Caritas across the Iron Curtain

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Piotr H. Kosicki Bishops' Letter of 1965

Caritas across the Iron Curtain?: Polish-German Reconciliation and the

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East European Politics andSocieties

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Caritas across the Iron Curtain?Polish-German Reconciliationand the Bishops’ Letter of 1965Piotr H. KosickiPrinceton University

This article takes the November 1965 letter of Poland’s Roman Catholic bishops totheir German counterparts as a starting point for historical inquiry into the nature andconsequences of Catholic engagement in Polish-German reconciliation. The articlebegins with a close reading of the letter’s text and its philosophical-theological under-pinnings; then, it discusses the letter’s reception history and its political consequences.The letter and its reception have a double significance: first, as an event in post-WorldWar II European political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical history; second, as an ethicalcommentary on the spirit of dialogue promulgated in the constitutions of the SecondVatican Council. Although the letter helped to facilitate a process of Polish-Germanreconciliation that remains ongoing, this process has failed to assimilate the letter’sethics of forgiveness. That failure has reinforced the roadblocks that hamper Polish-German reconciliation almost two decades after the fall of communism in Europe.

Keywords: Polish-German reconciliation; Roman Catholic Church; historical mem-ory; Polish intellectuals

Adtendite vobis si peccaverit frater tuus increpa illum et si paenitentiam egerit dimitteilli Et si septies in die peccaverit in te et septies in die conversus fuerit ad te dicenspaenitet me dimitte illi

—Luke 17:3-4

Nunc autem manet fides spes caritas tria haec maior autem his est caritas

—1 Corinthians 13:131

In the late autumn of 1965, the Polish bishops’ delegation to the Second VaticanCouncil (1962-1965), sending pastoral greetings to the other national delegations atthe Council, prepared also a letter to their German counterparts. The letter’s finalwords, “we grant forgiveness as well as ask for it.”2 The Polish United Workers’Party (hereafter PUWP) apparatus responded by launching a propaganda campaignagainst the Polish Episcopate: official media and petitions by associations of work-ers called the letter “national treason” and “un-citizen-like behavior,”3 and the party



214 East European Politics and Societies

apparatus propagated the slogan “We cannot forget and will not forgive” as theobligatory stance of all patriotic Poles. Overnight, 20 years of anti-German ferment—palpable since the end of World War II, indeed often vigorously encouraged by thePUWP—seemed to have boiled over.

This essay takes the 1965 letter as a starting point for historical inquiry into theethical and political significance of Roman Catholic engagement in Polish-Germanreconciliation. I begin with a close reading of the letter’s text and its philosophical-theological underpinnings; then, I discuss its reception history—both Polish andGerman, including press and political establishment as well as Catholic bishops andlaity—and its political consequences.

The letter and its reception have a double significance: first, as a major event inpost–World War II European political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical history; sec-ond, as an ethical commentary on the spirit of dialogue promulgated in the constitu-tions of the Second Vatican Council. The bridge between the letter’s text and contextis historical memory: the letter-as-text was a conscious response to memory of thepast, a “living memory combined with forgiveness” put into words by the PolishEpiscopate.4 Paradoxically, the letter-as-event itself became a site of historical mem-ory, a point of reference in both Polish and German narratives that embodied thestruggles of aggressors and victims coping with a traumatic past. Although the letterhelped to facilitate a new process of Polish-German institutional reconciliation thatremains ongoing, this process has failed to assimilate the letter’s ethics of forgive-ness. That failure explains the roadblocks that continue to hamper Polish-Germanreconciliation almost two decades after the fall of communism in East Central andEastern Europe.

The Text

The Polish bishops issued the letter as an invitation to the German bishops to join inthe Polish Church’s 1966 celebration of the millennium of Polish Christendom. It wastherefore one of 56 letters delivered to the various national delegations at the Vatican,

Author’s Note: I thank Jan T. Gross, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, and Adam Michnik for strongly encour-aging me to pursue this topic in article form. From an idea nurtured at the “Polish-German Post/Memory”conference at Indiana University–Bloomington, 19-22 April 2007, the text has evolved with the benefit ofcomments from and conversations with Peter Brown, Anthony T. Grafton, Tony Judt, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, Joanna Niz

.ynska, and Jeffrey L. Stout, all of whom I thank, as well as the anonymous reader for

East European Politics and Societies. The archival research was supported by an IIE FulbrightFellowship. Abbreviations for references to archival materials are as follows: AAN—Archiwum AktNowych, Warsaw; AJT—Archiwum Jerzego Turowicza, Kraków; KIK—Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej(Warsaw); PZPR—Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; UdSW—Urzad do Spraw Wyznan; WSiSO—Wydział Stowarzyszen i Spraw Ogólnych; WWR—Wydział Wyznania Rzymskokatolickiego.



Kosicki / Caritas across the Iron Curtain? 215

yet, among these, the letter addressed to the German bishops had unique political under-tones. No peace had been concluded between Poland and the Federal Republic ofGermany (hereafter FRG) following World War II, so—even setting aside the ideolog-ical claims of PUWP propaganda that the FRG was a neo-fascist state—the Polish bish-ops were addressing citizens of a country with which the People’s Republic of Polandwas still at war. Thus, the Polish-German border solution reached by the Allied leadersat Potsdam—without a Polish voice at the table—remained unrecognized by WestGermany. Germans expelled from the “recovered territories” claimed a right of returnand expropriation, and Poland’s full recognition of the German Democratic Republic(GDR) seemed to preclude the normalization of relations with the FRG.

The Second World War moreover left a legacy of fear and resentment that thePUWP skillfully manipulated. Propaganda explicitly channeled this antipathytoward West Germany while exonerating East Germany, proclaimed to have “brokenforever with militarism and nationalism.”5 The Polish bishops discussed this juridi-cal, political, and institutional context in their letter; more than simply a politicalspeech-act, however, the letter represented a complex latticework of historical, ethi-cal, and theological claims. Forgiveness, forgetfulness (oblivio), and love (caritas)were the cornerstones of the Polish appeal for Polish-German reconciliation.Archbishop Bolesław Kominek of Wrocław, the author of the letter’s text, perceivedthe confluence of Vatican II and Poland’s millennial anniversary as an ideal momentfor the Church to attempt to do what the State would not.6

Given that Polish reactions to the letter focused almost exclusively on its finalwords—“we grant forgiveness as well as ask for it”—it is essential to review the restof the letter to understand the message of which that phrase was but one part. In fact,most of the letter was an extended Polak-katolik narrative of the traditional variety:Polish national identity and Polish Catholic identity developed in tandem and insepa-rably, in part as a response to centuries of German antagonism toward Poland, begin-ning with the Teutonic Knights, proceeding through Frederick the Great, andculminating in Adolf Hitler. Yet this German Sonderweg narrative was equivocal: his-torical memory of German antagonism seemed to be interspersed in the letter withmemory of what Basil Kerski and Robert Z

.urek have called “the great role of media-

tor that Germany played in the Christianization and Europeanization of Poland in theMiddle Ages.”7 At the narrative’s conclusion, Kominek virtually apologized for theearlier equivocation: “Do not hold it against us, dear German brethren, that wehave recounted what has happened in the last part of our millennium. It is less anaccusation than our own justification!”8 The next sentence acknowledged “how largenumbers of the German population bore up under superhuman pressure exerted ontheir consciences, for years on end, by the National Socialists.” But was this acknowl-edgment an olive branch or a tactical move?

The answer to that question lies in an assessment of how the Polish bishopsaddressed two matters: (1) the concrete political issue of the “western lands,” whichnecessitated resolution of border and property disputes, and (2) the broader issue of



how to cope with collective memory of the trauma of World War II. The bishops’treatment of the western lands question, though taken by both Germans and PUWPpropaganda as a sign of capitulation to West German claims against the Oder-Neisseborder, was in fact deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, the Polish bishops expressedsympathy for Germans forcibly expelled from their homes in the aftermath of WorldWar II: “We well understand that the Polish western border on the Oder and Neisseis, for Germany, an extremely bitter fruit of the last war of mass extinction. Part of thebitterness is caused by the sufferings of millions of German refugees and expellees(expelled by an inter-Allied order of the victorious powers at Potsdam in 1945).”9

This statement, while sympathetic toward German trauma, clearly attempted to sepa-rate Poland from the question of responsibility for that trauma: the parentheticalphrase’s bitter tone reinforced the claim made subsequently that Poland had not infact been among the “victorious powers at Potsdam.” According to the Polish bish-ops, then, Poland, dealt a fait accompli by the United States, Great Britain, and theSoviet Union, was itself victimized from afar when it was excluded from the negoti-ating table at which the decision was made to force Germans to leave their homes.

In the next paragraph, the national-political thread of the bishops’ argumentationbecame even stronger, as they argued that Poland had, if not a legal right, then atleast a moral claim to the western lands. The paragraph began, “Our fatherlandemerged from the mass murder not as a victorious state, but extremely weakened.What is at stake for us is our existence (not a question of ‘more Lebensraum’).Without the western territories, it would mean that our more than 30 million peoplewould be compressed into the narrow corridor of the ‘Government-General’ of 1939-45—and also without the eastern territories from which millions of Poles have hadto cross over since 1945 into the ‘Potsdam western territories.’Where else were theyto go at that time, when the area of the ‘Government-General’ together with the cap-ital, Warsaw, lay in rubble and ruins?”10 To argue that “our existence” was “at stake”sounds like desperation on the part of the Polish bishops, yet their presentation wasso pragmatic that it even met with approbation in some of the German responses:“This is the factual reality, which we do not overlook after the loss of the Polish east-ern territories.”11 Contrary, then, to the claims of Polish official propaganda, bystanding firm on moral rather than political-legal grounds, the Polish bishopsseemed to have gained the upper hand on the question of the western territories.12

Objective aggressors (Germans) and victims (Poles) shared memory of World WarII as a catastrophically traumatic episode, yet the inability to agree on a shared narra-tive prevented reconciliation.13 Disagreement over the past went hand in hand with adisputed present: “What is at stake for us is our existence.” History, while unarguablyrelevant to the matter at hand, was so primarily because both parties had experiencedit: Poles and Germans shared the wartime past. Of course, they experienced the warfrom opposite sides, and the Germans had been the aggressors, yet the traumatic mem-ory of rubble, ruins, death of loved ones, and having nowhere to go constituted a com-mon frame of reference for those left alive on either side. The Polish bishops attempted




to establish a shared language for institutional reconciliation with representatives oftheir former aggressor by invoking the traumatic realities of that aggression.

Although the logic of this position may seem paradoxical, empirically it is quitecommon: association of trauma conditioned on dissociation from blame is the basisfor initiation of dialogue in spheres ranging from psychotherapy to litigation andnegotiated settlement.14 The deeper question here is to what extent the Polish bish-ops managed to channel this “aggressor-victim” memory away from national andinstitutional politics into a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation. In other words,did the letter mark a qualitative shift from a pathology of blame instrumentalized forpolitical ends to an ethics capable of facilitating a shared future? Such a shiftentailed an ethics that was not only principled in the spirit of Vatican II but also themost practical way to a shared future of peace between nations.

