“Memoir Fever” in 20th Century Poland

A popular poststructuralist claim states that speaking in your own voice is the foundation of any emancipatory struggle. According to this idea, one becomes a subject who can influence public discourse by an act of public speech. Following this assumption, one could say that the 20th century not only brought unprecedented mass violence but also resulted in the mass emancipation of many different social groups. The spread of universal education resulted in the rapid growth of adult literacy, providing many with new forms of expression that led them to strive for a Hegelian recognition of the other. First, by learning how to read, people could dive deep into books. Novels especially had become a massive phenomenon in the 19th century, and they provided narrative formulas that showed how to put one’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings into a coherent whole. Once they learned how to write, people from marginalized groups could keep diaries to inscribe their own stories on paper. As a result, for the first time, one could access the detailed description of the lives of people operating in the discursive shadow. There was only one more thing to be done—someone needed to encourage people to keep journals, as this was far from a natural practice for many. Among those who took up this challenge were Polish sociologists.

It all started with The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas, published in five volumes between 1918 and 1920. This study by one Polish and one American sociologist was based on an extensive collection of diaries, letters, and other personal documents of Polish peasants who emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Though it was not recognized as important right away, it established a new method in sociology called “biographical research” or “personal documents method.” This aims to reconstruct life histories by drawing on (auto)biographical narratives and documents. When Znaniecki returned to Poland, he founded the Polish Sociological Institute in Poznań and began the tradition of organizing competitions for memoirs. The first one was “for the best biography of a worker written by himself,” organized in 1922. This competition attracted 161 submissions and the organizing committee had to increase the number of awards from two to 25. Thus, slightly over 100 years ago, Polish “memoir fever” started.

Throughout the interwar period, dozens of competitions for memoirs took place, targeting various social groups, such as peasants, the unemployed, rural and Jewish youth, and migrants. One of the most famous, organized in 1933, was for peasants. Almost 500 memoirs were submitted and 61 published. Out of many heartbreaking and touching testimonies, I would like to draw attention to one of the very few submitted by a woman. It is a moving memoir signed tellingly by “the wife of an eleven-acre owner in the Warsaw district.” The diary told the story of a woman whose life had been filled with violence, exhaustion, and despair. She concluded it with a poignant declaration: “I don’t want a reward, but just a bit of sympathy. For, truly, there is probably no more forgotten and unappreciated being in the world than a peasant woman, and most of all here, in Poland.” However, despite all the suffering, she proudly declared that “today’s woman in the countryside is a quiet heroine, full of merits for which no order is enough.” She added: “If I were a well-educated woman, I would write a whole huge work on the misery of the rural woman, but unfortunately, I am just such an ordinary, average rural woman.” One could consider the author a true feminist pioneer as her testimony was also a vital emancipatory manifesto: “We, rural women, on whose shoulders a huge burden of duty has fallen, a hundred times heavier than on men, we demand our rights! We demand an improvement of our fate, we cry out for relief!” These words resonate strongly even today, showing the misery of an ordinary Eastern European woman from less than a century ago.

Competitions for memoirs continued to be organized in Poland even under the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. They resulted in, for example, many written testimonies of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, which are now part of the Ringelblum Archive. After the war, the biographical method in sociology was in full force: in 1969, a record number of 114 competitions for memoirs were organized. The tradition faced a crisis after 1989, as many public institutions ran out of money and struggled to survive. However, it continued in democratic and capitalist Poland. Recent examples include the “Competition for Pandemic Memoirs” and the  “Competition for LGBTQIA+ Memoirs,” both organized in 2020. 

While “memoir fever” in Poland was focusing on written journals, the phenomena of home movies spread around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, the invention of light cameras allowed amateur recording of scenes from everyday life. This contributed to the emergence of a new “film diary” genre established by Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian emigrant who came to the United States. In 1969, he premiered his first film diary, Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches. By combining the recorded images with an off-screen commentary, Mekas decided to tell the story of his life marked by forced emigration. A similar idea occurred to Marian Marzyński, a Polish Jew who left his homeland in 1969 as a result of the anti-Semitic campaign that began there in March 1968. Immediately after leaving, he started using a camera to make autobiographical film documentaries. The first one, Skibet, was made in 1969, the same year Mekas premiered Walden. Exile was a trigger that made both men turn their cameras on themselves.

However, we know about Marzyński as the first one from Poland to start something we could call film diaries because he sold them to American and Danish TV stations, which showed them to the public. There are probably thousands of home videos hidden in private archives around the world that make up a priceless collection of archives of ordinariness. But, just like written memoirs in Poland earlier, home videos and film diaries are about to receive recognition as a sociological source within a biographical method. Some attempts toward this are already being made, thanks to initiatives such as the Not-So-Ordinary project led by Agata Zborowska at the University of Chicago. She is creating a unique and vast archive of home videos made by Polish emigrants in the United States. A century after the University of Chicago published Znaniecki and Thomas’s classic, a similar study is being conducted in the same institution based on filmed testimonies. It seems like Polish “memoir fever” has just entered a new stage, in which visually preserved memories are finally given consideration.

Paweł Rodak, Zapomniana epopeja. Polskie konkursy pamiętnikarskie i literatura, “Teksty Drugie” 2024, no. 2, p. 21.

Pamiętniki chłopów, Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, Warsaw 1935, p. 42.

Ibid., p. 28.

Ibid., p. 29.

Wykaz konkursów na pamiętniki w Polsce w latach 1921-1979. In: Pamiętniki Polaków 1918-1978. Antologia pamiętnikarstwa polskiego, vol. 3, Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, Warsaw 1983.

Łukasz Kiełpiński is PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw. He was Jerzy Giedroyc Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM in 2024.