Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T00:18:27.594Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2020

Abstract

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I had the good fortune to share the subsequent versions of this essay at the following events: the conference “Exporting Socialism-Making Business: Intercultural Transfer, Circulation and Appropriations of Architecture in the Cold War Period,” at the Leibniz Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung in Erkner, Germany (June 21–22, 2018); the East European seminar at New York University's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (February 13, 2019); and the Polish Lecture Series at the University of Virginia (April 1, 2019). I am grateful to Alexander Geppert, Kyrill Kunakhovich, Monika Motylińska, Molly Nolan, Tanja Scheffler, Philipp Ther, Jared Warren, Larry Wolff, and the two anonymous reviewers at the Slavic Review for comments and suggestions. I am also deeply indebted to Mr. Tomasz Mikszo, the nearly all-knowing and certainly most generous archivist of the fair, who gave me many, many hours of his time, showed me around the Tower, and who passed away prematurely in 2019. Research for this article (and the broader project of which this essay is part) was made possible thanks to the Research Enhancement Program short-term grant from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2016, and a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2017–18.

References

1 On the Romantic myth, see Król, Marcin, Romantyzm: piekło i niebo Polaków (Warsaw, 1998)Google Scholar; Walicki, Andrzej, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (South Bend, 1994)Google Scholar; Janion, Maria, Niesamowita słowiańszczyzna: Fantazmaty literatury (Kraków, 2017), 12Google Scholar; Nicieja, Stanisław Sławomir, “Legenda Kresów Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej,” in Stawarz, Andrzej, ed., Dziedzictwo i pamięć Kresów Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 2009), 720Google Scholar; Miłosz, Czesław, Native Realm: A Search For Self-Definition, trans. Leach, Catherine S. (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; on the Palace, see David Crowley, Warsaw (London, 2003), 42; Zaborowska, Magdalena J., “The Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the ‘Changes’ through Stalin’s Palace in Warsaw, Poland” in the Journal of Architectural Education 54, no. 4 (May 2001): 205–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grzegorz P. Bąbiak, “Pomniki władzy w krajobrazie Warszawy XIX i XX wieku: Od Soboru Newskiego do stalinowskiego Pałacu Kultury,” in Zuzanna Grębecka and Jakub Sadowski, eds., Pałac Kultury i Nauki. Między ideologią a masową wyobraźnią (Kraków, 2007), 31–50; Patryk Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957 (Chapel Hill, 2015), 3–5; and Michał Murawski’s anthropological study, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw, and a City Transfixed (Bloomington, 2019).

2 Papernyi, Vladimir, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. Hill, John and Barris, Roann (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), esp. xxi-xxiv, 47, 116–17Google Scholar.

3 Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); challenges to this binary thinking include Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal, “Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West,” in Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, Joes Segal, eds., Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam, 2012), 1; Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, 2010), xv; György Péteri, “Sites of Convergence: The USSR and Communist Eastern Europe at International Fairs Abroad and at Home,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (January 2012): 3–12; Susan E. Reid, “The Soviet Pavilion at Brussels ’58: Convergence, Conversion, Critical Assimilation, or Transculturation?” Cold War International History Project working paper #62, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/WP62_Reid_web_V3sm.pdf (accessed July 29, 2020); Serge Guibault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1983); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), 613; Yves Cohen, “Circulatory Localities: The Example of Stalinism in the 1930s,” trans. Stephanie Lin, Kritika: Exploarations in Russian and Eursian History 11, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 11–45.

4 Murawski, The Palace Complex, esp. 53; Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorij Kozlov with Sylvia Hochfield, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (New Haven, 2007); Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 554–57; Richard Anderson, Russia: Modern Architectures in History (London, 2015); Miriam R. Levin, When the Eiffel Tower Was New: French Visions of Progress at the Centennial of the Revolution (South Hadley, Mass., 1989); Joseph Harriss, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (Boston, 1975).

