Warsaw’s Palace of Arts and Culture in the po…

Introduction

In 1989, after the fall of communism in Eastern Central Europe, Poland had only known sovereignty for just around twenty years in its recent five hundred year history. Naturally, one wonders how a people who had been split between so many different countries, including the monolithic Hapsburg and Russian Empires, preserve a national identity. Even with “polishness” having survived into the interwar years, the Soviet Union’s desire to create the soviet man and its attempt to eradicate any national identity which fell outside of “sovietness” further problematized Poland’s nation building post-1989. In fact, the threatened identities of Eastern Central European countries and other post-socialist states, who were for so long under a system which was “deeply a-national, anti national, and supranational,” is a recurrent issue even today. But because of Poland’s history as a practically non-existent sovereign country, except for during the interwar years as the Second Republic, the role of identity is exemplified in both its struggle for independence from the reins of the USSR pre-1989 and in the creation of a free, democratic Poland post-1989.

In having identified an interest in exploring both the preservation of a historical Polish identity and the creation of a new one as a way to mark its newly acquired sovereignty, I wanted to find a focal point which epitomized the struggle for a unique Polish identity and through which to explore the post-1989 transition. My research landed on Pałac Kultury i Nauki im. Józefa Stalina, Warsaw’s Palace of Art and Culture. It is not just my research’s focal point, but also quite literally is geographically in the center of Warsaw and culturally in the center of Poles’ conceptions of their country and nationhood. Gifted to Poland as a sign of friendship from Stalin, it has become both a way that socialism had persisted into post-1989 Poland but also a means through which its citizens have fought back against the Soviet “anti-national” identity. Exploring artistic and pop culture representations of the Palace of Culture, especially in the context of dissidence, before and after 1989, also yields insight into what went into creating a Polish identity and what this identity meant for Poles before and after the collapse of socialism. The reappropriation of the Palace of Culture by the Polish and its relationship with historical memory post-1989 can additionally serve as an analogy into identity and nation-building in Eastern Central Europe as a whole.

In this paper, I am going to first describe the architectural environment in Europe more broadly and its influence on Polish architecture and urbanistic thought leading up to 1939. I will then shift to a discussion of how the events of the Second World War changed the priorities of the built environment in Warsaw, and especially how the devastation faced by Poland from the Nazis turned the focus of its society to the past rather than to the future. Once Poland falls under Soviet control, its architectural and intellectual environment further metamorphosizes into a combination of old Polish tradition, socialist ideology and a desire to preserve and reconstruct Polish identity. Here is where the Palace of Culture comes in, as the best example of this new climate. The last part of the paper will be dedicated to exploring artistic and general media representations of the Palace of Culture both before and after 1989. Such a discussion proves fruitful in understanding the role of the Palace as a metaphysical object dominating both in Warsaw’s skyline and in the minds and memories of its inhabitants. Such a dichotomy yields interesting insights into how identity is preserved, formed and transformed, especially in a post-totalitarian context.

The Polish Environment pre-1952

Following the first World War and the need for both physical and socio-political reconstruction, architectural thought in Europe was thriving like never before. Modernism aimed to take inspiration from the quickly industrializing and increasingly technological world. The movement wanted to do away with pre-war styles which centered around “unnecessary” ornament which was economically inefficient and only furthered social stratification. Organizations like CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) were looking to find new ways to conceive of our living and working conditions by redesigning residential space. Their ideas were centered around ideas of existenzminimum, or the “minimal dwelling”, which looked for ways to minimize floor space, population density and cost while maximizing healthy living through access to green space, facilitating transport and encouraging social interaction. With thinking about private residential space and how it interacts with publicness, CIAM architects turned to thinking about urban planning and the organization of space in cities as a whole. Innovative urban plans by American Frank Lloyd Wright, such as Radial and Broadacre City, which imagined cities as growing along communication routes, or Otto Wagner’s reconstruction of Vienna and its Ringstrasse to fit modern needs for increasingly faster paced city life, inspired CIAM. By the fourth CIAM conference in 1933, Swiss architect le Corbusier published a document on urban planning called the Athens Charter. It expanded on the earlier “CIAM 4 functions”, which in studying different cities, identified four central conditions in urban life: living, working, recreation and circulation. This conference in 1933 was called “The Functional City” and significantly inspired architecture and urban planning for the rest of the twentieth century.

