The Culture War Threatening to Rip Through European Politics

(Bloomberg) -- After enduring four decades of communism and producing renegade directors such as Roman Polanski, the National Film School in the Polish city of Lodz has a long tradition of refusing to kowtow to authority.

So when rector Mariusz Grzegorzek made his annual speech to open the academic year, he decided to fire a warning shot. “We’re witnessing a dismantling of many extremely important cultural institutions,” he said.

It was October 2017, two years after Poland elected a government that became the European prototype for Donald Trump’s America. Theater plays had been sabotaged by protesters and days earlier the head of the Polish Film Institute was dismissed. It had co-funded “Clergy,” a movie about child abuse, greed and alcoholism in the Catholic Church that broke box-office records.

The comments were prescient. Poland has only headed deeper into a culture war between the conservative and liberal forces that are fighting over Europe’s future. The government is tightening its control of the arts to glorify the nation and portray Poland as a victim of 20th century meddling by world powers and a bastion of Christian probity in a morally bankrupt continent. For Grzegorzek, it all has sinister echoes from communism, with the message from the ruling party that you’re either with us or against us.

“We’d never thought that atmosphere would come back,” Grzegorzek said last week in his office in a former industrialist’s palace that now houses part of the film school in Lodz. “It’s very hard to be an island of freedom when everything outside is infected.”

If Poland’s economic transformation since joining the European Union 15 years ago has been astonishing, it’s the social and political revolution that’s now more remarkable. Opponents of the ruling Law & Justice party under Jaroslaw Kaczynski say it’s lording over every facet of society, underpinned by the ever-present church and an undercurrent of homophobia and anti-Semitism.

The government has clashed with Brussels over its revisions to the judiciary and freedom of the media. It wants priests to have a greater say in sex education, tried to ban abortion and last month renewed its attack on gay rights. The mantra is that only the party can defend against what it calls “anti-Polonism,” or prejudice against Poles.

The long arm of the state controls funding to the arts and favors period pieces or documentaries that fit the government’s narrative.

In February, the parliament granted an extra 1.3 billion zloty ($342 million) for state television, its mouthpiece. When the murder of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz shocked Poles the previous month, state TV suggested his stabbing at a rally was a result of opposition parties triggering a rise in hate speech.

The Ministry of Culture, meanwhile, has cut funding for the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk that documents Poland’s struggle against communism to “align the funding with its responsibility” for the institution run by the municipality. It pays for the construction of museums that center on Polish history, including a project by Tadeusz Rydzyk, a powerful priest with close ties to the government.

Waldemar Paruch, the political science professor who runs strategy from inside the prime minister’s office, said rival parties had created causes celebres out of trivial things.

“Democracy isn’t designed to function when everything is politicized,” Paruch said last week in Warsaw. “And the problem Poland has is that today everything is political—from theater to film to nature.”

Films such as 2015 Oscar-winner “Ida,” which depicts the difficult relations with Jews during and after World War II, are part of an anti-Polish ideology, the government says, an “education by shame.” It believes the country’s cultural and historical narrative of the past 30 years has painted Poles as the perpetrators of crimes, not the victims.

Culture Minister Piotr Glinski said attempts to build national values are being sabotaged by the opposition and European Council President Donald Tusk. A former Polish prime minister, he called on the country to defeat the “modern Bolsheviks” in a speech in Lodz during November’s celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Poland’s modern independence.

“The way Law & Justice is described aims to exclude, annihilate, dehumanize and delegitimize us—we are to be treated like the Jews by Goebbels,” Glinski told the weekly magazine Wprost. “We’re compared to fascists and dictators. I am referred to as a censor who carries out Stalinist purges in theaters.”

Us-against-them has worked well for the ruling party. It’s leading opinion polls before European Parliamentary elections next month and national ballot in the fall. Officials in the pro-EU opposition coalition acknowledge that they need to win in May—even by just one vote—to stand any chance of staying united.

The division in Polish society is no more evident than in Lodz, where the film school was founded after World War II because of the near total destruction of Warsaw 120 kilometers (75 miles) away.

The city of 700,000 is a former industrial hub and one of Europe’s great Jewish cities before the Holocaust, immortalized by Nobel Prize winning author Wladyslaw Reymont as “The Promised Land” for would-be textile magnates. The 1975 movie of the book was directed by Oscar winner Andrzej Wajda, another product of the city’s film school.

Home to underground initiatives during communism, the city is a mix of the old and new Poland. Red-brick disused factories from its heyday sit opposite 1970s communist-era apartment blocks.

The train station is an oversized construction of ceramic flooring, glass and steel structures and smooth escalators, a prime example of Poland as the poster child for EU expansion. The country gets more aid on a net basis than any other state, something Law & Justice seeks to maintain.

The sprawling cotton and linen factory complex built by German-born industrialist Karl Scheibler in the 19th century included a school, homes for workers and a fire station. These days, Mercedes and Jaguar cars are parked outside while across the street lies crumbling empty warehouses awaiting the next stage of development.

Lodz Mayor Hanna Zdanowska, 60, ran her own textile business before joining Tusk’s Civic Platform party.

“Politics is everywhere these days,” she said last week at City Hall on Piotrkowska Street, the 4 kilometer-long boulevard that cuts through the center of Lodz. “The main thing that happened is that they want to control everything from your kitchen to your bed. They’re not managing the country, they’re managing power.”

Zdanowska was in the audience in 2017 when Grzegorzek gave his speech. She called it “brave.” It was clear he wanted to stand against political intervention “because otherwise it would be the end of culture,” she said.

But as the audience applauded, Grzegorzek’s colleagues worried he’d gone too far. Then the Ministry of Culture called and asked for a copy of the speech. It didn’t say why, the school said.

That year, a provocative production at the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw was targeted by protesters who tried to block the public from entering the building, shouting “great, catholic Poland.” Bishops said the play amounted to blasphemy, while prosecutors launched a probe as the work may have insulted the religion.

The theater’s most recent production analyzing Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and hate speech in Poland also caused an outcry from the ruling party. Deputy Culture Minister Jaroslaw Sellin said it involved people who “live in a parallel reality and see things that don’t exist in Poland.”

Yet many Poles are ready to confront the country’s dark side. After the “Clergy” movie hit cinemas in 2018, it drew 5 million people in a country of 38 million. Last month, archbishops published an unprecedented report on child abuse, though stopped short at an apology and called pedophilia a global phenomenon.

At the Lodz film school, rector Grzegorzek is worried where the culture war may go next.

“It’s going to be narrower and more and more suffocating,” he said. “I’m really very frightened. The arts in Poland are going to be more and more political—on both sides.”

--With assistance from Wojciech Moskwa and Dorota Bartyzel.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Andrea Dudik

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