5 Recent work on the fairs includes: Péteri, “Sites of Convergence”; Katherine Pence, “‘A World in Miniature’: The Leipzig Trade Fairs in the 1950s and East German Consumer Citizenship,” in: D.F. Crew, ed., Consuming Germany in the Cold War (New York, 2003), 21–50; Mary Neuburger, “Kebabche, Caviar or Hot Dogs? Consuming the Cold War at the Plovdiv Fair 1947–72,” Contemporary European History 47, no. 1 (2012): 48–68; Cathleen M. Giustino, “Industrial Design and the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO ’58: Artistic Autonomy, Party Control and Cold War Common Ground,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 185-212; Tomas Tolvaisas, “America on Display: U.S. Commercial and Cultural Exhibitions in the Soviet Bloc Countries, 1961-1968,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, 2007; Robert Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C., 1997); Tanja Scheffler, “Die Leipziger Messe während der DDR-Zeit. Franz Ehrlichs Perspektivplanungen,” Leipziger Blätter, Sonderausgabe: 100 Jahre Alte Messe (2013): 42-46; Shane Hamilton, “Supermarket USA Confronts State Socialism: Airlifting the Technopolitics of Industrial Food Distribution into Cold War Yugoslavia,” in Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 137–65; Austin Jersild, “Socialist Exhibits and Sino-Soviet Relations, 1950–60,” Cold War History 18, no. 3 (2018): 275–89; Izabella Agárdi, “Socialist Work on Display. Visualizing the Political at the 1948 Budapest International Fair,” in Yannis Yannitsiotis, Dimitra Lampropoulou and Carla Salvaterra, eds., Rhetorics of Work (Pisa, 2008), 1-26; Susan Reid, “The Soviet Pavilion at Brussels ’58.”

6 “Alongside history’s reconstructive work,” Paul A. Kramer recently wrote, “history can also serve as a mode of critical social thought. Such critical histories reconstruct past worlds, in part, in order to problematise, destabilise and denaturalise particular social formations, by embedding them in currents of time and change. It is an enterprise that necessarily registers the ways in which politics is temporally mediated.” See “Bringing in the Externalities: Historians, Time Work and History’s Boundaries,” History Australia 17, no. 2 (2020): 293–94.

7 Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. Gerrit Jackson (New York, 2016), 225–26.

8 Ibid. For other historical approaches to the lives of buildings, see, Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (New York, 2000) or Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 2017).

9 Anna Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation: Die Polonisierung der Stadt Posen nach 1918 und 1945 (Wiesbaden, 2013); José M. Faraldo, “Medieval Socialist Artefacts: Architecture and Discourses of National Identity in Provincial Poland, 1945–1960,” Nationalities Papers 29, no. 4 (December 2001): 605–32.

10 Barbara Wysocka, Regionalizm wielkopolski w II Rzeczypospolitej 1919–1939 (Poznań, 1981); Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation.

11 Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland (Oxford, 2018), 123.

12 Antoni Czubiński, Poznań w latach 1918–1939 (Poznań, 2004), 149–58.

13 Visiting Poznań before World War I, Władysław Studnicki is said to have quipped that “If [Tadeusz] Kościuszko suddenly showed up here, you would have made him immediately a director of a bank.” See Witold Molik, “Jak wygląda ‘poznańska ciemnota.’ Życie kulturalne w Poznaniu na przełomie XIX i XX wieku w opiniach publicystów warszawskich,” Kronika Miasta Poznania 80, no. 1 (2012): 94–106, esp. 94, 96, 104, 105. See also Böhler, Civil War, 181.

14 Beate Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa jako metoda narodowej prezentacji. Wystawa Wschodnioniemiecka (1911) i Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa (1929) w Poznaniu,” trans. Joanna Czudec, in Jacek Purchla and Wolf Tegethoff, eds., Naród, Styl, Modernizm (Kraków, 2006), 241–42. For broad studies of exhibitions, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, 1984); Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New York, 2010); for an excellent bibliography, see Alexander C. T. Geppert, Jean Coffey and Tammy Lau, “International Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs, 1851–2005: A Bibliography,” available at: https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/astrofuturismus/publikationen/Geppert_-_Expo_bibliography_3ed.pdf (accessed July 6, 2020).

