotional experiences. Ambivalence is one of the more complicated factors; it is a partially closed national attitude constituting part of the aggregate identity of the individual. However, it is not the one and only and sufficient factor for classifying the entire position of the author of an autobiography as an expression of withdrawal or closedness. It may signify partial openness. Several other special indicators of the closed identity in respect to national attitudes were used in analysis of the open-ended autobiographical statements and the responses to the questionnaire part of the interview. Rejection of the possibility of dual national identifications was one of the direct indicators. This indicator can be represented on a scale, since the respondents were given the choice of five possible double identifications: their own and—the counterpart of their own—simultaneous Polish, German, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Silesian and European identification. Some of the respondents accepted more, others fewer combinations, while others rejected all of them—even the European affiliation. Other indicators were reactions to questions pertaining to the wartime trials and tribulations of their families, contacts with members of other nations, assessments of television programs devoted to other nations (minority cultures), and attitudes toward the canon of their own and others' culture, especially the dominant culture. In all three groups there were declarations of dislike of Jews. Not once in the Silesian-German group did questions concerning Jewish culture call to mind recollections of the Holocaust and the problem of guilt related thereto. All of these questions had a projective aim. Given the necessarily general form of the question, not all of the reactions were subject to a clear-cut interpretation. Many of them were valuable for their spontaneity. The completely spontaneous responses in the open-ended autobiographical part of the text were especially valuable.

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This is by no means a complete list of the examples of closedness or openness of national attitudes in the texts studied. However, on this basis it is possible to ascertain the different weight and—what is especially important—the dissymmetry of the position of the same person on scales of individual indicators. Cultural ambivalence should be regarded as an intermediate indicator: a weak indicator of cultural openness or a weak indicator of cultural closedness. This indicator suggests vacillation as to which culture to accept for one's own, but not firm rejection or acceptance of one or both of them. Uncertainty as to the possibility of foreign national identifications is of a similar kind. A person's own double identification denotes a firm attitude of openness, if it is internally accepted. This was so in the case of the young Belarussian woman, who felt internally "split in two" by her double identification, which was conditioned by the situation but felt as a source of dissonance, and it also was true of the young Silesian, who called himself a German, Pole or German Pole and then said he was incapable of making a national self-identification (Y.S1.10). German scholars also have pointed out the ambivalence of the Silesian borderland (Rogall, 1994). However, ambivalence has a variety of shades. In turn, one single integral identification of a person is not necessarily coupled with closedness. That is not the case if the same person admits the possibility of dual or multiple identification of other persons, so not rejecting dual national feeling out of hand. In the Silesian group, however, only cosmopolites allowed for the possibility of all double identifications. Those persons identifying mainly with Polishness or mainly with German affiliation accepted the possibility of some double identification, but rarely Polish-German. The author close to the German option, who manifested opposition to Polish culture and grappled with his own uncertain identification, in the end planned Polish-German cultural bivalence for his child as the best solution to the problem of mixed genealogy (Y.S1.10). Another author with a firm German option was clearly culturally bivalent, with more extensive knowledge of Polish culture. In some moments of the interview he also accepted Polish identification without thinking about it, acknowledging the Polish "we" to his own surprise (Y.S1.12). This means a slight tendency to openness. Examples of very definitely closed, isolationist national attitudes were found in the Ukrainian group. There was very clear evidence in that group of the principle of endogamy (also not missing in the Silesian group), of placing a high value on their folklorist culture, of grappling with the problem of

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defining their own ideological fatherland, and of rejection of some elements of the Polish national canon as hostile to their own group. Not all of the Ukrainian authors of autobiographies were found to have a closed national attitude, and even less so may this be generalized to the entire population of this minority. The point here is just to emphasize that examples of the purest empirical type of national closedness appeared in this group. These features included a very firm rejection of all double identifications, which not only were opposed but also caused disgust and condemnation, as well as a castigation of conversion as national betrayal. Hubristic factors of national self-feeling, which often expressed themselves in the use of the word "pride" in reference to the role of their own nation, manifested themselves with great intensity here. The example of a declared double, Ukrainian-Polish identification and a few examples of cultural bivalence consisting in profound assimilation of Polish high culture coupled with esteem and love for Ukrainian folklore do not disprove this assertion. At the same time, other indicators place Ukrainians high on the openness scale. This is true especially of European identification. This is a clear example of the incommensurability of the scales. Specific examples of closed attitudes appeared in the Belarussian group. They came closest to the features of a traditional group, which for Popper, and before him for Bergson, were an example of a closed society. This group either lacks a conception of the big fatherland or accepts the Polish ideological fatherland as its own. Strong ties with the small fatherland were characteristic of this group, as they were among the Silesians. However, the Belarussians differed from the Silesians in their attitude towards Europe. Only in the Belarussian group were there examples of a flat rejection of European identification. This non-acceptance was motivated not by doubts about meeting the membership requirements of the European Union, but by disinclination to go outside the closed national circle. However, this attitude is not universal in the Belarussian group. A few Belarussian examples highlight the danger of succumbing to stereotypes. Among the young Belarussians there is even a cosmopolite, who says, "every person ought to feel a citizen of the world" (Y.B.4). Members of the Silesian group most eagerly and consistently were in favor of replacing the rigid boundaries of national states with permeable borderlines of cooperating regions. The open cosmopolitan attitude, which the respondents more or less literally termed as such, appeared here most often and most

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distinctly. There is no case here of a Silesian, Pole or German rejecting European identification, which is treated as an approved postulate but not always realized in practice. To state the unlimited national openness of the Opole Silesians as a regional category would be inconsistent with characteristics, presented in the last chapter, of the entire group studied representing this category. Of course, contradictory statements should not appear in the conclusions of the author of the report. On the other hand, the authors of the texts studied have the right to be inconsistent. The situational nature and instability of national attitudes is an obvious and explainable characteristic, especially of members of minority groups or of groups of a similar kind. A heterogeneous relation to strangers, especially towards the dominant culture, does not always stem from inconsistency and incompatibility of attitudes. The largely bivalent Silesians with German identification could completely assimilate certain elements of Polish culture, for example specific religious customs, and some of the literature. On the other hand, the elements of this culture with a clearly anti-German flavor repel them. In studies of pupils of primary schools conducted in Opole as far back as 1959 I found that the children of autochthons did not differ from children of the extraneous population in respect to their declared attitude towards Polish national values. On the other hand, they differed in respect to their attitude towards Germany and Germans. Such attitudes enable people of the borderland to be open to contacts with neighbors from abroad, but they hinder relations with the dominant culture of their state and society. For people of the borderland to be able to act as intermediaries in bringing neighboring cultures closer together, they must overcome the ambivalence that they feel in their country of residence, which differs from "the external fatherland" (Brubaker, 1995). This is difficult because relations between neighboring nations almost always contain some elements of antagonism. Even if there are no actual conflicts, the tradition of old conflicts endures in the symbolic sphere, in the writing of history, literature, and painting, and is perpetuated in popular culture and the school curriculum. This state is reflected in the situation and attitudes of the minority. Some of the examples cited have shown how encounters with elements of the dominant culture that are laden with antagonism cause the attitudes of a minority group to turn inward. This problem cannot be resolved by rejecting the elements that Hobsbawm called discovered or invented. They are too

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deeply rooted in the family tradition handed down and in the canon of the national culture. Besides this, only in part do they belong to the sphere of fictions and myths. A considerable part of them are historical facts, the core of bitter truth about what people did to each other as members of different national communities in the name of the interests and ideals of those communities. Those facts cannot be overcome by denying or forgetting them. However, other ways can be found of going beyond hostility, fears and the feeling of not belonging in relations between ethnic groups and nations. One of the ways also mentioned in the autobiographies consists in the cosmopolitan reaction of turning away from ties with the national community. That attitude, especially in its nihilistic version (Y.S1.1), has its negative side, however. It strips the individual of an essential part of his aggregate identity and the feeling of a group type of an important kind. The inconsistency of national attitudes in a borderland area paradoxically suggests another path of transgression. An internally accepted double national identification and cultural bivalence or polyvalence allows for the possibility of looking from two sides at conflictive phenomena and entering intimately into more than one sphere of emotional group experiences. At the same time, double identification may enable the individual to keep his distance in relation to two objects of national reference. No clear form of this effect was observed in the borderland autobiographies analyzed. The ability to keep one's distance requires considerable intellectual sophistication. The Economist, a Silesian with a German preference, and the Philosopher, a Ukrainian with a double identification, came close to such an attitude. K^trzynski, to a certain degree, also manifested this attitude, but his autobiographical material was too scanty for it to be documented thoroughly. The open national attitude, which simultaneously maintains attachment and distance in relation to one's nation, was an attribute of Jozef Czapski. His autobiographical materials will be examined in the final part of this book. Among the Silesian autobiographies written independently of this empirical study is an example of an Integral Silesian whose cultural bivalence is exceptionally fecund. He draws from both of the neighboring cultures of his native borderland area, but he does not identify completely with either the German or the Polish nation. The aforementioned photographic artist, Fryderyk Kremser, a member of the Hitlerjugend generation, came from a family divided by pro-German and pro-Polish elections during the time of the Silesian uprisings (Krzeminski, 1994). He was a member of the Deutsche

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Jugend, in which he did not notice or does not remember the influences of propaganda. In his entire account there is no criticism of this system and only one example of opposition in the form of the assistance that a neighbor gave to Russian prisoners dying of hunger. Only the advent of the front and the beginnings of Polish rule is a catastrophe in his eyes, just as in the autobiographies of other older Silesians. After October 1956 he made his peace with Poland. "In those days we were trying for something" he said in the interview, identifying with Polish society at large by his use of the plural pronoun. While preserving the deeply ingrained values of German culture and strong emotional ties with Opole Silesia—with the small fatherland—he discovered Poland thanks to his passion for touring and photography: "Poland made an artistic photographer of me." In Poland, the monuments and regional tradition also attracted him. The various Polish landscapes—the Tatra Mountains, Tykocin, his native Opole Silesia, an exhibition with a paraphrase from Goethe in Mickiewicz's version: Znasz-li swoj kraj? (Kennest du das Land?)—all of this, with an admixture of the landscapes of Germany and Monte Cassino, impressed its stamp on his artistic work. He manifested critical reserve towards both Poland and Germany, retaining fondness for his native Opole Silesia and an open attitude towards national values flowing from various sources. In the early phase of analyzing cases of the national borderland, a table was constructed of the relations between national identification and cultural valence (Table 1, p. 118). Some of these relations were confirmed in the study, others still remain hypotheses. Additional studies have proven some of these hypotheses, but also have led to the modification of some and the rejection of others. It was found that cosmopolitanism does not predestine to polyvalence as an active, positive attitude towards different cultures in all cases. It turned out to be more difficult than expected to separate bivalence and ambivalence. In many of the borderland cases examined this distinction is more a function of the situation than of concrete, crystallized individual identities. Bivalence can easily turn into ambivalence in two situations. First, when an individual from a borderland of cultures encounters the negation and belittlement of his basic culture on the part of members of the dominant culture; and second, when members of the dominant culture reject someone by questioning his competence in this culture or deny him the right to participate in this culture and suspect the sincerity of this intention. That attitude, shown by a dominant part of Polish society, stood in the way of the

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polonization of a larger number of Polish Jews. In many countries and epochs the historical condition of Jews in general was marked by ambivalence that was especially painful (see, e.g., Bauman, 1995). The hypothesis that cultural univalence excludes double national identification was not supported. More open or closed national attitudes of members of national minorities in Poland today still depend not only on legal regulations but also on the attitude of the Polish majority. This applies also to Silesians, and not only to those who have a more or less firm German identification, but also to those who are a Polish regional group and not a foreign national category. All of the Silesians from Opole Silesia had experiences of German pressures and influences of longer duration than the Katowice region. Their unavoidable cultural bivalence, which was not accepted and which was spurned with the insulting epithets "Kraut", or "Hitler", turned into ambivalence. This can lead to a turn away from Polishness and to consolidation of the closed attitude corresponding to the situation of a turtle in its shell. Charles Taylor, in his study on multiculturalism, conceived the notion of the policy of "equal recognition" as the cardinal principle for shaping people's identities in a process of dialogue. Refusal of the just recognition of some social category on the principle of equality is a contradiction of democratic society and cripples the individuals whom it touches and who internalize the picture imposed on them (Taylor, 1992a, pp. 34, 36). The refusal of the neighboring group to engage in a partner-like dialogue had caused the traumas expressed in the autobiographies of the Belarussians. The most striking example of a stressful childhood experience that was pushed into the back of the mind, if not the subconscious, was the description of an incident in which a stone was thrown in the direction of a boy, who, when asked the question "Who are you?", had answered "a Ukrainian". Young Ukrainians more often reacted with indignation and hatred to the humiliating use of the name of their nationality as an epithet. In the psychosocial and not only spatial sense accepted here, the complexity of the national situation of borderland people consists in the fact that they are eminently qualified and motivated to establish closer contacts with the neighboring cultural group, but at the same time they are subject to the reciprocal feeling of not belonging in relations with that group and of being rejected by it. As in all asymmetric ties between people and communities, the main role in shaping the nature of relations with national minorities falls to the dominant

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community. Clear reactions to the political changes that took place in Poland in 1989 were found in the autobiographies of the older and younger generation of the three minority groups studied. The Solidarity political breakthrough caused greater openness from both sides. This chapter contains a concise presentation of a certain aspect of this phenomenon reflected in the individual emotional experiences of members of minority and regional groups. Similar data on the Polish national center will be presented in the following chapters. However, numerous other studies, especially public opinion surveys using questionnaire methods, indicate that after five years of the construction of a democratic society in Poland, many prejudices and phobias continue in relation to people of different national culture and views. In analyzing the reasons for the xenophobia of Poles displayed towards minority groups culturally affiliated with large neighboring states, the collective mind of Polish society—if such a thing may be regarded as real in any sense—is rather similar to the collective mind of minorities, in that after the numerous and long-lasting experiences of the twentieth century, the national society continues to fear still strong neighbors and is even less inclined to forget the wrongs of the past. That is why in Great Britain it is easier to accept the use of Welch as a second official language, but it is a lot harder for Poles to adopt a similar solution in respect to the German language in Silesia. The linguistic autonomy of Wales does not threaten that area's political separation from the United Kingdom and for understandable reasons cannot evoke memories of Welch imposed on English people by force. The experiences and fears of Poles in relation to Germany and to "Russian" countries are different. The materials analyzed here also contain the unemotional account of Kremser on the educational merits of the Hitlerjugend preschool and on Kristallnacht in Kozle. There are similar passages telling of the good old times in Nazi Germany in the autobiographies of the older Silesians from Raciborz. These texts express attitudes that provoke inner protest in the Polish partner. Information about the attitudes of Ukrainians, for whom the ULA is a value hard to revise and impossible to reject, stirs up similar internal as well as external protests. Not all of the phobias in respect to "outsiders" have any real, even historical justification. An example of xenophobia lacking any rational grounds is Polish anti-Semitism. Although signs of it are on the wane, it is still whipped up on the occasion of political battles and with a clear political intention.

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The striving to join a supranational community that is in Poland's practical interest on the eve of the third millennium calls for reflection on one's own historical experiences: not in order to reject them, but to draw lessons from them in terms of political practice and in order to shape one's attitudes in both the cognitive and affective domains. The political and military situation of a medium-sized country in the field of influence of much larger forces will not make it easy to change attitudes if animosities and national fears have a real basis. This problem is not easy to solve. It requires rising above historical grudges and the axiological exclusiveness of a single culture. In the light of individual examples, it is possible to acknowledge the value of other people's culture on the principle of reciprocity without rejecting one's own values. However, the problem is to acknowledge as negative some elements of one's own national universe for the sake of reconciliation with one's partner. The stronger side in the partner-like relationship, a side which has no reasons for concern, may more easily bring itself to express self-criticism and tolerance. This principle ought to regulate the attitude of the national majority towards national minorities, not only in light of the law, but also in light of the individual attitudes of members of the community, if the nation as a whole is to be open. The problem of closedness and the degree of openness of individual members of the Polish nation representing different typological varieties are taken up in the next chapter.

Note: The materials used in this part consist of seventy autobiographical interviews recorded on magnetic tape and written down in the form of 3,182 pages of manuscript, and also two questionnaire interviews with 300 students of Warsaw higher education institutions. The studies were carried out between 1992 and 1994.

When love for people became death and the flaming ceiling fell on us blessed were they for whom this alarm for hearts and hands was too little. KRZYSZTOF KAMIL BACZYNSKI, Work for the Hands

They went forward crying "God! Fatherland! Fatherland!" until God came out of Moses' bush, looked at the shouting ones and asked: "Which one?" JULIUSZ SLOWACKI, Parables and Epigrams

16. A Portrait of the Wartime Generation in the Background

The conception of a nationality as an imagined community very closely suits the phenomenon of the Polish nation, which thanks to its culture survived the nineteenth century without its own state institutions, and not only did not shrink in terms of its population, but even grew. From this example it may also be irrefutably demonstrated that the term "imagined community" is not a fiction detached from reality. Nor was that the intention of its use in Benedict Anderson's book. A cultural community mediated by the symbolic sphere still does not mechanically tie together all members of the community; it does not yet unify and standardize their national attitudes. The incommensurability of various indicators of scales of national characteristics is a feature not only of ethnic peripheries but also of the national center. One may even surmise that it appears with notable clarity in this center. However, the last assertion applies in principle to a center understood as a mass of individuals of a national community with a firm national identification. As a rule, these are residents of the geographical center of the country. The limiting expressions "in principle" and "as a rule" are necessary on account of the complexity of the reality examined and the possibility of a different understanding of the national center. When Mickiewicz, in Master Thaddeus, through the mouth of Bartek Prusak called Soplicowo the "center of Polish traits", he did not have in mind a geographical location or any real concentration of a culturally uniform community, but a model of national features and national identification. Czeslaw Milosz, who argues that the value and role of Mickiewicz was limited to the nineteenth century, at the same time states that the creation of this model captivated contemporaries and was a posthumous victory of the

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First Commonwealth (Milosz, 1992, pp. 16, 56,93). To illustrate the literary process of the creation of the model of Polish traits, Milosz does not hesitate to cite the example of minor writers, such as the novelist Maria Rodziewiczowna. This author, who was very popular in the interwar period, enjoyed a renaissance in the eighties and after the fall of socialism, until imported romantic dime-novel romances supplanted her works. Rodziewiczowna's writings were not confined to the role of literary melodrama. To the extent of her talents she consolidated and popularized Mickiewicz 's model of centers of Polish traits within the confines of the former Commonwealth. She created heroes "from the borderland bastion", who "were and will be" the mainstay of national existence in the borderlands. Sienkiewicz may be placed between these opposite literary extremes. For decades his types of borderland yeomen were the model or paradigm of national values. Although extravagant and pathetic, that literature touched upon a real phenomenon: the formation on the national peripheries of the attitudes described in the previous part of this work. Tiryakian and Nevitt called nationalism of the second type the nationalism of peripheries identifying with the state of the dominant nation. In the First Commonwealth that phenomenon was clearly visible among converts from the gentry and settlers from the center, portraited in the literature through the yeomen's settlements of the Dobrzynski and Bohatyrowicz families. The school and youth organizations, especially the "Pathfinders" and others, consolidated and expanded these values in the Second Republic. Summer camp activities and songs of "knighthood from the borderland watchtowers" molded the attitudes of members of the dominant culture that Jozef Chalasinski described in his study of Silesia. In interwar Poland the notion of the borderlands was associated primarily with the eastern border. In People's Poland not only did the borders shift to the west, but the entire borderland ideology as an intense national feeling obligatory for the entire group also turned towards the west in the official propaganda. The literary models of eastern borderland attitudes were banished, with certain exceptions. Among the most significant exceptions were Master Thaddeus and— paradoxically—Orzeszkowa's On the Niemen. After the fall of socialism the straitjacket of censorship was loosened. No official regulations stood in the way of the return of the patriotic and nationalistic literature of the borderland. Complete editions of Sienkiewicz's Trilogy had already started to appear in the seventies.