A year after, in 1934, under the influence of this Western European avant-garde movement and the constructivists in the east, Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus, two Polish architects, came up with a plan for Warsaw called the Warszawa Funkcjonalna (Functional Warsaw). Szymon Syrkus was one of the architects present at the CIAM IV conference in Berlin back in 1931. Warsaw was in many ways the perfect experiment city for CIAM’s ideas, and Syrkus led the way in advertising it as such. It was “presented as a city at the intersection of transcontinental traffic lines”¹ because of its unique position on the east-west border. Warsaw was a very moldable and dynamic place and many things which were already “fixed” in the more developed western cities and “could thus no longer be the object of functionalist planning, were still fluid in Warsaw”.² Syrkus proposed a functionalist plan for Warsaw, an opportunity for CIAM to experiment with the “Functional City”, which immediately put Syrkus in a relevant and central position. He brought in Jan Olaf Chmielewski, an “established and highly innovative planner”³ to add expertise to his proposal. In many ways mimicking the Soviet examples, they believed that architecture had to express the “most radical ideas and exert a direct impact on the changing of life-styles”⁴, in other words, they idealized the coming of a social revolution through the built environment. They were very focused on the prevailing social conditions and wanted to steer away from the “technocrats” who got carried away by technical enthusiasm and forgot “the crisis, unemployment, and the homelessness of the masses”.⁵ The main ideas behind the Warszawa Funkcjonalna was therefore preparing Warsaw for the future. The plan departed from “the flawed urban pattern of the tsarist past”⁶ and despite never directly alluding to any one political system, the architects spoke highly of a planned economy and imagined it in such a context. Both for Syrkus and CIAM, then, Warszawa Funkcjonalna became the perfect example for the connection between “the Polish situation with its specific problems, and the international discussion of architecture and urban planning”.⁷ It was a way to position Warsaw in the context of Western, majority Germanic architectural discourse. But although the plan was never realized, the ideas proposed by its two architects, unbeknownst to them, facilitated the later Soviet architectural “takeover” of Warsaw through its alignment with socialist values.

The five years between 1934 and 1939 did not provide enough time for much architectural innovation outside of theoretical plans and theory. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, Warsaw was one of the most damaged cities in Europe. Only one of four buildings were left standing and the old town was practically gone.⁸ After the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against Nazi occupation, the Nazis obliterated 85% of the Old Town as retribution for this resistance. Following the war, Poland took on a five year reconstruction plan of the Old Town and a whole organization, called the “Warsaw Reconstruction Office” was created to overlook the project. The Old Town, made up of building from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, was one of the “most important testimonials of Polish culture”⁹ and therefore its survival was paramount in rebuilding morale and the socio-cultural life of both the city and its people. The process of rebuilding included not just the reconstruction of historic structures, but also used the medieval network of streets, squares and city walls.¹⁰ Therefore, already at the end of the 1940s and before the architectural intervention by the USSR, there was a turn to historicism in Polish architecture. The unrealized Warszawa Funkcjonalna plan was rigorously against maintaining the historical urban plans of Warsaw, in line with the modernist movement and the CIAM architects. Yet by the end of the material and cultural devastation of World War II, Poland had to cling on to the remnants of its historical identity. In many ways, this identity now existed only in memory, and therefore Warsaw completely pivoted its urbanistic agenda to be in favor of rematerializing Polish historical memory and identity.

Just two years after the end of the war, in 1947, communist rule began in Poland following the general elections. In 1948, the “Soviet-backed Stalinists achieved complete political domination”¹¹ through the formation of the new Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Immediately, the PZPR set about remaking Poland through attempts to “gain the support of the population with promises of material wealth and cultural renaissance”,¹² a sort of new enlightenment which initially resonated well with a population which desperately needed something good to emerge out of the previous few decades. But because the immediate post-war years were a sort of tabula rasa, the Soviet Union was able to intervene and manually sculpt an identity for Poland which would match its political agenda. Yet from the very start, such policies were met with forceful opposition, and eventually grew to become something that threatened not just Polish independence but also meddled in its public and private memory, the only thing which can never be fully torn down. Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Arts is such an example of resistance and psychological rebuilding.

