L: Hotel postcard, 1935, Jan Malarski, public domain. R: Hotel Brühlowski, ca. 1939, courtesy of Jacek Dehnel.
NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey talks with Polish poet, novelist, and artist Jacek Dehnel about the ongoing battle for human rights in Poland, the relationship between memory and certainty, and the idea that poetry functions as “the white blood cells” of a society.
Ellen Hinsey: Jacek Dehnel—you are a poet, novelist, prose writer, and visual artist. You were born in Gdańsk, Poland, in the watershed year of 1980—the same year that witnessed massive country-wide strikes and the creation of the independent self-governing labor union “Solidarity” in that same port city—
Jacek Dehnel: Fortunately, when one comes into the world one is not yet burdened by knowledge which precedes you! Though, of course, early on I understood I was growing up in unusual times. There was a sense that we—my family, but also a large part of society—were discontented with the conditions of the period. This was not the Stalinist period—people could talk about politics rather freely without worrying that their children might repeat things at school. My father helped at a local parish distributing food from international aid. Like many others, my grandmother pinned a little electrical resistor on her sweater: a symbol of “resistance.” It was a time of shortages, and many children in Poland wore “z darów” clothes, i.e., items collected by humanitarian aid organizations somewhere in Western Europe. My brother and I wore them too, but my mother also sewed clothes for us. A few times she made us grayish overalls, sturdy enough to survive all sorts of backyard games. Amusingly enough, she used a cheap, strong fabric for these, which was produced in large quantities, but snubbed by customers: it was the gray camouflage cotton used for police uniforms.
EH: During this period, we sometimes forget that a number of distinct factions—on both the left and right—were already present within the Solidarity movement before the historic semi-free elections of June 1989. The legacy of these factions in current day Poland is still very apparent, which is to say that Poland’s conservative political landscape is not just something that developed over the last decade.
JD: Those differences came to light very rapidly, first in June 1989 and then during the presidential elections in the autumn of 1990. You could see how the whole “Styrofoam generation” (so called because during labor and hunger strikes people slept on makeshift beds made from large slabs of Styrofoam) began to splinter: neoliberals wanted to install Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” paradise; staunch Catholic fundamentalists expected to build God’s kingdom; seekers of “Socialism with a human face” supported a welfare state. There were also the apostles of ecology, the pro-European public intellectuals, and the rebels who considered any peaceful transition of power to be “treasonous” and called for trials and the disgracing of former enemies. And many others. When faced with the common enemy of the Communist Party they had been able to work together, but when they suddenly had a chance to concretely change Poland, it turned out their visions were quite incompatible or even contradictory.
One absence in all this, however, is striking: the absence of women. When Poland regained its independence in 1918, it was understood that throughout the whole nineteenth century women had played a significant part in that process; as a consequence, they demanded the right to vote. Dissidents, conspirators, often wives of suddenly prominent politicians, said: “our day has come.” And they were victorious. But 1989 was quite a different story. Women played an important role both in the Worker’s Defense Committee (KOR) and then in Solidarity, but when the gradual transition of power from Communist rule was initiated by the Round Table Talks, fifty-eight people sat at the table: twenty-nine from the government, twenty-nine from the opposition, including three “observers”—members of the Catholic and Lutheran churches. Among all of these, only two were women. Fewer women than clergy.
EH: Regarding women’s reproductive freedom, one of the paradoxes of Polish history is that abortion was decriminalized in 1932 during the interwar period, with further liberalizations after 1956, and available to women throughout the Communist period, but in 1990, during the Round Table Talks, the call to restrict abortion rights originated in part with the conservative faction within the Solidarity movement. Wanda Nowicka, a Solidarity activist and former Polish MP once said, “The negative forces, which threatened women’s rights, were not something new, which only developed after Solidarity won. They had had always been part of the movement. I just hadn’t seen them beforehand.”
JD: Before 1932, independent Poland used the former legal codes of Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary. Which was quite strange, as what was considered a crime in one town could be legal in another, or at least one might be liable for a different punishment. Indeed, the Code of 1932, which was the first Polish legal code since the eighteenth century, was quite progressive. It decriminalized both homosexuality and abortion. So, in 1966 a British man could distribute any political leaflet he wished, but he could be imprisoned for having sex with another man. In Poland a gay man could legally have sex with another man, but when it came to political leafleting—it was the opposite. During the Communist period, Swedish and Norwegian women would travel to Poland to get an abortion, and now Polish women travel abroad for the same reason.