For the historian to attribute an ethics of reconciliation to the letter, such an ethicswould have to have been articulated in the text so as to be intelligible to the letter’srecipients. I reproduce, then, this paragraph, which immediately follows the conclu-sion of the narrative of past trauma: “Despite everything, despite this situation thatis almost hopelessly burdened with the past, we call on you, highly esteemed broth-ers, to come out and away from precisely that situation: let us try to forget! Nopolemics, no more Cold War, but rather the beginning of a dialogue, such as thatwhich the Council and Pope Paul VI are seeking to foster everywhere.”15 Theremarkable feature of this passage is the call to forget, the implication of a cleanbreak with the past that could facilitate “the beginning of a dialogue.” But doesn’tforgetfulness imply denial, repression, or even falsification? How could the bishopshave thereby aimed to build a new ethics in the spirit of the SecondVatican Council?

The Ethics

Answering these questions requires close hermeneutic attention to the genealogyof forgiveness and forgetfulness in the Christian tradition. The Gospels and thePauline epistles establish a clear causal link between forgiveness, love (caritas,translated as “charity” in the King James Bible), and confession or repentance (for-malized in the Roman Catholic Church as the sacrament of penance16). The evange-list Luke, cited in one of the opening quotes of this paper, recorded Jesus’exhortation to forgive one’s brother if he repents after having done wrong. This prin-ciple is so foundational that followers of Christ must adhere to it without exception,such that, for example, “Even if he wrongs you seven times in a day and comes backto you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you are to forgive him.” Forgiveness followsfrom love, for, as Luke wrote, “If you love only those who love you, what credit isthat to you . . . you must love your enemies and do good” (6:32-35). Acts ofpenance and forgiveness are thus crucial constitutive elements of an ethics built onlove. Given Paul’s declaration in 1 Corinthians that “love” is the greatest and closest




to God of all human actions, an ethics of love must be the supreme ethics for alldenominations of Christian faith.17

It is a cornerstone of Roman Catholic doctrine that the Gospels teach humanbeings the imperative of penance and forgiveness, yet the evangelical texts alone areinsufficient to explain why the bishops’ letter seems to suggest that to forget is a pre-condition of forgiveness and reconciliation.18 Did the Polish bishops confuse anethics of love with a politics of amnesty and amnesia?

In the official documents of the Second Vatican Council—specifically, the pas-toral constitution Gaudium et Spes and the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium—we find at least a partial response. Article 40 of Lumen Gentium reiterated thatpenance is a precondition for forgiveness, while article 28 of Gaudium et Spes artic-ulated an ethics of love that differentiates between juridical (or political) and ethicalforgiveness: “But it is necessary to distinguish between error, which always meritsrepudiation, and the person in error, who never loses the dignity of being a personeven when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions. God alone is thejudge and searcher of hearts, for that reason He forbids us to make judgments aboutthe internal guilt of anyone.” By reserving to God exclusive jurisdiction over “inter-nal guilt,” the pastoral constitution called upon Catholics to practice an ethics ofunconditional forgiveness even as civic politics and criminal justice continue to meteout punishment, as they must in order to maintain order in human society.19

Nonetheless, the exhortation in Gaudium et Spes to amnesty “of hearts” seems toleave Catholics with no answer to a fundamental problem: juridical guilt aside, howis one to forgive when one remembers the other’s transgression?

Indeed, the Polish bishops’ letter’s very suggestion that the ability to forget is aprecursor to reconciliation implies that the mechanism missing from the Vatican IIconstitutions can be found in Christian conceptions of memory. John W. O’Malleyhas demonstrated the centrality of patristics for both the theology and the “style ofdiscourse” of Vatican II: bishops and theologians attending the Second VaticanCouncil were especially attentive to Augustinian thought.20 Book X of theConfessions of St. Augustine offered the formative Christian reflections on memoryas well as oblivio, a word encompassing both the state of “forgetfulness” (connotingpassivity) and the process of “forgetting” (connoting activity). Augustine himselfacknowledged that his reflections on obliviowere aporic: “I am certain that I remem-ber [oblivio], even though [oblivio] obliterates all that we remember,” and, “For wedo not entirely forget what we remember that we have forgotten. If we had com-pletely forgotten it, we should not be able to look for what was lost.”21

Augustine’s admissions of aporia were not, however, an expression of fatalism, butrather a suggestion that comprehending the ethical significance of oblivio followsfrom deeper meditation on the nature of God. In Hannah Arendt’s interpretation ofAugustine, oblivio becomes the enabling condition of caritas, understood as theessential mode of passage from mortal life into divine eternity. According to Arendt,when Augustine wrote, “God must be loved in such a way that, if at all possible, we




would forget ourselves,”22 Augustine was describing a process by which man “losesthe human mode of existence, which is mortality, while exchanging it for the divinemode of existence. . . . The transit is the forgetting.”23 In other words, to forget com-pletely is to enter the biblical measure of time, kairos, the realm of eschatology.24

The significance of oblivio is not, however, purely eschatological. The originalLatin term appears in translation as both “forgetfulness” and “forgetting,” oftenwithout closer examination of the semantic distinctions.25 This inconsistency interms is partly due to grammatical differences between languages; however, whatdistinguishes “forgetfulness” from “forgetting” is as much a theological-philosophicalquestion as a grammatical one. Augustine’s views continued to evolve after he wrotethe Confessions, but he remained a firm believer in the determination of all thoughtsand non-thoughts by Divine Providence, which endowed memory and oblivio alikewith “constant, latent energies.”26 To claim that “forgetfulness” is passive while “for-getting” is active is, therefore, a false opposition. Rather, the former expressesthe full phenomenological significance of oblivio as an experience in the world,while the latter, as Arendt observed, attends primarily to eschatological questions ofthe transit from the human to the divine. The accent in “forgetfulness” on the expe-rience of being-in-the-world necessitates the development of an ethics in mortaltime: forgetfulness thus conditions any ethics of reconciliation and caritas.

Although his work postdated the Polish bishops’ letter, Paul Ricoeur suggestedanswers to the problems of forgiveness and forgetfulness that help to reveal the ethicalbreakthrough in the Polish bishops’ letter. Indeed, John Paul II inMemory and Identitycited Ricoeur’s explanations as a key source for his own understanding of “remem-bering and forgetting.”27 Ricoeur referred to the 403 BC amnesty of Athens followingthe Peloponnesian War, as described by Aristotle: amnesty could be declared onlywhen all citizens of the new democracy jointly renounced their past divisions andarmed conflict with the oath, “I shall not recall the evils,” under pain of maledictions.28

According to Ricoeur, the example shows that amnesty, “the institutionalized form offorgetting,” can only produce a “caricature of forgiveness.”29 Ricoeur cited a definitionfrom Arendt’s Human Condition of forgiveness as the “unbinding” of the condemnedact from the guilty person—a formulation akin to that of Gaudium et Spes—yet hesolved the dilemma of separating criminal or political guilt from amnesty “of hearts”by modifying Arendt’s definition.30 The “act of faith” in forgiveness lies not in ignor-ing agency, but in separating the agent into two subjects: “a first subject, the one whocommitted the wrong, and a second subject, the one who is punished.”31 One forgivesthe first while leaving the fate of the second to God’s grace.

“True” forgiveness is possible only in caritas, which in turn is possible only inGod, just as “true” forgetfulness leads to God. Political and criminal judgments,defined by a punitive logic, are an inevitable fact of being–in–the–world, and attemptsto curb that punitive logic in a juridical context—especially in cases of such immensecrimes as those committed by the Nazis during World War II—“would be a graveinjustice committed at the expense of the law and, even more so, of the victims.”32 An




ethics grounded in caritas provides a set of principles for individuals who, allowingthe juridical system to function as it must, learn to approach each other for forgive-ness. Paradoxically, however, there is an asymmetry inhibiting “true” forgiveness, forforgiveness must be unconditional, while the request for forgiveness is inherentlyconditional. The “unbinding” described by Arendt and Ricoeur is complete only inGod, toward whom forgetfulness constitutes a “horizon” for forgiveness.

Is it possible, then, to forgive? Having called into question Arendt’s formula forforgiveness—Ricoeur never acknowledged that Gaudium et Spes articulated virtuallythe same imperative—Ricoeur left forgiveness “up to the recipients of the historicaltext.”33 And yet the case of the Polish bishops’ letter demonstrates the political instru-mentality that tends to contramand the historical text. The letter, however, is far moreimaginative, going beyond Gaudium et Spes and beyond what Ricoeur would writedecades later. Its final sentence—“We stretch our arms out to you who sit here on thebenches at the closing session of theVatican Council, our arms, and we grant forgivenessas well as ask for it”34—breaks the asymmetry of forgiveness by resolving into onesubject both the author of the request for forgiveness and the forgiver. Given present doc-umentation, there is no way to tell whether or not Kominek was thinking along theselines when preparing the letter’s text,35 but the simultaneity of these two speech acts—articulated in one phrase—suggests an unprecedented attempt at symmetry whose philo-sophical sophistication goes beyond the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council.

Yet there remains the question of forgetfulness. The text of the letter, whichbetrays a detailed memory of past wrongs, suggests that the Polish bishops them-selves had not forgotten, and the very phrase—“Let us try to forget”—by which theycalled for mutual forgetfulness seems to mask a different message. The verb try sug-gests a recognition that the attempt will fail, as well as an up-front dismissal ofutopian conceptions of amnesia-amnesty along Athenian lines. Moreover, we knowfromAugustine—indeed, from the word “forgetfulness” itself—that the formulation“try to forget” is an aporia because forgetting as a subject-driven action tends towardthe eschatological rather than the ethical.36 The resolution of this aporia lies in theethical space created by the phenomenology of forgetfulness, that is, its necessarycondition of being-in-the-world.37

An Augustinian understanding of oblivio is discernable in the letter’s exhortationto forget in order both to be more like God—i.e., to prioritize caritas—and to becloser to God. Kominek may have been thinking along prophetic rather than con-sciously Augustinian lines, but the revival of patristic theology at the SecondVaticanCouncil certainly shaped the ethics proposed in the Polish bishops’ letter, written,after all, at the Council. In the letter’s ethics of oblivio, to forget is not to lie butrather to construct a new, post-traumatic world in which neither aggressor nor victimwould retain that status any longer.38 The letter, in other words, proposed an ethicsof reconciliation as an intermediary ground between memory and kairos.

Despite the radical39 potential of forgiveness presented in the Polish bishops’letter—transcending Gaudium et Spes while allowing the bishops to draw on both




ethics and eschatology—the influence of the political was evident throughout the let-ter’s text, and politics dominated the letter’s reception. The very circumstances underwhich the bishops sent the letter were, paradoxically, political: although the point ofdeparture for the letter was the SecondVatican Council, a moment of new life for theCatholic Church, the letter focused on the millennial anniversary of the PolishChurch, a celebration of history and tradition.

And yet, this apparent contradiction in fact echoed the state of the Polish Churchat the time. The Church faced a contradiction between aggiornamento, the VaticanCouncil’s demand that the Church “in the modern world” forge a new identity, andthe urge to draw a national identity from memories of the past in order to struggleagainst the “socialist” identity imposed on Poland by the PUWP and the SovietUnion. As the 4 December 1965 Die Welt observed, “The Polish bishops do notname this power [the Soviet Union], but they point to it indirectly when they callattention to the loss of the Polish eastern territories and the millions of Polishrefugees and expellees.”40 The Polish bishops functioned in a world of reality andparadox that seemed reducible to a political duality: a Polish-Catholic identity tocounter an externally imposed socialist identity.

The Polish bishops were thus balancing an ethics of reconciliation and an ethics ofstruggle: the spiritual reconciliation with Germany was to aid in the political struggleagainst the Soviet aggressor. For this reason, to forget completely—whether possibleor not—was never even desirable.41 To read the Polish bishops’ letter of 1965 in lightofVatican II, the subsequent millennial celebrations, and above all the anti-Soviet fer-ment that rose to the surface in Poland in 1968, 1970, 1976, and ultimately 1980 is toshow that the letter—despite its remarkable status as a philosophical and theologicaldocument—also became an episode in the Polish political narrative.

