In September the first students will start their classes in the new Polish Studies Chair at Columbia University. Whom is it addressed to?
The programme is addressed to undergraduate and graduate students. Being a history professor, I can supervise theses on the history of Poland and Central-Eastern Europe. I also invite interdisciplinary students who are interested not only in history but also in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies or philosophy and who are looking for answers to questions connected with the history and contemporary Poland as well as its neighbouring countries (including Germany and Russia).
What will the curriculum include?
Poland is a place, a space, where many different histories intersect, including national, ethnic and individual ones. And it is not only the history of Poland, understood as the history of one dominating ethnic group. The so-called “history of Poland” of the 19th century is the history of different empires: Prussia, Russia and the Habsburgs. It is also the history of Jews, Germans or Ukrainians. Poland’s transnational history is only a small fragment of our offer though. Together with my students I would like to consider how the regional history of Poland and Central-Eastern Europe is connected with the international and global history of the 19th and 20th century. My students will have an opportunity to get to know the history of Poland understood in this way from the Enlightenment to modern times. I also want to ask general but important questions and look for answers in a local context.
Who is creating the Polish Studies Chair with you?
The word “chair” can be slightly misleading as it is one professor’s position and… that’s it! I’m on my own and I have no assistants assigned. However, there are lots of academics and lecturers at Columbia University interested in Poland and Central-Eastern Europe. I’m going to closely cooperate with them as well as their and my own students. I’m planning to look for partners in the Department of History and Slavic Studies. I know that there are excellent experts in Polish culture who specialise in such areas as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s works, for example. These are often people who have no family relations with Poland. At Columbia University there are also prominent Polish biology or law scholars. However, the fact how they do their research is much more important than their passport or background.
What will future postgraduate students of the chair work on?
I’m open to any postgraduate research projects on different aspects of modern and contemporary history. It is important that their interests are somehow related to the history of Poland but they can also do their research on global history. An excellent example is the history of migration or history of science. I’m also interested in a comparative approach, for example history of different cities or border areas – for example Silesia is such a region where histories of different ethnic and religious groups overlap.
I hope that my presence at Columbia University will attract students who are interested in current history (from the Enlightenment to modern days). I’m open to various historical subjects – social, intellectual or economic history as well as history of culture. Different combinations and configurations are possible. My specialisation is the history of communism, social history and the history of social sciences. I constantly learn something new myself and I gain new qualifications. I want to pass them on to my students.
Columbia University in the City of New York is not a new place for you. You have been connected with their Department of History for two years now, working on the history of Polish scholars who created an interdisciplinary and international group of people dealing with the growth, planning and social aspects of developing countries after the war. Could you tell us more about your studies – which of these scholars fascinate you the most? What was the impact that their work had on Poland and its development?
I study the history of two generations of economists, statisticians and social researchers who were interested in the problem of so-called “backwardness” of Central-Eastern Europe. Modernity and underdevelopment are two leitmotifs constantly present in the social and intellectual history of Poland. The main people in this area are Michał Kalecki and Oskar Lange but I’m also interested in Ludwik Landau, Czesław Bobrowski, Paweł Rosenstein-Rodan, Witold Kula, Kazimierz Łaski, Ignacy Sachs and Włodzimierz Brus. Each of them made an international academic career or was a renowned expert in his field. These are people of very vast horizons who represent the best traditions of Eastern European humanities. I want to demonstrate that they introduced very interesting concepts and ideas to global economy, which were reflected in the theory of development after World War II. This theory, cut off from its regional roots, has become a general set of economic knowledge about development and underdevelopment, which is applied mainly outside Europe and in postcolonial countries.
This group of scholars tried to be actively involved in the economic policy in post-war Poland. They did it with different results – Kalecki and Lange contributed to liberalisation of the economic system in Poland in 1956, but they were politically marginalised quite quickly. In the sixties Kalecki and Lange left the political circles connected with the Polish People’s Republic. As a result of the anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaign in 1968 Kalecki and his co-workers were finally side-lined and brutally pushed away from academic work in Poland.
Along with your PhD thesis you wrote a book entitled Waiting in Lines. On Experiences of Scarcity in Post-war Poland. What is the meaning of “waiting in line” in the historical and sociological sense but also as an experience passed from generation to generation of Poles? How has this “experience” influenced our modern life and our ability to manage in the new reality?
“Waiting in line” is a tried and tested anecdote, a mental shortcut which often illustrates the history of life in the Polish People’s Republic. In my book I’m trying to go beyond the anecdote and talk about those times not in the form of stories or dramatic experiences but as a social history where everyday events played a crucial role. Waiting in line or rather knowing how to avoid it became a source of resourcefulness, which has stuck in public memory and remains present in different social practices. Nowadays “coping with reality” often gains a political dimension – in the nineties one’s shrewdness and a kind of entrepreneurship were appreciated as tools to create a new free market economy. On the other hand, some people believed that social skills gained in those times (and before that) are a dead weight for Polish economy and society – scheming and handling things have become a synonym of anachronistic communism, whose legacy should be ridden off as quickly as possible. But the “communism spirit” is still present in the Polish society – a board game called “Waiting in line” created by Karol Madej and published by the Institute of National Remembrance has become a bestseller not only in Poland but, what is interesting, also abroad. It is a fascinating social world in a nutshell.
How do we cope in this new reality from the perspective of 25 years of freedom? Does our society catch up with all the changes that took place after 1989 in the psychological and sociological sense? Where does this post-communism nostalgia in some people come from?
I don’t like the world “society” because in the last few years the experiences of various social groups have become very different. Single mothers of disabled children who recently demanded minimum support in Sejm “cope” differently than the new upper middle class living in enclosed housing estates. Nowadays it is difficult to talk about mutual experiences. Of course, if we look at statistical data that show average values we can say that things are good. The question is for whom? I’m not sure if the post-communism nostalgia is so strong. I think that it’s much less important than political differences, for example between liberals and moral conservatives, right and left and so on.
You meet students in New York, Potsdam and Berlin – how do they see Poland? What do they ask about? What is their main interest?
It’s hard for me to generalise. In my classes we hardly ever evaluate history. We try to understand its various aspects. Paradoxically, I don’t really know much about what students think about Poland but I’m sure they are fascinated by the history of this part of the world – to an average American such historical experiences as censorship, violence of war, being eradicated, having no historical continuity or changing from one system to another seem unbelievable and for us, people in Central-Eastern Europe, it was daily bread. Fascinating stories are plenty.
Thank you for the interview.
Małgorzata Mazurek, PhD, has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of History at Columbia University since 2012. Previously she worked in the Centre for the Contemporary History in Potsdam and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. She also gave lectures at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Warsaw.
She graduated from sociology and history of the Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in Humanities at the University of Warsaw and the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her academic interests include social history of Poland and Central-Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century, history of social science, historic anthropology and Polish-Jewish relations.
She is a grant holder of Marie-Curie Fellowship, Henkel Foundation M4Human Programme, Stiftung Aufarbeitung and the Foundation for Polish Science (two-time laureate of the START scholarship for young academics).
She is the author of the following books: Socialist Factory. Workers in People’s Poland and in the GDR on the Eve of the Sixties (Socjalistyczny zakład pracy. Robotnicy w PRL i NRD u progu lat sześćdziesiątych) (2005) and Waiting in Lines. On Experiences of Scarcity in Postwar Poland (Społeczeństwo kolejki. O doświadczeniach niedoboru 1945-1989) (2010), as well as numerous articles and book chapters in Polish, English, German and French. She is fluent in four languages.
Photo © Joanna Szproch