EH: Perhaps we should speak here a bit about the complexities of the Polish Catholic Church.
Yes, all of this is deeply rooted, of course, in the role of the Catholic Church. That said, in Poland’s case this is very complex. Unlike in Spain, where the Church supported a brutal, authoritarian regime, in Poland the Church was at odds with the Party, although it’s worth remembering that from the very beginning there was quite a lot of cooperation between them. Right after World War II, when Poland’s borders were moved westward after the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, the Communists took over hundreds and thousands of German churches, mostly Lutheran, which were subsequently given to the religious communities that had been expelled from today’s Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. The majority of those churches were handed over to the Catholic Church. The Party was officially against the building of new churches, true, but nonetheless over three thousand were built before the end of Communist rule. In this way, it was very different from Romania, Albania, or other countries of the East Bloc, let alone the Soviet Union, where many churches were destroyed.
The same goes for the abortion ban: already in 1988, the Catholic members of the Communist Parliament proposed a bill banning abortion, with the support of the bishops. Amidst this period of political turmoil this project gradually evolved into the so-called “compromise of 1993.” That “compromise” meant that the more radical Catholics agreed with the less radical Catholics, that although abortion was restricted in publicly funded hospitals, except when the mother’s life was in danger, or in cases of rape, incest, or deformity of a fetus, a pregnant woman would not be prosecuted for an abortion. This project to restrict abortion was largely unpopular in Polish society; there were numerous protests, and there was a call for a popular vote on this question (signed by over one million people), but to no avail. No referendum was organized. When Polish society elected a new, leftist parliament—which allowed for abortion on grounds of social reasons, i.e., poverty—this law was overruled by the Constitutional Tribunal under a staunchly Catholic judge. Which, I think, today, after the Dobbs ruling, is something Americans can easily relate to.
EH: These policies have had an impact on all sorts of human rights in Poland. In the case of the LGBQ+ community, this environment has proven to be particularly hostile.
JD: True, although no bills have been introduced—for now, at least. The Church is struggling desperately against a growing majority, so they are trying to keep a hold on what they have. There is no marriage equality for LGBTQ+, not even civil partnerships, no adoption for same-sex couples, and no protection against homophobic or transphobic hate speech. Polish children of same-sex parents are even refused passports unless the couple formally declares that one of the parents is “unknown.” So, except for a minor change regarding discrimination in the workplace—introduced under pressure from the EU—the legal situation for gay men in Poland hasn’t changed since 1969 when prostitution was legalized for both straight and gay individuals.
What we now observe is an interesting process: right-wing politicians and the Church are spreading homophobic propaganda, which has resulted in an explosion of violence against the LGBTQ+ community, especially evident during the 2020 presidential election. However, they haven’t dared to change the 1932 law that originally legalized homosexuality—although President Duda once remarked he would sign a “ban on homosexual propaganda if the proposed bill were well-written.” Such political discourse clearly echoes Putin’s Russia. And the Polish Catholic Church has been collaborating quite closely and amicably with the Russian Orthodox Church and its conservative policies. This extends to meetings, signed agreements, co-financing for right-wing conferences, and so on.
On the other hand, Polish society—under cultural pressure from the “rotten West” (as Putin puts it)—is rapidly becoming increasingly tolerant. In short: the Church is losing the battle to Netflix.
EH: Along with human rights, there has been a great battle in Poland over historical memory. In your new two-volume nonfiction book, The Swans, you take on this issue of memory in a fascinating way. The book’s first section recounts a portion of your family history using stories and collective family memory. In the second section—for which you carried out extensive research in Warsaw’s Institute of National Remembrance—you look at the same story, but through the lens of information gathered by Poland’s secret police. Could you speak a bit about the genesis of this project?
JD: The title comes from the Schwanenservice, the most famous of the eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain dish sets, made for Count Heinrich von Brühl, an extremely wealthy and powerful minister of Saxony and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But this is also a family story. My grandmother was a daughter of a middle-class Warsaw businessman, but her sister married above her social rank. She married a real “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” one of two sons of a very wealthy man, who owned a factory, a luxurious hotel, and a large art collection.