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In the nineties another threshold was crossed with the invasion of mass culture through the electronic media. The dominance of popular culture leads one to doubt whether any literary patterns will retain wide influence. Literature also is becoming a less reliable source of materials for identifying actually supported values of wide scope. So it is obviously necessary to rely on data derived directly from the experience of commonplace reality. In this situation, the scholar of the culture of a collectivity of which he is a member has to do with an abundance of data that is not only an advantage but also an obstacle. He cannot, nor should he, forgo knowledge drawn from his own observations and inner personal experience. At the same time, he should take care to separate his own private attitudes and their emotional sphere from the material gathered in systematic investigations. For these reasons, the construction of a picture of Polish culture studied at the grass roots level in the behavior and attitudes of individuals presents many difficulties. This culture appears extremely diverse, and its reduction to several representative types is very risky, carrying the danger of lapsing into thinking in stereotypes. The investigation of the national center, not in the sense of the antithesis of the borderland but in the sense of the actual central sphere of the residence and life of members of the national community, does not reveal such clear national self-identifications as in the borderland sphere of the life of minorities. The situation becomes different only in "special moments" of the life of the nation, in which a crisis or threat intensifies national attitudes. In selecting autobiographies as the main subject of analysis it could have been expected that these special situations would leave a permanent trace in the authors' minds and would focus the entire autobiography in the age category we have called the "old generation of Poles" (O.P.). A preliminary analysis of the autobiographical materials gathered at the start of our investigations revealed the enormous diversity of stories of the authors' lives during the war and the occupation. These experiences did not automatically focus the entire narrative in all cases. The class and occupational differences among the persons selected for study in the initial phase made it difficult to reach clear-cut conclusions. The old folk adage could be quoted here: "People are different." However, recognition of this truth does not advance sociological knowledge. Bearing in mind the previous reservations and the fact that traces of wartime experiences were the subject of other autobiographical studies

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(Czyzewski et al., 1996), it was decided to focus on the young generation of Poles at the end of the twentieth century, but without completely omitting the generation whose youth fell in the period of World War II. The war was the determining experience of this generation, the formative period of its biography. In all attempts to define "national character", especially when making international comparisons, the main methodological rule is to make a clear reference to particular categories within national communities. For specific national features of culture make themselves known through differences of age, social class and education. This last variable especially influences appropriation of the canon of national culture, hence it determines a very important aspect of national valence. The variable of generation in turn decides which of the events that were important for shaping national consciousness a given age category could experience directly, which ones could be transmitted directly through the family, and which ones only indirectly through symbols—in historiography, literature, art. In accordance with Dilthey's concept of generation, which Mannheim and Eisenstadt developed later, an event is related to a fact that became a common experience for the generation in question. However, here it should be remembered that a common experience in the strict sense concerns only those social categories whose members were of a similar age but also in a similar or almost identical situation at the moment when the event occurred. Many different generations of Poles experienced World War II and the double occupation as the lifetime experience of their generation. Members of different generations had to experience these facts in different ways. Only when the object of analysis is a collection of persons representing the same or nearly the same generation is it possible to determine the scale of different reactions attesting to different degrees and varieties of national identifications and the role that national culture can play in an objectively similar situation of tension and crisis. Even such a precise concept of a generation experience still does not suffice to explain the different possible reactions. The objectively identical factors of an event such as the war and occupation do not have exactly the same effect on different class, occupational and educational categories. To a certain extent this applies even to the behavior of occupiers in the total war against members of the Polish nation, and even more so towards minorities.

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In studying the influence of a crisis situation at the grass roots of national phenomena, differences must also be considered between retrospective diary materials and sources arising spontaneously, contemporaneous with events. When retrospective autobiographies are left aside and sources contemporaneous with the events and containing evidence of Polish traits during the war are explored, many models of national identification and valence can be constructed or found. These models in part have the character of normative patterns, and in part are types of attitude distributed on a very wide scale, stretching from the purest crystallization of national devotion to evident examples of deviation—in the form of conversion to the nationality of the enemy—and betrayal, and acting to the detriment of national values and the people serving them. The last statement contains emotionally and axiologically laden terms such as patriotism, devotion, and betrayal. These terms here serve only as strict technical concepts referring to facts that are rather easy for the reader to identify, irrespective of the researcher's assessment of them. That assessment ought not to interfere in the characterization of the phenomena, but neither can it be excluded. While most of the behavior of Poles is easy to classify, there nevertheless are doubtful cases during the occupation such as the cooperation of Jozef Mackiewicz with the occupation press on account of his anti-Soviet obsession, or the behavior of some prewar Polish policemen who decided to serve the occupier in German-occupied Poland. However, some of those policemen at times assisted members of the underground, or at least tried to do the least harm to Polish society. These examples of different kinds and with different motivations are located near the lower boundary of the scale. Located at its extreme are consistent turncoats, Gestapo or NKVD agents, and stool pigeons blackmailing or handing over Jews to death, informers under both occupations. It is very unlikely that the last type of wartime experiences of a certain category of Poles would be recorded in autobiographies written today. On the other hand, profiles of this type may be found in other people's accounts and in fiction. An example of the last type is Walery Royski in Iwaszkiewicz's Fame and Glory, a depraved son of a landowner's family, a prewar anti-Semite, a Gestapo collaborator and agent. Statistically speaking, the most typical behavior was located in the middle of the scale of national wartime reactions. This was a category that endured the occupation in a nationally passive manner, but suffered physically and

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mentally under the occupation as Poles. The problem of national affiliation during the occupation became the object of formal decisions on the part of the occupying authorities who issued a valid identity card, passport and ration card, and decided on the degree of restrictions on freedom of movement in terms of space and times of day. Since nationality determined life and survival, no one could forget about it and push it to the margin of practical affairs. In these conditions national identification was something constant, and for many persons painfully present in everyday life through the feeling of danger, exclusion and restriction, humiliation and various related reactions. The intensity of the experience of the violation of general national values varied individually, but on the whole the sense of national identification in the society increased, because no one regarded as a Pole was exempted from the rules of the occupying system, which trampled all notions of human rights, dignity, safety, privacy, order, structure and seemliness. Milosz presents to Western readers a compelling overall picture of the occupation of Poland as a destruction of the "natural" order of the previous world by the Nazi occupying system in The Captive Mind (Milosz, 1980, pp. 37-40). The established order that became the normality during the occupation also had its culminating moments. Its apogee was the Warsaw Uprising, but even that event was experienced in different ways. In this special situation of national war in a besieged city and besieged districts the boundaries between passive endurance and heroic participation in the battle were often erased. An illustration of this is the description of the barricade erected under fire by the civilian population composed of "nothing but cowards", dying and ever more scared (Swirszczynska, 1974). In eastern territories all deportees faced extreme danger and oppression on account of their nationality, irrespective of whether they wanted to heroically manifest their Polishness or not. Here the criteria for singling out the victims of oppression were social class, political views, previous position in the civil service, and economic status. These victims included affluent Belarussian peasants classified as kulaks and rich Jews labeled as bourgeois by communist doctrine. Pressure increased on persons who wanted to retain Polish citizenship and who refused to accept a Soviet passport (Wat, 1990; Watowa, 1990). For all Poles and all citizens of the Second Republic the war and the occupation period brought about a change of life trajectory or even a trajectory in Fritz Schiitze's sense, that is, a dramatic and painful event that throws

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someone out of his normal life path. Jews or Polish citizens acknowledged as Jews found themselves in such a situation under the German occupation. No complete summary study has yet been made of the tragedy of this position reflected in numerous personal documents. The basic difference between the situation of Jews and Poles was the difference between an immediate sentence of total extermination and a partially suspended sentence. For most Poles the occupation was a long-lasting crisis that required a special kind of internal adjustment in respect to economic affairs, everyday practical behavior and mental makeup. Kazimierz Wyka called this form of existence imposed by extreme conditions a "make-believe life" going on "within the officially existing reality" and the extreme opposite of real life "enclosing itself within the circle of one's familiars". Real life "hid itself in the political underground, in the secret press, in the flourishing conspiratorial school system, in publications, cultural activity" (Wyka, 1984, pp. 9, 102). The notion of "make-believe life" created by a literary critic was widely popularized in the memoirs of other persons, often with the misconstruing of its real meaning. For not all persons living through the occupation were affected to an equal degree by the kind of split experienced by an intellectual, a staff member of the Jagiellonian University, who in the sphere of "real life" read Tolstoy, Mommsen, Hobbes, Pareto, Ferrero, Plutarch and the Sophists, and who had written two books on the theory of literature. For people living in the countryside and small towns and working on their farms or pursuing their craft the split between these two spheres was less distinct, even though the dangers of the occupation also constantly hung over them. They also were more or less conscious of the violation and suspension of their human rights by the lawlessness of the occupying order. They felt their Polishness most strongly en masse, although this is not always reflected in individual autobiographies. The change of trajectory in Schiitze's sense, understood as derailment, had an especially strong impact on the life of some Poles, often young ones, whose adjustment to the conditions of the occupation did not take the form of a clear hiatus between the sphere of real life and a transient "fiction", which was painful on account of the real dangers to which it exposed them. Forced by material circumstances, they entered into the occupation world of trade and speculation, and often into unavoidable contacts with Germans, always illegal and exposing them to the threat of being sent to a concentration camp or executed. Some of them, out of compulsion but not absolute necessity, worked

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in German supervisory institutions in the countryside or in cities, in offices, where they endured unavoidable humiliations, but benefited from better access to rare basic necessities and better protection thanks to "good papers" protecting them from being deported for forced labor or to a concentration camp in the event of being caught in a street round-up. Sometimes they allowed themselves to be seduced by German power, and from the nationally passive category they passed to the category of active collaborators and national turncoats. Walery Royski, Iwaszkiewicz's literary hero, who had his counterparts in reality, belongs to this category. In this entire category of persons too well adjusted to the conditions of the occupation there was no room for "real life" of the kind that Kazimierz Wyka led. Their time on the margin of practical comings and goings was filled with alcohol and crude ways of compensating for the uncertainty of existence and the deprivations to which they were subject with respect to needs that they could have satisfied in normal times. Their Polishness was not fortified by the tragic, extreme situation of the life of the entire national community, but rather was weakened. It is impossible to tell the size of this category that constituted an invalidation of the thesis of the integrating influence of crisis and threats on the national community. It is hard to expect an entirely faithful picture of this category in retrospective autobiographies of the wartime generation, but one can encounter accounts that come close to this type. The picture presented here is the construction of a pure, "ideal" type, in which many individual cases of a mixed nature do not fit. These are people who were fully involved in speculation during the occupation, who were associated with the lower German occupying authorities, but who at the same time gave money to the underground movement and had some contacts with the resistance, rather weak contacts but which became stronger towards the end of the occupation when the defeat of Germany was already obvious. A separate detailed study would be necessary in order to consider all of the different attitudes of the wartime generation resulting from differences of class, education and circumstances. Here only selected variants will be presented based on the retrospective testimony of the older generation of Poles. These materials do not fulfill the condition of saturation, but they do show certain varieties connected with the influence of factors apart from age shaping attitudes and behaviors. It has already been stressed that despite the total nature of the occupation, not all circles of the country were afflicted in equal measure by its conditions

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and not all of them reacted in the same way. A short analysis of some of the diaries of country folk out of the large number of them written in 1982 to 1983 brings this into clear relief (Fatyga, 1994). Of the five diaries studied in detail, two do not pay special attention to the situation of the occupation as seen from the national point of view. A country schoolteacher spent the occupation working in Germany and in camps. Ties with the prewar communist ideology, as he admitted, shaped his position towards the war. Another author, a social activist, devotes 20 pages out of a 155-page diary to events of the occupation and ties with the Peasants' Battalions. On the other hand, activities during the occupation are the main focus of a diary whose author commanded an independent resistance group of rural youth, unaffiliated with any organization, in a village of Podolia. His involvement stemmed from strong convictions shaped in school and determined by the ideology of the Polish Legions (the diary is anonymous). Another diary writer was selected for contrast, a somewhat older person professing leftist views, perhaps for opportunistic reasons. He describes as his contribution to the resistance movement making moonshine during World War I and desertion in 1920. During World War II he mentions some not clearly defined ties with the peasants' underground, but performed the functions of an "agronomist" supervising the deliveries of compulsory levies of agricultural products for the Germans. The last two cases may be regarded as very clearly determined by the situation in which the document came into being. In the first, the author conceals his name before members of the contest committee. In the second the situation might have strengthened declarations of leftist views and sharpened criticism of prewar Poland. It is hard to determine the influence of the circumstances under which we gathered the material for studies conducted in 1992 to 1994. One of the older Poles belonging to the generation of young people at the time of the occupation made a career in the army after the war, but emphasizes that he was not a member of the Party (Army Technician, O.G.2). His autobiography is a characteristic expression of aloofness to national problems during the occupation. Some older Silesians said that for them the war began in 1945. This author says that for him the war ended in 1941, when the German army entered the southeastern territories of former Poland. Like, the older Belarussian authors, he emphasizes the higher civilization of Germans in comparison with the Russians. However, the focusing value of his text, if this text is focused

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at all, is not the war and national affairs, but his work and career. The son of a skilled worker from a small town in Podolia, he sought a technical career in the army, which he succeeded in pursuing. Other values accented in his autobiography are connected with his private life, family and material existence. On the other hand, the three autobiographies of women from families of the intelligentsia and middle class are focused on wartime experiences viewed through the national prism. One of these women, a refugee from Lvov, participated in the Warsaw Uprising as a nurse. A woman refugee from Great Poland in a small city of German-occupied Poland helped her father, a doctor in the Home Army, to distribute news bulletins from radio broadcasts. All three women declare strong attachment to national values. The last one, who in the text calls herself a conservative, most clearly manifests hatred for Germans and lack of tolerance for all double or vacillating national identification. She calls a guard in a concentration camp a "damned German" and mentions the desire for revenge when, imprisoned after the uprising on the other side of Germany, she observed the undamaged German cities with anger. At the same time, she was captivated by the Gothic beauty of Worms and admits that the guards in the camp were rather tolerant. The national attitudes of all these women are closed in light of the double identification test. The woman from Warsaw is even hostile towards Mickiewicz through her failure to understand the meaning of the invocation to Lithuania, which for the bard is a synecdoche of the great fatherland of Poland, not only a description of the country of his childhood. With great hostility she mentions Milosz, who "doesn't know whether he's a Lithuanian or a Pole" (O.G.3). The woman from Great Poland, who in the test called herself an "ardent patriot" and rejected double identifications, said that she was against "such Pollack-Germans": "come out and say who you are: either you are a Pole or a Jew" (O.G.I). All three women express dislike of Russians. The father of the woman from Great Poland was arrested in 1945 and died in Siberia. The woman from Lvov compared the Soviet army of 1939 with the German army of 1941, with the same conclusion as the Army Technician (O.G.2). The woman from Warsaw was indignant at the sight of generals in Polish uniforms speaking Russian, whom she observed on the streets of Warsaw in the fifties. These women at the same time recalled their own or their families' good, friendly, or neighborly relations before the war with individual Germans,

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Jews and Russians. However, individual observations did not overturn their generalizations based either on inherited stereotypes or on their own tragic wartime experiences and the experiences of their near and dear ones and of their entire nation. This last conditional reaction of Poles who survived the war must be acknowledged as hard to overcome. However, it did turn out to be possible to overcome even in the course of the wartime experiences and participation in battle. This was not a common or numerically dominant attitude. For various reasons, however, the group manifesting such an attitude may be regarded as a symbol of sublimated Polishness during a time of trial. During the occupation the center of Polishness crystallized in reality, not literary fiction, in the form of a real type, and at the same time of a model and shining example, within the young generation of fighting Poland, usually called the Home Army generation. In military action this category also encompassed soldiers of other military groups, if they did not serve political goals determined from the outside. The nucleus of the ideological crystallization and national axiology of this generation was contained in the actions and utterances of the Home Army youth, at first mainly from the intelligentsia. Many features connected categories of rural and worker youth active in the real life of the nation with this nucleus—whether associated with the Peasants' Battalions, the wartime Pathfinders or the Home Army. They shared in common the catchwords of freedom, independence, faithfulness to national culture and tradition, and the necessity to fight. Here the rule of the intensification of national attitudes in a situation of threat to the collectivity and its culture was realized in full. More detailed descriptions of the ethos of the generation of the occupation differed depending on the environment, the level of education and community influences. An especially vivid, sensitive self-knowledge, both on the plane of the national bond and on the plane of the individual identities of the participants, characterized the most sophisticated part of this generation. Its nucleus, composed of the intelligentsia, expressed this self-knowledge both retrospectively, in attempts at self-identification, and in extemporaneous self-reflection closely connected with their activities. This was not a completely uniform position, even in the category distinguished on the basis of origin and education. A separate, lengthy monograph would be necessary in order to characterize the similarities and differences between the "Art and the Nation" group, the "Flame" group, and the Catholic "Young People's Truth",

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not to mention the extremely nationalistic "Struggle" and pro-Communist groupings. The writings of Jan Strzelecki and the documents of the Grey Ranks may be accepted as the most appropriate basis for a characterization of the center of Polishness understood as the quintessence of the intellectual and axiological expression of the young generation of Poles most deeply involved in the fight for Polishness. However, Polishness in this specific sense does not exhaust individual identity even in an extreme situation of the life of the nation. This understanding of Polishness grew out of the tradition of families of the intelligentsia and landowners. It was also strongly influenced by the school of the twenty-year interwar period, which faithfully handed down the national canon, and was combined and mixed with the ideology of the Polish legions, of nationalism, the Pathfinders and the Polish Socialist Party. It was very clearly national, but not nationalistic, and was not closed in its Polishness. The best example of open national attitudes may be found in the writings of Jan Strzelecki (Strzelecki, 1974). What is significant is that Strzelecki speaks not only in his own name, but wants to give testimony to his generation. That generation must be understood mainly within the parameters sketched above. However, some of its features also extend to the entire category of young Poles, for whom the war was the formative event of their generation and who responded to the challenge by joining the fight and being ready to devote themselves to this cause. In Strzelecki's meaning this center of Polishness was characterized by deep awareness of facing an existential borderline situation close to Jasper's conception. This situation was magnified many times in comparison with the borderland of cultures, which contains only some elements of such existential extremity. One of the consequences of its influence was a strong feeling of brotherhood, a consciousness of moving "along the edge of life" and an experience in which "I was permeated by us" (Strzelecki, 1974, pp. 33, 15). In attempting to bear witness to this community, Strzelecki spoke years later of life that ran along the edge of death and of torture-inflicted sufferings a lot worse than death that were supposed to force betrayal. Although disinclined to use lofty words of grandiloquent sentimentalism, he nevertheless admitted that life on the edge was indeed aptly described in such phrases as "to face death"; "to go through the school of suffering"; "to sacrifice one's life"; "to fight for people's happiness"; and "to devote oneself to the cause".

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The catalogue of these expressions does not name the cause that was served, nor does it name the enemy nation that created this existential borderline situation. Strzelecki's axiological system was too broad to be contained within the cause of one fatherland, and the frame of his theoretical references did not reduce itself to one national canon. The conflict in which his generation was involved was viewed in wider terms than Poland's war with Nazi Germany. It was apprehended in universal and existential categories. In fact, however, it was a war of the Polish underground with the power of the German army and Nazi military and police organizations. And it was fought not only with military means. The conflict was understood as a fight for human dignity in general, but that generation, or the part of it to which Strzelecki wanted to bear witness, waged the fight for human dignity in Poland, which was abased and threatened in the extreme. That is why Strzelecki wrote of the need to give one's life for values, and to increase beauty and love in the world so as to augment the potential opposition to the crime committed by that nameless enemy referred to only as "they" (ibid., p. 11). In practical terms, this meant that the life of this part of the generation of young Poles during the occupation was united in action, in education and the experiencing of art, in ethics in private life and the struggle for daily existence, in helping people, especially the persecuted, in hiding Jews, and fighting. There was no feeling of a split between two spheres of life here; there was no "make-believe life". All of life served one idea, imposed by the borderline situation but accepted voluntarily. If such a model of sublime attitudes were limited to a small group of friends around Strzelecki, it would be an exaggeration to recognize it as the symbolic center of Polishness under the occupation. However, this model represents a wider, similar, if not identical, type. Tadeusz Zawadzki wrote in 1943 of his activity in the Storm Groups of the Home Army Diversionary Command: "I entered into my work with my entire heart and life and all the more so when I became aware that this was necessary at the time. I quit the Technical College in November last year with full awareness that certain people must sacrifice their personal goals for the good of the whole" (Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 83). This type of devotion shone through in tens of wartime biographies of Pathfinders in the Grey Ranks, Pathfinders in other units and young soldiers of the Home Army in other areas of Poland. Not all of the three-hundredthousand-strong army and organizations engaged in political problems and

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armed struggle could fully realize this model, because the terrible conditions of partisan warfare often placed them in situations that forced them to take morally questionable and unquestionably immoral decisions. However, this chapter is not about the entire historical picture of young Poles of the occupation period. It deals only with that part of this generation that may be regarded as the symbolic and example-setting center of the Polishness of that time. What is important and characteristic here is that in this case this symbolic construction has a real counterpart in the life, actions and death of the people who were the source of this construction. They constituted the empirical type before contemporary and later hagiography turned them into an element of the bond of the imagined national community of Poles during the occupation, and an educational model reaching people through the wartime and postwar censorship (A. Kaminski-Gorecki, A. Kaminski, S. Broniewski). The reality of the life of this exemplary group of Warsaw Pathfinders fighting in the underground was partially but directly expressed in the surviving personal documents revealing their activities and thoughts. These testimonies of everyday life and thoughts that by chance survived the war and forced silence illustrate detached fragments of the occupation period. Tomasz Strzembosz in 1994 published a collection of such documents containing letters, notes, reflections and literary essays. The authors of those accounts, in part known and in part saved from oblivion in this form, were heroes of the books by Kaminski and Broniewski about the Grey Ranks. These are not autobiographies, but are even more personal, more authentic materials, reflecting experiences at the time of their occurrence and constituting the most direct expression of identity. Once again it should be stressed that these authors were not statistically representative of the whole, but were the pith and essence of sublime and noble but not typical values. In this sense they represent the exemplary center of Polishness in a borderline situation of the life of the national community. Nearly all of these persons come from families of the intelligentsia with connections to the landed gentry, with some members of the upper-middle class and higher military circles. They took up the legacy of "Poland of the intelligentsia", whose government Chalasinski charged with the defeat of the Second Republic (Chalasinski, 1984). They rehabilitated the better part of this legacy with their sacrifice. Their accounts are free of the pathos that authors writing about this subject are sometimes accused of. The courage of

