Dissonant Heritage of Central Europe

Should the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw be preserved or demolished? How to address the dissonant heritage of death camps and monuments to the Red Army? What is the secret to the phenomenon of some “large plate” tower blocks and Socialist Realist architecture? Are we willing to take responsibility for the entirety of material inheritance passed to us by older generations regardless of their national or ideological connotations? Authors featured in the 29. issue of “Herito” quarterly seek answers to these difficult questions.

In Poland and Central Europe, the last two decades witnessed the emergence of a large group of objects that are clearly discordant with the corpus of unquestionable monuments of national importance. These objects cannot be ignored or removed from our scope of attention. They provoke emotional reactions. It is for us to decide which elements of the inherited material culture we are willing to accept and treat responsibly. In this respect, the history of Central Europe leaves us with numerous difficulties.

In the 29. issue of “Herito”, Piotr Paziński investigates the problematic nature of death camps in Poland. Wojciech Wilczyk takes his camera and visits cemeteries of the soldiers of the Red Army, while Lola Paprocka visits the New Belgrade tower block project. Błażej Ciarkowski tells a story of holiday resorts built by the Nazis and the Communists. Jacek Purchla explains the nature of dissonant heritage. Michał Wiśniewski investigates the phenomenon of large plate tower block projects, while Aleksandra Sumorok proves that Socialist Realist architecture has many faces. Jakub Dąbrowski finds the sources of contemporary iconoclasm, and Ewa Chojecka analyses an unknown face of the udarnik monument in Zabrze. Of particular interest is Andrea Tompa's text on the history of Cluj – Romanian city with difficult history.

The issue features reviews of books by Kaja Puto, Mikołaj Banaszkiewicz, Katarzyna Kotyńska, Joanna Majewska, Łukasz Łoziński, Jakub Muchowski, Wojciech Wilczyk, Bartosz Sadulski, as well as announcements of visit-worthy exhibitions in Berlin, Budapest, Bratislava, Krakow, Olomouc, Prague, Warsaw, and Vienna.

Memory of the Reformation

On 31 October 1517, an Augustinian friar and professor of theology, Martin Luther, attached to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg his 95 theses that addressed the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church. Was this event crucial for the development of our concepts of individual freedom and human rights? Would capitalism ever be conceived without the protestant ethos? What was the role of Reformation in the shaping of modern Central European nations? These questions are tackled by authors featured in the 28. issue of “Herito” quarterly.

Bishop Waldemar Pytel examines the paradox of Lutheran continuity on the example of the Church of Peace in Świdnica. Jarosław R. Kubacki and Michał Choptiany recall the Mennonites and the Polish Brethren, the “enfants terribles” of Reformation. János L. Győri, Miloš Kovačka, Magda Vášáryová and Pavel Kosatík explain how Protestantism shaped the history and culture of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Arleta Nawrocka-Wysocka writes about chants, hymnals, and the rise of the Central European languages, while Łukasz Galusek draws a subjective atlas of the Central European heritage of Reformation.

Of particular interest is a text by Ewa Chojecka on the promotion of knowledge of Reformation in Central Europe in museum education, and Weronika Murek’s essay on Paweł Hulka-Laskowski, a Żyrardów-based descendant of the Czech Brethren and the first translator of “The Good Soldier Švejk”.

The new issue of “Herito” features reviews of interesting books and announcements of upcoming exhibitions.

Krakow and the World

The International Cultural Centre sees its mission and udertakings as founded on what is labelled as cultural heritage, namely using the elements of the past so as to serve present and future goals. The city understood as a mirror of civilisation – let’s take Krakow as an example – was always at the core of this way of thinking. That is why we believe that the debate on the nature of the city as well as the transformation which Krakow has undergone is crucial.

Today, an inquiry into Krakow’s metropolitan functions is not merely an investigation of its place in the European settlement network, its relationship with the outside world and the nature of its ongoing change (which is impossible to overlook if one only takes a stroll across the Main Square). It is also a question regarding competitive assets of cities like Krakow. Presently, large cities seem to have two main characteristics: acceptance of others and intolerance of mediocrity. Interestingly, however, only a selected few urban settlements can foster new intellectual qualities. The level of a city’s creativity depends on multiple factors: political and economical indicators, but also the amassment of cultural, educational and informative elements, offering synergistic possibilities, which are an essential condition for the emergence of creativity and innovation. I believe we should turn to these factors for the source of a new vision for Kraków. It is not, nor will it ever be, a global metropolis, but it has all the makings of a creative city.

