Mapping Warsaw: The Spatial Poetics of a Post-War City is an interdisciplinary study that examines the post-WWII discursive rebuilding of the Polish capital in such visual and literary texts as photobooks, newsreels of communist Poland (Polska Kronika Filmowa), feature films and the works of Polish writer and film director Tadeusz Konwicki. The study spans from 1945 until the Thaw era of 1956 and interrogates both Varsovian narratives promoted by communist authorities and those that emerged in opposition to communist propaganda. Conceptually, the book is centered on the notion of spatiality and draws on the theoretical insights of the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, but also on theories relevant to the genres of the primary sources, including literary criticism, cultural and film studies, theory of photography, and others. The monograph consist of an introduction, four chapters, and an afterword.
The first chapter, titled “Recreating Warsaw in Photographs,” is devoted to the genre of the photobook, whose symbiosis between image and text plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of Warsaw's spatiality, particularly in the first post-war decade. Ewa Wampuszyc examines Varsovian-themed photobooks published between the 1940s and the 1970s by both state-owned publishing houses and diaspora sponsored publishers. The chapter focuses on Warsaw, the Capital of Poland (1949) whose publication coincided with the introduction of the socialist realist method in Polish art and thus determined the album's status as a template for future photobook production. To provide a counterpoint to the communist-sanctioned Varsovian narratives, Wampuszyc analyzes the Swiss-published Warszawa, Varsovie, Warsaw, Warschau 1945, which shares a lot of points of intersection with the propaganda photobooks, but differs from them in its vision of Warsaw as an aristocratic and middle-class European metropolis.
In the second chapter, “Reconstructing Warsaw in Newsreels,” Wampuszyc examines the news reports and special bulletins produced by the Polish Film Chronicle in the first post-war decade that were paramount in depicting the process of Warsaw's transformation from rubble to a functioning capital city, legitimizing the new communist leadership's power, and unifying the divided post-war Polish society. Her analysis locates the newsreel portrayal of post-war Warsaw in its socio-political context and demonstrates the proneness of the genre to propaganda use, but also its sometimes unexpected ways of delivering autonomous viewpoints.
The Varsovian reconstruction storyline present in photobooks and newsreels found its continuation in the Polish post-war romantic comedies of error that are the subject of investigation of the monograph's third chapter, titled “Remapping Warsaw in Cinema.” Wampuszyc engages four films that feature Warsaw both as a geographical space with recognizable landmarks and as a site of a profound social transformation: Leonard Buczkowski's Treasure (1948) and Adventure in Mariensztat (1953) and Jan Fethke's Matters to Settle (1953), and Irena, Go Home! (1955). All of these films reiterate the official conceptualization of Warsaw's spatiality, however, due to the conventions of the comedy genre, they reveal some of the challenges of reconstructing the capital city while building a socialist state, such as housing shortages and problems of communal living, the labyrinth of construction sites throughout the city, women's rights and gender equality, and others. For comparison, the other visual media opened up about the economic and social issues of building socialism only after the Thaw.
The final fourth chapter, “Reappropriating Warsaw and the Palace of Culture,” is a case study of one of the signature landmarks of the Polish capital aiming to reveal the complex layering of competing narratives in the urban palimpsest. Wampuszyc delineates the following four narratives: 1) the original intentions of the construction and design plan, 2) the ideologically-sanctioned representations of the Palace in newsreels, 3) the counter-narrative of the documentary Warsaw 1956, and 4) the literary and cinematic depictions of the edifice in the works of Tadeusz Konwicki in order to demonstrate that official and counter-narratives do no efface each other, but rely on one another for their continuous evolvement and the sustenance of the Palace's palimpsestuous discourse.
With its innovative theoretical approach, creative choice of primary sources, and elegant blending of historical and close textual analysis, Wampuszyc's monograph is a welcomed addition to the Polish cultural studies corpus. The book is lucidly written and interspersed with numerous stills and photographs that aid the reader's understanding of how the communist symbolic appropriation of Poland's capital city's space in the post-war decade came about.