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the spiritual and organizational leaders of this group, which went far beyond the limits of the instinct for self-preservation, did not stem from youthful lack of imagination or from a whim to imitate Sienkiewicz's heroes. Such things may be found in the wider ranks of young soldiers of the Home Army, but not in the core group of the Grey Ranks. After a successful military operation Jan Wuttke (Black Fox) wrote in a verse about the "hard game for life in bloody diamonds and scarlet hearts" (Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 155), but in 1942 he warned against letting off steam in battle and against the danger of the emergence of totalitarian attitudes in one's circle. He encouraged his colleagues to study sociology and wrote: "We have too many important things before us to treat them on the level of play and pleasure. We cannot permit the name of Poland to be squandered lightheartedly today or in the future" (Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 186). As late as the fifth year of the war the members of the Grey Ranks strongly felt the contradiction between Pathfinder ideals and code, and the need to fight. Maciej Dawidowski (Alek) made a list of the moral problems and doubts connected with the sense and the ethical side of partisan warfare, with lack of certainty and internal peace, with the heavy burden of remembering participation in killing: "Do we have the right to force people by exploiting enthusiasm and tradition, by giving orders and assigning (for that's how it is) people to such work?" There is a fear implied here that in combating evil one may engage in the same actions as this evil: "What are we fighting for, are we creating Szucha street hangmen or Auschwitz guards?" He feared the psychic consequences of orders to carry out sentences—the "hardening hearts" and "demoralization of the best young people". At the same time, he remained one of the bravest soldiers and leaders of the Home Army Storm Groups. He died in battle soon after he wrote these words. This text, like the previous one and many expressions of Tadeusz Zawadzki (Zoska), contains the picture of a classical moral tragedy. It must be mentioned that young people who were the target of life-and-death struggle and who every day were threatened with a fate worse than death were capable of such feelings. This is what Zawadzki felt and expressed in his account of the martyrdom of Jan Bytnar (Rudy). The various actions of the resistance movement created not only moral but also intellectual problems. This concerns forms of the Small Sabotage campaign. Activities of this type were purely symbolic: tearing down German flags and hoisting Polish ones, writing or painting onto walls an anchor with

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the letter P standing for the battle cry and faith in the nation's victory, taking down German plaques from the monument of Copernicus, and showing the place where Kilinski's monument was hidden. This kind of activity also cost lives. So Tadeusz Zawadzki asked whether this activity, initiated as Wawer Action after the first mass execution of Poles, was not a mistake, since according to some opinions the young Pathfinders, as the future elite, should have been preserved for other purposes. Zawadzki himself answered, and without any reservations confirmed the necessity of both struggle of this type and of the participation of the Pathfinders in the Storm Groups as a continuation of only symbolic forms of resistance (Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 83). The intensification of symbolic manifestations in times of a threat to the nation have been mentioned in previous chapters of this book. Stanislaw Ossowski, as an officer during the September campaign, noticed the strong influence of Sienkiewicz's Trilogy on the peasant soldiers of his platoon (Ossowski, 1989). Reading Sienkiewicz and Mickiewicz kept up the spirits of many people during the occupation. In such conditions the symbolic universe of national culture played a role similar to the function of strictly religious elements. Jozef Czapski correctly observed this in Griazowiec and in Anders army in Yang Yul: "I had no idea how universal the reaction could be to our poets and to Chopin in the mass of Poles, if those Poles are sensitized by blows falling upon them." He aptly described this reaction not only as aesthetic but as having elements of religious attitudes in it: "That's how Jews listened to their prophets" (Czapski, 1990a, pp. 248, 249). Similar experiencing of national symbols was important "to give heart" and to sustain loyalty to the nation during the occupation of the country. Kaminski understood this when he initiated the Small Sabotage campaign and that is how the young executors of this action understood it. Highlighting the achievements of the national culture and its symbols was important for the satisfaction of hubristic needs, the desire to preserve national dignity. During the "times of contempt" in Poland the trampling of dignity was almost as painfully felt as fear and material deprivation. Young people in the Small Sabotage action fought to preserve this value through affirmation of the national culture. Personal needs and criteria of judgment among elite circles of the resistance movement were just as selective and sophisticated in the aesthetic as in the moral sphere. Jan Strzelecki and leaders of the Grey Ranks alluded in their personal reflections to Norwid and Brzozowski rather than to Sienkiewicz.

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Tadeusz Zawadzki referred to Slowacki's My Testament, when more with bitterness than with pride he described himself and his generation as "stones thrown by God on the entrenchment". Their generation were called diamonds, serving Poles in battle with the enemy instead of bullets (S. Pigon, according to K. Wyka, S. Korbonski, 1990, and other sources). In calling these circles of the young wartime generation the center of Polishness they are assigned the nature of a normative model and example, with the understanding that they should not be regarded as the statistical norm. An analysis using individualizing reduction makes it possible to treat the separation of such a type as a methodological step. However, such reduction should be accompanied by awareness that this type is at one extreme end of the scale, at whose opposite end were categories of national traitors, collaborators, and stool pigeons. The categories of this second extreme were associated with the social margin, which expanded considerably during the occupation (Szarota, 1973). The most frequent reactions of the society during the occupation were located between these two extremes. They were more typical in the common understanding, but also differentiated and variable. The special role of the "center of Polishness" is assigned to the first type on account of its role as a normative model, paradigm and criterion of judgment. This role would have been greater and probably more effective had it not been for the historical fate of Polish society and culture after the war. Despite the extremely negative, or at least ambivalent, attitude of the communist authorities towards the Home Army tradition, the example of the generation of Jan Strzelecki and the Grey Ranks broke through during the changing phases of censorship and educational policy. The publication of the studies of sketches by Strzelecki, the books of Aleksander Kaminski and later also of Stanislaw Broniewski created the foundation for the potential influence of this tradition. Kaminski's Stones on the Barricade had ran to seventeen editions by 1993 after being published twice during the occupation. The dates of these editions may be regarded as a barometer of the liberalization of the system until its fall: three editions between 1956 and 1958, one edition in the sixties, two in the seventies, four editions in the eighties and four from 1991 to 1993. The total editions of this fictional story of heroism and patriotism, together with five editions of Kaminski's books Zoska and Parasol and the books of Stanislaw Broniewski (1983, 1984) on the same subject, came to more than one million copies. Jan Strzelecki's publications had a narrower readership,

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but they were very important as the expression of an intellectually sophisticated example of Polishness. After years a critic wrote that "Proby swiadectwa immediately entered into the canon of required reading among independent circles" (Friszke, 1994, p. 285). Kaminski's book to be sure represented a canon of incomparably wider scope. In various periods these books were on the school reading list and were promoted in the Pathfinders' movement. Without special studies it is hard to assess their real influence on national attitudes. For many years a certain reliable, behavioral indicator of the duration of the entire complex of the tradition of the Grey Ranks were visits in crowds to the graves of the Pathfinders at Pow^zki cemetery, and lighting eternal flames at them. From this it is not absolutely clear which elements of the wartime Pathfinders' ethos were widely accepted as the symbolic center of Polishness and whether in addition to patriotism and self-sacrifice this model also contained moral struggles and dramas of obligations in contradiction with these values. One may surmise that only the edition of Stones on the Barricade in 1968 was permitted by the authorities as an element of nationalistic propaganda connected with the fight within the Party and with combating the so-called revisionist opposition. Nationalistic contents definitely were not expressed explicitly in the text, nor was that Kaminski's intention. He was firmly opposed to anti-Semitism, and during the occupation he took part in the campaign to save Jews. The intentions of authors still do not determine how their works will be received. The very descriptions of the situation during the occupation, the repressive measures of the Nazi authorities and the fight by young members of the resistance movement could kindle attitudes of nationalism, albeit this was defensive nationalism typical of the Polish situation since the nineteenth century. In studies of national attitudes among schoolchildren conducted in 1959 and 1988 I found that the main motive for dislike or hostility towards Germans were reminders of their wartime aggression, and the main source of information, especially in the younger age categories, were their parents' and grandparents' recollections of the occupation. The effect of literary models is also estimated against this background. Thus the main factors molding attitudes inhered in non-symbolic reality outside literature. However, the facts were also apprehended and constructed in some manner in semiotic form. The reality underlying the model of Polishness presented here in an extreme situation of crisis was expressed in the most direct way in documents coming from the protagonists of the real actions (Strzembosz, 1994a). In calling the

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model of their attitudes and actions a characteristic example of the center of Polishness, it was emphasized several times that its foundation is not the only one, but is an extreme type of highly crystallized and sublime reactions. Bearing in mind the scale of national affiliation discussed earlier, it may be concluded that this model ranks at the top of scales of Polishness that use different indicators. The indicator here is the strong appropriation of the canon of national culture confirmed by self-identification drawn from the repertoire of this canon (Stones on the Barricade). Coupled with this is strong integration with the national group as a small group, participation in the creation of national culture (Baczynski, Gajcy), and strong national identification on the ideological level proven in the most unambiguous way by the sacrifice of one's life. Of the nineteen heroes of the biograms prepared by Tomasz Strzembosz on the basis of the documents of a group of Pathfinders of the Grey Ranks with whom he was on friendly terms, only three survived the war. Fifteen died in battle, in Gestapo prisons and in Auschwitz, or fell in the Warsaw Uprising (Strzembosz, 1994a, pp. 214, 243). The private correspondence, personal reflections and notes, and the literary essays of this group make it possible to identify the features of national attitudes represented in this model. The previous quotations and numerous passages of the texts show that these were open attitudes, free of nationalism. However, an unavoidable contradiction took place between the behavioral and emotional aspect of these attitudes. They fought and killed, but they also wanted to remain faithful to the Pathfinder principle of regarding all people as neighbors. They took an oath to serve their country and could not accept the principle of non-resistance to evil. While opposing the oppression of the nation and the dire threat to it, they felt inwardly uneasy lest they take on the emotions and patterns of action of the enemy and adopt the practices of "licentious soldiery" (Wuttke, in Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 183). They did not want to place the fatherland ahead of the highest values—for Dawidowski this meant ahead of God—and not want to abuse the catchword "fatherland" (Dawidowski, in Strzembosz, 1994a, pp. 74-75). They were beset with moral problems and misgivings when they moved from Small Sabotage using symbolic methods to actual battle not under the command of leaders with Pathfinder traditions but of the Home Army Diversionary Command, which sometimes required them to participate in terrorist acts of repression (Broniewski, 1982, p. 178; Kaminski, 1970, pp. 21-22).

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These Pathfinder-soldiers fought not only with the enemy, but also with the natural reaction of hatred for the enemy, in accordance with the prayer of Jan Romocki: "O Lord, protect us from wrongs but also from vengeance for them" (Kaminski, 1970, p. 106; Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 206). Such accents also appeared in other circles during the occupation, but for natural reasons they were less frequent (Dmitrow, 1987). Members of the model group the Grey Ranks subordinated their lives during the occupation to conspiratorial tasks, but they did not reduce their identity to these functions. In accordance with the conception of the location of identity (Weinreich, 1991), their thoughts were also directed to the future. They pinned their hopes for a normal life in the future, if at all possible, on their present studies. Friendship also played an important role in their picture of life. There was also a place for love in it. However, a characteristic difference separated the thoughts about the future of this group as expressed in documents from the political projects and programs of the wartime " Wici" (a social-political journal of the Peasant Youth Union) movement from the young members of the socialistic "Flame" group. Communist organizations, which were independent in their ideological conceptions, are not considered here. The articles of the "Flame" group, written with the cooperation of Jan Strzelecki, conjured up a vision of a future Poland that was socialistic in some sense. The program accepted by the regional Cracow peasants' organization "Young Forest", or by the young members of the Peasants' Battalions, who identified with the oppositional but independent peasants' movement, contained slogans about the fight for a future People's Poland. In the light of the published documents the Pathfinders of the Grey Ranks did not reflect upon the problems of the future political system of the Poland for which they died. They were somewhat younger than Strzelecki. After moving to the Storm Groups they defined their social function as soldiers. In other spheres of their identity they were individualistically oriented. This was also true of their thoughts about the future. The moral leaders of the group, among them Aleksander Kaminski, in the future wanted to pursue the occupations of technicians, engineers, lawyers and teachers. They did not want to continue military careers (Kaminski, 1970). Stanislaw Broniewski does not write about the content of ideological education in the courses at "schools beyond the forest". There are no comments on political subjects in either of these sources, which may be due to the fact that the books were published during the period of socialism. Neither does this theme appear in

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the documents published by Tomasz Strzembosz devoted to the reflections of the members of the group. The preserved and published materials are naturally only a small fragment of the picture of the life of that time. However, the general opinion is that rank-and-file members of the Home Army did not focus their attention on political problems. The Home Army Headquarters opposed Aleksander Kaminski's wish to introduce proposals for future social reforms into the Pathfinder wartime textbook The Great Game (Broniewski, 1982). The documents of the Grey Ranks used here do not contain a political dimension mediating between the individual references of the authors' attitudes, their spontaneous reflection, and the sphere of national attitudes. This last sphere most strongly determined the real course of their lives, but it did not monopolize their identity. It differs in this respect from manifestations of militant wartime nationalism, which present in other military and political formations of the occupation. The open national attitude appears most distinctly in the retrospective account of his generation by Jan Strzelecki. The universalism of humanistic values shines through in this version of the model of Polishness. A person's nationality, like nationality in general, is a constituent part of those values. One must fight for it not because it is most dear, but because it is a human right to possess and cultivate it. This center of Polishness in an extreme situation of a crisis that threatens the nation's existence is one of the variants of reactions to the situation of the war and occupation. Other possible variants were mentioned only briefly at the beginning of this chapter. A foundation for constructing many different models may be found in the wartime memoirs, like the model of the exceptional nature of the "make-believe life" during occupation (Ryszka, 1994). The autobiographical materials of the older generation of Poles collected served only as a pilot study and did not reach the degree of saturation, therefore they will not be presented separately. Attention will be focused on the young generation of Poles who are our contemporaries and who are comparable with the young members of minority and regional groups described earlier. This generation is close in age to the generation of Jan Strzelecki and the Grey Ranks during the war, but it differs from them significantly in position, from the standpoint of the situation of the country, national culture and the surrounding world. The model of Polishness in an extreme, borderline wartime situation of the first half of the twentieth century, which was presented through the example

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of retrospection and the personal documents of that time of members of the occupation generation, was heroic not out of free choice but out of the necessity to act in historically determined circumstances. The verses of their poets—also of those less known than Baczynski and Gajcy—resonate with the wish to live, but at the same time are permeated with the consciousness of constant communion with death and suffering and with "a terrible fear like the throes of death" (Jan Romocki, in Strzembosz, 1994a, p. 206). Their death—the deaths of fifteen out of the nineteen—may be summed up in yet another quotation from Slowacki: they "burned out like incense in a moment of sacrifice". A picture of them remains worthy of memory—the last embodiment of the Romantic model. Which models or examples of nationality will the generation of Poles of the end of the twentieth century—a generation facing other conditions and the challenges of another epoch—accept?

17. Young Poles in the Period of the Democratic Breakthrough

Once again it must be mentioned that autobiographical materials used in case studies do not ensure saturation to the same degree as statistical studies on representative samples promise. This became obvious in the last chapter, where the main object of the description was a normative model, the exemplary picture of Polishness presenting the syndrome of personified national values at a time of a mortal threat to the existence of the nation. The purpose of this chapter is to show variants of Polishness in a less dramatic situation. Hence saturation would be desirable, but obviously not a standardized pattern that would be little more than a stereotype. Unfortunately, an exhaustive presentation of all probable varieties is not possible. However, a study of fifteen young Poles completing higher studies or beginning their professional careers in the fourth year of the fundamental transformation of the form of government (1994) at least provides some idea of the variety of scales, and the place of individual reactions on those scales, of national characteristics. This study also furnishes other data on how the lives of young people are influenced by sweeping social changes and by individual factors that require independent decisions and—often—a reorientation of a person's life course. These elements of the autobiographies were considered in the analysis both on account of their connection with national culture and for their own independent importance. In order to obtain greater comparability with minority groups that were associated with the peasant environment, authors from Radom voivodeship were added to those from the Warsaw metropolitan area. However, some of the authors living in Warsaw had peasant or rural genealogy. There are thirteen such cases, but they were not sought out deliberately. There are also

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many peasant-intellectual and worker, even peasant-squire, genealogical alliances, if the authors are to be believed. In the responses a tendency can be detected to embellish genealogies by alluding to aristocratic connections, just as under socialism people were eager to conceal such ties. Peasant roots are a visible sign of social mobility and of the changes in Poland due to urbanization in the second half of the century. A researcher who studies a social collectivity representing a dominant national culture, which, into the bargain, is his own, has a strong feeling of having inadequate data. This explains the tendency to use commonplace knowledge not included in original sources in the analysis. To some extent this is unavoidable and justified by the need for triangulation. On the other hand, this may harm the precision and accuracy of the research apparatus. In order to prevent such possible effects, a small questionnaire addressed to fourth-year students of three Warsaw higher educational institutions in the spring and autumn of 1994 supplemented this part of the study. The results of those questionnaires serve as comparative data in presenting some of the conclusions of the analysis. However, the autobiographies remain the main basis of the study. As expected, the autobiographies of young Poles were not focused on national matters in the same way and to the same degree as the autobiographies of young Ukrainians and some Belarussians and Silesians. Poles do not live on the ethnic-national borderland but in the center. On the other hand, they were the generation of the "Solidarity" social-political breakthrough. The authors were born between 1964 and 1973 and have a median age of 27. Some of them managed to join the movement in the first phase, before martial law, which they experienced very consciously. For others such a period was the end of the eighties. These autobiographies are focused on social activity, especially within the Pathfinders, and for this reason are connected with national attitudes. A similar relationship appears in the other authors as well, because the politics of the period of the overthrow of socialism in Poland was unavoidably marked by social protest on a national scale. Thus the way of thinking about the political events of the time of the breakthrough is regarded as one of the criteria of national attitudes among the persons studied. Another criterion is the place in the autobiography of events from the last war and the manner of talking about them. This indicator also concerns the problem of memory. Recollections of the war were included in

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the long memory of the wartime generation, whose autobiographies were used in the last chapter. For young Poles the war is now only a matter of other people's accounts, oral or preserved in various sources. The "Solidarity" breakthrough, on the other hand, can fit into the shorter time perspective of their memory. In an assessment of the nature of information from this period the private and collective context of memory must be distinguished as one of the indicators of national attitudes. Halbwachs, in his notion of the social framework of memory, took into consideration the social-cultural factors determining the process of remembering connected with space and with objects that enjoy a privileged status in the collective consciousness. Bartlett, in ethnographic African studies (Halbwachs, 1969; Bartlett, 1947), also accepted this second point of view. Autobiographical materials also underscore the role played by reference to the context of personal emotional experiences or to the context of the collective existence and culture of the nation in summoning up memories of the past. The combination of these two contexts is possible, but it does not always take place even when a fact of collective significance enters into the domain of individual experiences and potential experiences. The Round Table discussion and the 1989 elections, which although based on a compromise had far-reaching consequences, were revealed as events of cardinal significance for the life of the nation within the range of potential experiences of all the young people studied. However, not all of them to the same degree included accounts of them in the stories of the most important moments of their lives. Age was not a decisive factor in individual cases. For example, a person born in 1967 from a good Warsaw high school spontaneously mentioned martial law in his autobiography (Y.P. 1), but another person born in the same year does not even mention the events of 1989, even though she was already attending a university at that time. Besides, she said that she remembers secondary school better than higher studies, which in her mind are associated with worry and numerous perplexities about choosing her life path (Y.P.2). Since as a rule the autobiographies of young Poles are not focused directly on the nationality question, at least not exclusively, the biographical narrative concentrates on personal recollections and starts with facts from early childhood, sometimes important only in personal or family experience, such as sickness or even the purchase of an attractive household appliance—for example a refrigerator purchased by parents, the first one in the village.