Foundations of the Palace of Culture

The idea of building a “Central House of Culture” based on the Soviet model had already emerged with the PZPR in 1948. Soon after, an architectural competition was organized. Though Stalin had attempted to get rid of the non-social realist style conforming avant-gardists, the legacy of the constructivists and the influence of CIAM meant that the building had a very functional agenda. It was to be the “primary architectural accent of the entire city centre and of the entire capital”¹³ and should take into account the urban plaza that would emerge around it. The competition brief also stipulated that it must be “monumental” and would house everything from cinemas and theaters, to science and finance departments. There was an emphasis on the concept of “kompleksniy multi-functionality”,¹⁴ which took inspiration from the famous, conceptual project of the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. Kompleksniy meant that the project “addressed the design problem as an integrated complex”¹⁵, integrating all aspects of the built environment, from urbanism to socialist theory (like that of the social condenser).

Though the competition results never came to fruition, just four years later, in April 1952, a Palace of Arts and Culture was gifted to Warsaw by Stalin’s decree. It was to symbolize this new friendship between the newly-established Polish People’s Republic and the USSR. Unlike the earlier plans for post-war reconstruction, the Palace was part of the socialist plan to rebuild Warsaw “as an antidote to a prewar capitalist city”,¹⁶ which was presented to have been “fragmented, socially alienated and poverty-stricken”.¹⁷ It was meant to “socialize” postwar Poland. Lev Rudnev of the Soviet Union was appointed as the lead architect. Following the popular soviet saying “national in form”,¹⁸ he and his team traveled to Polish cities like Kraków and Chełm to study traditional Polish architecture and incorporate it into the final design. In reality though, it was almost an exact copy of the Stalinskie Vysotki (the “seven sisters”) in Moscow and was heavily embedded with ideological meaning in every aspect. For example, on the central façade of the building, they erected a bas-relief statue of a young man holding a book with “Marx, Lening, Engels, and Stalin” written on it. This statue quite literally continues to surveil Varsovians to this day.

Yet even disregarding its political intentions, the construction process itself caused discontent from day one. It clashed significantly with the other reconstruction efforts going around Warsaw at the time. Aesthetically, it was an eyesore for many Varsovians who wished for a return to traditional Polish architecture and conservative Polish identity. But most importantly, it took away resources from the reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town. In a “Warsaw rising from ruins, every construction worker was valuable”,¹⁹ and despite the fact that the Palace was being built and managed by the Soviet architects, the Polish side had to provide significant amounts of both labor and materials. This was especially noticeable in the earlier phases of construction, when instead of working on the Old Town, Polish workers were building residential quarters for the Soviet architect teams. Overall, the atmosphere before the Palace had even opened was harsh and tense. “Wages for Polish workers on the Palace were considerably lower than on other construction sites in Warsaw”,²⁰ and the working conditions were unsafe with an overabundance of supervision – a sense of panopticism was present. Negative attitudes towards the Palace were being exacerbated by the impact of the construction on the daily life of Varsovians. Many were forcibly resettled to “make room for the “Friendship” housing development built for the Soviet workers”.²¹ The size of the construction site was even more disruptive, and it “resulted in the demolition of extant prewar buildings and streets, the elimination of residential areas”²² and the displacement of thousands of people. Before it was even unveiled, the Palace was already infringing on Polish history, identity and peace.

The Palace was unveiled in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death. Unlike other socialist projects, it wasn’t built into the fabric of the city but rather was built to transform it. Since it was a Moscow-inspired and led project, “it moved the scope of Warsaw’s construction and spatial considerations away from the local and toward the East”.²³ The soviet dictum “socialist in content, nationalist in form” was officially followed, but while it was indeed socialist in its practical value as a place for the socialist worker and its usage as a sort of political pedagogical tool, it was barely “national” except for the performative stucco ornamentations in traditional “Polish” style.²⁴ It was built in the very center of Warsaw, soaring above the city and its square taking up almost fifteen hectares of land. Though on paper it moved the center away from the Old Town, in the minds and memories of the Varsovians it was initially nothing but a symbol of Soviet oppression and occupation.