Even if Krakow is hardly the heart of Central Europe, it does remains an element of the urban network that composes its core. It seems, then, that it is worth asking about the specificity of our Kulturraum, the cultural space symbolised by Central European metropolises. What is it that sets them apart from urban settlements elsewhere in the world (if they are indeed perceptibly different)? And has Central European identity suffered as a result of the twenty‑five years of rapid cultural change?

Hungary

Stanisław Vincenz used to say that the Danube river was a gate to Hungary. Horace wrote that it was as deep as the sea. The Danube unites Hungary, it is the country’s spine and bloodstream. When it flows beyond Hungary, it becomes its border. And in fact, every border is fluid, it both divides and unites, it is an end and a meeting point.
The Danube and Hungary are similar. At the beginning of the 20th century Endre Ady called Hungary the ferry country, ceaselessly drifting between the shores of the East and the West. This uncertainty as to which shore to land upon seemed to Ady characteristic of the Hungarian soul. László Németh wanted to see Hungary as a bridge country, not a rickety boat, thrown up across a river, connecting the shores and allowing people to freely cross it. He insistently explained to his country-men that despite their feelings of alienation in Europe and dreams of returning to their Asiatic origins, they could draw strength from their neighbours, because all of us – Central Europeans – are connected through “the bond of fate, as milk drawn from the same breast”.
That is why in this issue we examine our “milk siblings”. We travel along the Danube’s current, we stop at the Hungarian metropolis – Budapest – and we visit the country’s provinces. Above all, we ask the questions: who are the Hungarians and how do they position themselves in Central Europe?

Silesias

Silesia has a multiplicity of faces. Besides the name, it is difficult to find a common denominator between Lower and Upper Silesia or Cieszyn and Opole Silesia. The multidimensionality of the region has not been determined only by its three formative cultures: Polish, German and Czech. Other important contributors have been two great Christian traditions, Catholic and Protestant, to this day engaged in an intense dialogue with each other. Also the tragedies of the 20th century made their mark on the region, turning Silesia into a land of exile for many, its domestication taking a long time. Heterogeneity of Silesia also results from the fact that the region remains divided between two countries: Poland and the Czech Republic; but the Olza no longer divides the region in two, as the bridges across the river in Cieszyn are now open.
Because Silesia is mainly openness. Silesia owes its strong presence in the history of the European civilisation to this feature. Called the “emerald of Europe” in the 17th century, in the 19th‑century it became one of the main centres of the industrial revolution. The gene of modernity sprouted in this period and is growing fruit now – in Wrocław, which turned from an unwanted city into the European Capital of Culture 2016, or in Katowice, from a place of post‑industrial collapse becoming a UNESCO City of Music, joining the ranks of creative cities in Europe.
In this issue of Herito we speak about these metamorphoses and various facets of Silesia. And also about its otherness, owing to which Silesia is still not very well known, but this is where its greatest value lies.

Wzorowanie. Dizajn w Europie Środkowej

Does Central Europe have a distinctive design?
In the countries of our part of Europe – which in the last 150 years have experienced constant political, ideological, class, and cultural transformations – design reveals surprisingly many common features.
Distinctive patterns of identity were provided at the turn of the 20th century by Ruskin’s and Morris’s ideas embodied in the Arts and Crafts movement. By way of Vienna, they emanated on the whole area of Central Europe. The phenomenon of the Krakow Workshops is a perfect illustration how Ruskin’s idiom was put in practice to give shape to the vernacular, the local, the national.
Sovietisation, which made its mark on the second half of the previous century with its ideals of industrialisation and progress, paradoxically also unleashed in people a great desire to emphasise their own uniqueness. An enclave of freedom was found in design, after the Stalinist era liberated from the straitjacket of socialist realism – it allowed artists from behind the Iron Curtain to manifest their cultural belonging to the West and at the same time to underline their own identity.
In the last quarter century, design has allowed the countries of Central Europe to strike for their artistic and cultural independence, and to overcome the colonial divisions into the colourful West and the drab, imitative East.
So perhaps the distinctive Central European nature of our design is not an illusion after all.

