E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 204 Seiten
The Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk
E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 204 Seiten
Reihe: Public History in International Perspective
ISBN: 978-3-11-065503-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
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II Making the Museum
The First Months at the Office of the Prime Minister
On September 1, 2008, I became Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s advisor and his special commissioner for the Museum of the Second World War. This enabled me to take the first organizational steps, even before the Museum was formally established a few months later by the minister of culture. I invited Piotr M. Majewski and Janusz Marszalec to join me. Piotr worked at the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw as well as at the historical magazine Mówia Wieki. We became acquainted when Majewski submitted his articles to Mówia Wieki in the 1990s. At the time, I was an editor in the magazine’s twentieth-century history department. Piotr specialized in the history of Czechoslovakia and the diplomacy of the 1930s and 1940s. He had published very highly regarded and award-winning works on Edvard Beneš, Sudeten Germans, and the Munich crisis. I had known Janusz Marszalec, a graduate in history from the Catholic University of Lublin, since 2000, when we created together the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). In the summer of that year, after being appointed director of the Public Education Office and becoming its first employee, I found a pile of CVs submitted to the Office by historians who were seeking employment. I chose Janusz, who was the best candidate to create a branch of the Office in Gdansk. His expertise was in the Polish Underground State, a wartime resistance organization; his PhD, enthusiastically received by historians, dealt with the security forces of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. After a few months, at the turn of 2009, Rafal Wnuk joined our museum trio. Rafal, was a professor of history at the Catholic University of Lublin as well as head of the Public Education Office in the Lublin Institute of National Remembrance. He was an expert—in my opinion the most knowledgeable in Poland—on the underground independence movement in Poland after 1945, and he also specialized in Polish intelligence during the Second World War. He was a member of the Polish-British government commission to examine the wartime activities of Polish intelligence; as part of this task force, he had conducted archival research in London and Washington, DC. Wnuk was also the coordinator and editor in chief of the monumental Atlas of the Pro-Independence Underground in Poland, 1944?–?1956. The latter was a true magnum opus that chronicled all major actions undertaken by various resistance units. However, Wnuk’s critical position on the term “cursed soldiers,” used as a token of admiration by Law and Justice followers to describe anti-Communist armed postwar opposition, earned him many enemies on the political Right and in the IPN itself. Rafal Wnuk always spoke against the politicization and instrumentalization of history, and as a leading expert on the postwar underground—not only in Poland but also in the Baltic states—he repeatedly spoke out against the political manipulation around “cursed soldiers.” In 2008, Marszalec and Wnuk no longer felt at home at the Institute of National Remembrance, as they did not accept the vision of its president Janusz Kurtyka, who wanted the institution to represent historical politics and to be an ally of the Law and Justice Party. Independent and moderate staff members were marginalized or encouraged to leave. Many of them left willingly, preferring not to be part of the politicization of the Institute. In anticipation of these developments within the IPN, I left in January 2006, just after Kurtyka took over, in order to return to academia and research activities. I approached Marszalec and Wnuk to jointly create the Museum of the Second World War at just the right moment in their professional lives, when they were open to the prospect of change and building something new. We were united by our age group: I was forty-two at the time, and they were a year or two younger. Piotr M. Majewski was a few years younger than us. The three of us had also experienced together the creation of the Institute of National Remembrance from the ground up and had worked there for many years. Without this ability to function in a state institution, with all its regulations, procedures, and rules for spending public money, none of us would seriously have considered partaking in such a crazy undertaking as the creation of a large historical museum from scratch. Working at the Institute of National Remembrance was, however, in some respects also a negative experience. For us, the Institute was a well-organized yet extreme—one could say Byzantine—bureaucracy, with all its directors, especially of regional branches. We wanted to create the Museum of the Second World War as a kind of antithesis of the Institute of National Remembrance: without bureaucracy, with more direct interpersonal relations, and as a relatively small team connected by a common task rather than a large institution. Although initially very slim, the team grew with time, especially as the opening approached, and it became difficult to fully maintain this “antibureaucratic” style. The meeting space in Warsaw and the organizational foothold, in the form of a one-person secretariat, were very helpful for the project, which from the beginning was conceived not only as a local enterprise in Gdansk but also as a nationwide endeavor supported by a network of extensive international contacts. I also knew that the road from the prime minister’s initial announcement of the decision to create the Museum to its actual opening would be long and bumpy. If it was to be more than a “virtual museum,” we needed to overcome many bureaucratic obstacles and secure substantial funding—not an easy task when the government was consistently attempting to reduce the budget deficit. Being attached to the Prime Minister’s Office and my having the title of special commissioner of the prime minister for the Museum of the Second World War gave us a chance at more effective operation. Yet I would pay the price for that; Law and Justice would persistently allege that I became a politician. I do not consider these allegations to be justified, because I did not deal with any issues that would go beyond the Museum’s affairs and other topics related to history. Notably, the same people who raised allegations against me were not bothered by the fact that the director of the Warsaw Rising Museum, Jan Oldakowski, was a Law and Justice MP and, unlike me, was involved in real parliamentary and party politics. However, as these allegations keep surfacing, I will provide an account of my work within the Prime Minister’s Office; after all, it was mainly concerned with the very beginning of the Museum, before the Gdansk team took over. In the first weeks, the most important issue was to decide where exactly the Museum would be located and how that would affect another planned project, the establishment of the Westerplatte Museum. The latter had its roots in the first Law and Justice government from 2005 to 2007. It was promoted by then deputy minister of culture Jaroslaw Sellin, originally from the Tricity area (Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot), which was probably one reason he so fiercely opposed the Museum of the Second World War. From 2005 to 2007, the project to create a new museum at Westerplatte remained in the conceptual stage. Paradoxically, the Westerplatte plans were taken up by a politician of the Civic Platform Party in Gdansk, Slawomir Nowak, one of the closest and most influential collaborators of Prime Minister Tusk. Nowak and a group of his Gdansk associates, young activists of the Platform, apparently wanted to repeat the success of the Warsaw Rising Museum and to build their public careers on that project. Nowak expanded Sellin’s idea. A kind of “historical park” was to be built at Westerplatte, using both the preserved objects of the Military Transit Depot, a pre–Second World War Polish military site in the free city of Gdansk, and historical reproductions. It was to be supplemented with a new marina and other facilities intended to attract Gdansk residents and tourists to Westerplatte. One of Nowak’s close relatives, a Gdansk Civic Platform councilor and the former head of his parliamentary office, was to become the director of the Westerplatte Museum. The relative was not a historian and admitted that he was not interested in history; this was supposed to be an advantage, allowing him to resolve disputes between professionals impartially. The public did not receive this proposal well. There were accusations that this was a clear example of political nepotism on the part of the ruling party. By the way, I thought that the idea of reconstructing the nonexistent objects of the Military Transit Depot was completely groundless, because it would lead to the creation of a kind of historic Disneyland. The true merit of Westerplatte was its authenticity, preserved guardhouses, and ruins of the barracks, which ought to be protected. The establishment of the Westerplatte Museum was announced on September 1, 2008, the same day that I became the special commissioner of the prime minister for the Museum of the Second World War. This caused some confusion, which Tusk resolved quickly. He invited me to a meeting in his office (I met him personally for the first time then), which was also attended by the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, Tomasz Arabski, and by Slawomir Nowak, Wojciech Duda, and Grzegorz Fortuna. All the participants at the meeting but me were from...