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Individual differences in the selection of facts remembered are significant from the point of view of social importance in the wide sense. One of the authors mentioned 1981 only on account of having to work hard during the harvest and does not mention anything else about this year (Y.P.I3). Another person, a resident of Warsaw who was fifteen years old at the time, stated that for him martial law was not an unusual experience, but he regards it as a fact that requires a commentary (Y.P.3). Yet another person, one year older, said that after martial law he decided to drop his plans to enroll in the Military Technical Academy, because he became disgusted with everything that had to do with the military (Pathfinder I, Y.P.4). For several persons martial law was the beginning of becoming actively involved in social activity: it mobilized them to join the social protest action in various forms. The account of the earliest remembered experience of a public nature concerns observation of airplanes flying towards Czechoslovakia in 1968. At that time the author of this autobiography was on holiday with his family in southern Poland and was only four years old. However, he insisted that he remembers this event from his own experience and not just from what his family told him. These stories and reactions of people around him at least must have influenced the interpretation of this fact, remembering it and elevating an ordinary experience to the rank of an important emotional experience, a Dilthean Erlebnis. Among other important events of his life the same author mentioned activity in the Pathfinders' Winter Emergency Department during the state of martial law in Warsaw (Pathfinder II, Y.P5). The example of the last author once again shows the deceptiveness of using only one indicator of something as complicated as national attitudes. In the self-identification test Pathfinder II did not mention national identification, and all of his self-definitions in this test were non-institutional. At the same time, numerous other passages of the text gave an indication of strong national feeling. The self-identification test is better suited than many other survey questions for use in mass investigations irrespective of its projective nature. However, the results may depend on many different factors that are difficult to control. That is why it may be misleading to draw the same conclusions from similar answers. The two student questionnaires supplementing the autobiographical study also included the self-identification test that asked point-blank: "Who are you?" In the first study 23.3 percent of students of economics and the technical sciences mentioned nationality, while 74 percent used expressions

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relating to mental characteristics. That category of expressions was in first place; it was mentioned even more often than "student" (52%). In the second study, which covered students of law and education, 70.3 percent of them used national self-identification, and this aspect found itself in third place after "person" and "student". It is hard to explain such a great difference in the results of two questionnaires administered in the space of only five months. It may be suspected that this was due to the "effect of the interviewer", who in the second study might have suggested that the answers ought to be substantival in nature. That could explain the small number of expressions of mental characteristics in the second poll. A similar error would not appear unnoticed in interviews recorded on magnetic tape. In most cases, in the autobiographical questionnaires the self-identification test that asked not "Who are you?" but required the completion of the self-presentation statement "I am ...", did not incline the respondents to display national identification. The autobiographies are full of examples of a very serious involvement (although not focusing the autobiography) in national affairs in the period of the breakthrough. On the other hand, there are also examples of egotistical aloofness or of the domination of practical, selfish interests. As in the case of members of minorities, the selection of the Polish respondents deliberately excluded leaders of political and ideological groupings or persons close to these leaders. Only in two cases did we choose persons affiliated with particular political orientations. Thus the spread of positions in the sample studied does not correspond to the entire gamut of ideological orientations of young Polish intellectuals at the beginning of the nineties. The aforementioned survey also indicates slight interest on the part of students of higher years in organized political life. At a selected course of study at Warsaw Technical University and Main School of Commerce the percentage of members or sympathizers of any particular party came to 30.7. At two university specialties—law and feminist studies—the percentage was 17.6. The percentage of sympathizers and members of leftist parties was 6.7 and 3.4 respectively. In accordance with the selection principle, the authors of the autobiographies constituted a uniform group in terms of nationality. In one of the cases national identification in the text was expressed characteristically as follows: "For me it is obvious that I am a Pole" (Moving Up, Y.P.ll). In accordance with the assumption that what is obvious does not provoke reflection, con-

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centration on the problem of their nationality was not expected from the authors. However, in two other cases the thread of other national elements in the generation of their grandparents appeared in the genealogical information. In one case this was a Russian thread (Y.P.5), in another a Jewish one (Y.P. 14). A Belarussian woman, grandmother of Pathfinder II, was completely assimilated. Only in moments of disturbance of consciousness in her last illness did she speak in Russian, and before her death they summoned an Orthodox priest. However, her origin was not disclosed to the author until he was an adult. According to his account, this happened because his parents believed that in the face of the generally hostile attitude towards Russians the consciousness of Russian family connections might be troublesome for him. Apparently in the text this knowledge exerted no visible influence whatsoever on his national attitudes or on his attitude towards his grandmother, who, anyway, had left Russia during the revolution as a young girl. The second case of mixed genealogy was more complicated. The author of the autobiography from a family of intellectuals was brought up in a workers' district and in school met with the expression "Jew" as a stigmatizing epithet. In his genealogy the author himself emphasized ties with the gentry and the borderlands. But for him the genealogical Jewish thread was a particular personal problem. Yet this was not expressed in his declared interests in Jewish culture or Jewish history. On the other hand, he manifested a tendency to identify with the culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a la Milosz. Once in Lithuania he even passed himself off as a Samogitian. Other authors had no significant threads of "Europe in the family" and rarely expressed their Polish identification explicitly. On the other hand, their Polishness manifested itself on different scales in different ways, but it appeared directly in responses to the question about the fatherland and about attitudes towards other nations. That generation generally has been called the generation of the breakthrough, but the sample of authors studied extended to ten age-groups or demographic cohorts. Thus, formally speaking, they did not belong to one generation, if the range of a generation is limited to seven age-groups. Only one young person, the youngest one, was outside this boundary. Besides, at a very early age this person had become actively involved in political activity in the breakthrough period and referred to her contemporaries as "the last ideological age-group" (Y.P. 14), thereby spontaneously marking the boundary of a subjectively defined generation.

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Above we emphasized that differences of historical experiences depend not only on age. The main probable sociological reasons for this differentiation must be examined next. Autobiographical pronouncements provide no certainty here, notwithstanding the richness of data in comparison with the results of the questionnaire. Often, however, they furnish at least a partial characterization of the social circumstances forming behavior and cultural values. Partially peasant origin in the generation of grandparents dominated in the sample studied. This means the handing down of a uniformly Polish tradition, but—as a rule—it is less consciously instilled than in families of intellectuals. On the other hand, some of the authors showed an interest in family tradition and even attempted to trace their family tree. However, the lack of detailed information and interest was the rule. The historical shock waves experienced by Polish society in the last half century were not conducive to the preservation of the identity of places of residence, things owned, social structures and all other factors that perpetuate memory thanks to tradition and continuity of experiences. One of the authors with an intellectual genealogy emphasized the exceptionality of the example of his own Warsaw family, whose home was not destroyed and whose family mementos, material traces of the past, were preserved (Y.P.5). Another person from a family of intellectuals stemming from the rich peasantry was proud of the memory of the leading social role of his ancestors, at least in the municipality or parish, and of the participation of his grandfathers in the war with the Bolsheviks in 1920 and of relatives in the Second World War. The experiences of the families of the authors of the autobiographies include the German and Soviet camps and the memory of two wartime invasions. More will be said about this in connection with the attitude towards strangers, which at the same time draws the boundary of national familiarity. The autobiographies of this generation in the wide sense have been called here descriptions of the life of witnesses of the breakthrough. In analyzing the testimonies of this generation it must be remembered that the authors' parents grew up in People's Poland, and they themselves were born and spent most of their lives in this political system. This fact enables one to look at the social breakthrough from the point of view of a retrospective picture and to assess the influence of socialist institutions on their decay and fall.

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The analysis enables one to distinguish the following categories of institutions of social-cultural influence: the family, schools and university, the church, peer groups, the Pathfinders, and finally the Independent Students' Union—the latter, together with the church, no longer part of the political system but a force combating it. We have emphasized that there was no autobiography here of a current supporter of socialism close to the Social Democratic Party of the Republic of Poland. On the other hand, the sample included one member of a party with a liberal-democratic orientation and one member of a rightist-Catholic party. They were chosen deliberately as representatives of opposite orientations within the post-Solidarity groupings. It is a different matter in the generation of the authors' parents. Not many authors mentioned the Party membership of their parents. The fathers of two of them held functions in the Party apparatus, three fathers for a certain time were professional officers, and one also held a position that required Party membership. The son of one of the Party functionaries recalls, distancing himself from his own past, that in his childhood he wanted to emulate his father, join the Polish United People's Party and become a "manager". He also remembers that his grandmother on the distaff side refused to carry a portrait of Stalin during the First of May parade and went "to work" instead (Y.P.9). Another author in turn recalls his father, a good professional, who preferred to remain a foreman to the end of his career rather than be promoted at the cost of joining the Party, which was a condition of promotion: "That's just how he was" (Pathfinder III, Y.P.6). However, the Party membership of their fathers did not exert any special visible influence on the national attitudes of the authors according to the autobiographies. The authors' grandfathers were members of the wartime generation. Most of them lived in the countryside and were peasants. Their positions varied considerably, however. None of them was associated with the Peasants' Battalions. Strong links with the Home Army were found in the very patriotic family of the mother of Pathfinder IV (Y.P.9); in the family of the Engineer, whose father boasted that he had participated in the underground movement as an infant, because his grandmother had transported in his baby carriage illegal news-sheets distributed by his grandfather (Y.P.7); and in the intellectual Warsaw family of Pathfinder II. Scanty information about the war, which was often remembered from the stories of other rural grandfathers, concerned the everyday material difficulties of the wartime period more often than public affairs. Other motifs of those recollections will be discussed in con-

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nection with the picture of enemies. The author whom we have called "Moving Up" commented on the lack of any tradition of grand history in his family: "That it was the war [...] that this is history [...] for him [grandfather] it was like he was in church on Sunday and two years ago his horse had collapsed in the field. It was as if life was recorded on magnetic tape in one uninterrupted sequence. He remembered that he got a rifle-shot wound in his arm, but where and why, even his children probably didn't find out" (Y.P. 11). This case may be regarded as an extreme example of meager national tradition. If a family of this type was presented as an important factor of influence, it is not on account of the transmission of grand history, which the authors learned from books, but on account of the molding of fundamental values: the ethos of work, attachment to one's kith and kin, career ambitions, plans to build the kind of home that "once was burned down". Examples of the fathers' conformist political attitudes did not exert a tangible influence on the authors' behavior during the entire period of the political crisis of 1981 to 1989. One may regard this as one of the signs of the internal disintegration of the system. Pathfinder IV, who in childhood wanted to be a member of the Polish United Workers' Party, in the eighth grade of primary school joined the school underground movement. Later he was a member of the Citizens' Committee. He says that his father, a Party member, "in verbal declarations was an anti-Communist". His mother's family had strong links with the Home Army and its members barely escaped "exile among the polar bears" (Y.P.9). A significant other for him was his grandmother's brother, a prewar Pathfinder, who handed down the tradition of Andrzej Malkowski. So it is understandable that, notwithstanding the Party affiliation of his father, he encountered no strong resistance in his family to his activity in the political opposition. He also underlined the paradoxical nature of his family situation. Similar paradoxes were common in People's Poland and were connected with the special nature, comparatively speaking, of the Polish version of socialism. Political attitudes during the Solidarity period in an obvious way were strongly linked with national attitudes. On this plane the generation of the political breakthrough came into contact with the school, Pathfinders and church as the three most important public institutions, in addition to the family, that shaped their social-cultural attitudes, or at least were the background of this process. The individualizing approach appropriate to the method used here brings to light the diversity and not the repressive nature

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of the school institutions with which the authors of the autobiographies had to do. These were renowned Warsaw secondary schools—Batory, Rej, Lelewel—and rural and small town schools in Radom voivodeship. Most of the authors devoted a lot of attention to school memories, which constituted a considerable part of the experiences which they remembered. These remembrances, in the free response autobiographical part, for the most part concern life with peers rather than school programs. In the seventies and eighties the school handed down the canon of national culture already without the drastic selection made in the years of Stalinism. Although Marxist interpretations were retained in textbooks, the canonical part itself did not differ markedly from what it was before the war. So it was the source of national tradition. If any resistance appeared to this transmission, it was more likely on the part of young people themselves. The author of one of the autobiographies admits that he did not read Master Thaddeus from start to finish. A student questionnaire of 1994 also indicates faint memory of this most canonical of all canonical works for decades. Although in the open question 55 percent of the respondents mentioned Mickiewicz among the authors every Pole ought to know, 39 percent of them showed only minimum knowledge of the poem and 43 percent gave no answer at all to this question in the test. Taking into consideration the complementarity of individual parts and the assisting role of films and television, it must be acknowledged that the school period furnished the age-groups studied with knowledge that permits one to speak of a national community of communication through literature, national art and history, embracing at least secondary-school graduates. None of the authors mentioned the primary and secondary school as an institution that had helped to form his personality. Few teachers were mentioned as significant others. Only higher studies left visible traces in this regard. Neither did anyone mention the school as an especially repressive institution in the political sense, although the omission and distortion of historical truth in school programs was mentioned. Some authors looked for the true history of Poland in illegal publications: for example the works of Albert-Roszkowski, and Michnik (Y.P.12). One of the authors remembered how his teacher, in a hushed voice, spoke of Katyri during a lesson. The Lawyer's autobiography contains a characteristic example of a manifestation of school opposition. He presents the growth of his political interests under the influence of news from the press and from "Free Europe", and

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against this background, describes a spontaneous, unplanned demonstration that bordered on a pupils' prank: during an art lesson he had written "Down with Communism!" on the bulletin board. "There was a bucket of red paint there [...] There were three or four of us boys who weren't painting because we didn't want to, so I proposed that we write something on the wall, just for a joke" (the author used a stronger expression) (Y.P.I 2). This is reminiscent of 1823 in Wilno, when pupils wrote on the school blackboard the words "Long live the Constitution", an incident which started the Philomaths movement. However, here the epoch and circumstances were different: it was the year 1988 or 1989. The writers of the slogan bravely and proudly admitted to their deed, but they did not suffer any consequences for it. In emphasizing the function of the school attended by young Poles of the breakthrough period in passing down the canon of national culture, it should be added that the autobiographies confirm opinions about its limited educational influences. The role of the Pathfinders in the seventies clearly stands out against this background, because this was a universal compulsory school organization. In the eighties the authors voluntarily associated themselves with the Pathfinders when the influence of the opposition movement based on the tradition of Andrzej Malkowski and the developing Independent Pathfinders' Movement grew stronger (Strzembosz, 1994b). According to Tomasz Strzembosz's estimates, in the autumn of 1980 around one hundred thousand young people in Poland and around nine hundred instructors were involved in this movement. Thus the Pathfinders' autobiographies analyzed here are hardly something marginal as a manifestation of the breakthrough period. Whether the activity of a considerable number of Pathfinders had the nature of opposition or resistance is a matter of definition and does not seem to be the most important thing (Friszke, 1994). But it should be stressed that the entire Pathfinders as an institution was not of such a nature. No statistical conclusions can be derived from the number of politically active Pathfinders in the set of authors of autobiographies. As many as four authors of the autobiographies analyzed here were given the cryptonym "Pathfinder". These were only persons whose association with the Pathfinders exerted, according to them, a real influence on their life course and constituted a clear, even main axis around which the autobiographical text was crystallized. Pathfinder I, who is from the provinces, started to be active in the Pathfinders in the eighth grade of primary school, but did not concentrate all of his energies in the Pathfinders until martial law, when this

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activity assumed a new nature: "All of my cultural-social life started to revolve not around class, not around school, but passed to the forum of people from different circles, different cities. My way of life certainly changed [...] it is consistent with the law of the Pathfinders." "At the university I did not cease being a Pathfinder [...] sometimes one has to sacrifice something for others" (Y.P.4). That sacrifice consisted in periodically neglecting studies for the sake of working with the team. Pathfinder II, who comes from a Warsaw family with strong intellectual traditions, voluntarily embraced this necessity. In his case the decision to become involved in the Pathfinders was the result of long and hard thought. He feared becoming involved "with an organization subordinated to the Communist Party". After five years of work with this organization he did not feel controlled and says that he was completely free within his troupe, despite the denunciations against him for taking the Pathfinders to mass in church in uniforms during summer camp. His conception of the mission of the Pathfinders called for personal abstention from participation in institutional forms of political opposition. For he believed that "it was wrong to allow children to get involved in such a political struggle [...]. They won't remember what they were fighting for, only the means". Reflecting generally on the dilemma of combining struggle with educational activity, the author aptly referred back to the dramatic situation of the Grey Ranks and the moral conflicts that their members felt. "I did not conduct any such struggle through the Pathfinders. On the other hand, by having influence on children and bringing them up to be honest people in a dishonest system, well, I acted against this system in a natural way, although I obviously do not have any real measurable merits in destroying this system" (Y.P.5). These reflections deserve attention in connection with the more general moral problem that people had in functioning in Poland in the epoch of socialism, and with their different positions in relation to it. Pathfinder II gained certainty as to the sense of work in the Pathfinders after the first experiences in the Pathfinders' Winter Emergency Department during martial law. That activity consisted in helping people who found themselves in difficult circumstances, families of the interned, etc. The text of another autobiography confirms the aptness of his remarks on the interest of very young people in struggle, which dominated over the assessment of the ideological sense of its goals. The author of that autobiography—a member of the opposition—became enthusiastic about participation in the "snow-

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storms" (street demonstrations), hence mainly about the form of the struggle itself. Like one other author (Y.P.8), this author (Y.P.I4) was given the cryptonym "Politician". It should be noted that despite diametrically opposite ideological orientations, both of them represent the same conception of politics as a way of life. Znaniecki, in his typology of "people of the present", included people in the category "people of fighting play". Politician II, a liberal who probably is unfamiliar with Znaniecki, compares his political interests with the leisure time activities of his colleagues and says that for him politics is also an optional activity, "in a certain sense a game, play", although he cautions that it is not only "a game for power". Politician I, a nationalist, calls politics his "hobby" and passion. In accordance with his ideological position, in both the test and the text he emphasizes the importance of his Polishness, but the accounts of his life course testify first and foremost to his passion for political activity. The definitions of the fatherland by Politicians I and II do not express any special emotions. Both of them are defined by elements of theoretical reflection. Politician II attaches importance to Polish cultural distinctness, but describes Polish patriotism as "buffoonish" and lacking realism. In the identification test he called himself a Pole, but in the light of criteria of valence, the indicators of his mastery of national culture are low. On account of his attachment to Russian literature, he can be called bivalent. Politician I, a nationalist, remembers well patriotic songs that Politician II either did not know or had forgotten, but in light of the criterion of knowledge of the canon of higher culture his position on the valence scale is low. The attitude towards the national culture is a function of his political passion and seems rather declarative and instrumental. The incommensurability of the scales is clear in both cases. In the biographies of Pathfinders I and II one can find material for an assessment of the attitudes of Poles during the epoch of socialism, as broached by Pathfinder II. For Pathfinder III, who comes from the countryside, participation in the Pathfinders started with First of May parades and waving banners in front of the tribunal, which he later reproached himself for, but he explained that at that time he did not understand the ideological meaning of those facts. He called the year 1981 a turning point in relation to socialism. After this period an emissary of the free Pathfinders, a student from Cracow, brought to his school the conception of a reform of the movement. "After 1981 none of us any longer could accept [...] that official hypocrisy" (Y.P.6). In this period the Pathfinders became the most important cause for

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him. "That organization shaped me in a certain sense [...] it opened my eyes [...] helped me to develop." The double role of the Pathfinders in socialist Poland appears even more clearly in the text of Pathfinder IV, which brings to light the paradoxes felt in his family and in society. Through his mother's family he took up the tradition of the prewar Pathfinders and the struggle of the Home Army during the occupation. From his tenth year "I tied my life to the Pathfinders up to this day; first it was a lark, a lot of fun, then [...] it became something else" (Y.P.9). Only after some time did he become aware of the political subordination and the political ambitions of the "generals" in the Pathfinders. For him the announcement of martial law was a moment of enlightenment, in which he was helped by the family tradition "of the real Polish Pathfinders" that exists right "under his skin". Despite this, he was troubled by the thought that he was engaging in a kind of "political prostitution". The portrait of Cardinal Wyszynski was exhibited at the camps of his troupe and the young people under his charge were never asked to swear allegiance to socialism, but the Pathfinders were led out to march in the First of May parade with the awareness that otherwise the troupe might be disbanded "with a single stroke of the pen". Under the constant threat of being expelled from the Pathfinders "in defending myself I had to pretend that I was not acting against socialism. That was a seeming paradox". He summed up his stance as follows: "I think that this is what one had to do at that time" (Y.P.9). Irrespective of compromises and camouflage, in the light of the autobiographies the Pathfinders, more strongly and effectively than the school, inculcated national attitudes by a return to interwar traditions, the repertoire of Polish Legions' songs, the cult of Pilsudski, and literature, including Aleksander Kaminski's book Kamienie na szaniec (Stones on the barricade). Although in the last decade of the Polish People's Republic Kamienie was on the school recommended reading list, the book exerted a stronger influence in the Pathfinders. Memory of the heroes of the Grey Ranks appears in several of the Pathfinders' autobiographies (Y.P.4; Y.P.5; Y.P.8; Y.P.12). The Lawyer, who for a certain time was also strongly involved with the Pathfinders, remembers a social evening in his school devoted to the Warsaw Uprising, with a recitation of passages from Kamienie, verses of Baczynski, and the staging of passages through the sewers. According to the author's

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account, the performers of this show were very moved and repeated it only reluctantly at an official gathering attended by the local authorities (Y.P.12). Thus the model described in the last chapter as the center of Polishness in a critical moment of national existence revived in the mind of the young generation of the period of the political breakthrough. It must be cautioned, however, that this was only one of the kinds of reaction to the social transformations in narratives produced after the collapse of the socialist system. Another variant is contained in an autobiography whose author, an active Pathfinder, combined the cult of the Grey Ranks, the Home Army and the Diversionary Forces with a criticism of the tradition of martyrdom, and called for the cultivation of the pursuit of success and not the glorification of grand defeats (Y.P.8). That position is connected with an orientation that will be described in the next chapter. On the other hand, the religious motif, which at the same time is one of the national values characteristic of this period, is closely connected with the Pathfinders in the autobiographies. However, "characteristic" here does not mean universal. The texts do not contain all variants of attitudes of the generation selected for study. The absence of autobiographies of young representatives of the post-communist Left has already been mentioned. Even outside that Left a certain differentiation exists in the general attitude towards religion, and an even greater variety of shades. However, the dominant element of this sphere of public life in Poland in the eighties was the support that the opposition movements found in the church. Here we must recall the position of Adam Michnik, who with gratitude remembers the kindliness he encountered in Catholic circles associated with Tygodnik Powszechny. This was the position of another opposition faction that first emerged from the internal revolt of "searchers of contradictions" within socialism. Other sources resorted to help from religion in efforts "to bring up honest people in a dishonest system", which was characteristic of part of the Pathfinders. The texts analyzed also contain information about individual, traditional forms of participation in religious practices, for example repeated pilgrimages to Cz^stochowa. A new variety of religious practices in comparison with traditional, perhaps stereotypical Polish rites also appear in the narratives. Several authors spoke of their participation in national oasis actions, of ties with Taize and of trips to France to international meetings of this movement.