The City as a Work of Art

Since the time of Plato and Vitruvius the quest for truth, goodness and beauty has been accompanied by thinking on the ideal layout of the city and composition of its space. It is thus no coincidence that the dream of the ideal city fascinated so many outstanding thinkers and artists of the Italian Renais-sance. The goal of achieving harmony and perfection by creating the ideal city plan – stellar, founded on the principles of regular geometricity – has largely, with a few exceptions, remained a utopia.In 1889 Camillo Sitte’s much-publicised book Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen was released, and its role evolved into that of a manifesto of thinking on the creation of urban space in artistic categories. It was also a bid – doubtless a very idealistic one – to oppose the negative effects of rapid urbanisation in the industrial age. So should Camil-lo Sitte’s ideas today be dismissed as nothing but the utopias of an aesthete who treated the city as a kind of stage set? Or was his text rather an act of impotence and capitulation by an urbanist? Neither. Sitte was protesting at the reduction of modernday urbanisation to the technocratic dimension, in a sense foreseeing a scenario akin to that which Fritz Lang showed in his apocalyptic Metropolis.But the city is more than simply idea and form; it is also function and process. In other words, the city is a reflection of its civilisation. This is the conception of the city that for twenty-five years has been at the heart of the ICC – our research, our exhibitions, our educa-tional programmes and our publishing activity. The very first conference organised by the centre, Managing Historic Cities. The Case of Central Europe, in 1991, was focused on the tensions that arise between the processes to which contemporary cities are subjected and the heritage amassed in them. Our logo – inspired by the Vitruvian ideal of man and the concept of the golden ratio – expresses a pursuit for beauty through the creation of ideal forms that are at once open and dynamic. It is thus no coincidence that in this double issue of our quarterly Herito accompanying our jubilee marking twenty-five years of the ICC’s work we have decided to tackle the question of whether the city – and in particular the contemporary metropolis – can be a work of art.

Galicia after Galicia

For 150 years Galicia was an artificial construction of Austrian diplomacy, the fruit of the partitions of Poland and its failure. It has not existed now for 100 years. That is why we are constantly asking the question: why is Galicia constantly in us? Does it really determine our identity? Where does the power and attractiveness of this legacy come from today? The his- tory of Galicia provokes us to ask difficult, at times very difficult, questions, ones that often give us contradictory answers. Galicia after Galicia is, more than anything else, a phenomenon of diversity, which today means a polyphony of memories – dominated by myths. It is a territory where not only the memories of Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians and Jews, but also those of Czechs, Hungarians, Armenians, Slovaks and many other nations of Central Europe meet. This memory of, as some people say, paradise lost, is quite often exterritorial. Today we can see it not only on both sides of the San River – in Lviv and Krakow, not only in Vienna, but also quite unexpectedly in Jerusalem, Haifa, Brooklyn, or even California. Galicia, like all of Central Europe, is more than anything else a complicated relation between time and space. In the case of today’s Ukraine this legacy often seems problematic and requires new reformulations.
The Myth of Galicia exhibit was devoted to these issues. Its presentations – in Krakow and in Vienna – turned out to be a great success, which not only confirmed the livelihood of the Galician myth but also, more importantly, the weight of the questions asked. The exhibition was concluded with the conference Galicia after Galicia which was organised in March 2015. This issue of Herito is an outcome of that meeting.

Balticum

The Balticum as a geo-cultural community? Arguments to support this claim would probably be as numerous as sceptical voices. But it is not a question of evidence. Another issue seems to be much more important: why is it advisable to think in terms of large geo-cultural regions and what possibilities are openedby such thinking?
Polish Presidency of the Council of the Baltic Sea States provokes us to take a look at the countries situated around the Baltic Sea and their cultures, and to ask some questions.
Can the Baltic be called the Mediterranean of Northern Europe? Does it unite or perhaps divide the nations living around it? With what values is Balticness associated? Can they become the foundation for a Baltic community and identity? To what extent is Poland a Baltic country? Have the Poles become a nation of the sea?
Looking at history, politics and art, we seek answers to these questions.

