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Silence in Historical Narration – Several Remarks on Methodological, Cognitive and Educational Effects
The themes of silence and passing over in silence in historical narration is a fact in any Polish and popular historiography. The problem, however, is how these effects of the phenomenon are justified and what methodological, cognitive and educational implications they have.
There are various reasons for passing over in silence in the description of the past are various. The first can be acknowledged as objective ones; resulting from the lack of sources of information or not enough historical workshop which enable reading out the document of the past as well as its description based on it. Other can result from more subjective factors.
We can only mention the case of Marxist methodology, historiosophy and historiography that, as no other, directly stated that the picture of the past should contain only facts which justified Marxist order. In the case when there was not enough sources confirming it, the Marxists assumed that a historian should replace the lack of any traces of the events, which virtually should have taken place, butwere not marked in an accessible archive, with a theory. ccording to this, Accordingly, a historian should describe the missing/unrecorded events out of the source, that is those which are not attested in any sources, but which must have or should have occurred or taken place because that resulted from the Marxist logic of history.1
It was different when the sources were too many and memory of non-distant events was recent/(so recent that) enough to resist complete elimination. In such cases, manipulations were made and actual sources were replaced by documents specially created, falsified or manipulated and given a status of basic and necessary sources. That happened during the whole period of the Polish Peoples’ Republic; a particularly valuable and desirable situation was when a recipient of the contents could not realize that they was manipulated. As evidence we could quotethe case of developing and publishingmaterials which would defame the role of non-communist Polish underground in the fight with the German occupant. On 28th August 1946 KC PPR Secretariat, being aware of a small amount of records which would prove the actual fight between communists and Nazi during the occupation, ordered an elaboration of materials which would discredit other anti-Nazi centres of opposition.2 Two years later, on occasion of another anniversary of World War II it came out with an explicitly sounded title The Black Book of Polish Reaction – of Contemporary Targowica. Not only its factography but also its assumptions referring to a vision of Polish history, mainly its non-distant, became the basis of historians’ workshop and popularization the knowledge about the past.3 The basic mechanism of this vision was passing over in silence the historical events which were uncomfortable for communists and featuring those which were meaningless but comfortable from an ideological point of view. In history discipline there were reviewers of dissertation who took care of it as well as appointed in this aim appropriate educational institutions, finally, when there was rare necessity, also censorship. In a case of educational procedure there were reviewers of coursebooks who took care of maintaining such a conception of Polish past. They realized that it was a falsification of history but they thought that it was necessary because of ideological reasons. One of them frankly wrote, while recommending a book to be printed, that a value of the book comprises such a conception of the material by the author that a reader would not even realise that he or she is manipulated by him.4 Silencing over something (understood as a primary condition and involving a discovery of a new historical fact by a researcher but which was for some reasons uncomfortable for compulsory version of history and that was why unadmitted for popularization) or passing over in silence (the fact that already works in a public circulation but is inconvenient for condition of historical knowledge) in history that is falsification of the past reality each time. However, it is the particular falsification. In Marxist historiography it was taking on a form of deconstruction of parts of the history and appeared as an absence of particular facts in the narration. It generated a negative picture of the past.