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None of the biographies in the sample is entirely focused on experiences of this kind. On the other hand, there are descriptions of emotional experiences that shed interesting light on the formation of the overall identity of young people in Poland at the close of the twentieth century. Some of these descriptions provide evidence of attempts to break out of the mold of traditional, customary forms of religious practices through awareness of the possibility of deeper forms of religious experiences. The emphasis is on the awareness of possibilities rather than on such experiences themselves, because except for one case there was no evidence of deeper and more lasting emotional experiences approaching religious illumination or mystical communion. Some Ukrainian autobiographies were closer to such experiences. Pathfinder II, who was also a leader of a group in the Catholic Intellectuals' Club, recalls that he had a certain religious experience in France during a Taize conference, but he commented upon it as follows: "As one can see, that was an entirely unimportant episode, because I had even forgotten about it." However, he remains aware of the possible value of similar experiences and also mentions "a certain religious experience in singing Holy Father in a big church" (Y.P.5). The Lawyer, who attended oasis meetings four times, also spoke only of "a moment" of religious experience, but also said that God is constantly present in his life (Y.P.12). The Technician, who has musical interests, laid a stronger accent on traditional ties with religion. For him religion is first and foremost a prop in difficult moments of life. This concerned not only the dogma of the faith but also ties with the parish institution of Nazarene Families. Apart from his family, the most significant others in his life were two priests. In secondary school he also became attracted to religion out of cognitive interests, not only out of the instrumental need to find mental protection against the anxieties of life. In the survey conducted among students of the technical sciences and economics, 10.7 percent used statements referring to religion in the self-identification test. As in the autobiographies analyzed, various kinds of religiousness unquestionably lay hidden behind this number. Religion in these last texts most clearly was understood as a source of symbols expressing social and national opposition to the system. Religion here is treated instrumentally rather than as a value for its own sake. The example of a member of a rightist organization is typical of this approach. He refers to religion in the self-identification test, but he speaks of religious acts and not of religious experiences.

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He recalls regular attendance at religion classes as an occasion for afterschool contacts with peers. The Third of May masses are the background for political demonstrations. Numerous pilgrimages to Cz^stochowa are described as successive propaganda actions in support of Solidarity. Masses for the fatherland are also an occasion for manifestation of common political attitudes. There is no information in the text about religious experiences that in any way were associated with important facts of the autobiography. One may surmise that this is an example of a typical phenomenon for this period of the political breakthrough, but it requires closer analysis on the basis of more extensive materials. It cannot be said that purely religious experiences were entirely alien to the author of this autobiography in the course of his life. However, there was no place for them in a more extensive narrative. Other authors repeatedly brought into relief the special closeness of religious and national symbols characteristic of Polish culture: the church songs Our Lady and God Save Poland were treated like national anthems and as elements of the canon of the national culture. A quotation from Milosz, which also had a religious connotation, read before the monument to the fallen shipyard workers became a new canonical text. The connection of religion with the national cause and with politics was a general feature of this period, just as it had been in the past in other "special moments" of the life of the nation. Despite the fact that the autobiographies of young Poles were not as focused on the national problem as the autobiographies of the members of minority groups—people of the borderland—the Polish autobiographies combined other values with nationality. On the other hand, it was hard to decide whether the focusing value was more often nationality and the dependent value politics, or vice versa. In numerous cases religiousness joined with both of them to create a unified identification complex. An intensification of the indicators of this complex of values would constitute a certain basis for the construction of a scale of Polishness related to the data of the first, spontaneous part of the autobiographical narrative. However, here as well the incommensurability of indicators already appears clearly in certain persons. The very conception of a political value raises a certain serious doubt that appears in the accounts of actions. On the one hand, it is good when the authors do not confine themselves to verbal declarations of attitudes, but on the other hand value as a Parsonian catechetical (focusing) object of an attitude must be more closely defined by analysis. This value, left unsaid, may be sover-

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eignty, democracy, truth, and undefined freedom. The anti-value—socialism or the Communist system—as the antithesis of the first three values, especially of the last one, is the most clearly described. A hermeneutic operation of moving from the clearly expressed anti-value to positive values runs a considerable risk when the object of the interpretation is mainly a description of events. That is why the second part of the interview constituted an important basis of the analysis. It concerns appreciation and knowledge of the national culture and the culture of other nations, and of the national symbols mentioned in the first part of the biographical narrative by some, but not all, authors. Appreciation and appropriation of the national culture is described in the theory adopted here as cultural valence. In the previous analysis of national minorities, peripheral regions and other spheres of borderland cultures, attention was focused on the phenomena of bivalence, ambivalence and polyvalence characteristic of them. The Polish cultural center represented by the texts analyzed here provides mainly examples of univalence. However, that assertion applies to the appropriation of the canonical, representative culture, the one that Pierre Bourdieu called the authorized culture, instilled by the school and other institutions through the mechanism of "symbolic compulsion". That sphere of culture is examined here first, because it has special importance for the determination of the collective identity of the nation, although it does not arise from the source of one national tradition (see Diagram 1, p. 27). However, if the appropriated culture of a central group is mainly univalent—Polish—then its individual appropriation obviously is not uniform. The group studied does not furnish data for the creation of the widest possible scale of differentiation since it is uniform in respect to the formal level of education—although not its nature. Except for two eventual cases, it does not contain any example of a purely humanistic specialty or of careers of intellectuals. This is a non-statistical representation of the intellectual center shaped by social processes of transformations and advances. In the twentieth century, the situation of the national center in Poland after 1918 differed from that of the generation of national minorities in respect to access to the national canonical culture. In modern societies, that culture is transmitted mainly by the formal educational system, even if private transmission in the family still retains the crucial role of early and lasting initiation. Both in the Second Republic and in People's Poland the school system of

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minorities was considerably neglected. For this reason, and also on account of other factors weakening and delaying the development of their own higher culture in Belarus and Ukraine, the transmission of the national or ethnic culture of national peripheries was confined mainly to folklore. The Polish culture dominant since 1918 favored the transmission of national culture in the official school curriculum. The only exception to this is the period of the occupation. During the heyday of the Stalinist period political-ideological pressure caused a painful breach in the traditional canon, and on the elements of the canon that it permitted to remain it imposed interpretations that suited the propaganda goals and theoretical dogmas of Marxism in its vulgarized form. This pressure applied especially to the positivist pose of the nineteenth century. A flood of Soviet propaganda and culture was forced upon the public. In the field of "mass songs" for a few years it even threatened to inundate the entire area of popular national culture and was a dike against popular Western culture. That situation started to change in the sixties. The authors of the autobiographies could encounter, at most, relics of Socialist Realism in old editions of books and in the opinions of some teachers. On the other hand, they were still constantly exposed to political propaganda in school. School curricula gradually changed, however. Despite later fluctuations, after October 1956 the school could transmit many basic elements of humanistic culture, in which elements of the Romantic canon once again dominated. That cultural policy was dictated by manipulative considerations and the desire to legitimize the political system at least through actions in the cultural field, given the economic inefficiency of the system and its political rejection by most of the society. This policy also may have been connected with the ambitions of successive political leaders, who wanted to appear in the role of protectors of culture, from which they felt partially disinherited in the previous system (Kloskowska, 1990). Finally, older teachers quickly returned to prewar educational patterns and practices that they remembered from their youth and regarded as the only correct ones. On the other hand, the traditional national canon underwent erosion on account of a change in the situation of its recipients. The passage of time, filled with social changes, did its work. An important factor here was the spread of higher education among socially mobile young people, who were unprepared by their families for the appropriation of nineteenth-century literature—either Romantic or Positivist. In studies conducted in the middle

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of the seventies I found a collapse in the reading of Zeromski and only a selective influence of Mickiewicz. Only Sienkiewicz reigned unchallenged in the position of the most-read and best-loved national writer. The Romantic and other canons were revitalized during the Solidarity period, including earlier elements of the national tradition, as a result of church cultural events, the individual competencies of some leaders of the movement, such as Zbigniew Bujak, the editors of Tygodnik "Solidarnosc ", and activists of local centers of the movement. The motivation behind these events was the search for symbols adequate to the needs of the moment—one of the most important in the nation's history. The prominent intellectual Jozef Czapski, as well as the young Engineer from the provinces quoted above, who spoke of how strongly people experience patriotic values during periods of history-making turning points, pointed out the role of such moments in intensifying national feelings. During the period when the study was carried out the breakthrough had already occurred, although its consequences turned out to be limited. The "special moments" of national feelings had passed. Nationalism became an instrument of the political game, and most elements of the canon took on the role of material remembered more or less clearly from school textbooks. In accordance with the concept of valence, the national culture, as its essence, is supposed to be an instrument of expression, active familiarity with something and not only knowledge about something, the habit of communing with symbols constituting the sphere of reality shared with communities closest in terms of destiny, emotions and the understanding of many important elements of the world. This can be univalence, bivalence or polyvalence. So depending on those three variants the collectivity that is the object of reference can be one, or mainly one, or two or more. No developed national culture flows from only one source, so certain elements of polyvalence are already contained in any one national culture. Examined from the ground up, from the grass roots level, irrespective of this the culture of an individual may be rooted in various national canons, although usually not as deeply and comprehensively as in the culture that is his most personal one. Our aim was to check the forms of this rooting by asking about the national canon and universal canon of educated young Poles at the end of the twentieth century. These questions were expressed as a request to define duty, the value recognized in different fields of the representative culture, that is, of the one Bourdieu called authorized. We obviously were more concerned with a

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synthesis of felt, practiced values. However, getting to them is more difficult than discovering at least opinions about approbation and duty, that is, the canon as a norm fixed in the canonical texts of the culture. The autobiographical interview was somewhat better suited for this task than an ordinary questionnaire. However, we also made use of a questionnaire so as to obtain at least a superficial quantitative distribution of opinions about the canon in the postmodern age of the distortion of criteria of judgment and norms. The question we asked Warsaw students of economics, law and the technical sciences in the spring of 1994, and students of pedagogy and law in the autumn of the same year, was whether there are works of art, historical facts and personages that every Pole ought to know. In the first questionnaire 82.7 percent of those polled, and in the second questionnaire 87.8 percent, answered in the affirmative. Only 9.3 percent and 4.7 percent respectively answered in the negative. Hence the vast majority did not question the norms of the canon. Except with respect to music, examples of canonical elements given in the answer to the open question did not vary from the established positions of the classics and the hierarchy of school curricula. Such opinions among young intellectuals may be regarded as pedestrian. These opinions in part very likely were an expression of conformist indifference to the problem of the study. Answers to several questions checking elementary familiarity with the canonical literary positions mentioned showed very faint memory of their content and surprising general information gaps in a certain number of respondents. In the first questionnaire 17 percent could not even name the author of Kordian. In the second, while 55 percent did mention Mickiewicz as a required classic, only 8.8 percent were able to give more than one correct answer on the subject of Jacek Soplica's confession. In the eighties, 80 percent of a national representative sample could recite by heart at least the beginning of the invocation to Master Thaddeus (Pisarek, 1990). Ten years later the situation probably had not changed very much, because no radical changes were made in the school curriculum. After the heroic period of Solidarity, for most Poles, even young and educated ones, Romantic literature once again became a matter of school knowledge or the lack of it, not a living element of cultural valence. In light of the two student questionnaires the new content that has replaced some of the Romantic works does not come from new literature but from the visual media. That is probably the explanation for much the better memory of The Wedding than of Master Thaddeus. That memory may be due more to Andrzej Wajda than to

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Wyspianski himself. An even more extensive memory of the Trilogy may come from films and not reading. As long as the school does not abandon the traditional canon, a return to the sources will be possible and hypothetically probable in special moments of national tension. An appreciation of the traditional canon appeared even more clearly in the authors of autobiographies representing the generation studied. The position of this canon was weaker than in the young prewar intelligentsia, but in compensation for that it was spread to young people of other social classes. It must be stressed that the persons studied were members of the generation that had participated in the Solidarity political breakthrough. This had an effect on their reactions vis-à-vis the national culture. In comparing their autobiographies with the questionnaires of students a few years younger, the possibility of certain differences resulting from this reason should be kept in mind. However, the effect of age is not clear cut. The texts of the autobiographies permit a somewhat deeper probing into the role of the canon by showing different variants, while refraining from conclusions as to how widespread these variants are. Dominant among the authors of the autobiographies are the so-called canonists, who sometimes experience this canon very emotionally. An unambiguous definition of felt values is difficult even on the basis of much more copious and more spontaneous material than the questionnaire data. The abundance of detailed information in the pronouncements is not an infallible indicator, since such abundance could come from a good level of humanistic education and demanding teachers in secondary school. It should be noted that the authors themselves sometimes used the term "canon", even though the researchers did not use it. One person, as the basis of exemplification, describes what "such a Pole—the man-in-the-street" ought to know. Two positions may be distinguished among the few "canonical skeptics": one according to which the very principle of canonical compulsion is questionable, and another that expresses doubt as to the reality of this normative requirement. The Individualist calls the question as to what every Pole ought to know "idiotic". He asked a rhetorical question in return: "And if he doesn't know it, so what?" (Y.P.3). The Teacher, the only specialist in Polish language and literature in the group, who for years has been drilling the contents of the canon into young people's minds, expressed the opinion that it is unrealistic to expect the canon to have wide scope (Y.P.2). Finally, one person disclosed a lack of understanding of, rather than approbation for,

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the recognized hierarchy of culture. As examples of works that every Pole ought to know he first mentioned Verne and Szklarski, "because a book is a book". Then he mentioned Mickiewicz, the battle of Grunwald and the song Mother of God, as things that "always moved him" (Y.P. 11). In most authors standard positions from the Polish language and history curriculum dominate as an illustration of canonical content. The main accent is on the battle of Grunwald, and, in the fine arts, its portrayal in Matejko's painting. Sienkiewicz is the most important author in literature, although one may doubt whether he owes his position to literature or to films and television, as in the case of The Wedding. From the standpoint of cultural initiation this is an important difference, but it does not have any effect on the evaluation and position of this value in the comprehension of the respondents. Sienkiewicz {Deluge, Pan Michael, Teutonic Knights) is mentioned in the context of Master Thaddeus, Mother of God and the national anthem. One of the respondents states point-blank, that"The Trilogy is Poland's national anthem" (Y.P. 10). In describing his understanding of the concept of fatherland, Pathfinder IV includes in its compass Matejko and Sienkiewicz's Trilogy (Y.P.9). The Humanist, from a Warsaw family of intellectuals, states that Sienkiewicz and Mickiewicz are equally important in the canon of national literature and says: "There is no Pole without Sienkiewicz." On the other hand, he expresses the opinion that nothing has appeared in the literature of the twentieth century "without which one cannot be a Pole", that makes one "feel a tie, with a tingle under the skin [...] in the society and in the individual" (Y.P.I). This author is a special case, because his literary experiences are rich and embrace the highly valued Herbert, the less valued Milosz, Herling-Grudzinski, and, from foreign literature, Shakespeare, Shaw, Kafka, and the classics of Russian prose. On the other hand, the entire knowledge of literature in many of the others is confined to a model that can be called "a canon of the Zagloba type", to paraphrase Boy-Zelenski. Several authors express not only approbation for The Wedding, but also a strong feeling of its value. " Wedding—mandatory", one author repeated twice (Y.P.9). A second stated outright that The Wedding "embedded itself very deeply in my memory and my heart" (Y.P.5). A third stated that The Wedding had exerted a significant influence on his "historical, national thinking, one can say" (Y.P. 6). Taking into consideration the peasant family background of these authors one may infer that Wyspianski's treatise, infused with the idealization of the peasantry typical of his age, still carries weight in the never-ending discussion of the

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Poland of the intelligentsia and the Poland of the peasantry. Kamienie na szaniec is also included in the canon (Y.P.4). The example of the Humanist demonstrates that approbation of the "Sienkiewicz" canon may coexist with being well-read and having intellectual aspirations. The Trilogy was the first book that many Poles read after Poland's defeat in September 1939, when they also needed cheering up. As a previously quoted Silesian German noted, The Trilogy, which he read with pleasure, can also serve as the support for national megalomania. It can also be a swashbuckling adventure story of the movie variety. Another model of Polishness appears fleetingly and less distinctly in the autobiographies. In one of the autobiographies it is expressed through summoning up Norwid, Zeromski, Borowski and Naikowska. It is not consciously opposed to the dominant canon. The author, a Pathfinder, also a reader of Rev. Tischner, states that for him Norwid was "something quite exceptional against the background of our Romantics" (Y.P.6). After the example of Norwid, this variant can be called the model of "the bitter bread of Polishness". All authors of the autobiographies representing the Polish national center could draw from the rich stock of their national culture transmitted by the school. They were in a different situation from members of a minority acquiring an education in circumstances of the dominance of the majority culture while being more deeply rooted in their national folklore. In the Polish group there are far fewer references to folk culture, although the questionnaire part of the interview gave an opportunity for this and most of the respondents had peasant origins. Attachment to the countryside, which was previously noted, expresses itself rather in sentiment for the general atmosphere of interpersonal relations. In two cases this is supplemented by an active interest in folk music. The problem of the relationship between approbation of the canon and the practice of cultural choices could be the subject of a separate study also using the autobiographical method. In focusing attention on national cultures, we had to consider here the attitude towards foreign cultures. The authors usually treated this problem, which arose at the end of a long interview, very briefly. Positions with respect to foreign cultures had appeared sporadically already in answer to the question about the cultural knowledge every Pole ought to have. In accordance with Diagram 1 (p. 27), cultures outside the syntagma of their own culture were not ignored or rejected. The text of Politician II, who, in answer to the question about the canon for Poles expressed aloofness to

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Polish Romanticism, represents a special case. The classics of Russian literature dominated in his general canon of culture: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and Pushkin. However, he admitted to a poor knowledge of writers from the West. He could not even recall the names of Camus and Flaubert. In his interests politics dominated over literature. During an excursion to Lithuania he called himself a Samogitian (Y.P.14). Russian (but never Soviet) literature also appeared in other accounts. This should be emphasized on account of the negative image of Russians, as based on other data from the autobiographical interview. Literature was not foremost in the universal canon that the authors presented. The school curriculum, which devotes more place in this field especially to France and Italy (Szpocinski, 1995), did not leave a lasting impression. The picture of the world outside Poland was constructed mainly from elements of historical events, political personalities, cultural monuments and places that the respondents had already visited or would like to see. In sum, the bulk of the experiences and judgments of the representatives of the generation studied were univalent in the field of "higher", canonical culture, which was entirely dominated by the national culture. The Individualist (Y.P.3), who rejected the very idea of a canon, represented an entirely different, extreme variant. His literary choices eliminated Polish authors entirely, but included Poe, Bulgakov, Vonnegut and Hasek. Even those persons who expressed approval of the official, school canon did not confine their personal, voluntary cultural choices to that canon. Tastes in popular culture that did not fit within the official canon presented a different picture. If it is acknowledged that beat and rock music is still an important means of expression for this generation of young adults, it must be stated that this introduces elements of cultural bivalence into its attitudes. This is one of the factors of universalization, a wide opening up beyond the borders of one's own culture, because it unites various levels of education and young generations. Popular art, especially music, may protect against becoming locked up in one national tradition and may open the borders of other communities. For the generation of 1968 in Poland and elsewhere in the world that art was a stimulator of, and instrument for expressing, social protest. In Poland, however, this was protest with unavoidable national accents. The trigger was the political affair connected with Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve in the National Theater.