Thinking the Landscape

“Landscape is more than painterly or visual effects,” Stanisław Vincenz wrote in 1943. “It is also the soil on which we walk and which we work, its undulation or flatness, its waters – seas, rivers or marshes – and even the air that we breathe.”
Without man, without his presence, the world will not become a landscape, just as space itself is not place, but only becomes it through thought and spirit – i.e., understanding. It is understanding that transforms a space into a place, understanding that permits living, as Heidegger wrote. Landscape is a record of that transformation, of the process of bcoming at home in the world; a record that we have learned to “read”.
Alongside the conceptions of Vincenz and Heidegger, there are others equally worth recalling: Franz Hessel’s passion for loafing, Walter Benjamin’s arcades, Christian Norberg‑Schulz’s genius loci, David Lynch’s urban landscape and Gordon Cullen’s townscape movement. For it was these that paved the way for a new mode of thinking, which in the 1970s and 1980s precipitated the “cultural turn” in the humanities. And landscape was undoubtedly one of the phenomena which defined that turn and facilitated the meeting of a range of research perspectives.
Today, the list of fields that have turned their attention to landscape is a very long one: from geography, art history and photography, and aesthetics, through ecology, landscape architecture and cultural studies, to research into memory, cultural heritage, and even law and economics – which is proof of the success of the recently passed “Landscape Act”.
The landscape is the environment of the life and activity of humankind. It is also image, memory, and a way of seeing the world. It is material for art and the substance of memory. In this issue of Herito we want to show the variety of its manifestations and the diversity of considerations in researching it. For it is through thinking that we create landscape.

Cold War Modern Architecture

Twenty years ago Adam Miłobędzki used the term “socmodernism” to denote the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, and attempted to evaluate it for the first time in The Architecture of Poland published by the ICC. The assessment was not at all favourable.
A synonym to huge prefabricated concrete slabs and factories of houses, typified, extremely economical, and utilitarian, going hand‑in‑hand with the bureaucratisation of the architect’s profession, “socmodernism” manifested itself to Miłobędzki through hundreds of residential settlements set up and managed by the state; concrete jungles making the dogma of Communist social engineering come true. In other words, the “post‑artistic era” producing a secondary functionalism, made passive loans from the West.
That it was too critical an assessment, and that as much bad as good can be demonstrated on both sides of the iron curtain at the time, was proved in 2008 by the Cold War Modern exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Yet, what such a look required was some distance.
Today, “socmodernism” has become fashionable. The appraisal continues, although hardly ever does it reach beyond the borders of people’s own country. Thus we take a broader look at the architectural landscape of former “Communist democracies” and break away from the stereotype of the “concrete jungle style”.
The picture that emerges is indeed enticing: a generation of artists who remained unconnected and clung to their own path, while the international style of modernism was experiencing its heyday. In their own manner, they opposed the system, as they did not let themselves be pigeonholed into any doctrine, be it architectural or political. Despite the unbelievable scale of wartime damage and despite the need to “start from scratch”, they were the architects of continuity, faithful to the ethos of profession and the inheritance of their predecessors. With these to fall back on, they developed their own, original language of architecture, and many of their works have gained the status of icons.
We are no longer looking at them with bias, as we stand closer to fulfilment of what Karel Prager addressed so frequently, namely, that new things are what people only have to get used to.
Translated from the Polish by Piotr Krasnowolski

