In Mapping Warsaw, Ewa Wampuszyc proposes a new look at post-war urban history in the Polish capital through a series of overlapping lenses, including photography, cinematography and literature. By establishing ‘spatiality’ as the core theoretical model for the inquiry, the author teases out narrative strands that connect photobooks, newsreels, films and literary narratives to real and imagined sites of socialist urbanity. Multidisciplinary and refreshingly varied in its structure and tone, the book gently moves the reader through increasingly complex and multidimensional readings of original historical sources.
The prologue and introduction offer a concise and articulate political history of both pre- and post-war Warsaw as it connects to the author's extensive fieldwork in the city and to her positionality as a member of the Polish diaspora. The first three chapters consider complex ways in which communist ideologues mobilized mass media to communicate a seemingly preordained socialist future, largely disconnected from the reality of ruins and rubble. Significantly for urban historians, chapter 3 uses an in-depth visual analysis of newsreels to show that the conceptualization of Warsaw as a socialist city predated the actual reorganization of space, and mentally prepared Varsovians for momentous demolition and construction campaigns. It demonstrates that newsreels, drawings and architectural models spatialized propaganda in an attempt to blur distinctions between memory and imagination, between the city as it was and as it was destined to be.
Chapter 4, the richest and most exciting part of the book, brings together all the visual material and theoretical investigations of the previous three chapters, and uses a networked approach as the basis for a sustained reflection on the political, social and architectural history of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. Focused on the literary and cinematic work of the writer and film director Tadeusz Konwicki, this chapter moves beyond the established caesurae, bringing the reader to the late 1980s – a tense moment full of expectations for the fall of communism. Finally, the afterword serves to connect the historical narrative to the present through a short excursus into the shifting toponymic landscape of Warsaw after 1989 as well as an important acknowledgement of the limits of studying official discourses, especially the potential for marginalizing Jewish experiences.
While exceptionally successful at following the networked and multimodal visual practices of Stalinist propaganda in Poland, Mapping Warsaw presents a more reductive history of planning practices and outcomes, overlooking the formative role of modernist planners in the earliest post-war years (1945–47), and overstating differences between ‘preservationists’ (conservationists outside of the United States) and ‘socialist ideologues’. This is noticeable mainly in sections detailing the work of the Capital Reconstruction Office (Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy, BOS). Especially in the first three crucial post-war years, BOS was a complex and politically pluralistic institution that used its propaganda apparatus to promote a modernist (and often specifically a functionalist) vision of the city situated in an odd political and spatial confluence with heritage conservation and socialist realist planning.
Whereas in the sections pertaining to urban planning the concern is over a certain flattening of ideological pluralism, the opposite is true for the theoretical parts of the text, where definitions are sometimes hard to pin down. Interpreting Merleau-Ponty, Wampuszyc defines ‘spatiality’ – the operational concept for the whole study – as ‘the experience of the body in relative or subjective relation to the surrounding material world’ (p. 8). ‘Spaciality’, and the companion concept ‘semiosphere’ (compare Mieczysław Porębski's ‘iconosphere’), are used often in the book, and while the idea to come up with a theoretical model that describes the cunning ways in which images and texts were spatialized in Polish propaganda is useful, paring these words with field-specific terms such as ‘textualization’ (p. 8) and ‘palimpsestuousness’ (p. 12) obscures their original definitions, particularly for non-specialized readers. On page 85, Wampuszyc defines spatiality simply as a ‘sense of space’ – perhaps the most flexible definition that best suits the broad application of the term throughout the book.
In demonstrating to urban historians how to draw successfully on theoretical models borrowed from film, literary and cultural studies, Mapping Warsaw makes a valuable contribution to a limited English-language scholarship on Warsaw. Using a number of thoughtful case-studies, Ewa Wampuszyc has created a bicultural space of inquiry that will help bridge linguistic, scholarly and socio-cultural gaps long held intact by the Iron Curtain.