When World War II ended, most of that was gone, so the father established one of the first postwar antique shops in Warsaw, and I think he was instrumental in acquiring and selling what remained of a famous Swan Set. Obviously, his shop was soon closed by the government, yet the generation of his sons preserved their social position and quality of life. In 1960s they owned a nice villa, had a bunch of servants, and drank French cognac and ate Russian caviar. Quite extraordinary, especially in a Communist police state, right? No wonder it didn’t end well. Long story short, one of the brothers emigrated to Vienna, but the other remained in Communist Poland and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison following an extremely politicized trial. Throughout my childhood and youth, I would listen to bits and pieces of “The Case,” as it was sometimes called. Finally, I ventured to take a closer look, and it meant over four years of work.
First, I give voice to the next generation of family members, who retell the lives of their parents. Then I juxtapose their stories with documents, i.e., interrogation records, the trial files, reports collected by the secret police, etc. These paint a completely different picture. The family memory is a story of white, impeccable swans, whereas the archive’s memory is a story of a muddy, black pond. Neither is true; neither is a lie. Hence the title: “The Swans. History of a certain family, a certain art collection, a certain porcelain set, a certain affair and uncertain memory in a certain country of Central Europe.”
EH: The extent of the records you encountered in your work were rather immense—
JD: I went through well over two hundred volumes of trial records and photographed over sixteen thousand pages. What emerged from that, however, was far more than the story of the family my great aunt had married into: it is a vast panorama of society. Prewar Poland, World War II, the Polish People’s Republic in its grim, Stalinist period, and the less oppressive time afterwards. Poles, Germans, Jews, Russians, aristocrats and secret agents, Gestapo officers and housewives, antiquarians and diplomats, shabby bazaar vendors and art collectors, you name it. I have found it far more interesting than the dry legal case itself. And I was constantly amazed how much those rather dry records retained of the real, everyday language. It was fascinating. I am impatient to see how readers will react to it, but the text is vast, and there is still a lot of editing to do, and so the book will not appear before autumn.
EH: Although we have been speaking about your prose, poetry is at the center of your work. Due to a number of important Polish poet exiles in the United States, including Miłosz, Zagajewski, and Barańczak—and the awarding in 1996 of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Szymborska—there has been a belief that Poland is a country that deeply values its poets. But you have regretfully noted that this attitude is changing.
JD: In fact, it changed already starting in the early 1990s and has not improved since then. In the Communist era, poetry provided a space for social discourse, as it was not as affected by state censorship as prose, and much less than the press and other mass media. It was a space of allusions, innuendos—of Aesopian language, so to speak. When censorship ended, those things became unnecessary, so a lot of people assumed that poetry itself had become obsolete.
We have seen a huge decline in the number of literary reviews in daily newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines; instead of reviews, which are supposed to help readers, we have promotion that helps the publishing industry. But it all started with the decline of poetry reviews, which disappeared in the mid 1990s. Subsequently, people stopped asking for poetry in bookstores, and, in turn, publishing houses refused to publish poetry, those sadly “unmarketable” products. As a result, there was even less interest in poetry reviews. A vicious circle. “The old dinosaurs”—namely Herbert, Miłosz, Różewicz, and Szymborska—were probably the last to have this kind of presence in the press.
On the other hand, after 1989 Polish poetry also took a turn: the new generation did not want to write about politics and lofty ethics. They preferred to be more intimate, obscure, and experimental. A huge wave of poetry inspired by the New York School followed, and, frankly, I think that a large number of less experienced readers somehow felt betrayed. They stayed with the old names they knew and were intimidated by the “difficult” new poetry. And hence a certain pact between the poets and the poetry readers was broken. But I would say one can see it slowly growing back, often because of poems that take a social or political stance.
EH: A Romanian poet once said that rather than conceiving of poetry in a historically linear fashion, it should perhaps be understood as the “white blood cells” of a society. Depending on the nature—and urgency of circumstances—it waxes and wanes, reemerging in times of crisis when called to come to the aid of an endangered body politic.
JD: I strongly agree with that. And I think that the abovementioned rise in an interest in poetry is connected to an increase in our anxiety in the face of the pandemic, the war, and looming climate change. We instinctively feel that essays, press articles, and scholarly papers are very important, of course, but poetry provides a kind of insight that cannot be replaced by anything else.