A Century On from the Great War

We, nations of Central Europe would not be there, sovereign in our own states, without that war.
The long 19th century held no encouraging prediction for any auspicious turn of history. Since the Napoleonic revolution was suppressed, despite attempts repeated hither and thither, there have been no major disturbances in the peace and stability between the great powers of the Holy Alliance; even though there were constant disturbances, and temperaments were heating up; even though civilisational progress, and national and class emancipation gained incredible momentum. Until everything erupted in 1914.
A comparison of the map of Europe in 1815 and a hundred years later, after the end of “The Great War” leaves no doubt that the “Central European mosaic” is the consequence of the shockwave that accompanied the 20th century entering the arena of history; which happened precisely in 1914.
Delayed and – as it was to prove – short, the new century brought enough to overshadow the war that it opened with, and which was the first to be called a world war. The spectacle of the second global war exceeded all and any conceptions both in the scope and the gravity of the massacre. The post‑war order decided in Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam affected the world system of powers and the everyday life of Central Europeans to a far greater extent than the decisions made 25 years earlier in Versailles, Saint‑Germain, Neuilly, Trianon, and Sèvres.
We parted with the 20th century without compassion. The Warsaw Round Table, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the Wall peacefully brought down in Berlin were reasons for considerable pride. The lesson in history seemed learnt… if not for the shots fired again in the Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Which is why we return to “the Great War”. Not as much to examine its reasons and course, but rather to ask about its remembrance, about its significance for us today. And the picture that emerges from such a reconnaissance is far from unequivocal.
Translated from the Polish by Piotr Krasnowolski

Nations and Stereotypes

History teaches us that international relations are strongly contingent on our representations of others. Even if the beliefs we live by do not find corroboration in reality, we are reluctant to discard stereotypes or prejudice, which Ambrose Bierce called “a vagrant opinion without visible means of support”.
Thinking of stereotypes is deeply vested in culture, history, and collective memory. It reflects more than real, ancient or recent conflicts, yet it cannot be disconnected from them entirely. After all, stereotypes are born from tension and rivalry, frustration and aggression.
Gordon Allport was right to note that stereotyping is “the law of least effort”. It provides relief from reflecting on what the world is really like, even if it does result in harmful simplifications. This is especially true for national stereotypes, which, once formed, seem impervious to revision or modification. The most efficient means for changing them can in fact be the political situation. We need not seek far and wide; this is happening before our very eyes. Today, Poland and Germany are connected by friendly relations, and moreover Germany is among Israel’s greatest friends in Europe, while it is the tie between Ukraine and Russia that is undergoing the toughest test.
Nothing, therefore, is granted once and for all. Even stereotypes are not set in stone.

Turcja - Türkiye - Turkey

Antemurale Christianitatis – the Bulwark of Christianity – is an important constituent of many national cultures in Central Europe. It is also the experience of the Poland and Poles. Several centuries of the Polish Republic and the Ottoman Empire as neighbours are still alive in the Polish tradition and culture. And what is interesting is that our perception of Turkey is burdened with the load of national mythology which comes from the turn of the 20th century. Its foundations still lie in the works of the Polish Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz from over a hundred years ago. What is more, Sienkiewicz’s glasses have become stuck on our noses so perfectly that many people forget they are looking through them at the past of our part of Europe. It is time to take them off . It is time to have a look from the other side as well.
To what extent can we talk about the European limes of the Turkish Empire? About the civilising mission of Turkey in our part of the continent? About Turkish heritage – denied, unwanted, or maybe just forgotten?
At the same time we are intrigued by Turkish experience of the 20th century; the Turkish road to constructing a modern and democratic country; the complicated relations between tradition and development.
When raising these issues, we do not hesitate to ask about Turkey’s European horizon – in the past, today, and perhaps in future. Both the 90th anniversary of the signing of a treaty on friendship between the Second Polish Republic and the Turkish Republic (2013) as well as the 600th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between the First Polish Republic and the Ottoman Empire (2014) make an excellent pretext to do just that.

Conflicts of Memory

Each community devises specific modes of remembering, but also of forgetting uncomfortable facts. Ars memoriae and ars oblivionis constitute an inseparable pair.
Common memory is a sphere that we reconstruct anew every day, even though people claim that the essence of their identity is unchanging. While history itself is a closed structure, memory is open both to individuals and to the collectivity. Collective memory reconstructs rather than registers the past; and memory is not necessarily explicit. The issues today include not only reclaiming memory and polyphony of memory, but also – and perhaps above all – conflicts of memory, the problem of “our memory and yours”, difficult memory, manipulation of memory, and its sacralisation, appropriation and instrumentalisation. Following this idea, in this edition of Herito we try not only to become oriented in the nature of conflicts of memory, but also to look around the landscape of memory that surrounds us, Central Europeans. For, above all, one needs to start with oneself.

