“Still Nothing About Silesia”: Codifying Regional Family Memory in Polish Literature After 1989

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Upper Silesia is represented in post-1989 Polish literature. A historical region currently divided between Poland and the Czech Republic, Upper Silesia was once a contested borderland and site of contact between Polish and German cultures, as well as a hub of heavy industry, especially coal mining. After Poland’s current borders were decided in 1945, numerous factors—including mass migration and deportation, the repression of regional differences by the communist regime, Polish-language education, and ongoing processes like deindustrialization—had begun to radically alter the region’s cultural identity, drawing it closer to the Polish mainstream. Starting in the period of Poland’s transition from communism to democracy and ending in the present-day, my work asks how Upper Silesia is constructed within the Polish-language literary imagination, as exemplified by several books about the region that have gained prominence among national audiences and critics. The works studied are stylistically divergent, ranging from from an autobiographical essay, to historical novels, to book-length nonfiction, to a realist novel. Close readings of these texts identify genre conventions, as well as the cues that serve to code works as Upper Silesian or not. I argue that across formal conceits and time, a certain set of conventions, i.e., occasional Silesian language use and dramatic references to specific events of twentieth-century history, have become a shorthand for Upper Silesian identity on the contemporary Polish book market. Crucially, when these conventions are absent from literary works—-even ones that are set in Upper Silesia and centered on local life—the texts in question are not necessarily read as “Upper Silesian” or “regional” by audiences and critics. Nonetheless, images of family life, inheritance, and memory come into sharp focus in all of the texts I study, implying that works about life in Upper Silesia that have attained some degree of national prominence share themes of family and memory, regardless of how “regional” they are considered to be. Chapter One begins with the seeming absence of Upper Silesia from the regional writing boom of the 1990s. First, I argue that certain regions were better represented than others in this period due to genre conventions and the critical discourse surrounding nostalgic writing. Then, I turn to Adam Zagajewski’s 1991 autobiographical essay, “Dwa miasta” (“Two Cities”), suggesting that Zagajewski’s choice not to include references to regionally-specific language and history led many critics not to label the work as Upper Silesian, despite its setting. Chapter Two identifies the 2010s as a moment of emergence for Upper Silesian themes on the Polish book market, due in no small part to the historical novels of Szczepan Twardoch. I analyze his 2014 novel, Drach (Dragon or Paper Dragon in Silesian), one of the first texts centered exclusively on Upper Silesian history to achieve national success. I contend that Twardoch engages with and ultimately defies both the left- and right-coded tropes of the Polish media discourse as he constructs a compelling narrative about Upper Silesian anti-heroes and other flawed regional characters. Twardoch’s work is contrasted with Anna Dziewit-Meller’s 2016 novel, Góra Tajget (Mount Taygetus), which educates national audiences about the wartime and postwar suffering of Upper Silesians, at times referencing the Holocaust. Despite their differences, both novels seem to situate Upper Silesian cultural distinction in the dramatic events of the twentieth-century, just as they deploy the Silesian language. Chapter Three studies Zbigniew Rokita’s 2020 reportage, Kajś (Somewhere in Silesian), book-length nonfiction centered on the author’s decision to learn more about his Upper Silesian heritage in the hope of claiming a regional identity for himself. While this work offered national audiences an accessible guide to Upper Silesian history and an introduction to debates on the Silesian language, its very premise implies that regional belonging is in some way tied to familiarity with twentieth-century history and a basic knowledge of Silesian, rather than simply living in the region. Finally, Chapter Four reads Anna Cieplak’s 2021 novel, Rozpływaj się (Melt Away), which lays bare the inner voices of four struggling residents of Upper Silesia spanning from the 1990s to contemporary period. The novel’s protagonists do not display an interest in or knowledge of regional history and only speak Silesian when forced to by their elders. I conclude that Cieplak’s novel points to the contemporary ambivalence of Upper Silesian identity when it is not fixed on the events of the early to mid twentieth-century that are writ large in regional history. The dissertation ends with a brief epilogue about other art forms that express regional culture, emphasizing that Upper Silesian cultural expression should not be seen as exclusive to the particular conventions and audiences of Polish-language literature as they have developed in the past thirty years. Keywords: Poland, Upper Silesia, Literature, Prose, RegionalismSlavic Languages and Literature