The Reception

The Polish bishops utilized historical memory to peg the future of the PolishCatholic Church at least partially to an ethics of reconciliation with West Germany.But how was their message received?

The German press reacted sooner than the German bishops’ conference, but itwas the bishops’ response that commanded the most attention. Despite its enthusi-astic beginning—“It is with deep emotion and joy that we have received yourmissive”—the letter’s language is best described as guarded. The German bishopsattributed the spirit of the Poles’ message not to the Poles themselves but rather to“our common work in the Council.”42 The bishops referred to “the injustice and thepain that the Polish people have had to bear during the course of history,” but the replycontained no clear admission of agency, and passive voice dominated the letter at cru-cial points. The bishops wrote, “Terrible things have been done to the Polish people byGermans and in the name of the German people. We know that we must bear the




consequences of the war, consequences that for our land, are harsh.”43 Even thisguarded, limited recognition of culpability includes an unmistakable reference toGerman suffering: the point of departure for the German letter was not the Poles’ recog-nition of trauma as a shared memory but rather victimhood itself as a shared identity.

Following the Polish bishops, the Germans “too beg you to forget; yes, we ask youto forgive.”44 The structure of the German letter seems to have paralleled the structureof the Polish letter: a brief historical narrative led to a call for reconciliation throughforgetfulness, and the sentence, “To present a bill for guilt and injustice . . . will cer-tainly not help us,” marked the letter’s ethical high point.Yet unlike the Polish bishops,the Germans then returned to history and tradition, focusing on the sensitive issue ofthe western lands: “When these Germans speak of ‘right to a home’ they—aside froma few exceptions—have no aggressive intention. Our Silesians, Pomeranians and EastPrussians are trying to say that they lived rightfully in their own homeland and thatthey retain their tie to this home. At the same time they are aware that now a new gen-eration is growing there, of people who also consider this territory—to which theirfathers were sent—as home.” The last sentence attempted to guide the discussion awayfrom history, yet the past returned through the word “fathers.”Whereas the Poles’mes-sage regarding the western lands was their importance to the continued existence ofPoland in the present and future, the Germans’ underlying message remained unclear.Indeed, juxtaposed with their grand exhortation to forget, the German bishops’ lauda-tory tone in describing “right to a home” claims as a symbolic or emotional “tie”appears either unpardonably naïve or defensively apologetic.

Nation-state politics thus colored the German reply far more distinctly than thePolish text: “This Christian spirit will contribute, therefore, to the reaching of a solutionto all the unhappy consequences of the war, a solution satisfactory and fair to all sides.”The Polish letter called for Germans to go beyond pastoral communication to action,but this German sentence obscured the course of action to be taken. “A solution satis-factory and fair”—what was fairness in this context? On what was it to be based, andwho was to adjudicate it? Moreover, a determination of what was “satisfactory and fair”would have been a priori at odds with the Polish bishops’ethics of reconciliation, whichthe Germans claimed to accept. How could a new, “just” solution have been attainedbut by breaking the Polish letter’s symmetry of forgiveness, channeling past wrongs,and articulating the very “bill for guilt and injustice” that the Germans had earlierrenounced? The Germans’ ambiguous advocacy regarding the crucial western landsquestion was therefore incompatible with forgetfulness. As eagerly as the Germanbishops accepted the invitation to the Polish Church’s millennial celebrations inCzestochowa, as enthusiastically as they laced their reply with invocations of “brother-hood” and “forgiveness,” as a response to the ground-breaking ethical program pro-posed by the Polish bishops, the German letter was at best tepid and ambivalent.

This ambivalence, understandably, proved tremendously disappointing to thePolish bishops. Jerzy Zawieyski, Wiesław Chrzanowski, and other prominent PolishCatholic intellectuals of the time recalled that primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski




“seemed very disturbed” in the months following the German reply. He apparentlytook offense easily and lost the composure with which he generally carried himselfin conversation.45 Wyszynski later wrote to Julius Cardinal Döpfner, German pri-mate at the time of the letter’s transmission by the Polish bishops, “the GermanEpiscopate’s answer to our letter of reconciliation (of 1965) disenchanted not onlyPoles, but also public opinion worldwide.”46

The German response was particularly disheartening because it seemed to reverserecent progress in German Catholic receptivity to reconciliation with Poles. Döpfnerhad given a sermon in October 1960 as bishop of Berlin calling on Germans to make“sacrifices,” arguing that the “community of nations and states” was more importantto the future than “the border question.”47 Döpfner and Wyszynski had met and hadproductive conversations in Rome even before the convocation of the SecondVaticanCouncil, at which they worked in the same Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs ofthe Council. In 1963, the Polish and German Episcopates had jointly applied to theVatican for the beatification of Maksymilian Kolbe, a Polish martyr who perished atAuschwitz. Given all of this apparent progress on both personal and ecclesiasticallevels in the first half of the 1960s, Döpfner’s failure to spearhead a more enthusias-tic reaction by the German bishops not only disappointed the Poles but in factappeared to represent a retrogression.48

Kominek expressed his unhappiness with the German response much moredirectly than Wyszynski. We should pay particular attention to the language of hispublic comment, for it makes a telling postscript to the discussion of forgiveness andcaritas. In a January 1966 interview for German television, Kominek stated,“Forgiveness and apologies apply only to those ready to do penance, who in factadmit guilt. Where there is no confession of guilt, there is also no forgiveness.”49 Letus return for a moment to the asymmetry of forgiveness described by Ricoeur: in thePolish bishops’ letter, Kominek resolved that asymmetry, at once forgiving and ask-ing for forgiveness, demonstrating caritas and doing penance. As he understoodtheir subsequent response, however, the German bishops had done neither: for thisreason, Kominek lost faith in the vision of Polish-German reconciliation that he hadpromulgated in the letter, based on forgiveness and forgetfulness in the chronos,rather than the kairos. In the interview, Kominek did not disavow the philosophicalparadigm of reconciliation articulated in the letter, but he expressed a certain fatal-ism that Polish-German relations would henceforth be bound by the political ratherthan the ethical. Despite the best efforts of Catholic laity on both sides (and ecu-menical efforts on the German side), the fatalism proved prescient.50

Indeed, the German press at times seemed more appreciative of the Polish bishops’action than the German bishops had been. Die Welt acknowledged the Polish controlof the western lands as “the factual reality, which we do not overlook,”51 andFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung claimed that “the message of reconciliation can nomore disappear from this world.”52 At the same time, however, elements of the Polishbishops’historical narrative provoked offense. The veryDieWelt piece that complement




Polish treatment of the western lands issue also declared the narrative “a line whichthe German people cannot accept, since it would unjustly bedevil their own history.This shows how broad the chasm between the two peoples still is, and how far we arefrom building a bridge.”53 Other commentaries revealed an overt anti-Polish bias:according to the Berliner Morgenpost, “it is to the credit of the Polish bishops thatthey have gone beyond themselves.”54 Finally, some German media portrayed theGermans as the facilitators of Polish-German dialogue: the same Berlin Morgenpostprinted, “one may hope that the brotherly word of the German bishops may perhapsfind a response among the Polish people: the readiness of the German people for areconciliation with their Polish neighbors.”

Meanwhile, the Polish government learned of the Polish bishops’ letter’s contentsonly after the German bishops had already received the letter.55 Indeed, the PUWP andthe Polish government were forming a strategy to respond to the letter just as the Germanbishops published their response and the German media began commenting on theexchange. Therefore, the German responses necessarily colored the Polish establish-ment’s reaction to the original Polish letter. This reaction amounted to a declaration ofwar on the Episcopate. First SecretaryWładysław Gomułka announced a campaign cel-ebrating the millennium of the Polish state in 1966, which would compete with theChurch’smillennial celebrations. This was a heavy blow toWyszynski, as became appar-ent in the tone of his 12 March 1966 letter to Gomułka, in whichWyszynski decried theofficial Polish press campaigns against the Episcopate—“Of what have I not beenaccused?”—before proceeding to insist that Church and State not only could but indeedmust work together.56 Rather than heed Wyszynski’s call, however, the PUWP’s CentralCommittee Politburo “ordered a propaganda campaign pointing to the false interpreta-tion of the facts contained in the letter as well as the political harm done by theEpiscopate. Toward this end, appropriate articles should be published in the press, . . .letters prepared to party organizations, materials prepared for Central Committeemembers, etc.”57

Public communiqués by the government followed the Politburo decision. On 10December 1965, the daily newspaper Z

.ycieWarszawy published a detailed catalogue

of objections to the Polish bishops’ letter: (1) the bishops had overstepped theirauthority by broaching political and legal issues;58 (2) there was nothing for whichthe Polish people needed to ask Germans’ forgiveness; (3) the letter had failed toassert Poland’s “fundamental rights” to the western lands;59 and (4) the bishops hadignored the GDR. I might add a fifth objection that underlies the previous four,which boils down to moral indignation: how dared the Polish bishops treat as moralequals descendents of Hitler’s nation, among whom were “German church repre-sentatives who stood by the brownshirts during the Hitler time and who blessed theHitlerian forces marching against Poland.”60

However, the full force of the Z.ycie Warszawy critique emerged only in its analy-

sis of the German bishops’ response, German public discussion, and the brief note ofreply sent by the Roman delegation of Polish bishops to the FRG on 7 December




1965. The Z.ycie text noted sardonically, “One must concede that the German bishops

remembered their duty towards the Bonn Government and the expellees better thanthe Polish bishops remembered Polish state interests.”61 The Z

.ycie text went on to

observe that the German bishops’ response to the western lands issue suggests that“another solution must be sought, with its result a revision of the present status.”62 TheZ.ycie text attacked as dangerously naïve the Polish bishops’ ethics, caricaturing the

German response to suggest the damage done by the Polish bishops: “Forgiveness?Reconciliation? But of course, we shall gladly forgive the Poles and make up withthem . . . on the basis of a revision of the borders and restitution to Germans towhom injustice was done.” And finally Z

.ycie Warszawy suggested that the bishops

had been at odds with the general will of the Polish people: “In whose name do thebishops come forward with an attitude that contradicts the opinion of the entire pop-ulation and the national interest?”63

The Z.ycie text was only one among many such texts published in official Polish

print media, though perhaps the most comprehensive, and notable also as an imme-diate response. Of all the accusations lodged against the Polish Episcopate, that ofhaving contradicted “the entire population and the national interest” was perhapsmost damaging. Archbishop Kominek of Wrocław was from the western lands,deeply familiar with German culture and traditions, and intimately concerned withthe ecclesiastical and juridical fate of those territories. To suggest that the letterbetrayed the nation was to suggest that the Episcopate had sold out to Germany: itwas an attempt to drive a wedge between Kominek and the rest of the Episcopate(especially Primate Wyszynski) and also to undermine the legitimacy of the PolishChurch.64 The extent to which the PUWP propaganda succeeded in riling Wyszynskiand the rest of the Episcopate was visible in the tenor of the primate’s correspon-dence as well as his perturbed demeanor, as reported by Zawieyski and his other vis-itors in the months following the exchange of letters.

