The religious group and its church

This paper deals with a late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century confessional community of Lutherans – one of the main Protestant groupings in Europe – based in Warsaw. There was memory of a Protestant tradition on which they could rely. Back in the sixteenth century, Reformation, most notably in its Calvinist version, swept across the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian state, creating a huge crisis for Roman Catholicism. In the middle of that century the nobility (szlachta) and magnates converted to Calvinism in large numbers, establishing new Protestant communities, consisting mainly of the peasantry. There was even an attempt at establishing a national Church, independent of the pope, as in other states in Europe of the time.Footnote ¹⁵ In the middle of that century the Protestant nobility, politically present in Warsaw (the capital) during, for example, the royal elections, wanted to erect a church building, an aim which ultimately failed. From the seventeenth century a new tradition emerged: of a Counter-Reformation that shaped the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to such an extent that the Polish nation under the partitions (1772–1918) established itself as virtually solely Roman Catholic, although in fact it did not cease to be a religious and cultural borderland, with many Protestant communities surviving in towns and villages,Footnote ¹⁶ not to mention the continuing survival of the Orthodox Church. This shaped the fates of Protestants in the region, and Lutherans in particular, because that group consisted mostly, though not exclusively, of immigrant cultural Germans. Warsaw, a very fertile Polish cultural centre throughout the period of the partitions, had its own impact on the group, giving way to a hybrid Lutheran-Polish pattern of identification, which also found its expression in commemorations. To be sure, it was a very ‘local’ community, not very large, and at the same time a minority group (representing at most 5 per cent of Warsaw's inhabitants), but its presence was felt by the city's inhabitants in the period in question. Particular attention will be paid here to two of this community's acts of commemorations: those of 1881 and 1931/2, which marked two important anniversaries of the official establishment of this religious group in the city back in the 1760s, and the erection of its church in 1781, conceived of as acts of memory, which combined symbolism and practice, two important anthropological categories. Commemorations are in this interpretation simultaneously ‘cultural artefacts’, deeply connected to the symbolic character of the human being in the world (as previously expressed by Ernst Cassirer), and examples of Bourdieuan practice.Footnote ¹⁷ They at the same time ‘masked’ the heterogeneity of a group and created social unity (to borrow the terms from Roy Wagner), and also put ideas and human reflections into action, shaping social identification in practice.

The focus of a group's integrity is very often a public building, connected to past glory: a castle, town hall or any other ancient structure, either functioning or in ruins.Footnote ¹⁸ Sacred architecture is a more straightforward example, as it serves certain communities and binds together, under one roof (in the case of Christianity), clerics and parishioners. The sacred places of religious minorities may also serve well as an example, because their presence is less obvious and the ties binding those communities are often very strong. Jewish synagogues all over Europe, Puritans’ places of worship in the Anglo-Saxon world and the churches of the Huguenots in France and Prussia may serve as the best known examples. The case of Warsaw and its Lutheran community's church will serve here as a symbol of the enduring existence of a minority group, which for decades (or even centuries) had to keep reinventing itself, while swearing allegiance to a particular physical object in space.

Warsaw was for a long time an unlikely milieu for Protestants. This relatively small, early-modern town was the capital of Mazovia, a region in Poland, the seat of sovereign dukes until 1526; later, from around the end of the sixteenth century, it was the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Located away from the main bastions of the nascent Reformation movement, like Krakow and Vilnius (Wilno), Warsaw saw a ducal edict granted in 1525 that forbade non-Catholics from settling and erecting churches, and which was later incorporated into the body of state laws of the Commonwealth, though the issue of its legal validity in subsequent centuries was not uncontroversial. Protestants and their informal communities began to appear in Warsaw, as elsewhere, after it became the capital of the Commonwealth. Initially worship took place in houses in privately-owned districts (formally independent towns) owned by magnates, which abutted the medieval Old and New Warsaw boroughs, which belonged to the crown, and also outside the city, in a Reformed church in Węgrów, 100 km away, which belonged for a period to the Calvinist branch of the magnate Radziwiłł family.Footnote ¹⁹