15 Geppert, Fleeting Cities, 117–28.

16 Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa,” 243; Jan Skuratowicz, “Architektura Targów Poznańskich przed 1920 rokiem,” Kronika Miasta Poznania 64, no. 2 (1996): 96–108. See also Ostdeutsche Ausstellung für Industrie, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft, Posen 1911. Offizieler Katalog (Posen, 1911).

17 Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa,” 243.

18 Der Oberschlesische Turm: Festschrift den Besuchern des Turmes gewidmet (Berlin, 1911).

19 Störtkuhl, “Hans Poelzig—architektura przemysłowa w Luboniu i Poznaniu,” Kronika Miasta Poznania 80, no. 3 (2012): 122–23,125.

20 Zenon Pałat, Architektura a polityka. Gloryfikacja Prus i niemieckiej misji cywilizacyjnej w Poznaniu na początku XX wieku (Poznań, 2011); Elizabeth A. Drummond, “Posen Or Poznań, Rathaus Or Ratusz: Nationalizing the Cityscape in the German-Polish Borderland,” in Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward, eds., Transnationalism and the German City (New York, 2014), 37–53.

21 Störtkuhl, “Hans Poelzig—architektura przemysłowa w Luboniu i Poznaniu,” 125.

22 Jerzy Ilkosz, “Hans Poelzig and Max Berg in Wrocław,” in idem., Max Berg’s Centennial Hall and Exhibition Grounds in Wrocław (Wrocław, 2006), 26.

23 Julius Posener, Hans Poelzig: Reflections on His Life and Work, ed. by Kristin Feireiss and trans. by Christine Charlesworth (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Matthias Schirren, Hans Poelzig: Die Pläne und Zeichnungen aus dem ehemaligen Verkehrs- und Baumuseum in Berlin (Berlin, 1989); Jerzy Ilkosz and Beate Störtkuhl, eds., Hans Poelzig we Wrocławiu: Architektura i sztuka, 1900–1916 (Wrocław, 2000).

24 Posener, Hans Poelzig, 6, 8. On p. 17, Posener noted the reference to “timber framework. . .reinforced by the fact that the brick infill is laid in patterns that had often been used in half-timbered houses.” But higher up, “on the restaurant level a very modern element is used, a window ribbon that goes around the whole building,” a hardly “sensational” element, according to Posener, although unlikely to have “ever been seen before.” What could have Poelzig meant by all this? Posener tried to guess: “‘If only our ancestors,’ the architect seems to be saying, ‘had had steel girders instead of their wooden posts, they probably would have built something very much like this.’”

25 Ibid., 12.

26 Deborah Ascher Barnstone, “The 1929 Breslau Werkbund Exhibition: Constructing German Identity in Architecture and Urban Design,” in Ascher Barnstone and Thomas O. Haakenson, eds., Representations of German Identity (Bern, 2012), 132.

27 Jerzy Müller considered the Tower to “have a remarkable iron construction and a good interior” but be “pretentious and gloomy in interior design.” See J. Müller, “Budownictwo,” in Stanisław Wachowiak, ed., Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa w Poznaniu w roku 1929, vol. 2 (Poznań, 1930) 14. Władysław Czarnecki, Poznań’s chief architect during the PWK, called the Tower’s silhouette “ugly, heavy and unaesthetic.” See Wspomnienia architekta, vol. 1 (Poznań, 2006), 90. See also Czarnecki, To był też mój Poznań: Wspomnienia architekta miejskiego z lat 1925–1939 (Poznań, 1987); Filip Czekała, Historie warte Poznania: Od Pewuki i Baltony do kapitana Wrony (Poznań, 2016), 14.

28 Murawski, The Palace Complex, 9.

29 Andrzej Zarzycki, “Na Przekór Wątpiącym i Zrozpaczonym”: Cyryl Ratajski, 1875–1942 (Poznań, 1991), 67.

30 See Noah C. Elkin, “Promoting a New Brazil: National Expositions and Images of Modernity, 1861–1922,” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1999).