What really mattered to the Episcopate at the time, however, was the response ofthe Polish nation. Antoni Dudek has reconstructed Confessional Affairs Ministryreports from interviews conducted by functionaries at the local and regional level withclergy in January and February 1966: although only five of the 51 Polish bishops dis-tanced themselves even slightly from the letter, over 50 percent of parish pastorsopposed the letter.65 Allowing for intimidation and selective presentation or inflatedstatistics in the documentation, the reports suggest significant grassroots oppositionwithin the Polish Church to the ethics of reconciliation proposed by the bishops.Wyszynski himself observed in a February 1966 sermon, “young priests who, perhapsout of curiosity, read more of all sorts of political statements, to some degree, hereand there have succumbed to this argumentation and at times have even taken a sep-arate position [from the Polish Church as a whole].”66 Again and again, respondentsin the interviews compiled by the Confessional Affairs Ministry cited that one crucialphrase—“we grant forgiveness as well as ask for it”—as a compromising, even unpa-triotic action. As Władysław Bartoszewski has suggested, “The Polish bishops’ letter





decidedly reached above the contemporary average state of social awareness andmoral maturity of Polish Catholics. The German bishops’ response corresponded insome sense to the level of moral maturity of German Catholics.”67

With the enthusiastic support of local PUWP organs, protests sprang up through-out Poland in December 1965 decrying the “behavior unbecoming of Polish citizens”represented by the bishops’ letter. This phrase comes from a letter addressed toArchbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków by the workers of the Solvay factory, in whichWojtyła had himself labored during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The workers pre-sented largely the same complaints as the Z

.ycieWarszawy text: the illegitimacy of the

bishops’ claim to initiate dialogue with West Germans and the outrageous nature ofthe notion that Poles need to be forgiven by Germans. The letter concluded, “We cat-egorically protest against the points of view and actions presented by part of thePolish Episcopate in their letter to the German bishops.”

What can the Solvay letter tell us about the reception of the bishops’ letter by thePolish working masses? Adam Michnik captures the lesson of their letter succinctly:“these are the guardians of the memory of suffering who take action against thosewho do not want to remember that suffering; that those guardians of memory stub-bornly defend Poland’s image as an innocent victim against those who want to askforgiveness of the ‘successors’ of German fascism.”68 Although doubtless ghost-written by the provincial PUWP committee, the letter harnessed genuine popularfear and resentment. Amidst a flood of propaganda unleashed by the PUWP appara-tus, with the Polish Episcopate reluctant to add fuel to the fire by publishing the fulloriginal text of their letter, it was difficult for workers, farmers, and other socialgroups not to express dismay at the injustice that the bishops were apparently per-petrating against Polish national memory. To forget all-too-recent suffering was, inthe minds of those of good faith reading reports of the bishops’ letter in Z

.ycie

Warszawy and other official sources, to dishonor the memory of the dead and tocapitulate in a symbolic struggle almost as vigorous in 1965 as it had been in 1945.

Michnik’s description of the “guardians of the memory of suffering” has deephistorical roots in Poland, tied to the proverbial martyrology linked to AdamMickiewicz’s “Christ of Nations” metaphor for Poland, the image of Tadeusz Rejtanbaring his breast before his fellow delegates to the Polish Sejm, and many other ref-erences from the Polish collective memory. To understand the masses’ response tothe letter—and the tropes used by the party apparatus to reinforce that response—isto understand the truly radical nature of the Polish bishops’ letter. In this sense, theletter may indeed have been un-Polish, if to be “Polish” is to give priority to the past.The Polish bishops sought to move beyond past suffering; they aimed not to weakenPolish national identity but to strengthen it by consolidating resources. Why con-tinue to fight a war that has been over for 20 years when another, ongoing strugglerequires attention? “Try[ing] to forget” was to serve the purpose of neither anarchynor capitulation; indeed there was a calculated national interest at stake. But therewas also much more: as Wojtyła wrote in his response to the Solvay workers, the




essence of reconciliation is “respect for the human person and his conscience.” ThePolish bishops’ letter of 1965 struck a delicate balance between national interest anda universal appeal to caritas.

Paradoxically, the Polish Church itself contributed to the triumph of the nationalinterest in a popular imagination captured by the Polish ecclesiastical millennium,without the appeal to universal good and therefore more in the spirit of the PUWP.During the months of darkness and struggle with official propaganda that followedthe disappointing exchange of letters, the Episcopate continued preparations for thenationwide celebration of the millennial anniversary of Polish Christianity. Althoughthe Polish government prepared its own millennial celebrations and refused visas toall foreign guests invited by Wyszynski—including Pope Paul VI—the Polish pri-mate carried out the planned Great Novena. A copy of the icon of the Virgin Maryof Czestochowa completed a peregrination around Poland—in spite of threats andattacks by agents provocateurs—and clashes between crowds of faithful and crowdsof anticlerical protesters only minimally marred the celebration.

Yet the 1966 ceremonies exemplified the same national martyrology that Wojtyłahad rejected in the Solvay letter. As Andrzej Friszke describes them, they were “cel-ebrations accenting the Marian cult, identifying Polishness with Catholicism, raisingPrimate Wyszynski to the level of national father and leader.”69 In spite of the Polishbishops’ radical attempt at re-channeling Polish-German historical memory, the dis-appointing German response and the flood of demoralizing propaganda led thePolish Episcopate itself to move away from the ethics of reconciliation.

The Catholic Intellectuals

At the same time, however, the Polish Catholic intellectuals increasinglyembraced that ethics.70 These intellectuals became the primary agents and safekeep-ers of the re-channeling of historical memory, culminating in the elevation of theirclosely affiliated bishop Karol Wojtyła to the papacy and in the emergence of theSolidarity movement. Given their central place in the narrative of the transformationof post–World War II historical memory in Poland, these intellectuals require aproper introduction.

Prior to 1956, the only Catholic activists to receive passports for travel outsidePoland were members of the PAX group, “progressivist” intellectuals officiallyaligned with the PUWP, whom the Party had granted several seats in Parliament.71

Indeed, between 1953 and 1956, PAX had a monopoly over legal lay organizationsin Poland: even the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, established in March 1945, wasco-opted as a PAX organ after its editorial staff refused to print a laudatory obituaryfor Stalin.72 When, in the summer of 1956, Gomułka commenced his meteoric returnto power, a circle of pre-war Catholic intellectuals and young disaffected membersof PAX coalesced around the poet Jerzy Zawieyski, and Zawieyski negotiated with



Gomułka after the latter’s installation as First Secretary the establishment of the“ZNAK” Catholic movement. This movement initially included the weeklyTygodnik Powszechny (reclaimed from PAX by the new First Secretary), the monthlyZnak (reactivated after a three-year hiatus), and a network of five “CatholicIntelligentsia Clubs” (hereafter CIC) in major Polish cities.73

Beginning in 1956, ZNAK received permission to send delegations of varyingsizes—initially 15 to 20 people, each subject to review by the Ministry of the Interiorprior to issuance of passports—on trips to Western Europe and beyond.74 Officially,Gomułka was giving ZNAK (along with PAX, which continued to receive concessionsfor travel despite its opposition to Gomułka’s rise to power) the opportunity to showinternational gatherings of Catholics that Poland, far from being a repressive state, per-mitted the flowering of a worldly intelligentsia.

However, the ZNAK intellectuals also made innumerable contacts that wouldendure for decades; they became contributing and even governing members of inter-national organizations. Most importantly, they experienced life outside Poland. In1957 and 1958, CIC members aged 20 to 30 journeyed to the island of Port-Cros inthe Mediterranean to join the young Parisian elite of the Conférence Olivaint, shep-herded by Robert Schuman and other Christian politicians and social leaders.75

Subsequently, ZNAK representatives visited with the editorial staffs of Esprit and LaRevue Nouvelle; they cultivated the acquaintance of Florentine mayor Giorgio LaPira. By 1970, the movement’s stature had risen such that it had provided theSecretary General of the 1967 World Congress of Lay Apostles and both a SecretaryGeneral and Vice President of the international Catholic theological conference PaxRomana. Over the three years of the Second Vatican Council, there were always 5 to10 ZNAK members in the Vatican. Overall, between 1958 and 1966, the ZNAKgroup sent over 350 representatives abroad.76

By 1965, Polish Catholic intellectuals were thus well-established members ofevolving transnational Catholic networks. As officials in the Ministry of the Interiorwrote in 1968 in theirAnnual Internal Report on the activities of Catholic associations,“Representatives of the Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs have penetrated circles on almostevery continent.”77 However, Germany remained problematic as a destination becauseit was divided and because Poland had no formal relations with the western republic.Since the late 1950s, a handful of Polish intellectuals had attempted to develop work-ing relationships with German counterparts: these were Stanisław Stomma, a legalscholar and chief of the ZNAK parliamentary group;78 Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor-in-chief of the monthly Wiez and ZNAK Member of Parliament beginning in 1961;79

Jerzy Turowicz, editor-in-chief of Tygodnik Powszechny, the cultural heart of theZNAK network;80 and Mieczysław Pszon, a member of Tygodnik Powszechny’s edito-rial staff who became the all-purpose point of contact for German Catholics in Polandand Polish Catholics going to Germany.81

Since Poland did not recognize the FRG, the GDR was a natural starting point.However, selecting working partners was a risky business, as ZNAK did not want to




find itself dealing with Stasi fronts or “progressivist” groups controlled by the EastGerman regime. By the early 1960s, Stomma and Turowicz had established a work-ing relationship with the leadership of Aktion Sühnezeichen, a movement active pri-marily in the GDR. Established by Lothar Kreyssig—a Protestant lawyer who hadopenly challenged Nazi legal standards both as a civilian and as a Wehrmachtconscript—in 1958 following a German Evangelical Church synod, the Aktion’s pur-pose was atonement for the Shoah. Its members built memorials to the victims andcared for Jewish cemeteries in European countries, among many other activities,while also sending representatives to Israel on goodwill missions.82

In 1965, the Aktion organized a pilgrimage of penance to Auschwitz andMajdanek, an event that received wide coverage in German press. A recentlyappointed editor at Tygodnik Powszechny named Władysław Bartoszewski devel-oped a passion for work with the Aktion.Although, according to his own testimony,he tended to stay on the margins of the ZNAK movement, Bartoszewski became theAktion’s chief liaison in Poland.83 For a formerly imprisoned wartime resistance herorehabilitated only during de-Stalinization, he received unprecedented travel permis-sions, and in 1963 he began his journeys abroad by traveling to Israel, subsequentlyto Austria and the GDR. Into the 1970s, he remained a pivotal figure in Catholicattempts to improve Polish-German relations.84

By 1965, there had thus emerged a core group of Polish Catholic intellectualsversed in German issues. They regularly published articles on Germany in TygodnikPowszechny,maintained correspondence with the few Germans whom their censoredletters could reach, and counterbalanced the strong French-Italian orientation in thePolish Catholic intelligentsia. Even before the Polish bishops’ letter to the GermanEpiscopate, 1965 proved to be a year of great tests for the ZNAK group with respectto Germany. Following a 23 June pastoral letter promulgated by the wholeEpiscopate, Archbishop Kominek in September organized ceremonies and symposiain commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Polish administration of the west-ern lands.85 Predictably, West German press lambasted the event. However, the WestGerman Evangelical Church (EKD) in October published its Vertriebenendenkschrift,an “Essay on Refugees,” in which it affirmed Poland’s right to the western lands andmoved for reconciliation of Poland and West Germany over the issue. This letter,which flew in the face of the Polish establishment’s presentation of all West Germansas revanchist, capitalist fascists, received little attention in the Polish press, though itcontributed to the Polish bishops’ decision to send the letter to the German bishops.86