The nascent Lutheran community included mainly artisans of German origin and culture, along with wealthy merchants, boasting networks of long-distant contacts. These contacts may have been responsible for the unconventional form of the church which they planned to build. Discussions were held in the 1770s, a time of anti-rococo spiritual turmoil, shortly after the toleration acts of 1767–8 were passed – thanks to pressure from the Russian ruler – which allowed for the erection of new non-Catholic churches. The template for the first version of the church might have been an Amsterdam Lutheran church with a circular plan and a large dome by Adriaan Dortsman, proposed by the architect Ephraim Schroeger. The author of the final design was Simon Gottlieb Zug (or Zugk), a Lutheran and a prolific architect-cum-garden designer. Both of these architects came from the German lands, specifically from Saxony, and had previously worked for the Saxon court in Warsaw. Zug, along with supporters in the parish, envisioned a very large domed structure, with an inner diameter of around 30 metres, similar to that of St Paul's cathedral in London. It consisted of several basic geometric figures juxtaposed upon one another: a cylinder with a spherical dome, crowned by a cylindrical lantern and flanked by prismatic additions, each connected to the others in an openly anti-baroque, simple, even brutal way. The main features of the design were its purity and its monumentality, the latter being strengthened by the portico's Doric columns, a style that slowly gained popularity in the period in question, and by the rustication of the ground floor. The central ground plan, suitable for Protestant needs as it provided good visibility of the altar, was symbolic in its own way: it consisted of a circle with the sign of the cross inscribed upon it. The entire structure constituted an artistic statement: a giant building, inspired in its outer and inner form by the Pantheon in Rome. It was one of the first examples of mature classicism, and a departure from the style characteristic of royal Warsaw architecture, which was more akin to rococo, and was named after the last Polish king: the ‘Stanislaus’ [Poniatowski] style (see Figures 1 and 2).Footnote ²⁰

However, it was also the manifesto of a certain community. The monumentality of the church and its location, outside the centre, but still very near to a magnificent royal seat of the former Saxon dynasty and Warsaw's main street (Krakowskie Przedmieście), along with the orientation of its facade towards the city centre and not towards the West, as in the Christian tradition, can be seen as a conscious attempt to mark the presence of Lutherans in the city. The form of the church, different from the predominant Baroque of the other, Roman Catholic, churches, highlighted the independence of the Lutherans: the entire building seemed engaged in a dialogue with the rest of Warsaw. The church had its origins in specific historical circumstances.

Figure 1.

Adam Piniński, ‘The Lutheran church in Warsaw’ (completed 1781), 1839: Polish National Library.

The community evolved in the decade after the passage of the laws of 1767–8. The parish elders, who originally ran the community, were superseded by a joint leadership of elders and a series of more democratic committees, which included the Warsaw Lutheran burghers. These burghers succeeded in overseeing the confessional community, presiding over the parish council (Kollegjum Kościelne)Footnote ²¹ from which the pastors were excluded (an exceptional solution among Lutherans in the region).Footnote ²² The financial might of community members found its expression in the building of the church, which was only partly supported financially by foreign Protestant rulers (of Saxony and Sweden). Its scale and architectural language expressed the identity of a religious community that could boast newly acquired legal rights and now marked the city with a strong spatial symbol, its own church, which was consecrated in 1781.

The Lutheran parish was German-speaking and most of its members were culturally German, with a distinct sense of separateness and local patriotism. The confessional authorities could communicate with the Polish-speaking officials in Polish (at least since 1791), and some of the families were already assimilated into Polish culture and language. The wealthiest members were engaged in banking (such as one of the supporters of the church project, Peter/Piotr Tepper), served the most powerful families and had ties with King Stanislaus, who (allegedly) interested himself in the projected church. Their attachment to local affairs later led Warsaw Lutherans to support the anti-Russian (and anti-Prussian) insurrection of Tadeusz Kościuszko in 1794. The 60-metre-high church lantern served as a military observation point. The failed insurrection resulted in the final partitioning of the Commonwealth; hence Warsaw Lutherans entered into a difficult period under foreign rule.

