Academic literature on the topic 'War-songs, Polish'

The topic of the article is music that is strongly connected to the history of post-war, Polish again, Wroclaw — the city and its cultural, social and political landscape. This includes not only songs composed by artists from Wroclaw, but also songs dedicated to this city. In the article, songs from different timespans are analysed: the ones composed in the 1950s, in the pioneering period of restoration, as well as countercultural songs from the 1980s. The paper is complemented by an analysis of the newest songs that pretend to be hits or anthems of Wroclaw, although they have never gained the same fame as classical songs written by Maria Koterbska or new-wave band Klaus Mitffoch.

The article addressed the issue of using folk dance as a tool of propaganda by the communist party. It is not uncommon to associate the activity of folk groups with the period of socialist realism and the years that followed in. Folk song and dance ensembles have always been a colorful showcase of the country outside of its borders and have often added splendor to distinguished national events with their performances. Nevertheless, their artistic activity was not motivated solely by the beauty of Polish folklore, for folk ensembles formed after World War II were often created to aid the goals of the communist party. Reaching for folk repertoire and transferring regional songs and dances to the stage was seen as opposition to the elite culture. Cultural reform made performances accessible to the working class, and folk song and dance expressed admiration for the work of people in the countryside. In addition to traditional songs from various regions of Poland, the repertoire of these ensembles also included many songs in honor of Stalin and about the Polish-Soviet friendship. Paweł Pawlikowski’s award-winning film, Cold War, which partially follows a song and dance ensemble (aptly named Mazurek), shows many of the dilemmas and controversies that the artists of this period had to face.

The present article is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive – as much as the available sources allow – presentation of Polish music in Great Britain during the war, without any claims to completeness. The main institution attracting Poles in London was, practically from the beginning of the war, Polish Hearth, founded by Polish artists, scholars and writers. The Polish Musicians of London association with Tadeusz Jarecki organised classical music concerts and published contemporary works by Polish composers. The organisation was instrumental in the founding of the London Polish String Quartet. The BBC Radio played a huge role in the popularisation of the Polish repertoire and Polish artists, broadcasting complete performances. What became an extremely attractive form of promoting Polish art were the performances of the Anglo-Polish Ballet, founded by Czesław Konarski and Alicja Halama in 1940. The post-war reality meant that most of the scores published at the time were arrangements of soldiers’, historical, folk and popular songs characterised by simple musical means suited to the capabilities of army bands, but conveying the spirit accompanying the soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces during the Second World War. Polish Army Choir established, as the first among such ensembles, on Jerzy Kołaczkowski’s initiative.The author hopes to prompt further studies into the history of migrations of artists and work on monographs on the various composers and performers. Undoubtedly, there is a need to bring this part of our musical culture to light, especially given the fact that interest in Polish music abroad has been growing in recent years.

Like many other composers, Andrzej Panufnik lost his entire musical oeuvre as a result of the Warsaw Uprising. By then he was already the composer of two symphonies, a piano trio, the Five Polish Peasant Songs and Tragic Overture. This last piece, which he had conducted himself in occupied Warsaw in 1944, had brought him considerable success. Listeners felt its terrifying resonance inaddition to appreciating its masterful construction, and the event remained in many people's memory for years, establishing Panufnik's musical position as a composer as well as a conductor. (Before the war, he had graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory with degrees in both fields, and later studiedconducting at Vienna's Hochschule fur Musik with one of the greatest conductors of the time, FelixWeingartner.) His pre-war compositions, premiered in the late 1930s, had already been very well received by the critics. There was no doubt that Panufnik would play a significant role in post-war Polish musical life.

The paper is dedicated to two soldiers’ songs from the second half of 1917, written in the atmosphere of rebellion of the Polish Legions against the Central Powers. The turning point in the history of Polish military units during the First World War, which was caused by the so-called Oath crisis, for the demilitarised and interned soldiers, was the time of fighting by means of word, rather than weapon. However, they manifested their pride and perseverance of the Polish soldier, using mockery. Occasional poetic works – Dziadowska pieśń żałobna o odwrocie legionów spod Warszawy and Santa Lucia – shaped the independence ethos on the basis of a solid foundation of folklore and literary tradition (using e.g. the convention of ‘a beggar’s song’ and ‘a news story’). Arrogance and an ironic attitude, expressed in songs, conceal the real tragic situation of the soldiers – who were deprived of the chance to serve the Nation for being disobedient towards the German army. Szczypiorno and Beniaminów – places to which they were interned – are elevated to the rank of symbols of defiance and contempt for the invaders and constitute a significant element of the legend surrounding Piłsudski’s Legions.