The ZNAK parliamentary group, moreover, drew attention to the EKD letter. ItsMembers of Parliament had an unprecedented position as a group of Catholic intellectu-als unaligned with the PUWP but with freedom of speech in Parliament. Jerzy Zawieyskiin a 12 November speech connected the September celebrations with the October EKDletter. It is useful to highlight in this speech an ambivalence characteristic of the estab-lishmentarian conventions that the ZNAK delegates felt pressured to adopt even as theypresented relatively independent opinions. Although he lauded certain elements of West




German civil society, thereby flouting the Polish establishment, Zawieyski at the sametime appealed to that establishment by denouncingWest German government policy andmedia coverage, declaring that ZNAK too was working to “counteract the stiff and blind-to-the-facts policy of the Federal Republic of Germany.”87 Zawieyski adopted this con-vention to ensure that his audience would focus on his core message: “the entire nationsees the border on the Oder and Neisse as untouchable, the boundary of peace. The una-nimity of the Church hierarchy and the entire nation was acclaimed by the entire world,with the exception only of West Germany.”88

Given this message, it is perhaps surprising that Zawieyski had no foreknowledgeof the Polish bishops’ letter to the German bishops. However, multiple sources con-firm that this was indeed the case. The ZNAK movement learned of the letter onlyfrom German media, and when Zawieyski and Stomma called on Wyszynski torequest permission to see a copy of the full text, the primate indignantly rebuffedthem.89 Andrzej Friszke has called this Wyszynski’s greatest mistake in the entiresequence of events preceding and following the delivery of the Polish bishops’ let-ter.90 The decision was not, however, incomprehensible. Earlier the same year,Stomma had sent the Holy See a report on what he believed would be required tofacilitate the normalization of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and thePolish People’s Republic. Stomma did this without first consulting Wyszynski, whomhe perhaps sought to provoke to action. Instead, Stomma succeeded in provokingonly Wyszynski’s resentment; relations between the primate and the ZNAK groupsoured precisely at the moment when they would become pivotal.

The cruel irony of Wyszynski’s decision to keep Zawieyski and his fellow intel-lectuals in the dark is that the argument Zawieyski had advanced in Parliament on 12November was precisely the argument needed by the Episcopate to rebut the propa-ganda attacks initiated in early December. The Polish government stirred a sense oflooming danger: if the Polish bishops were allowed to have their way, the interna-tional community might swoop in and reclaim the western lands for Germany.Zawieyski, one week before the letter had even been penned, pointed to the clear-headed answer: yes, theWest German refusal to recognize Polish sovereignty over thewestern lands was offensive, but it was largely symbolic. Although great dangermight lay in a remilitarized, revanchist West Germany, the land claim would neverstart a war that, in any case, would first require the dismemberment of the GDR,which fully acknowledged and defended the Oder-Neisse border. The real danger, asZawieyski later contended in a 14 December speech, lay in the prospect that the worldmight interpret “facts and polemics resulting from the letter as some sort of divide inPoland against the backdrop of our most significant issues, toward which the govern-ment and the Episcopate together with the entire nation have demonstrated for a full20 years their solidarity.”91 Zawieyski painted a bit too rosy a picture, but in essencehe was right: following the letter to the German bishops, the party undertook a cam-paign of provoking a split in the Polish nation where none had really existed.To object to asking the Germans’ forgiveness was one matter—indeed, Zawieyski




personally had such qualms—but to act as though the Polish bishops had materiallyendangered Polish sovereignty was not only absurd but itself a possible endangermentof Poland’s place in the international arena.

Zawieyski gave this speech without full knowledge of the contents of the letter,after Wyszynski’s refusal to release it. However, Wyszynski reportedly took offenseat the speech, finding it insufficiently supportive of the Polish bishops, for Zawieyskihad lamented that “there had appeared in the letter phrases painfully received byPolish society.”92 Paradoxically, although Wyszynski might have found optimaldefenders in his nation’s Catholic intellectuals, the distrust he manifested in 1965began a spiral of events that drove a wedge between the Episcopate and the Catholicintelligentsia.

Zawieyski, Turowicz, Stomma, and their compatriots had found the SecondVatican Council profoundly transformative: what spirit of universal reconciliationthey saw in the Polish bishops’ letter, they identified with the promise of a Polishaggiornamento.93 As Wyszynski continued to manifest distrust toward the intelli-gentsia, however, and as the Episcopate under his leadership appeared to shift awayfrom ethics of reconciliation toward Polish Catholic chauvinism, the intellectualsgrew disaffected.94 This is not to suggest that they ceased to meet with Wyszynski orthat they failed to participate in the Great Novena; as Poles and as Catholics, theyfollowed their bishop, and they celebrated the millennial anniversary of theirChurch. However, they felt that a window of opportunity had been missed, and thismoved them to act increasingly on their own.95

The Consequences

In the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Polish bishops’ let-ter illuminated a path to change open even to the more nationally minded among theintellectuals, who may have cringed at the request for forgiveness. The SecondVaticanCouncil had re-channeled the historical memory of the entire Roman Catholic Church,giving the Church new horizons and a new identity “in the world” through aggiorna-mento, advocacy of religious freedom, and new pastoral and dogmatic constitutions.Likewise, the bishops’ letter attempted to light the way for a Polish nation stuck in theshadow of a towering Soviet hegemon, and it went beyond even Gaudium et Spes,Dignitatis Humanæ, and Nostra Ætate in its ethics of reconciliation.

Polish Catholic intellectuals began to travel to West Germany already in the mid-1960s following the installation of a West German diplomatic (trade) mission inWarsaw, eight years before Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik yielded a juridical rapproche-ment.96 Already in 1962, Tygodnik Powszechny editor-in-chief Jerzy Turowicz wasable to travel briefly to the FRG for a series of lectures, and on his return he wasdetained by officials of the Interior and Confessional Affairs Ministries, whodemanded a full report on West German Christianity, including the Episcopate, lay





intellectuals, and the ruling Christliche Demokratische Union (CDU) government.97

Turowicz criticized Christian Democratic chancellor Konrad Adenauer for “pragma-tism and even opportunism,” and he declared that the FRG’s “Episcopate had notdone its duty since the war by failing to make the German masses aware ofGermany’s war guilt.” At the same time, however, Turowicz enraged his interrogat-ing officials by insisting that “there is a milieu of Catholic intellectuals in the FRGthat recognizes the Oder-Neisse border, whether because they recognize Germany’sguilt or because they believe it to be a fait accompli.”

Even substantive disagreements with their West German counterparts did not pre-vent the Poles from repeated attempts at dialogue and discussion. On the very daythat the Polish bishops wrote their letter, Stomma was in Düsseldorf participating ina radio broadcast with two West German Christian Democratic politicians. Indeed,Stomma was holding the line that Bonn should accept Polish western borders’ sta-tus quo, with the additional claim that Poland’s security as a sovereign nation bene-fited from having two German republics with which Poland could deal separately.98

Although Stomma did not convince his interlocutors of his position, he maintainedcontact with them afterward. As the Polish Ministry of Confessional Affairs acknowl-edged in a 1968 memorandum, Stomma’s “wide variety of public-speaking engage-ments on the territory of the FRG regarding the Polish position on the German borderissue” made him a more recognized authority on this political matter than any repre-sentative of the PUWP or the governing coalition.99 Beginning in 1970, his contactsenabled regular exchanges between West German CDU politicians and Polish Catholicintellectuals. This, indeed, is how later Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki metlater West German president Richard von Weizsäcker. These political contacts subse-quently proved useful both as the Solidarity movement was forming with leadershipfrom Polish Catholic intellectuals (including Mazowiecki) and during the process ofGerman reunification, when Mazowiecki held the office of prime minister.100

At the time, Stomma’s existing contacts enabled a smoother normalization of rela-tions by adding a political valence to the international network of Catholic intellectu-als in which the Poles participated.101 Such political activity was not limited toappeals advanced through the West German Catholic intelligentsia; Bartoszewskicontinued to lead in ZNAK’s contacts with the Aktion Sühnezeichen, and Stommaarranged for the participation of ZNAK representatives in a variety of peace confer-ences held in the GDR.

In 1968, the Bensberger Kreis, a small movement of West German Catholic intellec-tuals, issued a memorandum signed by 160 intellectuals from across the FRG, includingthe young theology professor Joseph Ratzinger. According to Gottfried Erb, one of thefounders of the Kreis, its members acted on the following rationale: “The signal sent toPoland by the German bishops is insufficient. We have to clarify that in the CatholicChurch in Germany there are many people convinced that the Oder-Neisse border mustbe recognized as a final solution and that Poles living in the borderlands need no longerbe afraid.”102 The Bensberger Kreis memorandum was the sort of enthusiastic call for



Polish-German dialogue for which the Polish bishops had hoped in November 1965.103

Władysław Bartoszewski, whose first trip to the FRG in 1965 had brought him into con-tact with Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks, the subsequent founders of the BensbergerKreis organization,104 joined Stomma and Mazowiecki in praising this memorandum inthe pages of Tygodnik Powszechny andWiez .105

For at least two years after the memorandum’s publication, an exchange of cor-respondence was maintained between the Warsaw CIC and the Bensberger Kreis,resulting in numerous publications by Poles inWest German journals and converselyby West Germans in Polish Catholic journals. From the archives of the Ministry ofConfessional Affairs, it is clear that the government watched these contacts withgreat interest, walking the line between suspicion that the Polish intellectuals werecommitting treason and fascination with the progress made by this small handful ofintellectual elites. Indeed, the Ministry’s file on the Bensberger Memorandum isthicker than almost any other surviving file pertinent to the ZNAK movement.106

Ultimately, the Polish state concluded diplomatic normalization withWest Germany,in which ZNAK played no official role. After it publicly denounced Gomułka’s “anti-Zionist” campaign in 1968, the ZNAK movement fell into official disfavor, andalthough it retained its seats in Parliament, the death of Jerzy Zawieyski in 1969 markedthe final stage of collapse of the bridge between ZNAK and the PUWP. Nonetheless, byNovember 1970, Stomma, Mazowiecki, Bartoszewski, and other ZNAK figures knewpersonally several of the CDU politicians involved in the Ostpolitik of Brandt’s GrandCoalition; they sent out personal notes of congratulations to these politicians, fromwhom they received enthusiastic replies. The first notes sent, however, were to theBensberger Kreis, which, in the estimation of the ZNAK group at least, had done morethan any other group in West Germany to facilitate normalization.

Beginning in 1970, formal contact between groups became much easier. In 1964,Pszon, Turowicz, and others had made contact with the leadership of the WestGerman branch of Pax Christi, an international peace movement functioning throughnational branch organizations, when the German branch came toAuschwitz on a pil-grimage of penance.107 In the 1970s, Turowicz traveled regularly to Pax Christi con-ferences.108 Bartoszewski became a personal favorite of Reinhold Lehmann, PaxChristi’s secretary-general, who journeyed to Poland in 1972 to plead personallywith Polish authorities for Bartoszewski to be granted a passport to travel to WestGermany.109 At this time, Bartoszewski grew in stature at the forefront of Polish-German reconciliation. His correspondence with Jerzy Turowicz from 1970 to 1975traces this evolution: in 1972, Turowicz had helped to organize the first Pax Christiseminar in Poland, held at Auschwitz, in which Bartoszewski had participated as adiscussant. However, in 1973 and 1975, it was Bartoszewski who organized semi-nars for youth coming to Poland from the FRG, and his historical scholarship on theNazi occupation of Poland was a central topic of discussion.