EH: Last year’s invasion and war in Ukraine has been an immense trauma for its citizens, who have witnessed the bombing of their cities and the loss of family, loved ones and friends. While not the same as the war zone, those outside Ukraine have also been affected by a senseless war, where a democratic country is subjected to daily bombings and reported atrocities. In the first year over ten million Ukrainian refugees passed through Poland—
JD: There was, and still is, a great deal of voluntary work in Poland. People take care of refugees, share their homes and food, collect and send humanitarian aid. There is also institutional help on many levels. I see it in the literary world, how writers’ residencies co-organized by the Literary Union—a writers’ association which I chair—opened their doors to Ukrainian refugees, just as they had done for Belarussian refugees the previous year. Ukrainian writers help in a variety of ways, for instance Andriy Lyubka raises money to buy vehicles for the Ukrainian army, and this charming intellectual with an angelic smile has already sent about one hundred and fifty camouflaged cars to the frontlines. Everyone finds their own way: some people drove to the border and transported the refugees, some made sandwiches for the hungry, some donated money. I am quite knowledgeable about antiques and if I find a nice object, I buy it and then auction it off to raise money for medical transports to frontline hospitals. We watch and we act.
EH: You have recently written a long and very moving poem entitled “Tenebrae Responsoria,” which addresses the war in Ukraine. In it you describe, among other events, the 2022 siege and destruction of Mariupol. In the poem’s lines you pose the complex question of whether you have the right to write about this. You poignantly ask: “why do it, in the name of what, who gave me the authority?” This is an important ethical and aesthetic question—
JD: I have heard many times that Polish writers now have a duty to write about the tragic situation in Ukraine. But there are books that, frankly, seem rather exploitative of the war. I highly appreciate the work of war correspondents and nonfiction writers—people who risk their lives to report from the war zone, as well as those who perform the painful task of collecting victim testimonies, be it in Ukraine or anywhere else where refugees have found shelter. And above all, there’s nothing wrong with Ukrainian writers transforming their experiences, be they personal or more general, into prose or poetry.
When it comes to foreigners, however, there is a temptation to somehow use the tragedy’s engine for personal gain. Obviously, we are touched by this war—and our feelings may well be genuine, but we should always remember that for us it is still second-hand suffering. A cut on your finger always hurts more than someone else’s leg being ripped off. Therefore, I am very cautious to not cross this line and always write as an observer rather than decorate myself with someone else’s genuine pain, which I have no right to do.
EH: On the other hand, when speaking about the war at the 2022 Frankfurt Book Fair, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. “Please keep writing about it . . . Do everything possible for Europeans to know how many people lost their lives struggling for rights . . . Witness it and tell about it. Because there are the threats other nations of Europe might face, too—” Perhaps there is, in fact, a space for the response of others?
JD: Zelenskyy is right that the visibility of this war is crucial to Ukraine’s victory. However, personally, when it comes to literature, I see our duties mostly as making space for Ukrainian voices. So, we should turn to Ukrainian writers and artists and help them financially, provide them with art residencies, with scholarships, and, especially, with newspaper columns—to make their voices heard. Be it in a poem, an essay, a collection of victims’ narratives: they deserve our attention.
EH: Towards the end of “Tenebrae Responsoria” there is a turn, where you shift your gaze towards the streets of Poland and imagine their destruction. For many Poles, the current war can only bring up memories of the immense destruction that took place during the Nazi invasion in 1939, throughout the war and the final razing of Warsaw in summer 1944. Following this, the capital was called “the most destroyed city in the world.”
JD: This is even more pronounced in my case where, for example, my family comes partially from Warsaw—destroyed by the German army—and my childhood was spent in Gdansk, which was razed by the Soviet army. Atrocities were committed in both cities, and centuries-old cultural riches were reduced to ashes. When you enter the National Library in Warsaw, there’s a glass urn on the stairs. It holds the ashes of burned books. During World War II, the German administration amassed the most precious collections from Polish prewar libraries in one building on Okólnik Street, a stone’s throw from my Warsaw apartment. It was as if—not in terms of size, but in terms of importance to the nation—you had put together the most prized items from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the John Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Smithsonian. Or the British Library, and Bodleian and Cambridge University libraries. All in one place. This included Gothic manuscripts, incunabula, autographs of the most celebrated poets and authors, letters, documents, maps. Many of these books hadn’t yet been catalogued or republished, so we don’t know exactly what was placed in that “ark.” After the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the German army agreed to preserve the city’s cultural heritage and art collections. A month later, however, the Brandkommando, or Burning Detachment, destroyed almost the entirety of Warsaw’s libraries, including the treasures on Okólnik Street.