But because the building had become such a monumental presence in Warsaw, it quickly became a dynamic object that is always in flux and reflects the changes and zeitgeists of the time. Already in 1956, Stalin’s name was removed from the book cover on the façade, following Khruschev’s secret speech and marking the beginning of de-stalinization throughout the Eastern Bloc.²⁵ Following the Polish Thaw in October 1956, the Palace ceased to exist as the focus of political propaganda, but “did not disappear from peoples’ everyday lives”.²⁶ Representations and opinions of the Palace up until today remain abundant and give us a glimpse into the formation of Polish identity and its manifestations in both the Socialist and Democratic eras.

Reaction and representation before 1956

No other postwar building in Poland had garnered as much attention and been featured in as much media, from communist tracts, to sociological studies and visual art, as the Palace of Culture. This proves that the Palace “is not just a building, but also a textbook of national and cultural identities”.²⁷ I would like to start with one of the earliest public representations of the palace which were the Polish Film Chronicles (PKF). The PKF was a ten-minute long newsreel which would be broadcasted before movies in cinemas between from 1944 to 1995. The newsreel would show everything from politics to entertainment, but also often times showed important events that were happening around Poland. Starting from 1952, the PKF filmed several episodes showing the “flawless”²⁸ construction process of the Palace of Culture. It was a propagandistic expression of the “perfect cooperation between Soviets and Poles”²⁹ and what is portrayed to be the Polish dream of drawing on the experience of the superior Soviet engineers. The construction would “finally fend off the ‘imperialist threat’”³⁰ and ‘free’ Poland from the reins of “Western” civilization. In fact, in 1953, there was a separate segment which commemorated the eight anniversary of “Warsaw’s “liberation” by the Soviets”.³¹ Within its three minutes, it featured two monuments: thirty seconds was spent on the 1945 monument and the rest of the two-and-a-half minutes dedicated to the Palace of Culture. Instead of focusing on the actual historical aspect of the newsreel, it focused on Soviet-expertise and material contributions to the Palace. The “fact that Poland also contributed labor and materials to the building of the Palace”³² was completely left out, as were the economic problems and the wide dissatisfaction of the Polish workers and people. Therefore, in official discourse and representation, the focus was on the non-Polishness of the palace and there was no acknowledgment of true public opinion on the matter. Though the PKF “cinematically integrated the image of the Palace into the urban landscape”³³ and established it as an “urban icon”,³⁴ the Palace remained an “imported creature”³⁵ imposed on Warsaw’s skyline.

Yet right after Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially after the 1956 Thaw, the Palace of Culture became “strangely invisible”³⁶ in the official media, such as photobooks and newsreels. But it remained ever-present, always in the background of Warsaw city life, and its true form as it existed in the eyes and minds of Varsovians began to be revealed through pop culture and media. It may simply be a pile of stones cemented together, but the reality and influence exists and is created in the heads of the people.