In June 1975, Bartoszewski spent two weeks in West Germany shepherded byLehmann through meetings with prominent Catholics: from Cardinal Döpfner, to




Herwig Gückelhorn, editor-in-chief of the influential Rheinische Merkur. Bartoszewskicopied Turowicz on the report that he was required to file with the Ministry ofConfessionalAffairs on his return from the FRG, and the report detailed 25 such meet-ings with prominent West Germans. His visit was covered by German media, whichinterpreted it as “a phenomenon attesting positively to the flexible policies of thePolish government.”110

Bartoszewski’s extensive contacts and positive reception were part of a rise inCatholic intellectual engagement in Polish-German relations. The Ministry ofConfessionalAffairs had observed this engagement already in 1962, when it had firstattempted to limit the number of ZNAK representatives granted passports.Paradoxically, however, the more the Ministry sought to limit the Catholic intellec-tuals’ international activities, the more focused and consequential those activitiesbecame. ZNAK members went from attending youth seminars in France in 1958, tocovering the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, to initiating serious policyconversations with leading West German politicians in the late 1960s. Already inJanuary 1966, the Ministry reported that “Catholic Intelligentsia Club representa-tives were behaving in a manner politically damaging to Polish state interests” intheir international travels, and the Ministry declared its intention to clamp down onthat behavior.111 Yet in December 1967, the Ministry reported that its attempts hadbackfired: indeed, the report’s authors now accorded to ZNAK the status of a “sep-arate foreign policy” that “functioned in distinct contradiction with the warrantedrequirements of policies in this sphere mandated by the State.”112 Despite their lim-ited numbers, the Catholic intellectuals seemed to be having a real impact from theinside, forging a “separate foreign policy” that, in the case of West Germany, pre-saged by several years the Polish state’s normalization of diplomatic relations.

Conclusions

The Second Vatican Council provided unique circumstances for the Polish bish-ops to articulate a radical re-channeling of Polish-German historical memorythrough their letter to the German bishops. In turn, ZNAK, as a network of layCatholic intellectuals, acted on and through that historical memory. Thus, theSecondVatican Council significantly reshaped the way that the Polish Catholic intel-lectuals conceived of themselves in their daily lives as Poles and Catholics.

It makes sense that the Poles looked outside Poland even prior to 1965 for sourcesof inspiration. It is also unsurprising that Turowicz, despite his indictments ofAdenauer and the German Episcopate, had positive things to say about West GermanCatholics in 1962. After all, what made the Polish Catholic intelligentsia a Catholicintelligentsia was its exposure and rooting in an international web of ecumenicalChristian philosophy: Turowicz and Stomma were reading the French personalistJacques Maritain 20 years before John XXIII recognized Maritain at the Second




Vatican Council for his prescient promotion of neo-Thomist humanism, and theGerman Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings on non-violence were formative forMazowiecki and the younger generation in the ZNAK movement. The SecondVaticanCouncil brought to life intellectual forces that for ZNAK prior to the Council hadexisted only on paper and in abstract conversation: beginning in 1965, the CatholicChurch exhorted all Catholics to live in the spirit of Maritain and Bonhoeffer.113

The Polish bishops’ letter of November 1965 therefore held the promise of lead-ing the Polish Church into its own post–Vatican II era. Imbued with a spirit of for-giveness that built imaginatively on the text of Gaudium et Spes, the letter seemedthe fulfillment of the deepest hopes of the ZNAK movement. However, the politicaland ecclesiastical reality surrounding the text from the start contradicted its spirit.Reluctant to inform ZNAK of the letter, Cardinal Wyszynski undercut the intellec-tuals’ ability to defend it, and the gap between the Episcopate and ZNAK onlywidened as the intellectuals perceived the developing millennial celebrations of 1966as a retrogressive renunciation of the spirit of the Vatican Council. Wyszynskiaccused ZNAK of disloyalty, and ZNAK members under their breath blamed theprimate for keeping the Polish Church in a pre–Vatican II holding pattern. The intel-lectuals were Catholics, so they remained loyal to their Church, but their disap-pointment in the Church’s path exceeded even their disappointment in the GermanEpiscopate’s reaction to the Polish bishops’ letter.

The notable exception to this disappointment was Karol Wojtyła. As a member ofthe Episcopate, he deferred to Wyszynski’s judgment in international affairs, and heexercised tremendous moral authority in Kraków in local, regional, and nationalissues. However, he had been one of the loudest advocates of aggiornamento at theVatican Council, and, when ZNAK representatives came to him with their cares, helistened and approved. With his guidance, members of the ZNAK group developedtheir own “separate foreign policy” independent of the Episcopate and independentof the State.114

The ZNAK Catholics’ disappointment in what followed, or what failed to follow,the promise of the letter’s text strengthened their conviction to live the dicta of theVatican Council themselves. In regional affairs, the issue that consistently inhibitedPoles from taking a united stand against the PUWP’s status as a Soviet puppet was theregime’s ability to instrumentalize memory of World War II and to use that memory todistract its citizens by channeling their resentment westward rather than eastward.

In 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister ofPoland since World War II. The following year, his diplomatic efforts resulted inPoland’s inclusion in an international conference on German reunification thatfinally ended the state of war between Poland and the FRG, formalizing the Oder-Neisse border between a free Poland and a reunited Germany. Juridically, Polish-German reconciliation had been achieved.Yet Polish-German memory of World WarII continues to plague Polish (and German) political, intellectual, and ecclesiasticallife. For example, Polish president Lech Kaczynski at a July 2007 European Union





summit publicly declared that, if not for Germany’s depletion of the Polish popula-tion during World War II, Poland would have more votes on the EuropeanCommission. Fears and legal claims over the western lands have been lodged incourts, and Erika Steinbach’s Center against Expulsions (Zentrum gegenVertreibungen) is a household name in Poland carrying the worst connotations.

Is this reconciliation? Diplomatic and institutional normalization may havefinally taken place in the form of treaties and entry into the European Union, but eth-ical reconciliation continues to elude Poland and Germany, and its persistent elu-siveness periodically reopens the same national-political wounds. In the spirit offorgiveness articulated in the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council, the Polishbishops’ letter offered an imaginative, enormously promising ethical prescription forthese wounds, and it inspired Catholic intellectuals to action. Nonetheless, the pres-ence of the political in the bishops’ letter and its overwhelming predominance in theletter’s reception undercut the actualization potential of the new ethics. As individu-als and through lay organizations, Polish Catholic intellectuals developed deep per-sonal connections with their German counterparts and achieved some measure ofreconciliation, but, with respect to the nation-state, politics determined even theintellectuals’ actions, first as members of ZNAK, then in Solidarity, and finally asmembers of the post-1989 governing elite.

Perhaps forgiveness and forgetfulness really do only exist as an eschatologicalhorizon, a matter of kairos rather than chronos: if this is so, Polish-German memoryof collective trauma will continue to plague both sides no matter what ethics thechurches and the laity promulgate. Yet there is a crucial conclusion about the histori-cal context to be drawn from the Polish bishops’ letter of 1965: the existence of theIron Curtain manifested itself in domestic and international arenas as a force ofdivision—even within the transnational, putatively universal Roman CatholicChurch—that drove its subjects to cling to historically defined national identities. Theletter’s ultimate failure casts the remarkable intellectual and political successes ofboth Polish and German laity in stark relief with the ethical failure to overcomenational tensions.

The new spirit ushered in by the Second Vatican Council genuinely challengedthe cohesion of Polish historical memory. When the German bishops failed torespond more enthusiastically, to throw the Polish bishops a line across the IronCurtain, the Poles buckled to enormous pressure for continued reliance on thenational over the universal. The field of play was set: for all their success in personaland organizational reconciliation, the laity too fell back into national politics. Yetnow, nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the pressures for nationalcohesion that existed in 1965 have dissipated; perhaps now is the time for a newenunciation of the ethics of reconciliation, to close the continuing chapter of Polish-German traumatic memory. The German pope Benedict XVI, after watching the bio-graphical feature film Karol: A Man Who Became Pope, made about his Polishpredecessor, invoked the memory of the Polish bishops’ letter of 1965, reiterating,




“Nothing is capable of making the world better, if evil isn’t overcome, and evil canbe overcome through forgiveness.”115

Notes

1. Both Gospel quotations come from Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, reprinted as Biblia Sacra IuxtaVulgatam Versionem (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).

2. “Polish Bishops’ Appeal to Their German Colleagues” (18 November 1965), in German-PolishDialogue: Letters of the Polish and German Bishops and International Statements (New York: EditionAtlantic Forum, 1966), 7-19.

3. Solvay Workers’ Letter to Karol Wojtyła, quoted in Adam Michnik, “Z dziejów rynsztoka:Naganiacze i nieobywatelskie postepki,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 24-25 September 2005, 16.

4. Basil Kerski and Robert Z.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich i odpowiedz niemieckiego

episkopatu z 1965 roku: Geneza, kontekst historyczny oraz oddziaływanie,” in Basil Kerski, TomaszKycia, Robert Z

.urek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie”. Oredzie biskupów polskich i odpowiedz

niemieckiego episkopatu z 1965 roku. Geneza—kontekst—spuscizna (Olsztyn, Poland: Borussia, 2006),5-54, at 6.

5. “About the Message of the German Bishops: In Whose Name?” Z.ycie Warszawy, 10 December

1965, in German-Polish Dialogue, 29-40, at 38.6. Polish primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, and Bishop Kazimierz

Kowalski also reviewed and edited the final draft. On Kominek’s ethics and politics, see the work of jour-nalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker Hansjakob Stehle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspon-dent in Poland at the time, who knew Kominek and other bishops personally. See, for example, Stehle,“Seit 1960: Der mühsame katholische Dialog über die Grenze,” in Ungewöhnliche Normalisierung.Beziehungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu Polen, ed. Werner Plum (Bonn, Germany: Verlag NeueGesellschaft, 1984); Stehle, Interview with Basil Kerski, Tomasz Kycia, Robert Z

.urek (Berlin, 2005), in

Kerski, Kycia, and Z.urek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,” 126-40. See also Piotr Madajczyk,

“‘Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,’” Wiez, September 1990, 112-24, at 113-14.7. Kerski and Z

.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 26.

8. “Polish Bishops’Appeal,” 16.9. “Polish Bishops’Appeal,” 15. Basil Kerski and Robert Z

.urek have appropriately termed the border

question the “Achilles’s heel” of the Polish Church (Kerski and Z.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 28).

10. “Polish Bishops’Appeal,” 15-16.11. “The Polish Bishops,” Die Welt, 4 December 1965, in German-Polish Dialogue, 117-20.12. Antoni Dudek has suggested that the central motivation behind the Polish bishops’ letter was, in

fact, political-legal. According to Dudek, ethics remained secondary in the bishops’ calculations to thegoal of normalizing Polish ecclesiastical administration of the western lands (i.e., shifting from tempo-rary Polish apostolic administrations of German dioceses to formally Polish dioceses), a step that theVatican was unwilling to take while the FRG failed to recognize the Potsdam border solution. Dudek isright to emphasize the significance of this political-legal question for Kominek and the Polish Churchmore generally; nonetheless, to dismiss Vatican II as a “pretext,” as Dudek does, is to overlook both theradical ethics that were central to the bishops’ initiative and the history of the universal Church to whichthe Poles belonged. See Dudek, “Oredzie i Milenium (1965-1966),” in Panstwo i Kosciół w Polsce 1945-1970 (Kraków, Poland: PiT, 1995), 181-211, esp. at 181.