Rumunia - Romania - România

Romania is a paradoxical country. Although the long 19th century was very kind to it – the young country entered the European arena and quickly acquired an esteemed position – the short 20th century did not spare it in any respect. Trapped between fascism and communism, Romania had chosen the lesser of two evils. Decades in the shadows of “The Sun of the Carpathians” turned out to be the worst years of all. “A sad country, full of humour” – George Bacovia’s prophetic words from the 1930s came true in excess.
Exiting communism was not velvety and the road to Europe – bumpy. Is this the reason why Romanian transformation turned out to be so complicated? This is just one of the questions we would like to answer, as the balance of that period is still open, and the reasons for the state of the affairs seem to be rooted in the past.
At the same time, Romania is an important partner in East‑Central Europe and we are not entirely aware of its potential. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to recognise and understand Romania’s specificity, and most of all – to perceive it as a country in the process of modernisation, which presents great inner diversity and cultural creativity, best manifested by the success of young Romanian cinema or “young Romanian art”.
Romania is different, but somehow similar, close, and therefore – very interesting. [JD]

Croatia in Europe

Democratic Croatia came into being 23 years ago, although it can hardly be considered a young state. Despite Croatia’s debut into the European Union today, it has been instrumental in the creation of European culture for millennia.
Nevertheless, Croatia’s Europeanness is marked by a certain dissonance between its two cultural variants – the Central European and the Mediterranean European. As Maciej Czerwiński notes, communism did not bring Croatia closer to Central Europe, to Kundera’s “kidnapped West”, but in fact drove it further away. Yet after the collapse of the communist regime, its attempt to distance itself from the stereotype‑ridden region virtually became declared proof of its Europeanness. The Croats “fled” the Balkans in the same way as the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians “fled” Eastern Europe.
However, the success of its European integration does not remove certain important questions from the horizon. Who do the Croats feel themselves to be? What is national identity, and is there any sense in discussing such a construct at all? Where is the boundary between “past” and “present”? Should the Yugoslavian idea be filed in the archives of history once and for all? And what role will fall to the Croats in a crisis‑racked Europe?

The elusive centre (of Europe)

Grasping the centre is a troublesome, difficult or perhaps simply impossible task. Take, for example, the two Visegrads – places with identically sounding names, one in Hungary (Visegrád), the other in Bosnia (Višegrad). The first, which gave its name to them Visegrad Group, is a sign of the possibility of overcoming old feuds and building the foundations for mutual understanding between the countries of Central Europe. The other is a symbol of tragedy and an attempt at rejecting the past, building a future on forgetting. Both Visegrads – located on almost the same longitude – symbolise two parallel Central European realities. Thinking about one, it is impossible not to see the other, especially in the neighbourly context of Central European cooperation.
A wider aspect of Central European culture and civilisation is presented in two other groups of texts. In the first, we ask contemporary art critics what has remained of the idea of Central Europe in art. In the other, we take a look at “visible” and “invisible” cities, following the civilisation and culture-building role of Central European cities from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, or the memory of the city present in literature and the cityscape.
And finally, professors Tokimasa Sekiguchi and Mykola Riabchuk share with us their perspectives – a remote and closer one – on Central Europe.
So the Centre of the continent remains a challenge. Being Central European is today not only the question of world view and identity. It has become the challenge of building our identity in such a way that this Centre is more and more clearly discernible for those looking from the outside.

Słowacja - Slovensko - Slovakia

Our main focus is both the past and the present of the Slovaks which is reflected in their culture and identity. On clear days we can see from our office windows the massif of Babia Góra on the horizon; working on this issue we wished to make Slovakia and its culture not only equally visible to but also better understood by its closest and more remote neighbours.
Authors in this issue include Vladimir Beskíd, Dana Bořutová, Juraj Buzalka, Magdalena Bystrzak, Rudolf Chmel, Mária Ferenčuhová, Naďa Hrčková, Andrzej S. Jagodziński, Ľubica Kobová, Milan Lasica, Rafał Majerek, Peter Michalík, Miroslav Michela, Maria Pötzlová Malíková, Magda Vášáryová and Teresa Worowska.

