Der umkämpfte Krieg

‘A kind of present from Donald Tusk to Angela Merkel’ (p. 226). This is just one of the ways in which Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, now Polish Prime Minister, chose to denounce the newly opened Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, commissioned by Tusk when he was Prime Minister in 2008. Over the past decade, Kaczyński had similarly suggested that the museum was intended to offer a ‘German’ view of the Second World War, focused on civilian suffering and the inculcation of a ‘fake’ pacifism rather than emphasizing the heroic Polish military resistance to both Nazi and Soviet invasion. One of his PiS party comrades accused it of promoting a ‘pedagogy of shame’ designed to imitate, and thereby ‘appease’, the ex-enemy in Berlin. He also presented it as an example of the post-communist elite’s supposed willingness to allow ‘cosmopolitan’ Anglo-American historians to tell Poles how they should interpret their own national past (pp. 143–4).

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