Poland and its Endeavor Toward Public History

Author: Curtis Leingang, BA European Cultures at the University of Wrocław.

Public history, as it currently stands in Poland, is not an officially recognized sub-discipline within the national academic sphere. Only the University of Wrocław offers a master’s program in this discipline, which came to fruition in 2014. On the contrary, oral history is recognized. Though both are unique, they often coexist/converge. In the case of Poland, the symbiosis of the two, when put into practice, has birthed a new wave of historical consciousness and memory. Yet the former is still overshadowed. What case, then, can we make for public history in Poland? 

I would like to first point out an example of oral and public history intertwining in history, from the salons owned by the high society within the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. According to Dr. Wiśniewska, “Salon hosts and hostesses controlled the composition of attendees and, to some extent, the agenda of the gatherings. Guests would sometimes share stories of their own or their relatives’ lives, both spontaneously and at the behest of their hosts.”¹ It is possible to extrapolate from the text the role-taking: hosts providing an accessible space meant for discussion, and the participatory agents. I will not push the analogy of proto-oral and proto-public history too far, but at the surface level we are able to draw parallels between the relationship between oral and public history, with an example of it being (albeit unintentionally, in this context) acted upon.  

Public history has flourished in other nations when adequate interest and recognition is given. The United States is a prominent example. Increased interest in higher education after the Second World War brought with it heightened intrigue about the past. This was coupled with historical anniversaries which encouraged community involvement to engage with history as more than just observers in the 1970s. With this new demand, museums and historical communities were able to commercialize and turn it into a “market”. This is not simply in selling a commemorative mug or shirt, but with the deliberate interest and needs of the consumer in mind; how to accurately, and in a digestible way, present the historiographic information in such a way that it benefits both consumer and historical society itself.  

The transformation of technology and easier mobility of the public audience lent its own hand in the success of American public history. Movies, television, magazines, and social media have attracted interest toward history, as well as providing an entertainment-based interaction between facts and consumers. Schindler’s List, for example, opened the nuances of the Holocaust to the mainstream public; oral testimonies were given and formulated into film. This cannot be easily done without the relationship between public and oral history experts working together. Oral history gave the tools, and public history employed them.  

Where does that leave Poland? Unfortunately, the censorship under authoritarian regimes caused much of a delay in the development in public history following these trends. Information was government-authorized and only served the public, in their eyes, if it could be beneficial to the state. However, now a free Poland, the early 2000s saw a breakthrough: the opening of the Warsaw Rising Museum became the first narrative museum, of which the creation had been supplemented with testimonies and information gathered from Second World War veterans. It is not simply a glass showcase museum: it features the hustle and bustle of streets and scenography playing on multiple senses to entice the visitor.  Following this success, more museums began to open with similar structures- showcasing history in an “all-human” and interactive frame.²

These museums did not only offer the Polish mainstream a chance to experience history in an engaging way, but the increased interest contributed to research centers coming together with museums to create spheres to further preserve history. The Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History (Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej), with cooperation between the Depot History Centre (Centrum Historii Zajezdnia) and “Remembrance and Future Center” provides an archive of publications submitted by independent researchers that, along with the informative value they provide, solidifies oral histories in the realm of public history and memory.  

That leads us to the main topic of this article: public history not being recognized officially in academia within Poland. As we have seen, the mutuality of both oral and public history, with the benefits they provide as a stand-alone domain, vastly benefited the consciousness toward history both in Poland and internationally. If public history was officially recognized and offered as a subdiscipline in Poland, we can only foresee that it would benefit historical societies with experts channeling their knowledge into broader outreach of history and public relations. The skills required to transmute information in a tangible and accessible method to the audience has clearly improved knowledge transfer when it relates to Polish history; and for a path toward awareness, it is essential.  

1. “Izabela Czartoryska: A Polish Public Historian in the Long Eighteenth Century” The Long History of Public History in Europe, ed. Thomas Cauvin and Joanna Wojdon (De GruyterBrill, 2026, pp. 111–136). (p.115)  ↩︎
2. Wojdon, Joanna. “Public History Entering Poland.” Public History in Poland, edited by Joanna Wojdon, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2018. Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.  ↩︎

Bridging Editor

Cassandra is a public historian, artist, and teacher in the History & Classics Department at Dawson College, in Montreal, QC.… Read more

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