13. On the shared traumatic memory of aggressors and victims, see, for example, Piotr H. Kosicki,“Sites of Aggressor-Victim Memory: The Rwandan Genocide, Theory and Practice,” InternationalJournal of Sociology 37, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 10-29. Specifically on Polish-German aggressor-victimmemory, see Kosicki, “Polen und Deutschland: Die Wahlen 2005 und Wandlungen in der politischen




Instrumentalisierung der Aggressor-Opfer-Problematik,” in Die Destruktion des Dialogs. Zur innenpoli-tischen Instrumentalisierung negativer Fremdbilder und Feindbilder. Polen, Tschechien, Deutschland unddie Niederlande im Vergleich, 1900 bis heute, ed. Dieter Bingen, Peter Oliver Loew, and KazimierzWóycicki (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007), 264-72.

14. See especially Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1995).

15. “Polish Bishops’Appeal,” 16-17.16. See, for example, Jean Delumeau, L’Aveu et le pardon: les difficultés de la confession, XIII-XVIII

siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1964).17. See, for example, Timothy P. Jackson, The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).18. Søren Kierkegaard famously suggested that the Gospel exhortation to consider “the lilies of the

field” and the “birds of the air” (Matthew 6:26-28) implied that “the person in distress actually gives hisattention to the lilies and the birds and their life and forgets himself in contemplation of them.” ThisGospel-derived conception of forgetfulness could serve as a device for coping with trauma, yet contem-plative forgetfulness is impermanent: memory of the pain returns (Kierkegaard, “WhatWe Learn from theLilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air,” Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. HowardV. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 155-212).

19. The distinction between personal ethics and criminal responsibility or “political guilt” recalls KarlJaspers’s reflections on guilt, specifically the culpability of post–World War II Germans for Germanwartime actions (Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Dial Press,1947]). For a crucial commentary on Jaspers, see Anson Rabinbach, “The German as Pariah: KarlJaspers’s The Question of German Guilt,” in In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals betweenApocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 129-65.

20. O’Malley, “Trent and Vatican II: Two Styles of Church,” in From Trent to Vatican II: Historicaland Theological Investigations, ed. Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella (Oxford, UK: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006), 301-20.

21. SaintAugustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (NewYork: Penguin, 1961), 223, 226. I sub-stitute the original oblivio for the English-language translator’s “forgetfulness” in these quotations tounderscore the significance of the rationale behind this translation.

22. Saint Augustine, Sermon 142:3, cited in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. JoannaVecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 28, n. 33.

23. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 28-29.24. A classic definition of kairos is a “religiously decisive time which is given and ordained by God,

a Moment which is decisive in the determination of destiny,” eschatologically, “a Moment of ‘filled time’in which the past is fulfilled.” See Paul S. Minear, “The Conception of History in the Prophets and Jesus,”Journal of Bible and Religion 11, no. 3 (1943): 156-61.

25. The English-language rendering of Paul Ricoeur’s La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli as Memory,History, Forgetting is a prime example.

26. My understanding of the historical significance of oblivio as part of Augustine’s thought is deeplyindebted to conversations with Peter Brown. The quoted phrase in this sentence is his.

27. John Paul II,Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millenium (NewYork: Rizzoli,2005), 144.

28. Ricoeur’s description comes from Aristotle’s The Athenian Constitution (Ricoeur, Memory,History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2004], 454). For a detailed discussion of the Athenian politics of reconciliation, see Nicole Loraux, LaCité divisée: L’Oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Payot, 1997).

29. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 488.30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 237-46.

Ricoeur’s discussion is at Memory, History, Forgetting, 486-93.




31. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 490.32. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 473.33. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 499.34. “Polish Bishops’Appeal,” 18.35. Basil Kerski and Robert Z

.urek have pointed out fascinating similarities—including lengthy pas-

sages copied word for word—as well as differences between the 1965 bishops’ letter and an earlier textby Kominek, intended as a welcoming speech for a 1960 Pax Christi pilgrimage to Poland that never cameto pass due to the Polish state’s intransigence. The differences are particularly worthy of note, as they sug-gest a conscious decision by Kominek to turn the 1965 letter away from practical politics to a more philo-sophical message (Kerski and Z

.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 22).

36. Friedrich Nietzsche posited “active forgetting” as a mechanism for preventing “ghosts” of the pastfrom disturbing “the peace of a later moment” (Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History forLife,” Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1983], 57-124, at 61). Dominick LaCapra argues for the Nietzschean conception, calling it “a comple-ment not an alternative to remembrance and memory work,” but ultimately even he notes that this for-getting is, in essence, “selective remembering,” that is to say, repression of selected memories (LaCapra,Writing History, Writing Trauma [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], 96). It is thus astrictly pragmatic solution that falls short of the ethical-eschatological potential of the Augustinianoblivio. Nonetheless, the category of “active forgetting” is crucial to understanding the GermanHistorikerstreit debates of the 1980s revolving around German collective remembrance of Nazi atrocities.See especially Jürgen Habermas, “Vom öffentlichen Gebrauch der Historie. Das offizielleSelbstverständnis der Bundesrepublik bricht auf,” Die Zeit, 7 November 1986.

37. For reasons of space, I do not deal at any length in this essay with the doctrine of the “forgetful-ness of God,” according to which God’s forgiveness of sins for which humans have repented entails God’sforgetfulness of those sins, so that He looks upon those whom He has forgiven as non-sinners withoutmemory of their past transgressions (“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins nomore” [Jeremiah 31:34]). This is an alternative but complementary understanding to that articulated byAugustine. It is kairos-centered, and, rather than emphasize the possibility for an ethics of oblivio in theworld, the “forgetfulness of God” underscores the need for penance as a welcoming of God’s forgetful-ness. To re-read Vatican II ethics through a comparative intellectual-historical framing of Augustinianoblivio and the forgetfulness of God would make a fascinating task for another essay.

38. In this sense, Kominek’s understanding is compatible with Ernest Renan’s insistence that forget-fulness is an “essential factor in the creation of a nation” (chapter 1, paragraph 7 of the 1882 Qu’est-cequ’une nation?).

39. In using the word “radical,” I mean not only a sharp break with pre–Vatican II national fragmen-tation and ecclesiastical tridentinism, but also “radical” in the strictly etymological sense of radix,going back to the roots. Vatican II was, arguably, radical precisely because it drew Catholic theology andecclesiology back to its patristic origins, before scholasticism, medieval Christendom, and the “Baroque”or “Counter-Reformation” qualities of early modern Catholicism.

40. “The Polish Bishops,” 119.41. Indeed, the Polish emigré writer Juliusz Mieroszewski of Kultura in Paris in 1966 described the

bishops’ letter as the first independent initiative in Polish foreign policy since the end of the SecondWorldWar and the emergence of the Eastern bloc. See Mieroszewski’s preface to Dialog polsko-niemieckiw swietle dokumentów koscielnych (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1966).

42. “German Bishops’ Reply to Their Polish Colleagues” (5 December 1965), in German-PolishDialogue, 21-25, at 21.

43. “German Bishops’ Reply,” 22.44. “German Bishops’ Reply,” 23.45. Jerzy Zawieyski, Diary, entry for 12 December 1965, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw. Wiesław

Chrzanowski, Interview (Warsaw, 6 November 2005).




46. Wyszynski, Letter to Döpfner, 5 November 1970, cited in Stanisław Markiewicz, “WładysławaGomułki koncepcja polityki wyznaniowej,” in Działalnosc Władysława Gomułki. Fakty, wspomnienia,opinie, ed. Walery Namiotkiewicz (Warsaw, Poland: Ksiaz

.ka i Wiedza, 1985), 172.

47. Döpfner, Sermon, in Petrusblatt 43 (1960). See also Kerski and Z.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 14.

48. Döpfner later acknowledged in a letter to Wyszynski that, compared with the Poles’ letter, theGerman bishops’ response was “reticent” and “full of reserve” (Döpfner, Letter to Wyszynski (14December 1970), cited in Edith Heller, Macht, Kirche, Politik. Der Briefwechsel zwischen den polnischenund deutschen Bischöfen im Jahre 1965 [Cologne, Germany: Treffpunkt-Verlag, 1992], 227).

49. Kominek, Interview (10 January 1966), in Die katholische Kirche und die Völker-Vertreibung, ed.Oskar Golombek (Cologne, Germany: Wienand-Verlag, 1966), 227-30. See also Piotr Madajczyk’s dis-cussion in Madajczyk, Na drodze do pojednania. Wokół oredzia biskupów polskich do biskupów niemiec-kich z 1965 roku (Warsaw, Poland: PWN, 1994), 133.

50. In the summer of 1966, the Katholikentag conference of German Catholics passed a resolutionthat, while resolving to respect the “Polish nation,” also stipulated that German Catholics should “holdfast to the just and correct rights of their nation” (Bamberg Declaration, in Versöhnung aus der Kraft desGlaubens. Analysen, Dokumente, Perspektiven, ed. Gerhard Albert [Bonn, Germany: Pressestelle derDeutschen Bischofskonferenz Bonn, 1985], 24).

51. “The Polish Bishops,” 119.52. “The Embattled Message,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 December 1965, inGerman-Polish

Dialogue, 124.53. “The Polish Bishops,” 118.54. “Hope for a Reconciliation,” Berliner Morgenpost, 8 December 1965, in German-Polish

Dialogue, 123.55. According to Hansjakob Stehle, Kominek had asked the PUWP insider journalist Ignacy Krasicki

to communicate to Gomułka information about the Polish bishops’ initiative, which he did; however,Krasicki represented the information as the fruit of investigations by the state security apparatus, ratherthan a sign of good faith on Kominek’s part. In Stehle’s mind, the false impression given by Krasickionly worsened the negative reaction when Gomułka learned the precise contents of the letter (Stehle,Interview with Basil Kerski, Tomasz Kycia, Robert Z

.urek [Berlin, 2005], in Kerski, Kycia, and Z

.urek,

“Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,” 126-40). Piotr Madajczyk has suggested that Krasicki may havebeen a pawn in internal political moves within the PUWP; see Madajczyk, “‘Przebaczamy i prosimy oprzebaczenie,’” 119.

56. Wyszynski, Letter to Gomułka, 12 March 1966, reprinted in Dudek, Panstwo i Kosciół w Polsce,247-50, at 247. Wyszynski’s personal sense of hurt and disappointment deeply impressed many of hiscontemporaries (Zawieyski, Diary, entry for 12 December 1965, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw);Chrzanowski, Interview (Warsaw, 6 November 2005). Aleksander Merker, “Władysław Gomułka aKosciół katolicki,” Forum Klubowe 22 (VI-VII 2005), 53-58, at 56. (Merker was, in 1965, one of thedepartmental directors in the Ministry of Confessional Affairs.) Gottfried Erb of the Bensberger Kreisrecalls that the primate’s decision to thank the Kreis with a formal letter on behalf of the entire PolishEpiscopate was universally interpreted as an expression of his displeasure with the German bishops’response (Gottfried Erb, Interview with Robert Z

.urek [Hungen, 2005], in Kerski, Kycia, and Z

.urek,

“Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,” 173-81, at 179-80).57. AAN: PZPR/V/80, 425. See also Andrzej Friszke, Koło posłów “ZNAK” w Sejmie PRL: 1957-

1976 (Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, 2002), 67.58. The exact phrasing was “have willfully encroached upon the area of foreign policy” (“About the

Message,” 40).59. “About the Message,” 33.60. “About the Message,” 30.61. “About the Message,” 35.62. “About the Message,” 36.63. “About the Message,” 40.