The subject of considerations in the present article is the work by Bartłomiej Paprocki: Historyja żałosna o prędkości i okrutności tatarskiej […], which appeared in 1575. What can be noticed in the said work is the process of intersecting of generic features of current-novelties song (Polish pieśń nowiniarska) and the epic features, the latter being particularly those that characterise historical narrative poems, such as: verismo, events chronology, using information from contemporaneous sources, recording places and persons who participate in depicted events, moderation when it comes to utilising stylistic devises. At the same time, mainly in the dedicatory letter addressed to Anzelm Gostomski, an endeavour may be noticed to overcome the poetics of current-novelties songs – not least by creating the image of poet as a soothsayer. To the author’s mind, the work by Paprocki appeared at the dawn of Polish heroicum. The narrative poem in question came a few years prior to the poetical renderings from the times of war campaigns of Stephen Báthory, which are considered by this subject’s scholars as first attempts at creating new poetical quality – the historical narrative poem.

One of the addressees of the letters of Prof. Ananiasz Zajączkowski was Aleksander Mardkowicz (1875–1944), a notary from Lutsk, who was one of the most affluent Karaim activists of the inter-war period. As a young man he moved to Yekaterinoslav, where he worked in a notary’s practice. There he made his debut publishing a few poems in Russian in some literary magazines. After Poland gained its independence, in 1921 Mardkowicz returned to Lutsk, where he started to play an important role in the life of the local Karaim community as a member and, for a time, a president of the Board of the community. But the major focus of his work were literary and editorial activities. As there was a need for literature which would encourage Karaim readers to develop an interest in their own language, tradition and past, towards the end of the 1920s Mardkowicz struck upon the idea of creating a Karaim publishing house. In ten years between 1930 and 1939 he published 15 brochures (most of them written by himself): four short stories, four poems, a collection of religious songs, a calendar, a Karaim-Polish-German dictionary, a grammar of the south-western dialect (written by A. Zajączkowski) and three brochures in Polish on the history and traditions of the Karaims. “Karaj Awazy”, a magazine entirely in Karaim, whose twelve issues appeared between 1931 and 1939, can be regarded as his major work. It had an enormous impact on the cultural life of Karaim communities not only in Lutsk, but in Halicz and in Lithuania as well. The letters written by Zajączkowski to Mardkowicz between the summer of 1933 and the spring of 1939 show us some unknown aspects of the relations between the editors of two Karaim magazines appearing in the same time: “Myśl Karaimska” in Vilnius and “Karaj Awazy” in Luck.

The July 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey caught the Greek Colonels (1967–74) off guard, as they proved entirely incapable of responding to the casus belli, partly provoked by their own actions. Greece remained technically in the state of military mobilisation for about four months and with the democratic transition well underway. This article catalogues the ways in which this conflict mobilised Greek civil society in unprecedented ways. Using oral testimonies, press clippings and three major documentaries of the time (Nikos Koundouros’ The Songs of Fire, Michael Cacoyannis’ Attila 74, and Nikos Kavoukidis’ Testimonials), the article dissects the cultural resistances against the war in one of the most traumatic moments in contemporary Greek history. It analyses the gigantic concerts that took place in the largest stadiums of Athens to protest the war, next to mass demonstrations and popular films protesting the invasion. It argues that these cultural events and artifacts re-enacted facets of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the respective countercultural scene in the US of the late 1960s. The article concludes that these modes of cultural and political resistance activated post-authoritarian Greek civil society, renegotiating the parameters of political participation and partly resetting the agenda of the country’s foreign policy following popular demand.

75 years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, but racism, nationalism and xenophobia (including anti-Semitism) are still widespread; in fact, due to an increasingly solipsistic policy of international leaders, hostility against those who don’t match race, religion, culture or sexual orientation is even experiencing a renaissance. Fake news start to replace facts. In Germany, politicians of the (democratically elected) right-wing party AfD (Alternative for Germany] publicly question the significance of the holocaust. According to the polls, around 33% of European youths have little or no knowledge about the attempted annihilation of Jews during World War II. In order to prevent the return of barbarism it is essential to remember and understand the characteristics that actually led to barbarism in the first place. Peter Weiss’ play Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen [The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Songs] written in 1965, takes a very thorough look at what Auschwitz was, how it had been made possible and how it survived in society even after the war. The following article examines the play and its context in literature and films on the Holocaust, paying particular attention to the possibility of explaining the, as Elie Wiesel has put it, “unexplainable” and converting it into a teaching experience for current generations.