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For that generation, however, popular youth music imported from the West was a sign of participation in the national social protest movement, as well as a departure from the lifelessness of socialist culture, and an expression of opening up to the Western world. In the eighties Polish popular culture produced its own artists and groups and, if not its own style, at least its own content with direct relevance to the problems of the national crisis. Not all of the well-known names of this specific extra-canonical canon appear in the autobiographies. For example, there is no mention of the "Perfect" and "Dezerter" groups. The most often mentioned names are Kaczmarski and Pietrzak, as well as Przemyslaw Gintrowski, Grzegorz Turnau and the "Republika" group. The Humanist made the following comment on the difference between his generation and the previous ones: "We took for our model not Lennon and McCartney but Kaczmarski and Gintrowski." The music of this generation was filled with "jingoistic tones. Singing verses in churches" (Y.P.I). Rota, God Save Poland, church music from the mass for the fatherland and the song My Country once again accompanied these singular moments of the eighties. Politician I, who said nothing directly about national feelings, spoke of these group songfests of national-religious songs as "an emotional experience that I doubt I will ever again have in my life" (Y.P.8). The way that common experiences of political, religious and national values blended into one arose from the special historical situation that placed its stamp on the youthful years of the authors of the autobiographies and, together with them, on several age-groups of young Poles who found themselves in a similar life situation and similar status roles. Situations of that type previously were called "special moments" of national existence. Students polled by the questionnaire already belong to the next generation. As one of the youngest authors of the autobiographies said, despite the fluidity of the boundary determined by dates of birth, which often partially overlap, they are already on the other side of the boundary. This does not mean a complete difference of attitudes. However, the very size of the group of students surveyed made it possible to extract variants that did not appear at all in the sample of authors of autobiographies, or were less frequent. The differences did not concern approbation or rejection of the canon, but appeared more clearly in the definition of the fatherland. In the previous part of the study the fatherland was defined as a syndrome of national values. The question on the meaning of the fatherland in the final

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part of the interview and in the final part of the questionnaire had a projective aim and used a double sense of the word "meaning". In asking, "What does the 'fatherland' mean for you?", we wanted to get both a definition of the concept and the eventual emotional reaction to its referent. The following types of answer were obtained in the first questionnaire from students of the Warsaw Technical University and the College of Business and Commerce: (1) positive apprehension of the ideological fatherland (36.6%); (2) objective, unemotional definitions, for example the country of one's birth or residence (18%); (3) no answer (13.3%); (4) negative, rejecting responses (11.5%); (5) positive definitions of the small fatherland (10%); (6) definitions that might have more than one interpretation for the respondent or the researcher (8.6%). The classification of the responses gives rise to many doubts, since several judges reviewed it and it underwent changes. This shows how difficult it is for professional public opinion polling institutions that are not specialized in the subject matter of the survey to work out questionnaires of this type that have open questions. The types of answer constructed in our schema are also not entirely uniform. Type 1, which expresses affirmation of the fatherland as a value, contains explicit expressions of attachment, pride, a sense of duty, but also the short-hand expression "my country" or "native country" emphasizing the feeling of a tie. The objective responses for the most part contained statements referring to the place of residence and birth, both personal: "the country in which I live"; and impersonal: "the place of birth". This typology may raise many questions, because on the basis of short statements it is hard to decide which ones are value judgments and which ones are a purely objective description, a definition. The negative responses are the most unambiguous, rejecting the concept of fatherland as a phrase, a platitude, a slogan associated with a negatively evaluated political party. Two responses state the intention to leave the country. In this category were also included the answers of respondents who wrote "nothing", sometimes in capital letters, in response to the question on what the fatherland means for them. If this category were combined with the questionnaires of respondents who do not answer this question at all, this group would constitute nearly one-fourth of all the respondents. However, it would be wrong to draw from this a firm conclusion on the national nihilism of a considerable number of students. Most of those who reject the concept of fatherland at the same time accept the principle of the canon as a postulate of being familiar with the

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national culture. This bears out the opinion that complicated and often ambivalent national attitudes are not a very suitable subject for questionnaire surveys. The question on the fatherland worded in the same way generated much longer responses in the autobiographical interview. Looked at in the context of all of the autobiographies they give a deeper insight into the nature of national attitudes. The Polish language does not make easy a lexical distinction between private or regional and ideological fatherland. That distinction, as stated earlier, played a big role in relation to minority groups, whose representatives concentrated their emotional attitudes mainly on the private, small "shirt" fatherland. This was connected with the vagueness of the ideological or state fatherland as an object of reference. The need to distinguish two categories of the small fatherland also should be pointed out: the strictly private fatherland is not always distinguished from the regional fatherland (Wapiriski, 1994). However, that difference in an important way separates the young Poles studied from the Belarussians and Silesians, for whom the region often was a clearly emphasized value. On the other hand, the small fatherland of the Poles is narrower and strictly private. References to the region of origin were not encountered, either in the questionnaire or in the autobiographies. An attachment of this type might have occurred if the study had extended beyond the center of Poland, to former Galicia or Poznan voivodeship. An entirely different situation existed in the Polish national center. The concept of the great fatherland already established at the end of the sixteenth century—the patria—dominated in the consciousness, but it was often coupled with a reference to native regions, place of birth, parents, home. The concept of fatherland as home also often appeared in questionnaire responses of type 1. "Home" is a vague term, however. This concept was used and overused in the nineties in reference to the entire country: "We are in our own home." In the autobiographies, however, home often has the literal meaning of the family home of grandparents or the place that a person wants to build for his family. Fatherland in the autobiographies most often is a combination of these two concepts, but in both cases the main emphasis is placed on the small private fatherland. The author who has a closed national attitude clearly concentrated on the family, his personal problems and immediate circle (Y.P.10). Another, more open person used wider concepts but not clearly defined in scope: "Home,

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people who think like I do, the place where I feel at home" (Y.P.I5). An interesting example of a double small fatherland appears in the pronouncement of the Humanist from Warsaw. After returning from trips abroad, the more ugly Warsaw seemed to him, "the more strongly I felt a certain kind of sentiment stemming [...] from the need for roots, feeling a tie with a place, feeling that it is mine". Since the author's mother comes from a peasant family, the Warsaw man says that he has a "split personality", because he "feels just as much at home in the countryside". In this case, however, this is not the same kind of split that exists in some members of minorities suspended between their own ethnic identification and Polish identification, nor even the same kind of split as in some Polish intellectuals in the first generation. The identity of this author is enriched through communion with two different circles that are regarded as equally familiar. Repeatedly, in several passages, he declares sentiment for the rural atmosphere, work in the field and elements of the rural culture of his mother's native village (Y.P.I). In the light of some indicators his national attitude must be called closed, but this is not consistent with the otherwise dominant nature of the response of a person open to various cultures. Authors who are graduates of the social sciences and derive knowledge of different categories of fatherlands from the professional literature gave lengthy and erudite answers. Such were the definitions of the two politicians, members of opposing parties. Yet, interestingly, both of them treated this question unemotionally, even though one of them belongs to a rightist party and is definitely a nationalist, while the second comes close to the cosmopolitan attitude. In this case as well the incommensurability of different indicators of nationality is very clear. Here one can also see how theoretical reflection cools down political passions. Notwithstanding his declared nationalism, Politician I very rarely uses the concept "fatherland" spontaneously. His response is largely oriented to giving an account of actions and not reflections, and his passion for politics finds an outlet in action. Only when he spoke of his Pathfinder activities as part of a campaign to benefit the Polish colony in the East did he say that this was activity for the sake of the fatherland. It is hard to decide whether the fatherland here is an autotelic goal of action or whether it is a lure in Pareto's sense, serving instrumental political activity. The definitions of the fatherland of several other authors are well considered, irrespective of their educational backgrounds, and clearly emotionally

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colored. The autotelic nature of most of the declarations of attitudes towards the fatherland is unquestionable. The ideological conception of the large fatherland dominates in them. The concept of home and family is coupled with the allusion to national history, to canonical art. Pathfinder III says that through the fatherland he feels united with the community of other people, "who also can say of themselves: 'I am from here'". He at the same time very rightly stresses the partial nature of national identification in relation to global identification, but he ascribes very great importance to national identification. He says that the fatherland as the source "of a certain identity" is the basic part of the personality (Y.P.6). The Engineer, who was called a realist here, just as aptly emphasizes the situational nature of national attitudes, saying that the concept of fatherland comes to life, "becomes more sensitive", in certain periods and moments of historic turning points (Y.P.7). He links the concept of honor with the fatherland. Like pride, the concept of honor also appears in other pronouncements. However, the characteristic phenomenon of shame that sometimes accompanies a strong feeling of national affiliation deserves attention. Pathfinder II speaks of his reaction to the burning down of an Orthodox church in Grabarka as the experiencing of a "grievous pain", because he hates intolerance and feels a tie with weaker persons. As a gesture of good will in compensation, he went to Gabarka with a group of young people to work in tidying up the local cemetery of the Orthodox community. This act of expiation also emanated from the feeling of a tie with the culture of his own nation, in accordance with the principle that its heritage must be accepted, together with responsibility. Another Pathfinder also spoke of responsibility as an element of the concept of fatherland (Y.P.6). That attitude is consistent with the stance of a Polish intellectual (Jedlicki, 1993). Fernand Braudel expresses a similar thought in the passage quoted at the beginning of this book. Years ago Roman Dmowski (1994) also voiced the principle of accepting responsibility both for what is a source of pride and for what is a source of shame. Only the criteria of judging what can be a reason for shame and pride in the fatherland fundamentally separated the Polish nationalist from the liberal French scholar, the Polish intellectual and two young Solidarity Poles. In sum, there was broad agreement in the autobiographical interviews with respect to the declared characteristics of the fatherland. The private and

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ideological fatherland understood together dominated in the interviews. These responses often expressed strong emotions in the use of such phrases as "a big question", "emotions connected with all of this", "uncommonly important" (on national language and history, Y.P.5); "roots" (a term used by many authors); "such a spirit, honor [...] emotionally received" (Y.P.7); the fatherland "means a lot", "in one's native country [...] one feels good not only in the material sense [but] with all the rest, with the entire outside setting" (Y.P. 11). The last author quoted is an information technology specialist who has a very pragmatic orientation towards life. He does not avoid a severe criticism of the situation in Poland, referring to observations made abroad, but he has never thought of leaving his country for good; he is tied to it by language, people and all that he called the "outside setting" that is so hard to define. Two main categories of elements of the fatherland may be distinguished in the definitions of the authors: the human factor and the cultural factor. Hence the fatherland is composed of kith and kin, family and friends, community with other people, and elements of culture: language—"the fact that we speak Polish" (Y.P.2); history—Grunwald, Matejko, Sienkiewicz (Y.P.9), Deluge and Master Thaddeus (Y.P. 1); as well as the landscape understood as a value. The emotional involvement visible in most of the definitions does not mean a completely idealized picture of the fatherland. This was already evident in the already quoted passage of the author who acknowledged that his beloved Warsaw is an ugly city. As for one of the other authors, the image of the fatherland is composed of a flawed picture "of old, dilapidated and new houses". There is also mention of attachment to the country, "even though things are bad" (Y.P. 11), and despite disappointment: "A person fought for something else, he feels so disappointed", but at the same time the fatherland "is something great, close to me" (Y.P.7). In comments on the fatherland there is often talk of "roots", of the return and decision to remain in the country. This motif appeared several times in the student questionnaire in the category of definitely positive descriptions in the statements of one-third of the respondents. The ease of communicating and reaching understanding in one's own country and own language is repeatedly mentioned there. The definition of fatherland as a community matches that conception. The elements of this community mentioned in the questionnaire also include history, honor and the sense of duty—sometimes a clear echo of Norwid.

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The attitude towards the fatherland expressed in these passages may be called autotelic, that is, oriented to a value that is precious for its own sake, not for the sake of some other goal, not a means but an independent goal. Perhaps the ease of communication in one's native language in comparison with the language barrier encountered abroad has certain features of an instrumental approach. However, some of the authors of the autobiographies overcame this difficulty without changing their autotelic attitude, while at the same time still remaining critical. This reminds one of the stance of Antoni Slonimski, who, when asked after the war whether he was returning to Poland for good, answered that he was returning for good and bad. A comparison of the attitude towards the fatherland in the autobiographies and in the questionnaire shows a considerable similarity. It must be remembered, however, that the positive definitions in the questionnaire only slightly outnumber the others—unlike the situation in the autobiographies. The number of authors was ten times smaller than the respondents to the questionnaire, and their selection could not be statistically representative. No case of definite rejection of the fatherland as a value was found in the autobiographies, but as many as 11 percent of the respondents to the questionnaire made such a declaration. Not all of the utterances of the authors of the autobiographies were as eloquent in the declaration of patriotic values as those quoted above. As already stated, Politician I, the author with the clearest nationalistic attitudes in the entire group, defined the fatherland in an unemotional way (Y.P.8). This is one of the numerous cases of the incommensurability of indicators of values. The Lawyer, a Pathfinder also close to the nationalistic orientation in politics, unexpectedly emphasized the relative nature of the understanding of the fatherland and the possibility of also treating Europe as the fatherland (Y.P.12). Two of the autobiographies most emphatically express aloofness to the concept of fatherland, but none of them is entirely consistent in this. Both of these authors come close to the cosmopolitan attitude by emphasizing that this should not be understood in the pejorative sense. Politician II regarded the question on the meaning of the fatherland as the most difficult in the entire interview and felt disconcerted by it. He cited Norwid's formula, but acknowledged it as an empty phrase and expressed regret on account of the overuse of the concept of fatherland by the nationalists. In the test he defined himself as a Pole, which most of the authors of the interviews did not do, because they regarded that as obvious. This author came the closest to cultural bivalence

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on account of his interest in Russian literature. At the same time, he was very strongly engaged in the political activity of Solidarity in 1989 to 1994, despite the fact that he is the youngest of all the authors of the Polish autobiographies (Y.P.14). The second cosmopolite and universalist in values, who condemns nationalism, stated point-blank that he does not feel rooted in any culture. However, his response is filled with contradictions and conscious paradoxes, as well as an intentional indulging in fiction, which he does not deny. He is also the furthest away from any pigeonholing of people according to their nationality. For that reason he expresses doubt about the question on double national identifications. He rejects the canon as a postulate and the obligation to have competence in the field of national culture. In response to the question concerning the fatherland this author unexpectedly stated that in the event of war he would join the army and fight for Poland. "The fatherland for me means simply that one has to defend it, if it is [threatened]. I would not even hesitate to take a rifle and kill people." Before this he had condemned the refusal to perform military service and expressed admiration for the Warsaw Uprising, also expressing surprise at his feeling (Y.P.3). That enunciation deviates from the mainstream of the autobiography characterized by extreme individualism, and a skeptical attitude towards patriotism, tradition and national cultures in general. He also stands apart from the attitudes declared in the student questionnaire, whose participants rarely mentioned the fatherland as a cause for which they would be willing to give their lives (6.7%). In a survey of students conducted in the seventies by Stefan Nowak, 80 percent of the respondents declared a willingness to sacrifice their life for their country, but at that time the external threat—after the experiences of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—was more real. Most of the students responding to our questionnaire represented the 1970 to 1971 agegroups. Their interests were concentrated on the present day and personal affairs. In response to the question on important events in their lives, only 2 percent referred to public affairs in the country. Most of them limited themselves to purely personal matters, despite the fact that in the questionnaire this question immediately followed the question on the fatherland. The Cosmopolite born in 1966 was the oldest of the authors of the autobiographies and remembered the national threats of 1980 and 1981.

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At the same time, his autobiography is an example of the evident contradictions and intricacies found by a detailed analysis of various aspects of the nation manifesting themselves at the grass roots level and originating from individual experiences. It was he who, in connection with the canon of national culture and the question of what every Pole ought to know, asked the significant question: "And if he doesn't know it, so what?" We must return to this question in the following chapters.

18. Young Poles Facing Others. An Open or a Closed Nation?

The concept of national affiliation is based on two types of indicator: (1) consciousness of a tie with one's own group and its culture, that "subcutaneous" relation to one's country of which one of the authors in the previous chapter spoke; and (2) consciousness of the distinctness of one's own group, its difference from others, from strangers. Many theorists of the nation mentioned in the first part of this book accept similar criteria: Max Weber, Marcel Strauss, and after his example Edward Tiryakian. However, their approach applies rather to the objective than to the subjective aspect: it expresses itself in discovery of the consolidation of the internal similarities of the nation and their peculiarity that distinguishes it from other nations. Yet, Mauss emphasizes not only the individual nature of the progressive individualization of nations, but also the subjective consciousness of this process as an inseparable factor of individualization. That aspect is the object of this analysis of national cultures at the grass roots. Both of these criteria are obviously graduated, different in the individual and situational aspects. Recognition of the closeness of "one's familiars" requires forgetting about individual divisions—class, political and cultural. The feeling of the strangeness of "others" is mitigated by neighborhood, common benefits and interests, occupational and intellectual affinity, and by the universality of elements of culture emanating from common sources or making use of mutual borrowings, often between neighbors and "neighbors by choice", sometimes mainly in one direction. Some of the authors of biographies from the ethnic borderland presented in the previous chapters, especially young Ukrainians, laid clear accent on the separateness of their group. Sometimes the feeling of the separateness of

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their group was uncertain, especially in the Belarussians. These are examples of double reactions to a borderland situation. The autobiographies of minority members more often were focused on nationality as a value, and many other values were linked with this leading value. In the Polish materials nationality was entangled with other values: the fight with socialism and the less clearly expressed striving for democracy. Fatherland and culture also appeared as an autotelic value. Poles as participants at the center of the dominant culture did not have to constantly accent their nationality in spontaneous autobiographical utterances. Not all of them did this even when they expressed their total identity by completing the sentence "I am...." However, the political breakthrough in the context of the Polish situation played a role in the life of this generation similar to that of a crisis in the history of the nation. That is why in a certain period the feeling of national identity intensified, but when the study was conducted the peak moment of this period had already passed. Discovery of the nature of national attitudes is an important object of the analysis of autobiographical texts made here. The second part of the free but structured interview provides clear indicators for this purpose. All of the authors of this group fitted into the category of the center of national culture. Neither strong manifestations of their nationality nor hesitation and duality with respect to this identification, as was characteristic of minority members, appeared in their self-identifications. This does not mean that all of them were Poles cut from the same cloth. The multiplicity of the family backgrounds of their national tradition has already been mentioned. For the group of members of the Polish dominant culture the problem of the boundary of familiarity was not linked with personal national affiliation. However, it did appear in several cases, albeit in subdued form, as was already mentioned in the analysis of Belarussian and Silesian materials in reference to Chalasinski's Young Generation of Peasants. Two of the autobiographies of young Poles from the nineties spoke of the feeling of crossing this boundary when going from the local rural school to a secondary academic or technical school in the city. In one case the problem even appeared of specific rural endogamy as a principle observed in the author's circle but not practiced by him. Endogamy in rural communities in its traditional form meant the opposition to, in terms of customs, if not a prohibition against, marrying someone from another village. Today, according to the authors' accounts, there is still opposition to the marriage of a village lad to a "city" girl. Strong

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relics of such expanded endogamy appeared in the Ukrainian and Silesian groups. Memory of the Mazovian dialect of a grandfather as a mark of separateness appeared once in the Polish group. Another factor that influences the feeling of internal differentiation stemmed directly from the situation of the political breakthrough and was strictly political in nature. An expression of this feeling was the slogan "Down with Communism!" written on the wall of a school classroom (Y.P.12); the waging of a "private war with communism" (Y.P.9); participation in street disturbances causing an encounter with the Civic Militia but also with the police after 1990, for example during a demonstration against the ousting of the Olszewski government (Y.P.8). Awareness of the internal political differentiation characteristic of democratic societies and attitudes prevents regarding one's nationality as the Alpha and Omega. Although Polishness was not questioned in the group studied, apart from a certain nuance of ambivalence in the attitudes of Politician II, the feeling of nationality intensified sharply in the perspective of relations with foreigners and attitudes towards them. In recent years numerous public opinion polls in Poland and elsewhere in the world have addressed this problem. Many questions have been raised about the adequacy of the research apparatus of those investigations. Given the fact that autobiographical studies are not representative, the problem of attitudes towards foreigners was taken up in the student questionnaires supplementing the analysis and already previously cited. This does not imply a change of opinion with respect to the limited value of those findings, but they can be useful as a supplement to another research method. In the face of the narrow scope of the questionnaire studies, they were examined against the background of comparable studies of national representative samples. The diversity of the findings was connected not only with the circle investigated, which is understandable, but also with the institution doing the research, a fact which raises serious doubts about the results of studies of this type. For example, data from the Center for the Study of Public Opinion (OBOP) for the years 1990 and 1991 show a decline of 10 percentage points (to 34%) in declarations of dislike for Germans and an increase of 8 percentage points (to 32%) in declarations of dislike for Russians. In 1991, some 19 percent declared dislike for Jews (Jasiñska, 1992, p. 224). In an article devoted to the political culture of Germany Klaus von Beyme cited data from the "Times Mirror" for 1991 on the national attitudes of Poles

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that differed considerably from the above findings: 45 percent felt animosity towards Germans, 41 percent towards Ukrainians, and 34 percent towards Jews (Beyme, Niedermayer, 1994). According to the same source, the declarations of the animosities of Western Germans towards some nations were as follows: towards Poles 49 percent, towards Turks 46 percent, and towards Jews 26 percent (p. 202). This author also cites data on declared xenophobia in several other countries of the East and West and concludes that to a considerable extent they cancel out the impression made by information about xenophobia in the post-socialist countries. Noteworthy in a comparison of these two publications is the divergence of data from different sources and the sudden changes of indicators of the attitude towards other nations, for example towards Germans and Russians, visible in the OBOP results. Some data from our student questionnaire give rise to similar doubts. However, they will be presented here in part for comparison with the more reliable materials of the autobiographical interviews. In the second questionnaire addressed to students of education and law, a classification question that served as a filter was asked: "Do you believe that the dislike felt by Poles for some nations is justified and correct?" Persons who chose the affirmative answer were supposed to answer the open question: "If yes, then for which ones?" In the next question the respondents of the questionnaire were asked to explain their position. This produced the expected reflection of some of the respondents that it is wrong to manifest dislike for entire nations. This reflection was consistent with the intended influence of the questionnaire. In sum, 42.6 percent justified dislike, while 39.2 percent rejected such a position. Hence the attitudes were polarized. In the same questionnaire a question had been asked earlier that was a repetition of the question addressed to the authors of the autobiographies at the end of the second part of the interview on entertaining the possibility of double national identification: "Can one regard oneself at the same time as a Pole and a: (1) Belarussian, (2) German, (3) Ukrainian, (4) Jew, (5) European?" In accordance with the intention, the question was projective. The reactions to a similar question elicited from members of minorities previously studied constituted an indicator of ethnocentrism as unwillingness to assimilate, especially with the Polish dominant group. In the study of young Poles this unwillingness was supposed to be interpreted as an indicator of being closed to the assimilation of foreigners, others, with one's national group. Table 2

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Table 2 Open and closed national attitudes among students (Data in percent) Object of reference