31 Maciej Roman Bombicki, Poznańska PeWuKa wizytówką niepodległości (Poznań, 1996), 125, 136–43.

32 Ibid.

33 Müller, “Budownictwo,” in Wachowiak, Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa, 63. The author adds that the classical tradition with simplified elements of the Empire style became the compositional key for the Exhibition—as a style that “has good traditions in Poland, as something that has been experienced and that is familiar, evokes a sense of attachment, thus amplifying a sense of constancy.”

34 Barbara Zwolanowska, “Architektura Powszechnej Wystawy Krajowej w Poznaniu w roku 1929,” Rocznik Historii Sztuki 11 (1976): 177–225, esp. 205–10.

35 Czekała, Miasto nie do Poznania, 38. On these plans, see Marcin J. Januszkiewicz and Adam Pleskaczyński, I haj vivat Poznańczanie: Co o Poznaniu wiedzieć wypada (Poznań, 2001) 203–4; on Paris, see Harriss, The Tallest Tower, 10–16.

36 Störtkuhl, “Hans Poelzig—Architektura przemysłowa w Luboniu i Poznaniu,” 121.

37 Beate Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa,” 250.

38 Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa,” 250.

39 Grzeszczuk-Bendel, “Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa 1929,” 25.

40 Müller, “Budownictwo,” 71.

41 Exceptions include architectural historians Teresa Jakimowicz, “Wstęp: Dziedzictwo i balast historii,” in Jakimowicz, ed., Architektura i urbanistyka Poznania w XX wieku (Poznań, 2005), 12, and Jan Skuratowicz, “Architektura Poznania w latach 1918–1939,” Kronika Miasta Poznania 64, no. 4 (1996): 25. Moskal likewise notes that architecturally speaking, Poznań was only “superficially” polonized. See Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 83. Also: Stephen Paul Naumann, “In Sight But Out of Mind: The Construction of Memory at Three Once Stigmatized Sites in Berlin and Poznań,” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2012); Florian Znaniecki and Janusz Ziółkowski, Czym jest dla Ciebie miasto Poznań? Dwa Konkursy: 1928/1964 (Warsaw, 1984), 206–7.

42 Störtkuhl, “Architektura wystawowa,” 248, 251. See also Kazimierz Ruciński, “Rzut oka na budownictwo miejskie w Poznaniu,” Architektura i budownictwo 4 (1929): 199–237. On the other hand, when it came to new designs, throughout the newly independent Poland “tendencies to underline regional features were almost completely abandoned during this period, so as to erase the differences resulting from the over a hundred-year-long division of the country,” writes Malgorzata Omilanowska in “Searching for a National Style In Polish Architecture at the End of the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Century,” in Nicola Gordon Bowe, ed., Art and the National Dream: The Search for Vernacular Expression in Turn-of-the-Century Design (Dublin, 1993), 111. During the partitions, Russian buildings in Warsaw functioned as monuments to the tsar; the most bombastic case was the Aleksander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral at the Saski Square, which was taken apart during the interwar era. See Bąbiak, “Pomniki władzy;” Agnieszka Haska, “Rozebrać czy zostawić? Sobór pod wezwaniem Św. Aleksandra Newskiego a Pałac Kultury,” in Grębecka and Sadowski, eds., Pałac Kultury, 51–58.

43 Skuratowicz, “Architektura Poznania w latach 1918–1939,” 26.

44 Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław During the Century of Expulsions, trans. Tom Lampert and Allison Brown (Princeton, 2011), 360. Other cities architecturally contesting their Polish and German histories after World War II included Szczecin/Stettin and Gdańsk/Danzig; in both, authorities and inhabitants settled on a range of hybrid forms. See Jan Musekamp, Zwischen Stettin und Szczecin: Metamorphosen einer Stadt von 1945 bis 2005 (Wiesbaden, 2010); Jacek Friedrich, Neue Stadt in altem Gewand: Der Wiederaufbau Danzigs 1945–1960 (Cologne, 2010).

45 Müller, “Budownictwo,” 71.

46 Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 40.