Migration, acculturation and identification

The community changed with the changes in urban society. The history of Warsaw was a history of migration. For a long time, the Commonwealth was plagued by epidemics and from the mid-seventeenth century also by wars, which resulted in a relatively low population density. This led to waves of migrants being encouraged to settle in private and public realms and towns, and many of the migrants came from the nearby Polish lands acquired by Prussia, like Royal Prussia, north of Warsaw and Mazovia. The eighteenth century saw an increase in these initiatives.Footnote ²³ However it was only after 1815 that encouragement for settlement became a crucial part of the policy of the newly created Kingdom of Poland (a theoretically sovereign political body in personal union with Russia). After the Vienna Congress, a programme to encourage the immigration of ‘useful foreigners’, as they were called, mainly from Saxony, Silesia and the Czech lands, became part of its policy, and remained in force until around the mid-nineteenth century. Germans, mostly Lutherans, came and settled in the kingdom, fuelling expansion of the industrial region around the town of Łódź. Warsaw also benefitted from this influx. New citizens mixed with other non-native groups, mainly Roman Catholic peasant migrants who flocked to the city throughout the decades leading up to the First World War. These migrants settled to an increasing extent in the suburbs and often did not apply for permanent citizen status, thus enlarging the size of the non-permanent population. Warsaw was also the destination of Jewish migrants who escaped mainland Russia and its north-western guberniias as a consequence of new bans on Jewish settlements in Russia.

Warsaw society, a society of migrants and natives, consisted of groups, many of which were organised according to their own rules and adhered to different traditions from the native population, producing their own local, self-oriented memory. Likewise, the Lutheran community formed a more or less coherent group, bound by a common faith and historical background. The community changed over time as a result of migration. Newcomers and old families alike were bound together by their difference from the native population. In addition to their faith, this was their German language, combined with varying levels of fluency in Polish.Footnote ²⁴ It is hard to judge how many nineteenth-century Lutherans were recent migrants, and what proportion they formed of the whole group, but it must have been significant. The parish was also strengthened by the presence of Baltic-German officials and their families, who arrived to help the Russians manage the westernmost province (kray) of the empire, when that region lost almost all traces of autonomy within the empire, a consequence of failed uprisings against the Russians, such as the November Uprising (1830–1), which saw the Polish authorities of the semi-sovereign Kingdom of Poland pitted against the might of the Tsarist military. This conflict, which took on the form of a war between the Polish and Russian armies, prevented the organisation of any larger celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the church's consecration in late 1830. The parish council did not in fact meet for months.Footnote ²⁵ Further turmoil was caused by anti-Russian protests in 1861, during which the second Warsaw pastor Leopold Otto, a participant, had to leave the city for – as it turned out – more than a decade. Then came the January Uprising of 1863–4, not a regular war, but an insurgency.

As time went by the parish continued to change, influenced by the immigration of families of German origin, and the gradual process of acculturation. Lutherans, like their other non-Catholic peers, now had many civil rights hitherto denied to them. Catholic conversions to Protestantism ceased to be illegal. Marriages conducted by pastors became legally binding, and confessionally mixed couples could raise their children in both confessions (the sons usually followed fathers and the daughters followed mothers). The majority of marriages however remained in the same confession. On the other hand, Warsaw Lutherans did not shy away from contacts outside their community. To be sure, their professions encouraged them to stay in touch with their Catholic counterparts and offer them their goods and services. Many church members established businesses in the city, which eventually evolved to become by 1914 the largest manufacturing hub in the country.Footnote ²⁶ Cultural assimilation followed. Few became Catholic, but they did become bound to their new Vaterland. They learned the language – schools ran mainly Polish-language curricula until 1870s when Russian was introduced – and started to embrace Polish culture. The Romantic movement in literature was perhaps the strongest single factor that drew Germans to the local culture. As was expressed, somewhat exaggeratedly, in an article in the most popular Polish journal, Tygodnik Ilustrowany [Illustrated Weekly], run by an enterprising journalist, writer, translator and Lutheran, Ludwik Jenike, ‘almost all of the Evangelical parish's intelligentsia in Warsaw consists of Poles who, bar the names, have nothing German in themselves … not neglecting wider duties towards the country, with whose pursuits and needs they fully sympathise’.Footnote ²⁷ Some parishioners even began to convert to Roman Catholicism.

