Wojciech Szymański

The article’s aim is critical analysis of the Great War’s cultural memory in Poland and its production’s mechanism that emerged during the war and just after the conflict was over. Masculinist, heroic, brave – always heterosexist – and picturesque vision of the war that dominated, both, official and collective war memory, described by Maria Janion as “the uhlan western”, is a critical point of departure for introduction another version of the Great War memory in Poland. This one, contrary to the official one, is rather antiheroic and traumatic, and might be read as a kind of counternarrative that goes against the official ways of the Great War’s conceptualisations. The article wishes also to discuss the role and mechanism of the “war rumour” that has been identified by Marc Bloch in his study Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre by means of applying it to selected life narratives from the Eastern front – in particular memoirs and diaries written by male participants of the Great War. The French historian was particularly interested in how lying affects the psychology of war witnesses, how the witnesses constructed stories about the war events in which they participated or observed, as well as how rumours contribute to the birth of mass psychosis and hysteria. An in-depth scrutiny of several texts written in Polish during the war will also facilitate an identification of another, i.e. gendered, racial, and class aspect of the “false news” which Bloch ignored: namely its role in the creation of male hysteria. One could risk a claim that the relationship between war rumours and male hysteria is a major feature of the war narratives that are to be favoured by this article. The narratives, one should note, which have been erased from the official memory of the Great War and substituted by a heterosexist, masculinist tale about brave and rational soldiers and – here’s another lie – about irrational and hysterical women, civilians, and Jews.

The text presents a double interpretation (homoerotic and homophobic) of a commercial image of the “renaissance youth” set in the context of the 1980s and the twilight of Communist Poland. The subversive potential of homoerotic reading of the image, on which somewhere in the late 1980s someone wrote AIDS, is presented against the background of its history. The hand-made inscription is here interpreted not only as a homophobic act but first and foremost as an operation aiming at establishing the sense of the image in such a way so that the subversion founded on homoerotic reading is cancelled and the “renaissance youth” becomes a “sick faggot.” As a result of this operation, the image starts to create the only legitimate view of homosexuality, with connotations of sickness, very similar to images of AIDS that appeared in the homophobic public discourse of the Reagan era in the USA.

The article is a first scholarly attempt to identify and consider new perspectives and research problems related to the Great War cemeteries located in Western Galicia. Research on the cemeteries’ forms, origins and ideological expression that has been conducted so far in the field of art history becomes only a prelude for further interdisciplinary deliberations which remain heavily indebted to visual studies, semiotics, performance studies and memory studies. Consequently, Galician cemeteries are seen as (1) codified texts of culture and potential places of memory, (2) texts of culture that bear generic traces of tragedy as well as (3) performative texts of culture. As a result, new hypotheses and research postulates are laid out.