Indicators of attitudes Germans

Ukrainians

Jews

Acceptance of double identification

45.9

50.0

59.5

Rejection of double identification

37.2

31.8

28.4

Justification of dislike

35.8

6.1

10.8

N = 148

contains a list of selected answers to the question on double identification and on "justified dislike". What is striking in this table is the divergence between the relatively low indicators of dislike for Jews and Ukrainians and the much higher indicators of rejection of the possibility of simultaneous Polish and Ukrainian or Jewish identification. There is no such divergence in respect to the Germans. The questionnaire did not furnish any data to explain this problem. The question on the possibility of double identification is not the best suited for use in this type of research technique. The autobiographical interview contained more material, which, together with the commentaries to the authors' responses, provides a better insight into the nature of national identification and attitudes towards foreign cultures. This appears in the analysis of individual autobiographical cases. The problem of double national identifications and multiple cultural ties has great importance for the contemporary world. This world is characterized by great mobility in terms of people, information and goods, which in the past was unknown and impossible for technical reasons. The tendency towards unification and the expansion of the scope of political influences, ideas and experiences is a product of this mobility. On the other hand, it is accompanied by opposing tendencies that aim at affirmation of national separateness and boundary maintenance. Cultural polymorphism and double identifications are a compromise between these two tendencies that can help to resolve troublesome individual problems of self-identification. Members of minority groups and the residents of borderland regions understand this problem well. Their reactions vary, as we saw in previous chapters. There are also numerous examples of the recognition of double

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national identification as a personal life problem. For this solution to be effective individually and socially it must be accepted not only by the internally "split" people of the borderland but also by the center of the dominant culture. For acceptance by the center is an indispensable condition for the transformation of the burdensome ambivalence of a minority into enriching bivalence and the feeling of double support in the minority's own culture and in the culture of the dominant community. The group of authors of Polish autobiographies unquestionably constitute the cultural center. None of them had a genealogy that would exert an influence on the appropriation of a culture other than Polish, and only for one person did an alien genealogical element constitute a psychological problem and possibly explain certain cultural preferences (Y.P. 14). The determination of the position of the center towards the question of double national identifications sheds light on the attitude towards individual nations, and on the overall willingness to show tolerance. Together with the commentaries it shows the probable factors conditioning the expressed attitudes inherent in the authors' autobiographies. These data are easy to confront with information on the authors' intercultural contacts. Precise answers to the questions asked may also be presented in the form of a scale whose opposite extremes are acceptance of all double identifications and rejection of all of them. Such polarized examples of total acceptance or rejection dominated in the research sample. Four persons made their position dependent on the nationality that was supposed to co-determine the consciousness of a Pole. A numerical listing obviously has little worth here on account of the small and non-representative sample. What is most interesting is the nature of the arguments justifying the choice of a position and the links between this position and other indicators of the authors' national attitudes. Among the five persons who completely rejected the possibility of double identification is Politician I, an avowed nationalist, but also the Individualist, an avowed cosmopolite, and the Humanist, who demonstrated a generally open national attitude. Politician I, whose stance may be regarded as a logical outcome of a nationalistic ideology, questioned the possibility of simultaneously admitting to two nationalities. On the other hand, he accepted the possibility of changing national identification, but on the condition of controlling the loyalty of the national neophyte (Y.P.8). On the other hand, the Engineer, a realist, categorically and emotionally stated that "a Pole is a Pole and nothing else", for he has one fatherland and changing it would be a

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betrayal of his own kind (Y.P.7). Likewise, another technician acknowledged that "a native Pole" can never be a German, for example, and he extended this principle to all double identifications (Y.P.10). This is an expression of a closed attitude. The argumentation of the two most intellectually sophisticated authors was different. They both emphasized that in their comprehension national identification is a matter of definition. They rejected the double understanding as illogical. The Humanist, who is strongly tied with the national universe through family tradition, his own experiences and interests, added to the logical argument the emotional component of attitude, although he called such a reaction "perhaps anachronistic" (Y.P.10). The Individualist confined himself to asserting the inconsistency, in his opinion, of a person who declares double national identification (Y.P.3). The five persons accepting all double identifications include Politician II, who has a liberal-cosmopolitan orientation, but also the three Pathfinders, whose attitudes should be called patriotic in the common understanding of the word. Pathfinder I said that neither origin nor place of residence, but the feeling of a tie with the culture is of importance for the identification of nationality. "One can be a Pole-Jew and live in the United States or in Paris" (Y.P.4). Pathfinder II alluded both to the example of his completely polonized grandmother, who emigrated from Belarus, and to Tuwim: "It is hard to find a 'true Pole', if you'll pardon the expression, who had a greater mastery of the Polish language than Tuwim" (Y.P.5). Although he is an engineer by education, Pathfinder III broadly and in a "sociological" way speaks of the possibility of having roots in two cultures and of appropriating a new culture without rejecting the old one. He acknowledged application of the understanding of fatherland to two countries as especially right when these two countries have a similar tradition and can look for common ground and understanding, like Poland and Ukraine (Y.P.6). The openness of national attitudes judged according to this criterion could have been expected from all the Pathfinders, who are strongly committed to the idea of the movement and a return to its sources. For this is a position consistent with the Pathfinders' Code, which instructs members to treat all persons as neighbors. Obviously, both in the remote and more immediate past, practice has often deviated from principles even in this organization. Given the universality of the Pathfinders' movement in the seventies and its vitality in the eighties, there were many Pathfinders in the group of authors of autobiographies. The nationalist, with his closed national attitude, and some

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of the less involved members of organizations, who represent different positions towards the nation and the principle of the closeness of all people, also belonged to the Pathfinders. The cryptonym "Pathfinder" here was applied only to those persons whose autobiographies were focused around the activity of the Pathfinders' movement and its principles. Authors who were selective about the possibility of double national identification had the most reservations about combining Polish and German identification. This is consistent with the questionnaire results cited above. However, in addition to the answer itself the autobiographical interviews contain explanatory arguments and the entire text of the autobiographies sheds light on the deeper and wider motivation of attitudes towards foreigners. That motivation is formed on the historical plane and on the plane of personal, contemporary experiences and the life prospects of the authors. The first of these planes is more important for determining views on identification. In turn it has two dimensions that partially dovetail. The first of them encompasses the general picture of the history of Poland contained in the canon of school knowledge, in legends, myths and national art. The second is determined by family tradition, small history, rather meager in most of the peasant families of the authors but containing important references to recent national events, to events that had molded the picture of the generation of Poles sketched in a previous chapter. The second aspect of historical influence is quite varied. The first is very uniform, but it has varying influence with respect to shaping views on the distinctness or obliteration of boundaries between different national references of the individual's identification. The great historical tradition suggests an argumentation referring back to the past of the First Commonwealth and the affinity of its ethnic component elements. This accounts for the acceptance of Polish-Belarussian, PolishUkrainian or Polish-Lithuanian double identification. Expressed even more strongly in many texts is memory of international conflicts grounded in such facts/symbols and works as the historical Grunwald and Matejko's picture of the battle, Teutonic Knights in Sienkiewicz's version and Ford's film, Raclawicka Panorama and Grottger's series of drawings of the January Insurrection, and the stories of the heroes of the Grey Ranks. The memory of these things may provide arguments against double identification with "eternal enemies". But this is not a relationship without exceptions, for a certain appropriation of this knowledge is more common than the rejection of double identification.

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The tradition of a common historical fate and the affinity of cultures lowers the barrier of strangeness in those who partially agreed to accept double identification. The upwardly mobile Technician strongly emphasized his integral Polishness, but after a moment of reflection he added: "Here we have to do with rather close regions [...] once these were Polish territories. That may be coded in the genes of a Belarussian, Lithuanian or Ukrainian or passed down in tradition" (Y.P.ll). It would be unwarranted to suspect the author of this statement of imperialism and territorial revisionism. On the other hand, he exhibited a tendency to adopt a closed attitude, excluding from the possibility of joint identification not only Germans and Russians but also Jews. Unlike the previous author, the Lawyer, who is active in the Pathfinders and acknowledges allegiance to its principles, is of the opinion that next to Belarussians the Jews have special reasons for, and the right, to double identification. Jews have the capacity for assimilation while retaining the feeling of their own "great identity"; for years they were closely tied with Polish culture and even made a contribution to its folklore. This author is interested in Jewish literature, collects recordings of Jewish music, goes to a Jewish theater and watches the program "Shalom" on television. He resents it when Poles are accused of anti-Semitism. He fully accepts the examples of the conversion of Jews to Polishness, but he entirely rejects conversion in the opposite direction. Doubts as to the possibility of combining Polish self-identification with German or Russian identification stand in the way of his complete openness in the question of double identification. In a characterization of the canon of Polish culture this author mentioned many elements contained in the traditional pictures of Polish-German and Polish-Russian antagonisms. In his case, the transmission of great history in this understanding was supplemented with small private family history: the memory of his grandmother "tortured to death at Gestapo headquarters", a family in which only three persons survived the occupation. There is also the memory of his great-uncle, a Pathfinder and soldier of the Home Army, singing songs of the Polish Legions and uhlans. Private historical memory is especially difficult to overcome where it is rich and based on the prestige of family tradition. This is illustrated by the example of Pathfinder II, who comes from a family of intellectuals and landowners and was brought up in a home filled with mementos and memories. He felt strongly about the burning down of the Orthodox church in

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Grabarka and condemned this act of xenophobia; he valued tolerance and felt solidarity with minorities as the underdog. In principle he accepted the possibility of double identification, but not in all of the combinations mentioned in the question. His reservation extended mainly to the Germans: "Well, to be a Pole and a German at the same time, when memories are still fresh and when people are ready at the drop of a hat to show and emphasize this antagonism?" With a special gift for self-reflection, he was aware of his own inconsistency and explicitly stated the reason for it: "On account of that transmission of family tradition...." (Y.P.5). This legacy, described elsewhere, contained the story of his grandmother and mother, who was fourteen at the time, being deported to Ravensbriick, and his grandfather imprisoned in Dachau and later—after his release—deported to a Siberian gulag. So this author speaks with a feeling of guilt and regret: "My attitude towards the Germans: despite a certain assumption accepted in relation to other nations... I cannot... overcome in myself certain negative impulses towards the Germans, German culture and language [...] it's as though I have no control over this [...] it is on the level of some emotion" (Y.P.5). The text of this autobiography illustrates the mechanism of how a general prejudice comes into existence on the basis of concrete and individual facts, although—it must be admitted—of a very wide scope, as are the experiences of Polish society under the occupation. This author is aware that knowledge of the terrible experiences of his family combined with the historical picture of the "eternal enemy" causes an unjustified general dislike for Germans and everything German. This emotional-cognitive state lays the foundation for the formation of a negative stereotype of the Germans, namely, the conviction that Germans in general, which means "all Germans" are bad and hostile. In this case the tendency to create a stereotype and prejudices runs up against the opposite principle of tolerance, recognizing all people as neighbors, and finally intellectual resistance to unwarranted generalizations. The author is characterized by a clear sociocentric orientation. He was brought up in culturally and emotionally favorable family circumstances. The tendency to like people and to care for others found an outlet in his activity in the Pathfinders, which reinforced and strengthened this tendency. The study of biology at university provided him with intellectual training and sharpened his critical facilities. In the self-identification test as his characteristics he mentions "emotional, meditative, fair, intelligent". As a consequence, he tries

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to fight the stereotype forming within him. He speaks of the extreme conditions of his mother's incarceration in Ravensbruck: work beyond her strength, hunger—eating grass, suffering a serious illness with no medication. He also recalls the act of kindness of one German, a civilian worker in a factory, who for Christmas gave his mother a toy, treating her like a child, which she still was, and not like some contemptible element of the working force of a nation of subhumans destined for exploitation. Although this author defends himself against the stereotype, he cannot free himself entirely from prejudice. This and the previous case confirm the conviction of the powerful influence of private history on . the formation of attitudes, which was already noted in investigations of children conducted in 1959 (Kloskowska, 1961) and 1988. A non-stereotypical picture of the Germans appears several times in the family lore of native authors of peasant genealogy. Pathfinder I (Y.P.4), who accepts all double identifications, says: "My grandparents spoke [of Germans] in various ways." "My grandmother recalls a family that died in the camp", but "there were some who treated you to chocolate and others who beat you on the head with a rifle but". There are many similar accounts in the family tradition containing a double image of the Germans from the time of the occupation. The positive features mentioned are cleanliness, a high level of civilization, and organizational efficiency (Y.P.2). A comparison in this context is made with Russians, in which the contrast in levels of civilization is pointed out. Grandfathers and fathers passed down to grandchildren and children the picture of soldiers in tattered coats, manifesting "an absolute will for destruction" (Y.P.2). "That does not mean that the Germans murdered less, but as regards practical knowledge, the attitude towards material things [...] there is no comparison" (Y.P.2). The last author concludes the wartime account of his mother on the subject of the Russians by quoting her words: "simply barbarians" (Y.P.6). The Banker from the countryside remembers his parents' stories about expulsions and round-ups of people for forced labor in the Reich. Yet that did not prevent him from "falling in love" with the German language in school, whereas, as he put it, "as ill luck would have it" he had to learn Russian (Y.P. 13). Another author stopped learning Russian in secondary school for two months as a sign of national and political protest (Y.P.9). This was a part of a wider process of social reaction, in which political motivations were closely bound up with national ones. •Pathfinder II, who in fighting hard to overcome resentment against Germans, cites his mother's story of her first encounter with Soviet soldiers on

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her way back from Germany: "She recalls that worst moment...worse than the stay in the camp. They were spending the night in a deserted house, and Soviet soldiers were amusing themselves on the ground floor ... well, very vivid memories...wild singing, that drinking, that shooting into the ceiling [...] my mother didn't know what would happen next. Such a danger, completely leaving out the question of liberators, such a strange, strange fact" (Y.P.5). The broken sentences and sudden pauses show that the author is disturbed by this memory. Judging from his tone the word "liberators" is not used ironically, but it does underscore the striking discrepancy between the situation experienced by his grandmother and mother and the function performed by Soviet soldiers in the final period of the war: "leaving out the question of liberators". The author, who the whole time tries to be objective about his experiences and views, seems shocked by his own statement that his mother's most dramatic wartime experience, despite her sufferings in a concentration camp, is associated not with the Germans but with the Russians. Researchers in other questionnaires encountered similar comparisons between Germans and Russians. The recollections contained in some family biographies and the comparisons between the two nations based on them can upset the fixed and well-documented picture of Nazi Germany from the time of the war and the occupation. Two points must be considered when examining these materials. First, none of these reactions comes from families that spent the war in Warsaw or on territories incorporated into the Reich or that lived through the Warsaw Uprising. Second, the account contained in the autobiographies of young Poles is a second-hand one. A certain selection of facts and distribution of accents may result from the fact that after decades of perpetuating and highlighting a negative image of Germans, only recently has it been possible to freely judge the Russians. The young people, for whose generation the culminating experience was martial law and the breakthrough of 1989, tell about the past under the influence of those factors. The questionnaire survey of students in the autumn of 1994 shows that in this group the declarations regarded as unjustified dislike for Russians are ten percentage points lower than declarations of dislike for Germans (25.7% and 35.8% respectively), but Russians are in second place among objects of declared dislike. One very important conclusion stems from these materials. They show how even superficially the same facts, that is, the war and the German occupation, can be experienced in so many different ways if they are examined against

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the background of the complicated political situation of the country and through a cross-section of social classes and circles. This does not mean that a common national culture does not exist and that the concept of the nation must be rejected as useless. However, national unity is something more flexible than generally supposed. It also must be remembered that the identity of the individual is not composed solely of elements of the national culture in the narrow sense and of attitudes of national identification. That is also why it is possible to apply different criteria to attitudes towards foreign national groups. The nation examined at its grass roots, in its individual manifestations, is by no means as univocal as some theorists of nationalism would hope. They attempt to define the nation precisely and narrowly so that it can be stated that its historical origins are recent and the prospects of its survival very limited. These studies show that, in addition to the historical multiformity of the nation and national cultures, psychological and social national attitudes also differ considerably. These differences can be discovered even within such a uniform social category as young adult university graduates or university students, intellectuals belonging to the same generation. One of the important elements of attitudes towards foreigners is the number of perspectives determining this attitude. Apart from the perspective of great national history and private family history already considered, the individual and very contemporary perspectives opened up to young people by the political events of the end of socialism have become especially important. Like the young members of minority groups, young Poles now can go on trips abroad and establish direct contacts with members of various nations, with "others" appearing no longer in the role of traditional enemies or of foreign tourists looked at from a distance. The circumstances of these foreign trips were so varied that they also made reactions more diverse. According to the notions of European organizations for cooperation, especially the Council of Europe and affiliated or independent foundations, at the end of the twentieth century international contacts among young people are regarded as an especially effective way of building European consciousness, eliminating xenophobia and mitigating ethnocentrism. The authors of the autobiographies have not yet had an opportunity to make full use of these forms of travel. Even with the domination of trips to the West, in this group there were no holders of scholarships to Western universities. The trips were for work,

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tourism, and only in two cases connected with international religious meetings, and once with performances in an artistic troupe. The first, short trip described as "choking on the West" filled some with enthusiasm. For a student from a family of intellectuals touring Italy and France was a strong emotional experience. A member of a folklore troupe traveling widely throughout the world described encounters with Germans, Americans, Russians and Lithuanians as friendly. Those who had stayed longer abroad as Gastarbeiter (guest-workers) returned with different experiences. They valued the organization of work in the West, but the cold and materialized relations among people grated upon them. These opinions were partially a result of their subordinate social and material situation and the language barrier. This also became material for forming new stereotypes. After a longer stay in Germany doing paid work, the Farmer-Technician, who generally is characterized by closed national attitudes and oriented to respect for family/home values, expressed a very clear stereotype of the Germans as materialistic egoists, and contrasted them to the friendliness and family way of life among the Greeks. He thought that it was unnecessary to become acquainted with a universal cultural canon, because every person has his own culture (Y.P.10). This case illustrates the ineffectiveness of fighting ethnocentrism, which may have roots in more fundamental mental traits that are hard to overcome through the influences of culture. A phenomenon that may be called a temporary effect of ethnocentrism also arises in people with open national attitudes after a longer stay abroad doing paid work. This happens if the loss of the family and close social circle, and to a greater degree the loss of status—changing from being a student-intellectual to being an unskilled worker—is not offset by the creation of a substitute circle. The emigrant who becomes somebody different, a stranger, experiences a painful feeling of alienation. The role of his national identification in his identity expands above the measure of this identification at home. This effect appeared clearly in the autobiography of the Humanist, who spent a longer time in England. He made several apt, matter-of-fact comments about English society and summed up his experience in these words: "Ruthless reality [...] A hard school [...] I wanted to return." In describing his understanding of the fatherland, in a later part of the text he asserted that nowhere and never did it enter his head that he would not return to Poland (Y.P. 1). The reaction described as a temporary effect of ethnocentrism can be overcome. Numerous young scientists, intellectuals and specialists have gone

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abroad and not returned home after obtaining favorable working conditions for themselves and establishing good relations with their new environment. This is the well-known phenomenon of the brain drain. However, those persons who stay in Poland or return are the majority. Their ethnocentrism, which intensifies abroad, has been called temporary, because most of these persons do not show hostility towards foreigners in their own country. They speak positively of their foreign colleagues from their university days. They thus confirm what the members of national minorities said about the tolerant atmosphere of higher schools. This is not the complete picture of attitudes towards foreigners. One deliberately selected member of a nationalistic organization did not conceal his prejudice against Jews, but at the same time he stipulated that he is not an anti-Semite (Y.P.8). In this case the prejudice was grounded in the prewar family tradition of the petty bourgeoisie and in the ideological writings of Dmowski and, at least in part, in the orientation of the political part of his choice. In the other authors allusions to animosity towards Jews were evoked by the projective effect of the question about television programs devoted to Jews and Ukrainians. In all cases declarations of dislike were connected with the family prewar rural tradition. In respect to the source and nature of the prejudice they came close to young Belarussians, Ukrainians and Silesians. However, it must be emphasized that the attitudes towards Jews expressed in the autobiographies of the entire group of young Poles were clearly polarized, as indicated in the previously described attitude of some authors towards Jewish culture, marked by a liking for and avid interest in it. All of the infrequent mentions of personal encounters with Ukrainians and Russians were positive. Hence the wartime traditions contained in great national history and in family accounts weighed most heavily on the picture of the Russians and Germans. The picture of the Germans turned out to be unexpectedly mixed in the family historical perspective as well. The attitude towards Germans as foreigners in the perspective of the present day and the future has practical importance—both private and for the economic life of the country, as well as for the country's functioning in the new international institutions in Europe. Information in the autobiographies on economic contacts with German enterprises established in Poland refers to this aspect. Two authors work in such a firm. One of them regards this work as a good opportunity to gain practical professional experience and to earn a higher salary than in other jobs available

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to him (Y.P.6). The second one appraises this situation as especially beneficial, not only for becoming acquainted with new technology and good work organization. His ambition is to gain a position as "the boss's right-hand man", to achieve a similar economic status and lifestyle (Y.P.7). One of these authors had a strong family tradition of fighting against the Germans during the occupation, the second one rather only the memory of material exploitation and the feeling of danger. None of these past events prevented either of these authors from taking advantage of the practical opportunities of economic cooperation with Germans in the new order of economic and political relations. The nation and national culture were not directly the dominant focusing values in the set of autobiographies studied. In the free, autobiographical part of the statement these values clearly are coupled with the dominant and focusing social-political activity of the authors called here the Pathfinders and Politician I. Apart from this, other values also associated with the period of the breakthrough are highlighted in the autobiographies. One such characteristic value is enterprise, expressing itself not only in the desire to make a career but also in previous and independent money-making activity, taking advantage of the opportunities of the new economic order. Leaving aside foreign trips for paid work, this is no longer a continuation of unskilled cottage work in a students' cooperative, but is small business activity in trade or independent production. In connection with this, values often regarded as contradictory often appear next to each other. One of them is the traditional concept of honor that refers to the concept of the fatherland and the fight against the political enslavement of the previous political order. The second is pride stemming from gaining early economic independence, the feeling and prospect of life success. It may seem surprising that these two concepts and two orientations are combined with each other, at least in the small number of cases studied here. The two authors who explicitly speak of honor were, at the same time, already successful small businessmen when they were at university. A third author, the Engineer with closed national attitudes, at the same time wants to move up as high as possible in the firm established with German capital. He is simultaneously very attached to the family and to the peasant tradition of the Home Army; he appreciates the Romantic literary canon and says that in moments of historical tensions "such a spirit, honor" wells up in a person and patriotic feelings grow stronger (Y.P.7).