In the 1940s, the totalitarian occupying regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union implemented the strictest control and ideological guidance of intellectual and spiritual life of all time in Estonia. Essentially, the mechanisms and results of control are known. Cultural life was subjected to strict pre-censorship and post-publication censorship, and in the Soviet era also to thematic dictation.
 The intellectual and spiritual resistance of Estonians in those years, in other words their refusal to accept the ruling ideology, has been studied very little. The most widespread way of putting up intellectual and spiritual resistance was to remain silent, in other words to avoid creating works that were agreeable to the authorities. Selective silence, that is the selection of one’s points of emphasis, and splitting, in other words writing for oneself works that one keeps in one’s drawer while at the same time writing for publication in print, are also placed in this category. Recording actual history in diaries through the eyes of contemporaries of events, reading intellectually and spiritually enjoyable literature, and other such actions were ways of putting up intellectual and spiritual resistance.
 The main objective of this study is to ascertain in historical context the attempts to put up intellectual and spiritual resistance in the comedies from the 1940s by Hugo Raudsepp (1883–1952), one of the most outstanding Estonian playwrights of the 20th century. Ideologically speaking, dramatic literature was clearly one of the most vulnerable branches of literature. It was created for public presentation in theatres, after all, for which reason authors had to be particularly careful in their wording. On the other hand, plays provided both authors and directors with opportunities to conceal messages between the lines. For this reason, theatre became exceedingly popular in Estonia by the final decades of the Soviet era. The ridicule and mocking of the Soviet regime were especially enjoyed.
 The subjugation of Estonian intellectual and spiritual life to the ideological requirements of the occupying regime was launched at the time of pre-war Stalinism (1940–1941). Its aim was to rear Soviet-minded people who would help to justify, fortify and enhance the Soviet regime. The systematic control of the activities of creative persons and the working out of dictates and regulations were nevertheless not yet completed during the first year of Soviet rule. Many outstanding cultural figures remained silent or earned a living by translating texts. At that time, Hugo Raudsepp wrote the non-political novel Viimne eurooplane [The Last European], which is noteworthy to this day, while his plays from the period of independent Estonian statehood were not staged in theatres.
 Starting with the German occupation (1941–1944), the point of departure for Hugo Raudsepp was writing between the lines in his comedies in order to get both readers and theatregoers to think and to give them strength of soul. In 1943, he wrote the comedy Vaheliku vapustused [Interspatial Jolts], which has later been styled as a masterpiece. He concealed numerous signs between the lines of this play referring to the fate of a small people, in other words Estonia, between its great neighbouring powers the Soviet Union and Germany. Performances of this play were soon banned. Performances in theatres of all other plays by Hugo Raudsepp were similarly banned, with one exception.
 During post-war Stalinism in 1944–51, the sovietisation of Estonian cultural life resumed. Hugo Raudsepp did not initially write on topical Soviet themes, rather he sought subject matter from earlier times. His first play from that period entitled Rotid [Rats] (1946) was about the German occupation during the Second World War and it ridiculed the occupying Germans. Raudsepp also skilfully wove messages supporting Estonian cultural identity into the play. The play was staged in the Estonia Theatre but was soon banned.
