Remembrance and Rupture: Memory As Motor and Mirror of the Socialist-Communist Split in the Interwar Poland

In the Interwar period, European Social Democracy underwent a dramatic transformation: the previously unified movement broke down into two distinct, antithetical currents—a socialist and a communist one—under the combined, epoch-making impact of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. As the two divergent camps crystallized out of the once-united movement in the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, remembrance of the many “comrades” who had fallen in the succession of violent events that had taken place since the outbreak of war in 1914—the First World War itself, the Russian Revolution, the Polish-Soviet War, revolution and repression in Germany and Hungary—and the politico-ideological significance attached to such remembrance played a key role in the process of identity formation and differentiation among the Marxist left. The proposed paper examines this process as it played out among the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) and is part of a larger project that examines both the Polish and German experiences in light of the Comintern’s attempt to impose a single “orthodox” discourse of remembrance upon all communist parties. Here, analysis is specifically directed at how the PPS and KPP handled the commemoration of highly contentious individuals and collectives like Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and the war dead of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War and how the enunciation of distinct cultures of remembrance both drove and reflected the growing politico-ideological divide between the two parties.