The Palace between 1956 and 1989

The most famous representations of the Palace of Culture are in the works of Tadeusz Konwicki, through whose lens we can also investigate the changing role of the Palace for the Polish people. In his two novels, Wniebowstąpienie (Ascension) (1967) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979), he uses the Palace as a means of political critique of communist ideology by employing Christian discourse. This is an interesting dichotomy which attempts to “polish-ize” Soviet dogma as Christianizing the Palace “invokes and questions the Polish Romantic messianic and martyrological tradition”,³⁷ in other words, it returns to traditional Polish history. In Wniebowstąpienie*,* the Palace is presented as the “central, vertical axis of the city”,³⁸ with its force so strong that Charon (the mythological character), who is an amnesiac, has a preexisting memory of the building. This view of the Palace recalls earlier poems about it, which “invoke the Palace’s connection to the cosmic and celestial worlds”³⁹ through descriptions such as “A crystal ball shines high in the sky”. In fact, at its opening in 1955, Poland’s PM Józef Cyrankiewicz announced that the Palace is a building “radiating its social and cultural content over Warsaw”.⁴⁰ This idea of verticality persists into Konwicki’s work, but is reinterpreted by him in religious terms as a “cathedral-like conduit between heaven and earth”.⁴¹ Though Charon goes up to the thirtieth floor terrace of the Palace at the end of the novel, a monotonous gray sky obscures the view over Warsaw and thus the thirtieth floor becomes an “eternal purgatory from where they look upon a city that is scarred by the vagaries of history”.⁴² This aerial view over Warsaw reveals a city in ruins and covered in wounds, and its inability to be “healed” under the communist system. At the end of the novel, “the cathedral-Palace is defunct”.⁴³ The elevator is unable to take Charon any further up, and so despite the Palace’s verticality and height, any hope of “ascension” is dead. Here we see how Konwicki intertwines Polish history with its communist present and metaphorically shows how historical memory is embedded into even the most socialist object in Warsaw, and progress under the communist system is unattainable. Until Poland is freed, it is stuck in this purgatory between its own identity and the ideals of the Soviet state.

His second novel, A Minor Apocalypse, exhibits a similar agenda of critiquing communism and using Christian discourse to “rescue the palace from its socialist signification”.⁴⁴ But an interesting shift occurs in his 1989 movie, Lawa, which is based on Adam Mickiewicz’s nineteenth-century Romantic drama Forefather’s Eve. In this film, he juxtaposes a traditional reading of the play and period costumes with shots and views of contemporary Warsaw, with a specific focus on the Palace of Culture. It appears three times throughout the movie, everytime in a different manifestation. The first time it is shown from a distance at the center of Warsaw’s skyline, and in several shots, different historical epochs are portrayed with the Palace in the background. Therefore, the Palace is used as a “signal to the viewer that the film transgresses historical periods”.⁴⁵ The second time it is shown from inside a prison cell, which in context of Forefather’s Eve is impossible since the character is imprisoned in Vilnius. Thus, Konwicki’s juxtaposes different centuries and locations which establishes the film “as a distillation of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish history”.⁴⁶ The third time it appears as a sequence of four shots from the papal mass of 1987, which at the time was seen as an ideological and visual victory over the Soviet, communist authorities. All of these represent the Palace as existing outside of a temporal and spatial context and instead engraved into the minds of the people of Poland and now existing forever in their memories. Konwicki plays on “the tension between the intended original signification of the building (as a Stalinist structure) and its function as a dynamic architectural edifice”,⁴⁷ which is being redefined in a “ localized (Polish), urban (Varsovian), and historical context”.⁴⁸ In the film he defines the Palace not just in a Christian context, as with his two novels, but rather in the context of the 1987 papal mass, and thus with its political, ideological, historical and cultural implications.

Tadeusz Konwicki’s reading of the Palace was of course influenced by what the Palace came to represent, in the lead up to 1989, for the Polish people. Interestingly, the Palace had become filled with cultural and intellectual encounters with the West, with many Western artists, such as The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis, performing there in the 70s and 80s. Such events “rewrote the purported “socialist content” of the building and textualized the Palace with lived experiences that countered its ideological symbolism”.⁴⁹ It was originally intended to serve the purpose of the “antithesis” to the American skyscraper and Western architecture as a whole, and negate capitalist ambitions.⁵⁰ It was supposed to transform “old, capitalist Warsaw into socialist Warsaw”,⁵¹ but its fate instead demonstrates the dynamism and power of architecture to mold itself to its environment and ultimately, to the needs and beliefs of the people that it serves. As Murawski puts it, “the Palace “always had this weird, double function”.⁵² Ideology falters in the face of the true, lived experience of a people and a place, and its traditions. This was also noted and outlined in several issues of the independent Polish architectural publication of the 1980s called Arckitektura. In a 1982 issue, there was an essay by Daniel Karpiński titled “On the Day after Modernism”, which pointed out that “the most important aspect of postmodernism is its attitude towards tradition”.⁵³ This could be applied to both architecture and its need to reflect long-standing cultural traditions, but also to the cultural environment as a whole (especially considering widespread dissidence, such as the Solidarity movement). In fact, postmodernism in Poland “was influenced by the Polish school of historic conservation”,⁵⁴ and its Old Town is the only rebuilt one in the world to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This speaks to and is a monument of “the will of the Polish nation”⁵⁵ and its unwavering desire to preserve a uniquely Polish identity. While most of the democratizing world turned away from conservation practices, Poland had an increased interest in the matter in the face of an identity crisis under the Socialist regime. One of the terms used for the transition from socialism to capitalism in 1989 was Przeistoczenie, which means both “transformation” and “transubstantiation”. This is the “physical change of bread into the redeeming body of Christ during Mass”,⁵⁶ which could metaphorically be seen to mean the parallel przeistoczenie of the Palace of Culture from a pile of bricks in the skyline to an object of Polish resistance, memory and identity. It “related national narratives to the struggle for political freedom against authoritarian socialist rule”.⁵⁷

