The prince is dead
A casual observer of the Polish Parliament last week would have been surprised: the full complement of parliamentarians standing somberly to attention, as former Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek gave a eulogy to "one of the greatest Poles of our time." The man in question was Jerzy Giedroyc, who died last week in Paris, not having set a foot in Poland since World War II. Yet he is recognized as a man without whom Poland would perhaps not be independent today, or at least not in the way it is now, and whose role in fostering a rapprochement between the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe remains largely unrecognized outside of the region.
Although it was after World War II that Jerzy Giedroyc commenced what was to be literally his life's work the editing of the Paris-based emigre monthly journal Kultura he had already left an imprint on his home country. He was old enough to participate in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, and by the mid-1930s, to become an influential editor of political journals such as Bunt Mlodych and Polityka. During World War II, he fought in the Western-based Polish army, and for a short period afterwards managed to have a career in the London-based government-in-exile.
Yet in 1947, Giedroyc decided to move to Rome and then to Paris, and commence publishing Kultura together with a small band of collaborators. The journal can rightly be said to have shaped the minds of generations of Poles, who later consummated this intellectual upbringing in becoming the creators of free Poland in 1989. Giedroyc's view was that the real way to recover Polish independence was to engage in cultural and intellectual work, on the grounds that a failure to understand history, geopolitics and philosophy lay at the root of Poland's failings in the past and would do so again in the future.
It was in the pages of the journal and other publications of the Instytut Literacki publishing house that those writers in Poland and abroad whose writings were banned by the communist authorities found a home. Over the years, Leszek Kolakowski, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Michnik and others were able to develop the ideas that shaped the philosophy and tactics of anticommunist dissidence. Many such writers remain active in Polish politics today, such as the chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, Czeslaw Bielecki, who wrote in the journal under his pen name of Maciej Poleski. Not only that, but Kultura was regularly smuggled into Poland often in a miniature version that was printed especially for such a purpose and circulated in the anticommunist underground, so spreading its influence even wider.
Giedroyc and his colleagues contributed not only to Polish independence, but also to more broadly understood European culture and national reconciliation. In addition to Polish writers, Kultura also published Albert Camus, Raymond Aron and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting the journal's broader concerns over the future of European thought in the modern age.
But perhaps Giedroyc's most unheralded contribution to the present was his influence in shaping new relations between Poles and her Slav neighbors, the Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians in particular. Giedroyc recognized that Poland's weakness in the face of Russia was her tendency to make enemies of those who should have been her allies, and that inter-ethnic rivalries had been the downfall of pre-war Poland. This derived from Giedroyc's own background, since he had been born in that borderland region of eastern Poland where ethnic identities mixed and fluctuated over the centuries, and led him to realize that in the future political stability could not be established without cultural and political rapprochement in the region. The fact that Poland is now at peace with her immediate Eastern neighbors, and regards them as strategic allies, is in no small part due to the work of Giedroyc in the past.
In large part, Giedroyc achieved his dream of Polish independence in 1989. But over the last 10 years Kultura despite the fact that patriotic Polish intellectual and political thought naturally shifted its locus into Poland itself remained influential. Giedroyc himself was fiercely independent, refusing to travel to Poland, and managing to provoke controversy in the pages of Kultura. Many were surprised to see him supportive of Aleksander Kwasniewski, the current post-communist president, and also expressing concern about the dangers of a resurgence of Polish nationalism and clericalism. This failure to fit into the mainstream of anticommunist thinking cost him many allies, but never the respect of those who followed his writing.
Giedroyc's long-standing request was that the journal cease publication at the moment of his death, and so next month will see the last issue appear. The publishing house at Maisons-Laffitte outside Paris will become an archive, giving historians access to its documentation, a veritable monument of European culture constructed by one man known largely only to his countrymen.