64. In January 1966, Gomułka responded to a speech by Catholic intellectual Jerzy Turowicz with avigorous, public attempt to exploit differences of opinion between Kominek and Wyszynski in order todrive a wedge into the Polish Episcopate. See Friszke, Koło posłów “ZNAK,” 68-69.

65. Confessional Affairs Ministry officials compiled the data in cooperation with local and provincialbureaucrats: for interviews with parish priests, through the presidia of National County Councils(Powiatowe Rady Narodowe); for interviews with bishops, through the presidia of National VoivodeshipCouncils (Wojewódzkie Rady Narodowe). According to Confessional Affairs Ministry figures, 51 percentof parish priests declared opposition to the letter, while only 22 percent declared support; meanwhile 46of the 51 interviewed bishops gave statements similar to Archbishop Wojtyła’s declaration, “the letter isa great enterprise, bringing success in Polish-German relations.” See Dudek, Panstwo i Kosciół w Polsce,189-91, with Wojtyła cited at 191. The reports are at AAN: UdSW/WWR/78/35, UdSW/WWR/78/37.

66. Wyszynski, Sermon, 3 February 1966, cited in Madajczyk, Na drodze do pojednania, 138.67. Władysław Bartoszewski, Aus der Geschichte lernen? Aufsätze und Reden zur Kriegs—und

Nachkriegsgeschichte Polens (Munich, Germany: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), 333.68. Michnik, “Z dziejów rynsztoka,” 16.69. Friszke, Koło posłów “ZNAK,” 70.70. The distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals is fundamental in terms of the Polish

domestic reception of the bishops’ letter. AsAdam Michnik has underscored, the events of 1968 changed hisown attitude and the attitudes of other non-Catholic intellectuals, for whom the Catholics later became broth-ers in dialogue and arms. In 1965-66, however, as he later acknowledged, Michnik saw in the letter only atendentious “defense of the ‘trenches of the Holy Trinity’” (Michnik, Kosciół, Lewica, Dialog [Paris:Instytut Literacki, 1977], 61). For Michnik’s complete reflections on the significance of the bishops’ letter,consult Kosciół, Lewica, Dialog, 60-81.

71. Vincent Casmere Chrypinski, “The Movement of ‘Progressive Catholics’ in Poland,” PhD diss.,University of Michigan, 1958; Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki, “The Polish Crusader: The Life and Politicsof Bolesław Piasecki, 1915-1979,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2004.

72. Accounts by former Tygodnik Powszechny editors and writers describe finding “the office doorpadlocked and barricaded all of a sudden one day” (Jacek Wozniakowski, Interview [Warsaw, 24 May2007]). PAX took the name of the weekly without any of its personnel or any public acknowledgment thatthe paper had changed hands.

73. By 1958, the group also included the monthly Wiez and a concession for a small circle of parlia-mentary deputies.

74. “Ocena efektów politycznych kontaktów zagranicznych Katolików swieckich/PAX-ChSS-KIK[1967],” in AAN: UdSW/WSiSO/89/204, 7.

75. Maciej Morawski, Interview (Warsaw, 18 March 2006); Tadeusz Myslik, Interview (Warsaw, 2March 2006); Janusz Zabłocki, Interview (Warsaw, 11 October 2005).

76. “Ocena efektów,” 1. It is worth noting also that many of the older Catholic intellectuals—JerzyTurowicz is a leading example—had traveled abroad extensively prior to World War II.

77. “Ocena efektów,” 13.78. Stanisław Stomma, Interview with Basil Kerski and Robert Z

.urek (Warsaw, 2000), in Kerski,

Kycia, and Z.urek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,” 81-96.

79. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Interview with Tomasz Kycia and Robert Z.urek (Warsaw, 2005), in Kerski,

Kycia, and Z.urek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie,” 97-110.

80. For a detailed narrative of the presentation of Polish-German relations in Tygodnik Powszechnyand other Polish Catholic publications, see Andrzej Ranke, Stosunki polsko-niemieckie w polskiej publi-cystyce katolickiej w latach 1945-1989 (Torun, Poland: Europejskie Centrum Edukacyjne, 2004).

81. Wojciech Pieciak, ed., Polacy i Niemcy pół wieku pózniej: Ksiega pamieciowa dla MieczysławaPszona (Krakow, Poland: Znak, 1996).

82. Alice Holmes Cooper, Paradoxes of Peace: German Peace Movements since 1945 (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1995), esp. 170-72.

83. Władysław Bartoszewski, Interview (Warsaw, 9 March 2006).




84. See the file on the Aktion Sühnezeichen in the archives of the Polish Ministry of ConfessionalAffairs at AAN: UdSW/WSiSO/127/250.

85. See, for example, Jan Krucina, “Obchody koscielnego dwudziestolecia,” in Krucina, ed., Kosciółna Ziemiach Zachodnich (Wrocław, Poland: Wrocławska Ksiegarnia Archidiecezjalna, 1971), 101-12.

86. Kominek confirmed this in a 1966 interview that appeared as “Deutsche erwiesen uns einenBärendienst,” Stern, 18 April 1966.

87. Jerzy Zawieyski, Speech before the Sejm, 12 November 1965, in Sprawozdanie stenograficzne zII sesji, 3 posiedzenia Sejmu, 12 listopada 1965, 95-103, at 96.

88. Zawieyski, Speech, 95.89. Jerzy Zawieyski, Diary, entry of 12 December 1965. The full extent of Zawieyski’s personal

sense of hurt at the primate’s treatment of him was apparent in the entry for 18 December 1965, in whichZawieyski wrote, “I declared also that I take full responsibility, but I would back my brothers, whom hewas hurting, treating them as enemies of the Church.”

90. Andrzej Friszke, Interview with Marek Zajac, Tygodnik Powszechny, 24 March 2002,http://www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/275012/friszke.html.

91. Jerzy Zawieyski, Declaration by the “ZNAK” Parliamentary Group, 14 December 1965, inSprawozdanie stenograficzne z II sesji, 5 posiedzenia Sejmu, 14 grudnia 1965, 143-44, at 144.

92. Zawieyski, Declaration, 143. On 14 January 1966, Jerzy Turowicz gave a speech before theassembled Front of National Unity (Front Jednosci Narodowej) echoing the primate’s dissatisfaction withZawieyski’s speeches, suggesting that they should have offered full support of the bishops’ letter withouta hint of criticism; Wyszynski’s failure to work in concert with the intellectuals thus resulted in divisionseven within their own ranks (Turowicz, Speech, printed in Oredzie biskupów polskich do biskupówniemieckich, materiały i dokumenty, 2d ed. (Warsaw, Poland: Polonia, 1966), 185-89).

93. For example, the Warsaw Catholic Intelligentsia Club held weekly workshops after the Council’sdeliberations had ended at which club members led discussions of the documents and encyclicals pro-mulgated by the Council. Partial documentation from these workshops is at AAN: KIK 106.

94. This disaffection coincidedwith an emerging split within the ZNAKmovement itself.As ZNAKmovedaway from the primate toward its own understanding of the Second Vatican Council, a dissident group led byJanusz Zabłocki, a ZNAK Member of Parliament andWiez co-founder with Mazowiecki, established a new—though technically still part of ZNAK—Catholic institution, Osrodek Dokumentacji i Studiów Społecznych(ODiSS, the Center for Documentation and Social Studies). After 1968, this split became pronounced; in 1976,it became definitive, as Zabłocki’s group assumed full control of the ZNAK parliamentary club.

95. Jerzy Zawieyski, Diary, entry of 9 April 1966. See also Jerzy Turowicz, “1000,” TygodnikPowszechny, 10-17 April 1966.

96. See Dieter Bingen, Die Bonner Deutschlandpolitik 1969-1979 in der polnischen Publizistik(Frankfurt, Germany: A. Metzner, 1982).

97. “Protokół rozmowy z Jerzym Turowiczem [3 VII 1962],” in AAN: UdSW/WSiSO/89/47, 12.98. Polish Radio Intercept, 18 November 1965, inAAN: UdSW/WSiSO/89/53, [manuscript pp.] 18-19.99. “Ocena efektów,” 9.

100. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Interview (Warsaw 25 January 2006).101. Wolfgang Pailer, Stanisław Stomma: Nestor der polnisch-deutschen Aussöhnung (Bonn,

Germany: Bouvier, 1995).102. Erb, Interview, 173-81.103. See, for example, Mazowiecki, Interview, in Kerski, Kycia, and Z

.urek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy

o przebaczenie,” 102. For the Bensberger Kreis memorandum more generally, see Manfred Seidler, “DasPolen-Memorandum des Bensberger Kreises. Wirkung in Deutschland und Polen,” in Feinde werdenFreunde. Von den Schwierigkeiten der deutsch-polnischen Nachbarschaft, ed. Friedbert Pflüger andWinfried Lipscher (Bonn, Germany: Bouvier, 1993), 103-12.

104. Władysław Bartoszewski, Interview with Stefan Wilkanowicz, EuroDialog 1/97, http://www.znak.com.pl/eurodialog/ed/1/bartoszewski.html.en.




105. See especially Tadeusz Mazowiecki, “Polska-Niemcy i memorandum ‘Bensberger Kreis,’” Wie zMay 1968, 3-23.

106. AAN: UdSW/WWR/125/93.107. For details on the organization of the pilgrimage, see Alfons Erb, Letter, 3 March 1964, Pax

Christi Archiv, Bad Vilbel: Auschwitz File. See also Kerski and Z.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 15.

The German Pax Christi pilgrims for the most part came away with an extremely favorable impression ofPolish Catholics: “we were received in this country that had suffered so much at German hands with ashaming warmth, brotherliness, and hospitality” (Klara Dirks, “Bußwallfahrt nach Auschwitz,” Frau undMutter (1964), 248).

108. See, for example, “Dodatkowa informacja [ws. wyjazdu do Holandii na MiedzynarodoweSeminarium Pax Christi 4-8 kw. 1972 r.],” February 1972, AJT: Pax Christi File; H. Ernst, Pax ChristiNetherlands Chair, Letter to Turowicz, 21 March 1985, AJT: Pax Christi File.

109. Władysław Bartoszewski, Interview (Warsaw, 9 March 2006).110. Die Zeit, 27 June 1975, cited in Bartoszewski, Letter to Kazimierz Kakol, 9 July 1975, AJT:

Władysław Bartoszewski Correspondence File, 5. See also AAN: UdSW/WWR/126/351.111. “Stowarzyszenia katolickie—charakterystyka i działalnosci 1965,” in AAN: UdSW/WSiSO/

127/149, 9.112. “Ocena efektów,” 13.113. Consult especially Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels

d’une nouvelle chrétienté (Paris: F. Aubier, 1936); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (Munich, Germany: C.Kaiser, 1937). For Polish thinking on Bonhoeffer, see Anna Morawska, Chrzescijanin w Trzeciej Rzeszy(Warsaw, Poland: Biblioteka WIEZI, 1970).

114. Krzysztof Kozłowski, Interview (Kraków, 12 May 2006); Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Interview(Warsaw, 25 January 2006); Marek Skwarnicki, Interview (Kraków, 11 May 2006).

115. Benedict XVI, Speech after Premiere of Karol: A Man Who Became Pope, 19 May 2005, citedin Kerski and Z

.urek, “Oredzie biskupów polskich,” 6.

Piotr H. Kosicki is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. In 2005-06,he held a Fulbright Fellowship at Warsaw University and was a lecturer at the University’s Center for EastEuropean Studies.



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