After 1989

For many of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, monuments and buildings which have survived the post-communist moment now function as “mnemonic representations of past subordination and powerlessness”,⁵⁸ but new ideologies and identities have been imposed on them to create a sense of “newness” in post-socialist architecture. Since 1989, the Palace of Culture has continually been read as a “metaphor for the post-totalitarian moment”.⁵⁹ What constitutes identity is memory rather than any materialism, and thus identities can be established and reestablished through new narratives. Many have connected the role of literature production and architecture as being heavily intertwined. For example, Mariusz Zawodniak’s study from the end of the 90s, called Literature on Trial, discusses how architecture’s, and the Palace’s, role was the organization of space for the creation of a “new man or new society”,⁶⁰ while literature propagates and expresses these new products. Many contemporary visual artists have also focused their work on the Palace as a reflection of the post-totalitarian moment and its pivotal role in the “re” formation of Polish identity. Zofia Kulik, a prominent Polish artist, has a whole series of photo collages with the Palace as the focal point. The work “Self-Portrait with the Palace”⁶¹ shows a nude female body, surrounded by a full-body halo (evoking the image of Virgin Mary). The woman stands upright and holds a spire in both of her hands (implying phallic symbolism), with a large red star at the top, covering her chest. Above her head is an upside-down image of the Palace of Culture, almost like the representations of the Holy Spirit as a white dove in traditional iconography. Overall, the image is a collage of coexisting symbols of Polish historical and contemporary identity. Like the Palace, “it is a hybrid of past and present; like architecture, it stages the (dis)orders of multiple national histories and identities”.⁶² She visualizes the dichotomy between this “new” Polish identity which is a result of the past fifty years under socialism, with its more traditional and historical manifestations which are now embedded, but in many ways only symbolically, into this new conception of “Polishness”. She also juxtaposes and reinterprets “gendered narratives, political symbols and religious histories”,⁶³ in post-1989 Poland through her other works like The Guardians of the Spire, which all use the Palace as its main character with its various representations, readings and forms. An art critic, Ewa Lajer-Burchardth, notes on Kulik’s work that “memory may take the form of a cultural montage shaped by the scissors of personal experience”.⁶⁴ Perhaps, this is the why the “re-appraisal and displacement”⁶⁵ of a communist monument has been so easy, because what really matters is not its form but rather the way that it exists in people’s public and private memories. In fact, a large proportion of people in Warsaw, especially those over thirty five who grew up under the looming figure of the Palace and Big Brother, express appreciation for the Palace and describe it in a positive light. People remember going to the cinema, attending weddings and swimming in the pool rather than the socialist nature of the building. The Palace is an almost autobiographical object, which “resides inside childhood memories and family photographs”⁶⁶ and whose silhouette is engraved into the private memories of Warsaw’s inhabitants. Regardless of one’s opinion on it, the Palace is always there and hence a self-reading of modern Polish culture and identity can no longer exist without the Palace in it.