But the urn symbolizes not only those books that were destroyed. In 1939 Warsaw had 1.3 million inhabitants. The bombardments in 1939 killed “only” ten to twenty thousand people. The executions that followed took the life of about thirty thousand more. About one hundred thousand died in concentration camps and forced labor camps. The Warsaw Uprising claimed one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand, while the greatest loss was the destruction of the city’s Jewish population of about four hundred thousand people. How many books could they have written? How many books has Ukraine lost during this terrible war? Not only books stolen by the Russian army—but books that will never be written?
EH: Questions such as these, concerning historical and political topics, are only a part of your work. You are also very much concerned with “poet’s questions”: about the essential nature of poetry. I like very much something you have said on several occasions—that there is a “current that underlines reality that we cannot largely achieve verbally” and that “although poetry is based on words, it is in fact the spaces and silences between words that allow us to dig into deeper regions of knowledge and into a deeper understanding of the world.” Readers of poetry will intuitively understand this—could you elaborate a bit more about it?
JD: Since the classical myth of Orpheus, we know that poetry is a kind of magic, which can be used for good, but also, regrettably, for malevolent purposes. Spells and prayers are poems, they are masterful ways of influencing reality through the power of meticulously crafted sequences of words. I can’t say that I know exactly how this works, although sometimes I have my suspicions. I just know it does. Poems are a powerful instrument, especially when set to music. It’s like Papageno’s bells in The Magic Flute. When Edith Piaf sings “Ça ira!” you want to hang the aristocrats from lampposts, even if that is very much against your convictions. Although, of course, I much prefer poems that incite people to benevolent acts. As any sorcerer’s apprentice knows, however, poets have to be very careful when they lend their art to support some cause. We always have to take that into consideration.
EH: In poetry, your influences are broad: they include Polish writers such as Miłosz, Szymborska, and Herbert, international voices such as Rilke, Lorca, and Mandelstam—but also more ironic poets such as Philip Larkin. In terms of impact, you have said that it is not necessarily an entire poet’s oeuvre that might be compelling for a writer, but sometimes a single poem—or a single line. I wondered, to finish, if you could give an example of such a line.
JD: Noc zaprzęga konie and Śmierć, Leta, Lorelei, Leta. I deliberately quote them in Polish, because part of their appeal comes from their sound in my language—there’s something in the melody and rhythm that makes them intoxicating to me. The first line, Night harnesses the horses, comes from a classical poet, Hesiod perhaps, that I heard or read once, twenty years ago, at university and it still resonates in my mind. The second, Death, Lete, Lorelei, Lete is by Mandelstam, but at the same time not by him. The last line of “Decembrist” is actually: Russia, Lorelei, Lete—and only my misremembering changed it into the one which is engrained in my memory.
Of course, there are many more memorable lines by Mandelstam, but I mention this one because we tend to forget how much of poetry is not the mere text—but rather what occurs to it in the process of reading, and rereading. This is when the magic happens.
Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a Polish poet, writer, translator, and painter. His first collection of poems was the last book recommended by the Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. A prolific author of ten books of poems, five novels, several collections of short prose works, editorials, and essays, Dehnel has also translated works by Philip Larkin, Henry James, Edmund White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. M. Coetzee, among others. His own works have been translated into over a dozen languages. A selection of his poems, Aperture (Zephyr Press, 2018, trans. Karen Kovacik), received PEN’s Award for Poetry in Translation honorary mention. His novels Saturn (Dedalus Books, 2013) and Lala (Oneworld, 2018), both translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, are available in English. In partnership with his husband, Piotr Tarczynski, he also writes a detective series under the pen name Maryla Szymiczkowa. Two volumes in this series, Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing and Karolina and the Torn Curtain (Oneworld 2019, 2021 and Harper Collins 2020, 2022) have also been translated by Lloyd-Jones. Dehnel has been the recipient of the Kościelski Award and the Polityka Passport Award. Since 2020 he has lived with his husband in Berlin.
Ellen Hinsey is the International Correspondent for New England Review. She is the author of nine books of poetry, essay, dialogue, and translation. Her most recent book, The Illegal Age, explores the rise of authoritarianism. Hinsey’s essays are collected in Mastering the Past: Reports from Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Hinsey’s other poetry collections include Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory (Yale University Series Award). Hinsey has also edited and co-translated The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Poetry, and New England Review. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.