Rereading Polish Bishops' Appeal to German Colleagues of 1965 in the East Asian Mnemoscape (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
The topic of the article concerns the origins of the process of establishing and then developing bilateral relations between Germany and Poland at the turn of 1965 and 1966. The main argument is that advancing reconciliation in bilateral Polish-German relations was possible owing to the considerable input of the Polish Catholic Church, including the memorable letter of the Polish bishops to their German counterparts (“We forgive and ask for forgiveness”). These two years are significant for the mutual relations of Poland and Germany. First, in 1965 the Polish Catholic bishops submitted to their German counterparts the letter that opened the path to an improvement in relations between the nations. Afterwards, “reconciliation” was introduced into the public discourse. Second, in 1966 the Polish Catholic Church celebrated the 1000th anniversary of the Christianisation of Poland, which became both a challenge and a chance for developing the dialogue with Germans. Therefore, the main research questions concern, first, the determinants of the tensions between Poland and both German states after World War II as well as the impact of the 1965 bishops’ letter on the development of bilateral relations.
2013
The experience of genocides of the II World War deeply traumatized Polish society. This trauma caused long lasting tensions and untruthfulness between Poles on one side and Germans, Russians and Ukrainians on the other side. Common memory of the Polish society safeguarded the harms done even in past generations. While the civil societies and state authorities turned to be unable to fruitfully launch the process of reconciliation, the religious communities and their leaders step forward with the initiatives starting the process of reconciliation from the spiritual side and thus opened the path to success. The first example is the letter of Polish Catholic episcopate to German bishops1 in 1965 which launched the Polish-German healing of memories process. The second and third examples are respectively the common message of Polish Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church to the nations of Poland and Russia2 in 2012 and the
Review of Nationalities
More than half-century long process of reconciliation between Poland and Germany can be recognized as one the most exceptional contemporary examples of the rebuilding of relations both socially and politically. The fact that the reconciliation process between “eternal enemies”, Poland and Germany, succeeded is considered in metaphysical categories a ‘miracle of reconciliation’. The essence of this process was well summarized in 2015 in the Common Statement of the President of Poland Andrzej Duda and the President of Germany Joachim Gauck in the words “the Churches overtook politics”. This article aims to outline the contribution of the religious element as a significant factor in the process of Polish-German reconciliation, during which non-state actors were crucial players at its earliest stage, namely till the mid-1960s. The author proposes that in the case of the Polish-German reconciliation process the role played by civil society to a great extent was motivated by the religious...
The search for reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish relations since World War II
Choice Reviews Online, 2009
Why have some former enemy countries established durable peace, whereas others remain mired in animosity? When and how does historical memory matter in postconflict interstate relations? Focusing on two case studies, Yinan He argues that the key to interstate reconciliation is the harmonization of national memories. Conversely, memory divergence resulting from national mythmaking harms long-term prospects for reconciliation. After World War II, Sino-Japanese and West German-Polish relations were both antagonized by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. In the 1970s, China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalization. But the progress of reconciliation was soon impeded in the 1980s by elite mythmaking practices that stressed historical animosities. In contrast, from the 1970s West Germany and Poland began to demythify war history and narrow their memory gap through restitution measures and textbook cooperation, paving the way for significant progress toward reconciliation after the Cold War.
Global Studies Quarterly, 2022
Co-authored with Jessica Fernández de Lara Harada, Masumi Izumi, Monica Okamoto, and Jordan Stanger-Ross . During the Second World War, several Allied countries oppressed Japanese diaspora groups (also known as Nikkei). The United States and Canada apologized in 1988; today, Brazil and Mexico face reparative demands for their persecution of Nikkei communities. There has been no integrated analysis of these interconnected injustices. This article offers a preliminary account, highlighting some of the key transnational factors involved. It also addresses the significant domestic bias of public discussions about the injustices, a bias that ignores the historical centrality of transnational forces in historical processes of anti-Asian oppression. We ask whether the possible spread of apology politics from the US and Canadian cases to Brazil, Mexico, and Australia might help to promote a new political awareness of the transnational character of the wartime oppression of Nikkei civilians in Allied countries. However, our analysis reveals that the politics of apology tends to promote domestic bias in public understandings of anti-Japanese racism. Indeed, to the extent that transnationality emerged in our cases, it was in the perverse form of "White civility" comparisons that chided countries in the Global South to emulate their allegedly more advanced apologetic counterparts from the North. Yet, there remain compelling reasons for domestic political apologies in our cases. The point is not to proscribe apologies but rather to understand their biases and, in the cases at hand, to use the spread of apology debates in our cases to promote a more widespread understanding of transnationality in the production of anti-Asian racism and White supremacy.
Acta Poloniae Historica, vol. 128, 2023
The paper discusses the Polish Catholic Church's ambiguous contribution to the public debate on settling accounts with the Polish-Jewish wartime past. The Church is an actor of right-wing historical politics, which casts Poles in the role of the primary victims of the war but is reluctant to speak out on the Shoah. The growing scholarly interest in the dark chapters in the history of Catholic-Jewish relations, which brings to light the Church's institutional and symbolic responsibility for its attitude towards the persecuted Jewish community, has not translated directly into greater visibility of the issue in the mainstream media. However, the Church's ceremonial indifference towards the memory of the Shoah is not resistant to changes in the historiography of the Shoah. The Church's stance in the debate on the memory of the Shoah insuffi ciently recognises its position about the Jewish tragedy. On the other hand, it includes the actions undertaken by Father Wojciech Lemański and Bishop Rafał Markowski to commemorate the Jewish victims. The recognition of this cleavage aligns with sociological analyses of axiological divisions in Polish society.
Journal of International Relations, 2016
Visits (or attempts to visit) to the Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese officials have generated a series of controversies and tensions between the countries occupied by imperialist Japan during the Pacific War. The central dilemma is that Yasukuni, emblem of Japanese militarism, questions the coherence and consistency of the requests for forgiveness made by different Japanese prime ministers to countries in the region in repentance for atrocities and violations of human rights committed in the past. The weakness of the apologies is not an exclusive problem of Japan. On the contrary, the official pardon granted by one state to another has become an increasingly common practice, but questioned in international relations. The limits of apologies in the process of reconciliation between states have led to a new research strand, aligned with the debates on transitional justice, which discusses dimensions of the level of forgiveness in terms of rectification processes. From this perspective, pr...
2015
This paper represents an attempt to place the debate on history in Northeast Asia in a structural context and to see it as an outcome f tensions in state-civil society organization (CSO) relationships in Japan and South Korea. The paper uses as an analytical tool the work of Lily Gardner Feldman, who has focused on the roles of transnational non-state actors (TNAs) in post-World War II reconciliation in Europe. Although Northeast Asian CSOs and European TNAs do not always overlap precisely, most of Gardner Feldman’s TNAs qualify as CSOs according to standard definitions of civil society. This paper argues that geopolitical differences notwithstanding, moves toward reconciliation after World War II in Europe were greatly helped by the presence of legally sanctioned, transnationally active, broad-based CSOs. Conversely, the past suppression of civil society activity in both South Korea and Japan – in the former physically under successive military-backed authoritarian regimes and in...