 Raudsepp’s second play from that period, Tagatipu Tiisenoosen (1946), earned first prize at the state comedy competition in that same year. The action in the play was set in the period of Estonian National Awakening at the end of the 19th century. It ridiculed Baltic Germans and the behaviour of parvenu Estonians. Similarly to his previous play, he demonstrated nationalist mentality in this comedy by way of nationalist songs. It is noteworthy that by the summer of 1947, Tagatipu Tiisenoosen had also reached expatriate Estonians and it was staged with an altered title as the only Stalinist- era play from Soviet Estonia in Canada (1952), Australia (1954) and Sweden (1956).
 The thematic precepts imposed on Estonian writers and the mechanism for ensuring that those precepts were followed became even stricter starting in 1947. Raudsepp wrote his next 7 plays on required Soviet subject matter: post-war land reform (Tillereinu peremehed [The Owners of Tillereinu], 1947), monetary reform (Noorsulane Ilmar [Ilmar the Young Farmhand], 1948), kolkhozes (Küpsuseksam [Matriculation Exam] and Lasteaed [Kindergarten], 1949, Mineviku köidikuis [In the Fetters of the Past] (1950) and his so-called Viimane näidend [Last Play], 1950 or 1951), and the beginning of the Soviet regime in Estonia in 1940 (Pööripäevad Kikerpillis [Solstices in Kikerpill], 1949). Hugo Raudsepp skilfully wove words of wisdom for Estonians on surviving under foreign rule through the mouths of his characters, or discreetly laughed about Soviet reality in a way that the censors did not grasp.
 Post-war cultural policy culminated with the 8th Plenum of the Estonian Communist (Bolshevist) Party (EC(B)P) Central Committee on 21–26 March 1950, where among other things, the EC(B)P Central Committee Bureau was accused of allowing the exaltation of the superiority of Western European science and culture. Cultural figures were branded bourgeois nationalists and they faced serious ordeals. The fate of the great figure of Estonian dramatic literature was very harsh. Hugo Raudsepp was depicted as a ‘fascist henchman’ in 1950. He was expelled from the Estonian Writers’ Union and was deprived of his personal pension. He was arrested on 11 May 1951. Opposition to the Soviet regime was stressed in the charges presented to him. His play Vaheliku vapustused, which the German occupying regime had banned, and his only play that was allowed at that time, Lipud tormis [Flags in the Storm], were named as the primary evidence supporting the charges. Hugo Raudsepp was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in the autumn of 1951. He hoped to the last possible moment that he would be allowed to serve his sentence in Estonia. Unfortunately, on 18 February 1952 he was sent by train from Tallinn to Narva and on 19 February on to Leningrad. From there his journey took him to Vjatka, Kirov and finally Irkutsk oblast. This great man’s health was poor, and he soon died on 15 September 1952.
 Very few new literary works appeared in the 1940s. The historical nadir is altogether seen in post-war book production in the era of Stalinism. Estonian theatre was similarly in a most difficult situation due to censorship, shortage of repertoire, scarcity of funding, and layoffs and sackings of theatre personnel. Nowadays the survival of theatre at the time, regardless of difficult times, is appreciated, and actors are recognised for preserving Estonian identity and uniting the people.
 Hugo Raudsepp’s role as a playwright in supporting intellectual and spiritual resistance to foreign authorities has to be recognised on the basis of his occupation-era comedies. Hugo Raudsepp was one of the most productive authors of his day, writing a total of 11 plays in 1943–51. According to the assessment of scholars of literature, he never once rose with these works to the leading-edge level of his previous works. It was impossible to create masterpieces that would become classics in that time of strict ideological precepts and the monitoring of their observance. Taking into consideration the extremely restricted creative conditions, his works were still masterpieces of their time. As Hugo Raudsepp’s oeuvre demonstrates, spirit still managed to cleverly trump power regardless of censorship and official precepts. The denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult in 1956 once again opened the door to the theatre for Hugo Raudsepp’s best comedies from Estonia’s era of independent statehood. The witticism and laughter of Hugo Raudsepp’s comedies gave people renewed strength of soul.