The need to strengthen the confessional community and re-vitalise its sense of togetherness must have been felt by that time. Lutheran parishes in the Kingdom of Poland (after 1864 increasingly referred to by the authorities as ‘Privislinskiy Kray’, or Vistula Country) had hitherto relied heavily on intellectual support from abroad: Saxon and Prussian theological and liturgical books and universities,Footnote ²⁸ and pastors’ studies were completed in Dorpat (at that time a university town in the Russian Empire, now Tartu in today's Estonia), where Protestant clergy was legally obliged to study.Footnote ²⁹ In 1863 the first Polish-language Warsaw Lutheran periodical appeared, a sign of a developing Protestant public sphere in the kingdom. The bi-weekly Zwiastun Ewangeliczny [Evangelical Herald] was established and run by pastor Leopold Otto, who came from a Polonised family with deep roots in the country. In his 1864 article, an outline of the history of the parish was published for the first time.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 2.

Charles Caïus Renoux, ‘Funeral ceremonies in the Lutheran church’: Polish National Library.

Figure 3.

The Lutheran church with its environs: Illustrated Weekly, 1863: Wikipedia

The 100th anniversary commemoration

All of these changes and achievements are the context for an act of memory: the celebrations of the centenary of the consecration of the Holy Trinity church in Warsaw. This can be seen as an explicit attempt to endow the community with a new sense of shared memory and coherence. The festivities were meant to be parish-based, and were centred on the church itself, the material substance that bound its members together.Footnote ³¹ Otto referred to this mediator of the past and present as a ‘visible monument of the past’.Footnote ³² It was, however, decided that a thorough renovation was due since the last major works had been carried out half a century previously, in 1830.Footnote ³³ Estimates began to be sought from building entrepreneurs in earnest in 1878: bills issued by companies engaged in this enterprise, mainly owned by fellow Lutherans, are still preserved in the archive.Footnote ³⁴ The journalist Jenike presided over the parish council at that time and co-ordinated the works; the architect was Jan Heurich (the Elder), an active member of the parish; and the building works were carried out by the largest developer in Warsaw, a Lutheran called Kazimierz Granzow. Two committees were established: to organise the renovation and to gather the necessary funds. Due to the wealth of its parishioners the parish could fund the entire cost of the works,Footnote ³⁵ while some of the improvements to the interior were donated and or completed without charge by better-off members. The church was not a monument to the past in the legal sense; it was not a listed building because such a definition did not exist in Russia at this time and protection of significant buildings was very limited.Footnote ³⁶ Alterations to the original fabric were concentrated on the interior. The wooden altar was replaced by a marble one, new gilding was added to the columns and entablature, white benches were painted grey and new stairs were added to the chancel.Footnote ³⁷. Zug's classicistic design was not significantly altered, although by today's standards the changes were not inconsequential (see Figure 3).

One act of commemoration was a literary one: the 1864 article by Otto concerning the history of the parish until 1793 was extended and published in 1881 as a separate book, both in Polish and German. Thus parishioners were provided with a historical narrative, which must have strengthened their sense of belonging. It followed the story of Warsaw Lutherans, never particularly numerous and dependent on the stronger Calvinist community, from the fifteenth century, and the attempts to erect their own church in the city, finalised in 1781 and consecrated on 30 December, at a time when mainly German-speaking Lutherans could boast much larger numbers in the country in comparison to mainly Polish-speaking Calvinists, who were also present in the city, and whose new neo-gothic church building was completed just before the Lutheran church's jubilee, in 1880. The third element of commemorations was a new medal, struck by a Lutheran medallist, depicting the church: a reference to a similar medal struck when the building was constructed.Footnote ³⁸ Both the parish chronicle and the medal explained Lutherans’ presence in Warsaw and the legacy of those to whom the nineteenth-century generations could now refer as their spiritual ancestors. To be sure, quite a number of parishioners were in fact descended from the older Warsaw families, but a large sector, difficult to gauge precisely, were nineteenth-century newcomers. For this latter group, which encompassed many of Warsaw's brightest entrepreneurs, these ‘invented’ roots could replace their waning connections with their German places of origin.