47 Jakimowicz, “Wstęp. Dziedzictwo i balast historii,” 3; Czarnecki, To był też mój Poznań, 10, 23–24; Omilanowska, “Searching For a National Style In Polish Architecture,” 106; Antoni Czubiński, Poznań w latach 1918–1939, 56; Maria Dąbrowska, Dzienniki, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1988), 291. On similar sentiments with regards to the Palace of Culture and Science, see also Crowley, “The Ruins of Socialism: Reconstruction and Destruction in Warsaw,” in Michael Minkenberg, ed., Power and Architecture: The Construction of Capitals and the Politics of Space (New York, 2014), 209, and Murawski, The Palace Complex, Chapter 5, esp. 170.

48 Piotr Stefan Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, 1974), 229.

49 Jakimowicz, “Wstęp. Dziedzictwo i balast historii,” 8. Interestingly, in the interwar era Poznań Poles showed little interest in erecting monuments to the otherwise unquestioned national heroes, which Warsaw excelled in. As Skuratowicz writes, “The memory of heroes was celebrated in churches and at cemeteries.” See “Architektura Poznania w latach 1918–1939,” 14.

50 Ibid., 24.

51 Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 229.

52 Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “The Origins and Practice of ‘Organic Work’ in Poland: 1795–1863,” The Polish Review 15, no. 4 (1970): 23–54. According to Wojciech Puchta, the PWK in Lemberg (Lwów) in 1894 reflected the region’s growing commitment to “organic work.” See Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa we Lwowie w 1894 roku (Wrocław, 2016), esp. 266–67.

53 Symptomatic is an essay competition that sociologist Florian Znaniecki organized in 1928 around several questions related to one large inquiry: “What does the city of Poznań mean to you?” Znaniecki and Ziółkowski, 114. See also 297–325 for results of the 1964 contest, which are very similar to the original competition from 1928. The responses reaffirmed Poznanians’ self-identification with the Polish-German past, and outsiders’ perceptions of Poznań residents as different from Poles elsewhere, in positive and negative ways. See also Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 36.

54 Skuratowicz, “Architektura Poznania w latach 1918–1939,” 10.

55 See Marta Filipová, “Introduction: The Margins of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies,” in Filipová, ed., Cultures of International Exhibitions, 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins (New York, 2015), 4.

56 Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 92.

57 Znaniecki and Ziółkowski, 205.

58 At 57%, it was the least damaged building at the fair. See Andrzej Sakson and Andrzej Skarzyński, eds., Raport o stratach wojennych Poznania, 1939–1945 (Poznań, 2008), 144, 146.

59 Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu (henceforth: APP), syg. 775–22, kk. 4, 35. See also Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 114–16.

60 In Poland, limits on private trade were imposed in 1946, but by 1947, 20% of gross industrial output was produced by companies that were not state-owned. See Ivan T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 73.

61 “Results of the Home Furnishings and Clothing Fair Held at Poznan from September 21–30, 1946,” National Archives and Records Administration College Park, MD (henceforth: NARA), RG 84 entry UD 3124 box 1, unpaginated material, 1–2.

62 Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 116

63 Archiwum Akt Nowych (henceforth: AAN) syg. 195–3327, k. 5.

64 As late as 1949, Bolesław Szmidt described his plans of preparing Poznań for the second PWK, using areas in and around the city center as exhibition grounds. See “Rozbudowa Międzynarodowych Targów Poznańskich,” Kronika Miasta Poznania vol. 22, no. 1 (1949): 50. See also AAN syg. 195–3327, k. 54.

65 Teresa Torańska, “Them:” Stalin’s Polish Puppets, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (New York, 1987), 133. The postwar period saw renewed historical discussions of “organic work:” see Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Organic Work as a Problem in Polish Historiography,” Slavic Studies 19 (1974): 197.

66 On the (partially unsuccessful) takeover by the Polish state of working-class institutions and cultures, see Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 1997), esp. chapters 4 and 5. On 238–39 Kenney argues that “the mobilization of labor transformed labor relations, replacing tradition and experience with a new work ethic of individual competition against norms and other workers.” On the appropriation of Hungarian ideas of work into the socialist ethos at the Budapest Fair, see Agárdi, “Socialist Work on Display.”

