Suchergebnisse

"This book is devoted to the issue of nationalism in the latest Polish history and presents the subject on the basis of an enormous amount of source files left by the Polish United Workers Party. The work is a substantial input into the knowledge on People's Poland which shows with precision how the Polish communists used nationalistic arguments to legitimize and validate the system of power introduced by them. The author researches the fascinating source material with the help of a new and innovative concept"--

This book is devoted to the issue of nationalism in the latest Polish history and presents the subject on the basis of an enormous amount of source files left by the Polish United Workers Party. The work is a substantial input into the knowledge on People's Poland which shows with precision how the Polish communists used nationalistic arguments to legitimize and validate the system of power introduced by them. The author researches the fascinating source material with the help of a new and innovative concept.

The author defines "war panic" and analyzes specific manifestations of the phenomenon: the war panics that Poland experienced repeatedly after the Second World War. The author demonstrates that for Polish society the Second World War was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century, and that it left behind not only the human losses and a sea of ruins, but enormous deposits of fear. These ap- peared above all in flight behavior, the hoarding of shop goods, and the withdrawal of money from banks in order, for instance, to buy jewelry – every time the pattern was the same. The first war panic occurred already in 1945. Until the end of the 1960s, Poles were convinced that a third world war was just around the corner. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan also induced a panic. Poles were afraid of war, but war was also used to threaten them. During the Stalinist period, the threat was of American imperialism, and in the 1970s, of German "militarists" and "revanchists." The Second World War did not entirely end in 1945. The author claims that we can speak of its long-term, post-war continuation.

Almost seventy years now separate us from the outbreak of World War II. To date the most important trend in debates about the war's consequences for Central Europe has focused on the interconnections between the social, political and economic changes occurring during the war, on the one hand, and the origins of the communist bloc in that part of Europe, on the other. This approach is overly narrow: it fails to take account of the importance of the psycho-social consequences of the war, which were incomparably broader, extending far beyond the political dimension. The author attempts to sketch out a systematic account of the sociological and psychological effects of this war, through an examination of the Polish case. His analysis draws upon two key theoretical concepts: Pitirim Sorokin's sociology of catastrophes; and Piotr Sztompka's sociology of trauma. Paraphrasing the title of Sztompka's book (Trauma wielkiej zmiany. Społeczne koszty transformacji), we might call the Polish war experience "the trauma of the great war". The article shows the sources, symptoms and cultural consequences of the trauma of war in Poland.

Der Autor beleuchtet die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Hintergründe der Dezemberunruhen von 1970 in Polen. Nach seiner These zählte das ausgeprägte Gefühl "relativer Benachteiligung", insbesondere unter jüngeren Arbeitern, zu den Hauptursachen des Arbeiteraufstandes. Er weist dies anhand von Arbeiteraussagen nach, wobei er Berichte des Sicherheitsdienstes und der Organisationsabteilung des Zentralkomitees der Vereinigten Polnischen Arbeiterpartei (PZPR) sowie von Arbeitern verfasste Zuschriften an das polnische Radio und Fernsehen zugrunde legt. Er gibt zuvor einen Überblick über die wirtschaftliche und demographische Entwicklung in Polen von 1956 bis 1970. (ICI)

"Die Entstalinisierung machte es möglich: Im kommunistischen Polen durfte man Prostitution und die damit verbundenen sozialen Probleme wieder thematisieren. Dies geschah auch auf höchster Staats- und Parteiebene. Innenministerium und Miliz zogen Anfang 1957 eine erschreckende Bilanz. Zwei Dokumente spiegeln die Ratlosigkeit der kommunistischen Führung angesichts steigender Prostituiertenzahlen und damit verbundener Probleme wie Frauenarbeitslosigkeit, Zerrüttung von Familien, wachsender Kriminalität und grassierender Geschlechtskrankheiten. Die Wurzeln dieser Entwicklung reichen in die Zeit des Zweiten Weltkriegs zurück." (Autorenreferat)