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Review:„Im nationalen Gewande. Strategien kommunistischer Herrschaftslegitimation in Polen 1944-1980“/ Marcin Zaremba . Osnabrück: fibre, 2011. ISBN: 3938400676

  • With its ongoing Klio in Polen series, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw has made available a fine German translation of Marcin Zaremba's Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjionalizm: Nacjionalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (2001), a book that stands the test of time as one of the best recent analyses of post-World War II systems of power in Eastern Europe. In Zaremba's joint treatment of communism and Polish nationalism, he turns to historical and political sociology in order to examine the structuring of institutional power mainly by party elites. He scrupulously avoids the pitfall of treating identity in a cultural vacuum or outside the historical context of statecraft – and in 1942-44 he begins with Stalin – in which a select group of elites relied on a repertoire of tropes to form and modernize the nation. Zaremba argues that Polish communist elites and the leading figures of the dominant Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), who made the country a one-party state after 1948,With its ongoing Klio in Polen series, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw has made available a fine German translation of Marcin Zaremba's Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjionalizm: Nacjionalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (2001), a book that stands the test of time as one of the best recent analyses of post-World War II systems of power in Eastern Europe. In Zaremba's joint treatment of communism and Polish nationalism, he turns to historical and political sociology in order to examine the structuring of institutional power mainly by party elites. He scrupulously avoids the pitfall of treating identity in a cultural vacuum or outside the historical context of statecraft – and in 1942-44 he begins with Stalin – in which a select group of elites relied on a repertoire of tropes to form and modernize the nation. Zaremba argues that Polish communist elites and the leading figures of the dominant Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), who made the country a one-party state after 1948, consistently employed three principal legitimizing strategies – of universalization, rationalization, and narrativization – to master Polish historical codes and forge a stable communist Polish republic. Zaremba's book in 2001 frames the history of communism and the Polish Stalinist left's intersections with the modern political right starting with Roman Dmowski on Polish historiographical terms. This is no easy scholarly feat. Zaremba deals in equal measure with the reification of Marxism-Leninism in terms of ideology and propaganda, and Polish racial/ethnic legacies of intolerance in modern politics. Back in 1912, it was Stalin who envisioned the nation in deterministic form on a Marxist-Leninist path toward a communist future, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture." (65) Taking apart Stalin's propaganda motto of “socialist in form, national in content" (228), Zaremba shows what difficulties and insecurities the post-Stalinist leadership faced in Poland to overcome its legitimation deficit by constructing an official state ideology. Internal contradictions in the monocentric party-state's spokesmanship for the people were present in the PRL after it was formed in 1952, in communist elites' mythic efforts to exalt folk-national commemorations of Polishness.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author:Steven Seegel
URN:urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus4-7424
DOI:https://doi.org/10.11584/opus4-742
Editor:Tim Buchen
Document Type:Review
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2020/07/31
Date of first Publication:2014/05/20
Publishing Institution:Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt
Creating Corporation:Digitale Wissenschaftsplattform Pol-Int (www.pol-int.org)
Release Date:2020/08/03
Institutes:Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Polenstudien
Licence (German):License LogoKeine Lizenz - es gilt das deutsche Urheberrecht
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