67 Pawilon radziecki (Warsaw, 1948), 4.

68 The building was slated for complete disassembling, but the Poles invested funds for its temporary renovation just to give the space to the Soviets: AAN syg. 195–3329, unpaginated file, p. 2 of letter dated January 24, 1949.

69 APP, syg. 775–10, k. 88.

70 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (henceforth: RGAE), f. 635, d. 216, 1. 45

71 RGAE, f. 635, d. 216, 1. 45.

72 Reid, “The Soviet Pavilion,” 2–3; Vladimir Papernyi, “Hot and Cold War in Architecture of Soviet Pavilions (1937–1959),” in Rika Devos, Alexander Ortenberg, and Vladimir Papernyi, eds., Architecture of Great Expositions 1937–1959: Messages of Peace, Images of War (Abingdon, Eng., 2015), 81–98.

73 Papernyi, Architecture, esp. xxi-xxiv, 47, 116–17.

74 Ibid., 1.

75 From 1950 on, the Soviets used the central pavilion at the Leipzig Fair, which had received a makeover to disassociate its massive, neoclassical structure from Nazi times. See Tanja Scheffler, “The Technical Fairground in Leipzig in the Period of National Socialism,” trans. Elisabeth Reschat, in Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi, and Max Welch Guerra, eds., Urbanism and Dictatorship: A European Perspective (Basel, 2015), 178, and idem., “Die Leipziger Messe während der DDR: Zeit”; Neuburger, “Kebabche, Caviar or Hot Dogs,” 52.

76 Papernyi, Architecture, 146–171; Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the national Question,” in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, 1997), 114.

77 RGAE, f. 635, d. 216, 1. 46.

78 APP, syg. 775–10, k. 88; the same was true of 1948—see “Pawilon radziecki,” p. 14.

79 APP, syg. 775–10, k. 88.

80 APP, syg. 775–10, k. 89.

81 APP, syg. 775–9, k. 55.

82 APP, syg. 775–10, k. 88.

83 APP, syg. 775–10, kk. 88–89.

84 Centre des archives économiques et financières, Savigny-le-Temple (henceforth: CAEF), B-53261, French government report from XXII MTP, p. 5 of the document.

85 The Presidium of the Government decided on October 14, 1950 to cancel the 24th Poznań fair.

86 Piotr Marciniak, Doświadczenia modernizmu: Architektura i urbanistyka Poznania w czasach PRL (Poznań, 2010), 270. This was at a time when Constructivism was being slowly “exhumed” in the USSR as well. See Mëhilli, Elidor, “The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union,” Kritika 13, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 641CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also: Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, 2008).

87 Marciniak, Doświadczenia modernizmu, 270.

88 Szmidt, Ład przestrzeni (Warsaw, 1981), 154.

89 Ibid., 171–73.

90 Ibid., 347.

91 Klotz, Heinrich, The History of Postmodern Architecture, trans. Donnell, Radka (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 128130Google Scholar.

92 Szmidt, “Rozbudowa Międzynarodowych Targów Poznańskich,” 42.

93 Ibid., 42.

94 Zaborowska, “The Height of (Architectural) Seduction,” 212; citing Wojciech Tomasik, Inżynieria dusz: Literatura realizmu socjalistycznego w planie “propagandy monumentalnej” (Wrocław, 1999), 67.

95 Davies, Norman, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford, 1984), 148Google Scholar. Davies himself has been an energetic impresario of Poland’s Romantic myth.

96 Tim Gosling, “Hungary and Poland Tighten Grip on ‘National Narratives,’” Balkan Insight, July 29, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2019/07/29/hungary-and-poland-tighten-grip-on-national-narratives/ (accessed July 10, 2020). The Romantic myth has been challenged by works examining Polish antisemitism, which do not square neatly with images of Polish heroism and victimhood. For a broader reappraisal, see Porter-Szűcs, Brian, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Malden, 2014)Google Scholar.