From Socialist Realism to Postmodernism: Polish Martial Law of 1981 in Polish and Foreign Films

Abstract

In his discussion of the book by Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (2005), political scientist Jan Kubik criticises the project of remembering ‘communism’ as a homogeneous experience of collective labour, regarding it as a myth created by Western left-leaning artists and intellectuals, largely as a means to articulate and defend their own intellectual position. Instead, he proposes to avoid such generalisations by looking at communism and its memory as country and period specific. As he puts it, ‘What constitutes a satisfactory analysis of the memory of communism for, say, the former East Germany in 1995 may be completely off the mark for Poland in 2004 or 2007’ (Kubik 2007: 133). Equally, he points out that ‘inside Eastern Europe the process of coming to terms with the memory of communism has been impossible without dealing with the memory of anti-communism and its various forms. What continues to be politically explosive is not how communism is to be remembered but how resistance and open struggle against communism are to be remembered’ (ibid.: 132).