Another photographic project which reframes the Palace is called Palace LX by Błażej Pindor. This series from 2014 was a celebration of the Palace’s sixtieth-year anniversary, and was presented as purely black-and-white photographs. While he highlights the isolated parts of the Palace’s façades ad interiors to “reveal the elegant and carefully executed details”⁶⁷ of Polish art and craft, his photographer’s lens takes on a different meaning. As an avid admirer of modernism both before and after World War II, he focuses on the formal qualities of the architecture itself. Through Pindor’s visual frame then, the Palace of Culture loses “ its social realist or national qualities”⁶⁸ and is instead “recontextualized to form part of international modernism”.⁶⁹ His project thus represents another view of the Palace as being part of the international (including Western) stage, rather than purely a reflection of Polish or socialist identity. But he also employs reflective nostalgia, through exhibiting images of those places in the Palace that would have been most vibrant in people’s imaginations as B&W, “to undermine a dominant national memory regime prioritizing national authenticity”.⁷⁰ Similarly, Jacek Fota, another photographer, uses nostalgia towards social life under communism as the centerpiece of his work. His work, called PKiN, was also created for the Palace’s sixtieth anniversary and he directed his “attention towards unknown parts of the building to discover traces of a bygone era”.⁷¹ But Fota’s photographs are colorful and vibrant, especially displaying nooks and crannies that are still being occupied as small workspaces. He thus wishes to highlight the “vernacular memory of former decades and resonate with the personal experiences of the interiors”⁷² by focusing on small, private and hence cozy spaces rather than on large, monumental and intimidating auditoriums. He depicts the Palace “as a lively participant of the past”⁷³ which equally continues to inform our present. Through the works of both photographers, we see how the past of the Palace manifests itself in the present memories of its users, and how they intertwine to overcome its socialist beginnings and create through it new identities and a new, uniquely “Polish” society.

Conclusion

Since the collapse of socialism in Eastern Central Europe, there have been numerous campaigns to tear down the Palace. Many argue that the Palace is purely a symbol of past Russian and Soviet oppression which had to be “erased from Warsaw’s material and metaphorical skyline”.⁷⁴ But others have campaigned to preserve the Palace as an example of Polish socialist realism and a symbol of twentieth century totalitarian history. Indeed, in 2007 the Palace of Culture was declared a zabytek (historical land-mark). As I have discussed in this paper, artistic, visual and pop culture representations of the Palace of Culture reveal its essential role in defining “Polishness” both pre and post-1989. The Palace has been used as a means to preserve traditional Polish identity, through juxtapositions with religion and history (like in the works of Tadeusz Konwicki) and Polish modernism being defined in the context of historical conservation. But the Palace has also established a sort of “new” Polish identity as a result of the necessity to grapple with years of socialist rule while clinging onto national identity which was attempted to be dismantled by the Soviet Union. Even if the discourse of socialism represents a negative value, it nonetheless persists in both its material manifestations, as with the Palace, and in the intangible memories of individuals and societies. Since Warsaw cannot get rid of the Palace, at least if materially then not metaphorically, it has turned to “reappropriating” and redefining it in a new Polish and post-socialist, democratic context. Interestingly, the Palace now functions as one of the “city’s prime sites of municipal democracy”,⁷⁵ where the city council chamber meets, along with other democratic functions. The Palace is now “Polish”, and its discussed representations in art and media show how the population has completely reversed its function and inscribed onto it a new, identity-driven agenda. Polish postmodernism has these distinctive features of a “yearning for spirituality”⁷⁶ and a “concern with national identity”.⁷⁷ Unlike in many other countries, Poland’s unique situation and fate has meant that “the concept of a national tradition was [and is] always seen as an essential part of contemporary culture”,⁷⁸ and an essential aspect of the “continuous struggle against its real and imagined enemies”.⁷⁹ Poland’s condition, as seen through the Palace of Arts and Culture, can also be seen to represent a wider global pattern. Namely, the “globalized, collective, post-binary East-West transition into the post-totalitarian, millennial moment”,⁸⁰ and of how states reformulate and utilize their national identities after extreme political regimes and tragic histories.

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