Nations - history and memory

If the world today is as much a mosaic of nations and their histories as a social tissue of their individual memories, families, milieus and institutions, the sphere that has emerged between them appears to be an area of tension and often conflicts. What kind of conflicts? Whose conflicts? Who and for what purpose do memory and history now serve? These are some of the questions that run through this issue, and the review of opinions it publishes opens with Miroslav Hroch’s question: What does Europe still need nations for?

Stories form countries which are no more

In 1989 Poland bordered three countries. Just a few years later none of them existed. During this memorable autumn Milan Kundera’s dream was being fulfilled: that the countries from our part of Europe return from the East, where they wrongly found themselves, to where they should be – if not in the West then at least in the Centre. Countries liberated from unwanted (?) relationships appeared on the map. We know how different these separations were, in what circumstances Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the GDR or the USSR became a history. Common sense suggested that it had to be so, for these countries had been wrongly structured but still…we spent quite a chunk of our lives with them and in them!
And today? Does the time elapsed help in a sober judgement or does it colour memories with nostalgia?

Culture and politics

The history of humanity provides enough proofs for what one can call the principle of support. Artists have supported many a regime with their talents. On the other hand, the fall of many a tyrant would not have come about without them. And what if the power of art is as attractive as any other form of power?
As food for thought, we analyse the alliance of culture and politics in its various aspects, formerly and now.

Cities for thought

A city half existing and half abandoned, a city lost and half recovered – this is what Adam Zagajewski wrote of present-day Lviv. It is also the pars pro toto of the syndrome of the Central European city – not belonging fully to anyone, either to those who live there or those who lost it. And how many other names could we insert in place of Lviv? Of cities still as tangled as the mythical Gordian knot? Yet there will be no Alexander along, adds Peter Krečič, and we must start untangling it patiently ourselves.

Art is changing (a) place

To say that art is changing is to state the obvious. But the question of the way in which it is changing is not so trivial.
Art changed its location – it left the studio, but it also escaped somewhere beyond the galleries, beyond museum rooms. What does it mean for the institutions and to what extent the thinking about the infrastructure for art should be changed? And does the new venue for art also change? What is happening in the cities, the landscape, the public and private space subjected to the influence of art?

The city and the museum

Cities are museums of a sort – as three-dimensional illustrations of history, huge collections, but also treasure chests in which the spirit of the place hides. Unfortunately, the history of our part of the continent has rarely left them intact. Their existence here is a story of ups and downs. Perhaps this is what lies behind the overwhelming need to protect all that has been preserved or even to recreate what has been destroyed. The evolution of the urban space towards a role as a museum is interwoven here with successive waves of national revivals.

But matters of state and nation form only one chapter of the story which is the city. Moreover, the story of the city often provides us with an opportunity to free ourselves from narratives of the “one truth” ilk, to reconcile antagonisms, to uncover the genuine, albeit complex – because many-layered – identity of places. And museums have an important role to play in this process.

Imagined identities

Imagined communities, called thus by Benedict Anderson, revealed the principle of nation-building, namely inculcating an image of a translocal community to which people belong. They also bring to light the creative character of imagination, which was able to connect the abstract categories of nation, state and homeland with some specific area. At the same time they put in motion an identity narrative, necessary to unite the nation, which, after all, is a kind of “narrated community”, to borrow a phrase from Maria Janion.

In today’s fluid times a human being is looking for a place and a place is looking for a human being; people want to feel at home in a space but spaces influence entire communities. This creates the need to imagine certain possible multilayered identities – for a place, for people, for a collective. For some new kind of individuality.

Symbols and clichés

In the first issue, entitled Symbols and clichés, we give a critical airing to notions connected with national ideologies and political myths and their functions, and look also at their various reflections in art, architecture and the landscape. The material and non-material heritage of national ideology built up over the past two centuries continues to influence the collective imagination of our societies today. What is the nature of this symbolism in our times? Is it a burden of our age, a colourful tourist product or a shared heritage? In these days, does my hero have to be your enemy?

The theme we have chosen for this issue is by no means exhausted in its content. We hope you find that these discussions, opinions, reflections on new and recent exhibitions and books, and examples of successful cultural projects and modern institutions operating in the broadly defined field of heritage combine to produce an interesting panorama of culture from our region of Europe.