"The Conquest of History?" Toward a Usable Past in Poland Lecture 1: An Assessment of the History of Poland since 1939

Calling for recruits to what they described as a "voluntary fire brigade," they sought with the "cold streams of historical truth" to cool the hearts of their countrymen, which had been inflamed by a romantic passion whose outcome was a series of catastrophic national uprisings.4 The revival of nationalism and political activism in the 1890s was mirrored in the rise of what was later called the Warsaw school of historians, although their views were much less coherent than those of their Kraków counterparts. What one side regards as a ludicrous detail of no importance or consequence, the other sees as an epic deed of great historical significance; what one sees as the true precursor of independence, the other sees as a light-headed and dangerous adventure which did not have disastrous consequences for Poland only because it did not succeed.6 In the period of the Polish People's Republic (PRL, often referred to as People's Poland), historical research was subject to severe constraints.\n One-fifth of the supporters of the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), a party strongly opposed to lustracja, believed that this issue should be a central element in the political agenda.80 Every public opinion poll that has asked about the past has revealed deep divisions-whether it is a question of martial law.