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Another author, the Lawyer, who established a small, and prosperous bookshop at his university department, was and is active in the Independent Solidarity Trade Union and regrets that students are leaving this union "to make money". He knows how to combine his money-making activity with his social calling and values his honor, which he has always preserved, from childhood, under the influence of his peasant family. He attended four "oases" and at school waged his own private "war with communism". Now he is observing the decline of honor in what he calls "the new power generation". His national attitudes are open both in terms of his acceptance of double national identifications and his interest in the universal cultural canon. He is interested in the "classical approach", that is, the approach characteristic of Italian culture but also of America and the "Asian tigers". He says that "Poles are obviously splendid [...] but without shutting himself up to others" (Y.P. 12). The third author, a nationalist, accents the concept of honor as an element of relations in the small peer-groups of playing children in which he has participated. He declares definitely closed national attitudes (Y.P.8). From this it cannot be inferred that the concept of honor belongs invariably and exclusively to the syndrome of nationalistic attitudes. Honor is regarded as a value characteristic of traditional aristocratic societies—in Poland, of the Commonwealth of the gentry. The origins of the authors of the autobiographies in which the concept of honor appeared most distinctly are from the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. To be sure, one can speak of their appropriation of the traditions of the gentry through the examples of history and the writings of Sienkiewicz, which are particularly dear to them. On the other hand, Chalasinski, in his much more lengthy analysis of values and attitudes in The Young Generation of Peasants, wrote of "the honor of the shepherd" as a peculiar and characteristic element of the peasant ethos in Poland. The Lawyer cited above also very strongly accents the example-creating function of his peasant genealogy (Y.P. 12). He manifests certain features of moral rigidity, but he is not closed either to foreign cultures or to the new forms of the economic order emerging in the wake of the historic breakthrough. Thus the material analyzed shows an unclear picture of differences and divisions, which only a construction of stereotypes could provide. However, stereotypes are not very useful for recognizing complex reality. Two of the previous authors characterized, in the form of a stereotype, their young colleagues of the next generation. In their opinion these authors come close to ethical (Y.P. 12) and nationalistic (Y.P.8) fundamentalism. They reproach

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their colleagues, who on account of their age did not go through the experiences of Solidarity and the Independent Students' Association, for their materialism and their indifference to social issues, for losing the values of national culture and for their egoistic striving to feather their own nests in the new reality. A Silesian German, who during university studies at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties had established friendly contacts with Polish colleagues, expressed a similar opinion. He also regarded those age-groups of Polish young people as the last ones who "really cared about something" (Y.S.12). Questionnaire surveys of the age-group of young students younger than the authors of the autobiographies really do exhibit a great concentration on personal, egoistic life goals in terms of the declarations of their future plans. This also appears clearly in the response to the question about important events in their lives. Only 6.1 percent mention the activity of Solidarity, and 9.5 percent the fall of communism. Most of them spoke exclusively about personal matters. On the other hand, the autobiographies of authors called Pathfinders and Politicians, as well as most of the other autobiographies, clearly concentrated on public affairs. The surprising contrast between the egoism and egotism of "younger brothers" and the attitudes of the young adults several years older than them may be the result of a shift in generations between the populations studied. However, it may also be the effect of a difference in research instruments. For a questionnaire gives greater assurance of anonymity than an interview recorded on a tape recorder. Besides this, the set of authors of autobiographies was rather small, and the number of social activists that it contained cannot be regarded as representative. Hence the conviction of the difference between generations expressed by a few of the authors should not be applied literally to the demographic category but rather to the difference in the types of attitudes felt by young people today. This is evidence of the diversity of reactions to the experienced period of social transformations. Nor does this mean that the autobiographies do not contain personal themes connected with the authors' material situation, and the carrying out of their professional plans. The short life of the young authors crossed the dividing line of two social systems. Some of them had enjoyed social privileges under the previous system, such as scholarships and trips to other socialist countries during their studies. At the same time, they had experienced the economic,

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political and intellectual restrictions of that system. They had joined the fight against it through participation in various forms of protest: from street demonstrations and the distribution of leaflets to sarcastic laughter during social studies classes in school. In the new political system they showed a lot of resourcefulness and practical initiative. This applies not only to the three previously mentioned cases. Although the autobiographies also express criticism and a feeling of disillusionment with public affairs, the picture of an active posture towards the world and satisfaction with its opening dominate. In this respect this picture is different from the main characteristics of the picture of Belarussians. However, the last statement must be accepted with reservations. The group studied was not representative, nor was it uniform in any respect. That comment also applies to the key research problem: national attitudes. It is hard to construct firm hypotheses with respect to factors influencing the formation of particular national attitudes, despite the fact that the autobiographies furnish a lot more information on this subject than the questionnaire materials. In a study of the autotelic nature of the scientific calling on the basis of the autobiographies of humanists, the technique of contrasting pairs was used (Kloskowska, 1985b). A similar operation can be carried out on the material analyzed here. For example, Y.P.I and Y.P.3 have a similar family environment in respect to culture and their self-identifications in the test are similar—exclusively sub-institutional, personal. However, the structure of the text of the two pronouncements is quite different. These authors are equally familiar with the canon of national culture, but their attitude towards the canon is diametrically different. They also have entirely different attitudes towards the value of the fatherland. The first can be called a patriot in the ordinary meaning, while the second declares cosmopolitanism. There could be many factors differentiating the attitudes of the two authors and only some of them are identifiable on the basis of the text. Nonetheless, information included in the survey questionnaires contains data on this subject. Pathfinder II and the Engineer, whom we have called a realist (Y.P.6 and Y.P.7), constitute another pair suitable for a similar analysis. They come from the same vicinity and formally from the same class environment, peasant with an admixture of workers and lower-grade intellectuals. They graduated from the same school in the same technical specialty. The father of the first author rejected the possibility of occupational promotion, because he did not want to join the Communist Party. The father of the second author boasted of his

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parents' participation in the Home Army. Both authors are professionally active and career-oriented. They work in the same industrial plant founded with German capital. In their schooldays they found themselves within the orbit of influence of the Pathfinders, reformed after 1980. However, only one of them associated himself permanently with the Pathfinders' movement (Y.P.6). In the light of all our criteria, the first of these authors represents the open type of national attitude: he accepts all double identifications; he expresses interest in foreign cultures and takes a practical interest in them, especially Jewish and German culture; he objectively and positively judges foreigners during trips abroad to earn money, and expresses a liking for them. At the same time, he manifests many features commonly understood as signs of patriotism: attachment to the private and ideological fatherland, acceptance and knowledge of its canon, and activity in the interest of the national community in the form of "free Pathfinders" action (Y.P.6). The second author (Y.P.7), in terms of all our criteria, comes close to the closed national attitude, that is, nationalism in the Polish common understanding of the word. He rejects all double national identifications on principle, for "a Pole is a Pole and nothing more"; he denies the need for interest in foreign cultures; he has a feeling of superiority, but did express liking for his Slavic colleagues during studies in one of the neighboring socialist countries. In principle he accepts the canon of national culture and emphatically expresses the need to preserve it and to become familiar with it, although he admits that he is not competent in this field. He expresses strong attachment to the fatherland and in the test he clearly identifies with Polishness. He also rejects stereotypes, because his personal contacts with mixed national groups of colleagues during his studies convinced him of the diversity of characters among people of the same nationality. However, his reaction to television programs devoted to Ukrainians and Jews expresses at least aloofness or antipathy. On the other hand, this does not stand in the way of contacts with his boss, a German, whom he wants to imitate in professional activity and economic success. Practical matters are the dominant sphere of his values. Hence his nationalism is not extreme, because the emotions and opinions related to this sphere are subordinated to pragmatic considerations and real observations, where they are available to him. Politician I (Y.P.8) represents a more consistent type of nationalism. He uses ideological arguments to support his position, and his life orientation is

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connected with political activity and nationalistic organizations. In the selfidentification test he puts his Christian identification next to his national one. But his autobiography indicates rather a link with the organizational activity of church institutions than strong religious experiences. He rejects double national identifications as a sign of mental illness, of a "split personality". His national attitude is also closed in the light of other indicators. Anti-Semitism based on the family tradition most clearly appears in this author. However, his attitude towards Russians and Ukrainians is more moderate. The orientation of a politician-pragmatist also appears in his activity as a small businessman. On the other hand, he opposes the participation of foreign capital in domestic enterprises, a development that he calls the "looting of the national wealth". He derives his theoretical inspirations from Dmowski, and Haller features among the personal symbols of his values. His permanent affiliation with the Polish Pathfinders' Union does not work to modify this position, but—as one may surmise—serves to carry it out in social activity. Pathfinder II (Y.P.5) is characterized by diametrically different attitudes. His openness in national matters is linked with his conscious declaration of principles of tolerance. According to the text of his autobiography, he is ready to accept not only the heritage of Polish virtues and the precious treasurehouse of culture, but also the burden of Polish trespasses. He is interested in programs and publications devoted to national minorities and feels solidarity with the underdog. His religiousness is connected with the orientation of the Catholic Intellectuals' Club and the international Taize movement. Through that movement he has come into personal contact with members of other nations and has exclusively positive things to say about that. The author's attitude towards strangers forms itself against the background of a general socially centered attitude. The need to act with people and for other people, which he fulfills in the Pathfinders, inclines him to put in the background the values that in a certain period of his life had attracted him, for example scientific work. The strong cultural tradition of his family has tied him firmly to the heritage of Polish culture and set him firmly within the Polish self-identification. In considering double identifications he tends to believe that a tie with one national culture must always be stronger. However, he finally acknowledges that a double identification is possible, especially in respect to Jews and Poles, who are linked by a common history. On the other hand, he believes that it is hard to feel oneself to be a Pole and a German at the same time. In the text cited this author alludes to the recollections of his family,

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which suffered persecution during the war. The burden of wartime experiences appears in many sources as a motive for aloofness, antipathy or hostility towards Germans. However, the young generation of Poles studied are predominantly oriented to the future, and family or general memories do not stand in the way of their contacts with Germans today, either at home or during foreign trips. This problem has special importance for determining the attitude of young Poles towards the processes of European unification. These processes require open national attitudes. The evolution of French-German relations has often been brought up in connection with this problem. However, there is a considerable difference between the situation of France and the situation of Poland vis-a-vis Germany. This difference results from the different economic, political, and in the end military potentials of Germany and of its western and eastern neighbor. So, as one can see from the example of Pathfinder II cited above, the difference in the wartime experiences of France and Poland is psychologically important. Questionnaire surveys of young Poles on the subject of European identification conducted in two groups of students showed the expected predominance of acceptance: 87.8 percent. The autobiographical interview permits a deeper insight into the concept of Europe that goes along with the conviction or doubts as to the European affiliation of Poles. As among most of the educated young members of minorities, the superficial, geographical understanding of Europe was rare here. On the other hand, there were partially separate and partially interrelated concepts of Europe as a civilization and culture—in the sense of a syndrome of characteristic aesthetic and intellectual values—and as a set of moral values. Hence the authors' understanding of Europe is not uniform. The attitude towards the European affiliation of Poles—both the real and the postulated affiliation—differs according to this and to personal attitudes. Here again we have to do with the divergence of individual positions on individual scales. Mention should be made of the sublime conception of Europe expressed by Pathfinder II and the consequences drawn from it: Europe for him is a collectivity of people from different states and nations, "who are capable of rising in spirit [...], knowledge, thoughts above national boundaries". The author is not certain of his own European affiliation in this sense, because his poor knowledge of foreign languages makes it hard for him to overcome cultural barriers. He hopes that he is a European at least in the sense that "I

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don't feel hatred for European and other nations, I don't feel myself in conflict with them. Although ..." (Y.P.5). Here we must note the advantages of gathering materials by the technique of the "live" recording of autobiographical accounts. The author, who here formulates his response more spontaneously than in written form, stops here and recalls his deep-seated grudge against the Germans caused by the concentration camp experiences of his family. This attitude has not been overcome, which does not mean that it cannot be overcome in this individual case, because the author is a thinking person and his moral principles incline him towards an open attitude. Paradoxically, the Engineer, a realist, whose attitudes are rather closed (Y.P.7), in his pronouncement and account of these activities expresses no visible difficulties in his personal contacts with Germans. That position seems more characteristic of the tendency manifested by young Poles during the period of the political breakthrough and the earlier partial emergence of Poland from the isolation imposed by the socialist regime. The traditional stereotype of the Germans based on private family history, literature and national historiography was not entirely rejected. However, this did not stand in the way of him taking advantage of the rather easy to arrange economically advantageous trips to Germany. A different picture of the neighbor was formed on the basis of direct contacts. These experiences were not always able to remove the old stereotypes, but the ease with which they are accepted depends on the family tradition. As a result, the image of the "eternal enemy" was undermined. More realistic, varied observations replaced it and opened the way to closer relations and understanding, and especially to practical cooperation. The most idealized picture of Europe understood as the quintessence of the culture of the "West" appeared most clearly in the account of Pathfinder II. His vision of Europe was influenced by his travels to Italy and Paris, his visits to the Louvre and the Rodin Museum, which he remembers in particular. Such experiences made him aware of his own deficiencies. On the other hand, Politician I, who also applied aesthetic and moral criteria to Europe, lost the feeling of Western superiority in the process. He emphasized the input of Polish culture to the Latin style and to the nature and patterns of the behavior characteristic of the West. He saw a certain inferiority of the West in its dissemination of materialistic attitudes. The authors, who took high technological and economic development for the criterion of European affiliation,

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were inclined to believe that Poland lacks many of the things needed to attain European affiliation according to this justification, but that it is on the right road to achieve it. On the question of European identification two authors took a different stance from the dominant orientation. The Individualist, in explicitly declaring his cosmopolitan views, opposed all generalizations that put individuals into pigeonholes. "For me there is no Jew, Greek [...] or Pole [...] I met a person and not a Frenchman or a European" (Y.P.3). The statement of this author is full of contradictions and also fabrications. However, the latter applies more to the statement of facts than to views. His declaration of cosmopolitanism does not prevent him from saying that in case of need he would fight for his country, despite his negative attitude towards national uprisings and patriotism. He rejects the principle of any canons whatsoever, in terms of obligations to be familiar with the authorized culture—whether national or universal—resulting from social self-identification. The second author comes close to a position that is not so much cosmopolitan as pluralistic. Politician II—a liberal—represents an approach to Europe that differs from all the previous ones (Y.P.I4). He understands European affiliation as a certain style of culture and is the only one of this orientation who does not limit Poland to the context of the West. Next to the terms "Pole" and "European", in the identification test he uses the self-definition "fascinated by the culture of the East". Strictly speaking, in his conception this East is Russia and the countries successively making up the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the First Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The choice of his reading that fits into the canon that he recognizes—also the canon of a Pole—includes the famous Russian writers of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. According to him, Poland has an important place in Europe because "here cultures crisscrossed, on the one hand European, western ones, and on the other hand—eastern, Russian culture. That formed a separate Polish culture". Stating that he is proud of Polish culture according to such a definition, the author opposes his concept of European affiliation to the narrow conceptions of "Eurocrats from Brussels" (Y.P.14). In a certain respect the perception of Russia contained in this text differs diametrically from the dominant picture built up in the minds of other authors of autobiographies on the basis of stories told by grandparents and sometimes parents about the passage of uncouth and sometimes dangerous Soviet

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soldiers, who brought liberation from the Germans but also a social system imposed by force. One again it should be remembered that among these respondents there was not a single contemporary supporter of the Left whose views were different. On the other hand, Politician II—a liberal, the only admirer of Russian literature—is also fascinated by the format of Russia as an exponent of the East. But his attitude towards Russia is split. He does not differ from the other authors in his opinion about Russia's backwardness. He says that the Germans (Nazis) were not more civilized, "but at least they did not overturn social relations" (Y.R14). Before the fall of socialism in Poland antipathy for Russia, which was identified with the Soviet Union, was openly expressed. This antipathy was also transferred to Russian culture. For this reason, a high-school pupil, the son of a Communist Party functionary, for two months boycotted Russian classes in school. In Polish intellectual circles knowledge of the works and fates of prominent Russian dissidents was a counterweight to hostility towards the social system. Obviously, the school curriculum could not provide an opportunity to get to know these works, even to those pupils who might have been able to understand such writing. Only Bulgakov managed to break through this wall of isolation. In the student questionnaire Russian writers and artists were also very rarely mentioned among writers representing the universal canon. Of the writers of the Soviet period these were Bulgakov and once Pasternak; of the older writers Dostoyevsky three times, Pushkin once and Tolstoy once. Only 52 percent of the respondents accepted the principle of a universal canon of culture, and only some of them gave examples, mainly West European and American writers. The political breakthrough brought a new development, in distinguishing from Russia Poland's immediate neighbors who were liberating themselves from political dependency. Several times fondness was expressed for Ukrainians during trips to the East. It should be remembered that in the sample of young Poles studied no one had a family that came from the southeastern borderland and which could hand down the memory of the experiences of Poles in that area. Personal encounters with eastern neighbors also aroused interest in Poles living in the borderland, combined with echoes of Poland's mission of civilization and plans concerning relations with the East. In one case there was a clear reference to Dmowski's conception (Y.P.8). That orientation conforms with the conception of Poland's role within a uniting Europe as a bridge between East and West. However, individual attitudes for

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the most part turned away from the East and, on account of the identification of Russia with communism and the tradition of antipathy, were mixed with contempt. In sum, in their autobiographies and interviews the young Poles studied showed both open as well as closed national attitudes. The second may be called manifestations of nationalism in the common Polish understanding, a position that consists of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The indicators of both positions were partially the result of answers to the projective questions in the questionnaire part of the interview, but were mainly derived from an analysis of the autobiographical narratives. The following were taken as indicators of closed national attitudes: (1) rejection of the possibility of double identifications and of national conversions; (2) negative stereotypes of foreign nations; (3) prejudice or expressions of generalized animosity and/or contempt for other nations; (4) cultural univalence, with rejection of the need to know the canon of other cultures; (5) conviction that one's own culture is absolutely superior to others; (6) putting the interests of one's own nation first in all circumstances and at any price. The open attitude is characterized by the following indicators: (1) acceptance of double identifications and conversions; (2) elements of cultural bivalence or polyvalence or at least of a friendly interest in the cultures of other nations; (3) no negative stereotypes of foreign nations; (4) rejection of general national prejudices. On the empirical plane the indicators of national attitudes of the first and second type do not make up systems that are completely separate from each other. They can be mixed in the responses of the same person. Besides, other indicators appear that cannot be included definitely in any of these two types. This third type consists of: (1) using the conception of the private and ideological fatherland; (2) declarations of strong attachment to one's nation and culture; (3) fairly good knowledge of the canon of this culture; (4) acting for the good of the national community; (5) preferring to live in one's country if one can choose to do so. This type of attitude is usually called patriotism. So far this concept has been used rarely here, because its use may give rise to many misunderstandings on account of its emotional charge and the practical difficulty of separating patriotism from nationalism in every case. The eminent philosopher-logician, the father of Jozef Maria Bochenski, provides an example of such difficulties. In his sketch on patriotism originally published during the

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war (1942) he defined the fatherland as "acknowledging a certain national culture". While recognizing that patriotism should not violate "the principles of universal justice", he nevertheless stated that "there exists a strict obligation of greater love for things and features that by the order of Providence have fallen to our lot". And later in the deontology of patriotism he justified the postulate according to which "we love the fatherland and command it to be loved more than other larger or smaller communities" (Bochenski, 1989, pp. 9,13). In ,4 Short Dictionary of Superstitions published in 1987, heplaced the accents differently, stating that the nation is only one of many human communities. "To pass over all of them in favor of only one nation and to give it absolute priority above all others is obviously a superstition" (Bochenski, 1988, p. 45). In the first essay the author warned against passing over various human communities, but he clearly recommended loving the nation more than others, ascribing priority to it at least in this sense. The entry "Nationalism" in the dictionary of superstitions ends with a recommendation to distinguish nationalism from patriotism, but the principle of differentiation is not clearly stated. What it means to love the fatherland above all other communities, but not to accord it "absolute" priority and "not passing over" other communities, remains unclear in the definitions of the famous logician. Even greater difficulties are encountered in distinguishing open and closed national attitudes in the empirical data on the views and actions of white-collar workers who are not intellectuals. Nevertheless, from them one could expect consistency in their stance in this matter. A relatively pure, separate typological construction is easier to attain if it is based on fewer indicators. In the autobiographical interview material, answers to the second question of the questionnaire part were assigned special importance as an indicator. The question concerned recognition of a universal canon of culture and acceptance of double national identifications. Such a choice may be regarded as arbitrary, but it has a certain justification also with respect to other data of the first, purely narrative part of the interview. On the basis of these reduced indicators a diagram was constructed that makes it possible to determine the position of the fourteen Polish authors on the national openness/closedness scale (see p. 372). The scale serves only a classificatory function. However, the result gives food for thought. Criteria converged in the categories of the greatest and average openness (zone a) and of the greatest closedness (zone d). On the other hand, in zone c criteria were incongruous,

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