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

This book takes the mythos of the Parisian midinette as its primary field of investigation, analyzing the plethora of fanciful commentary about female garment workers in the capital during the belle époque, but demonstrating that this whimsical Parisian imaginary was a fantasy with political intention. This narrative of Parisian working-class femininity defined significant aspects of French popular culture, philanthropy, and labor reform from the fin de siècle through World War I, and became an essential means of representing and coping with the early twentieth-century encounter between labor and modern capitalism. From the 1880s through the Great War, nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of these women across French popular culture. The attractive, single young garment worker with a ready smile and inimitable Parisian taste was featured in countless novels, films, songs, social commentary, and even reform campaigns from the era as an inescapable urban type. She stood in for, at once, the superiority of French taste and craft, and the political and sexual subordination of French women and labor. The midinette was written onto the geography of Paris, by way of festivals, monuments, historic preservation, and guide books. She was also the public face of tens of thousands of real workingwomen whose demands for better labor conditions were modulated, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type. This book reveals the way that the figure of the midinette inflected labor policy, reform efforts, and the daily lives of Paris’s workingwomen.

This chapter studies the large and varied repertoire of songs created by Polish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Most common of these compositions are parodies of songs popular before the war. Drawing on well-known melodies and familiar styles such as the tango, waltz, or foxtrot, prisoners who listened to, created, and performed these songs could reclaim, if only for a moment, some part of their lost popular culture. Yet paradoxically, and as many survivors attest, these same songs, with their unsparing depictions of camp life, helped prisoners push aside thoughts of life before captivity and so preserve their mental balance during those difficult years. The chapter then looks at one parody song, ‘Heil, Sachsenhausen’, and also examines the song parodied, ‘Madagaskar’, itself a satirical consideration of the Jewish predicament in inter-war Poland. ‘Heil, Sachsenhausen’ served not only as a narrative of camp experience, but also as a darkly comic condemnation of Nazi ‘racial purity’ laws. Moreover, this parody song may have functioned as a zone of inquiry for the author's personal reflections on German-Polish and Polish-Jewish relations before and during the Second World War.

Bohlman’s chapter explores the fragmented archive pertaining to Polish military involvement in the Crimean War, focusing on evocations of military power and travel in legion songs. The chapter suggests that legion songs were a political technology for preserving and promoting Polish nationhood during a time of partition. Not only did such songs stimulate nationalist sentiment (both at home and abroad) and portray the legion as the fulcrum of Poland’s aspirational sovereignty, they also posited a relationship to land rooted in mobility. The chapter argues that poems and songs served to sing a nation into being, redrawing constantly shifting imaginary borders between Poland and the imperial forces that kept it splintered.

This chapter analyzes the way wartime experiences were reflected in the songs of Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to the Soviet Union. It introduces both the contours of the controversy and the broad outlines of what the Polish Jews went through during the war years. It also looks into the research about partisans and ghetto fighters that far outweighs their significance and their percentage of the Jewish population in Europe. The chapter investigates the hegemony of armed resistance by introducing the idea of “spiritual resistance,” which encompassed explicitly religious and other actions that raised the human spirit in the face of the Nazi effort to destroy it. It identifies singing as one of the many phenomena to describe spiritual resistance, which is considered an act that could have no possible effect on the war and yet allowed its victims to find the strength to continue living.

This chapter describes Stanisław Wielanek's Szlagiery starej Warszawy: Śpiewnik andrusowski (Hits of Old Warsaw: A Songbook of the Streetwise). Wielanek is the leader of Kapela Warszawska, a street band that usually performs for tips in an underpass near the Hotel Forum in the centre of Warsaw. They play mainly pre-war Warsaw urban folk music. Wielanek's 500-page volume contains a richness of material that is not only musical—including both scores and lyrics—but also literary and iconographic: from cabaret monologues and vignettes, jokes, bon mots, and biographical and contextual information, to drawings, posters, photographs, and postcards. Alongside old Warsaw songs and criminal or lumpenproletarian ballads, the book includes a separate section on Jewish folklore in Polish which is nearly 100 pages long, and another fifty-page section on Lwów.

This chapter investigates the songs in Yiddish and Polish remembered by survivors of the łódz ghetto. It draws on interviews with two teenage survivors of the łódz ghetto who settled in Australia after the war in order to document and preserve personal musical experiences and memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It also references long and established literatures on examining witnesses and testifiers in Holocaust and trauma studies that speaks at length of delicate dynamics and ethical responsibilities of representation. The chapter analyzes the claim that sonic experiences remain in memories of people and travel with them throughout their lives, providing moments of nostalgia, evocations of past connections, ties to culture, friends, and family, and frames of reference. It explains how memories of dark, distant, and problematic times are enabled and returned to resonate in the present lives of testifiers and witnesses.

This chapter assesses Julian Tuwim's Utwory nieznane (Unknown Works), the title of which is somewhat misleading. The book is largely made up of cabaret pieces that were performed and known to the public; they simply were never published in written form. Still, the book's publication in 1999 was an important event, not only for poetry lovers and historians of literature, but also from a Jewish perspective. Jewish topics appear prominently and in many forms in this collection of poems, facsimiles, juvenilia, cabaret skits and songs, and private letters from various periods of the poet's life. This is in clear contradiction to the stereotype, predominant in Jewish historiography, of the pre-war Polish Jewish intelligentsia as thoroughly assimilated and uprooted. Tuwim's example demonstrates that the opposite was the case. Like many other writers, he was in constant dialogue with his Jewishness, defending it when attacked, but also critical of Jewish obscurantism.