Blood and mother and the weeping birch tree – that's the old Poland. Post-communism, our problems are more universal
For the last 20 years the Polish people have been riding a merry-go-round of economic change – and of all the changes in habits and ways of thinking that go with it. There have been many winners: people who stepped off the roundabout refreshed and full of energy. They were creative in putting whatever tools and connections they had to good use. Their relatively high level of education and mental agility allowed them to be positive, even carefree, in refashioning themselves to fit a new age.
Among chaotic, grey tower blocks and old, gunfire-scarred apartment buildings, new ice cream-coloured tower blocks began to appear – clean, neatly fenced, pleasant. A new reality started to creep into stalls, then shops, then chains of shops. Supermarkets and hypermarkets multiplied until shopping malls became urban hubs. Open spaces were littered with chip wrappings; every scrap of fencing turned into an advertising hoarding. To an observer from outer space, this first 20 years of post-communist Poland would have looked like a multicoloured mould growing rapidly across a piece of bread.
So it is no surprise that it's taken a while for our culture to process this. At first, post-communist debate consisted of grumbles about the emptiness of consumerism, sniggers at the nouveau riche's lack of good taste, and exposés of the inner despair of ad agency executives – who might be rich, but surely had to be inwardly lonely and afraid. Punk bands sang lyrics like "So you gotta have it, you gotta buy" – but in the end, even they couldn't pretend they weren't buying more and more, just like everyone else. Polish artists discovered the metaphor of hypermarket as church, consumption as religion. That was shocking at first; today it just seems banal.
Then, at the turn of the millennium, the "excluded" started appearing in films and books. It turned out that the merry-go-round had not served everyone. Into the brave new landscape of steel and glass blocks there shuffled those whom the carousel had not carried anywhere, or who had simply fallen off.
Films and plays began to be populated by cruel bailiffs, exploited workers and destitute people. The closed mines and slag heaps of Silesia became the directors' favoured location. In counterpoint to this there was also a big run on romantic comedies, featuring Warsaw's three highest skyscrapers, newly built bridges, and the city's scruffy streets filled with nicely dressed extras. It was a Warsaw believable only by someone who had never been there.
Then we began to deal with something else: our attitude to "otherness". Polish migration to the west began to teach a society utterly lacking in diversity that not everyone in the world is white and speaks Polish, and of course that not everyone is heterosexual. It was a long time before a gay person could appear in a Polish television serial and not be killed in a road accident in the first episode. Artists did a fast-track job of conveying this diversity to Polish society at large, and such matters are now in the cultural mainstream.
Poles have a tendency to be gloomy and depressed. We like to support each other in the view that we live in the worst country on earth. When, in 2004, our numbers dropped as we emigrated, the saying was: "Last one out turn off the lights." Young people argued that Poland was toxic, that it had failed to nurture them.
The opening of borders and the mass movement of young people to the UK and Ireland has created a wave of new artists who are creating just as well in English as they do in Polish (but they prefer English). They've wiped their memories clean of the laments of dying soldiers under birch trees, recited at endless school assemblies. They want to be free, they want a good life.
But those who stayed behind, and those who have come back, have learned something: a human being isn't just a body that you can cut out and stick into a new cultural context. So what we are seeing today is an attempt to get to grips with the whole question, turned and considered in many ways, of national identity. A redefinition of concepts like homeland, patriotism, roots and heritage is under way, a search for new metaphors, a new poetics, something different from "blood and my mother and the weeping birch tree".
Questions of how to deal with our overblown history and carry it with us into a new era are being tackled in new dramas such as Long Live the War by Paweł Demirski, and in films such as The Hall of the Suicides by Janek Komas. Komas tells of a new generation, unburdened by history, which was born and raised in a free country, kitted out with Barbie dolls and Lego. Its characters include a boy who owns plenty of gadgets, is sexually and socially disorientated, and who lives in an internet phantasmagoria, and his parents who have sex with their employees to save time because they spend so long at work. The film deals with a reality which is beyond history, and beyond Poland.
That's also a good sign, that Polish art is beginning to emerge from its hermetically sealed space, and our problems are at last starting to be less inward-looking, and more universal.