An Ethnography of Memory of the People’s Republic of Poland. Everyday Culture in Postwar Poland 1956–1989

Cultural participation was seen as a source of prestige, and the requirement of personal development, of becoming a cultured person, gained popularity and became almost an inherent element of the model of social advancement. The intelligentsia was expected to elevate the cultural level of the country, primarily by introducing the less educated parts of society to the national culture. […]

In our study of socialist Poland we wanted to focus primarily on the memories of everyday life of those who lived in that period. Our perspective refers therefore not to the experience of a witness of history, understood as a sequence of significant events, but rather simply to the everyday life of people who lived in this historical epoch. The aim of the study is to show not the functioning of the People’s Republic of Poland but how individual sought to “find themselves within it,” especially ways of dealing with problems, of living and experiencing. That is why we are not concentrating on studying the cultural memory of socialist Poland; rather, we are attempting to refer to the communicative memory of that period. A memory collected in the form of personal and biographical accounts, one analogous to narrative memory.