The festive Sunday service was conducted by both pastors: Otto (back in Warsaw since 1875; see Figure 4) and Karol (German: Karl) Gustaw Manitius (in Warsaw since 1874) on the morning of 30 December 1881. The celebrations included a small ‘procession’ to the church from a new parish building close by which was used by charitable organisations. Some pastors from other towns in the kingdom were invited, as were representatives of the Russian urban government. Two Warsaw horticultural companies provided flowers. The service itself mirrored the language divisions within the community: the main sermon, delivered by Manitius, was in German; the second, in Polish, along with the final liturgy, by Otto. Interestingly enough, the new parish choir sang a Beethoven cantata in Polish and the closing songs in German.Footnote ³⁹ Otto's sermon was later published as a booklet and distributed by two large printing houses-cum-bookstores, owned by Lutherans. The service was in itself a testimony to the changing language situation: Polish was introduced on a par with German as the language of services and sermons in that same jubilee year, 1881.

Figure 4.

Leopold Otto, c. 1861: Polish National Library

References to the Lutheran community as a community of memory were scattered throughout the text of the Polish sermon. Otto, like proponents of today's memory studies, highlighted the act of remembering the past as a crucial element in building the future (‘in each past also lies the future’). The construction of the sermon was clear: the past of the parish since 1781 was presented as a foundation upon which the future can be built. This past relied not only on the preaching of the Gospel, but also on charitable and social initiatives: running institutions, including a modern hospital in Warsaw, and on the activities of parishioners and parish council leaders of outstanding merit. As Otto emphasised: ‘The past was given to you by the law of inheritance, and you, the living, gathered within the walls of our church, especially the parish members, look and bow before it, and listen to the message from the tomb in order to understand.’Footnote ⁴⁰ The agenda for the future was to adhere to Christ; in other words, it was connected to the retaining of each one's confessional identity.

To stay faithful to the religious tradition did not, however, exclude engagement with the rest of Warsaw society, as was simultaneously being proved, for it was over Christmas (25–27 December 1881) that Warsaw witnessed dramatic scenes, which were a symptom of the growing tensions between the Christian population and its Jewish counterparts. The Jewish population had increased over recent decades due to Russian legislation banning Jewish settlements in villages and many cities in Russia and Lithuania. Jews flocked to Privislinskiy Kray, increasing the anxiety of Poles but also complicating the lives of those Jews who had already lived there for a long time and had become at least partly assimilated into the local culture. A sign of the worsening situation of Jews in the empire was a wave of pogroms in 1881, which may be partly attributed to a generally difficult climate in Europe because of the economic downturn and the ‘long depression’ starting in the 1870s.Footnote ⁴¹ Panic in one of the Catholic churches in Warsaw led to the deaths of a few dozen congregants, and a rumour that the culprit was a Jewish thief, caught red-handed pickpocketing, caused anger. Over the next three days mobs attacked Jewish shops and injured many Jews in Warsaw and in the neighbouring villages. This was a shock to the assimilationist movement in the country, for Jews and the Polish intelligentsia alike. The events were deplored and criticised by Polish authors and public subscriptions were launched to help the victims.

All this left the Lutheran community facing uneasy choices. The main Lutheran celebrations eventually went ahead, but the organisers cancelled a formal dinner at the Warsaw Civil Club, which had been planned for after the service. Instead, the participants (parishioners and invited guests) one by one agreed to hand over their financial contributions for the dinner to meet the needs of the victims, thus expressing their civic commitment.Footnote ⁴² It also mirrored a growing integration of the community within urban society. Sixteen years later, in a state-wide survey, almost 48 per cent of Warsaw's Lutherans declared Polish to be their mother tongue. This was probably an underestimate,Footnote ⁴³ and was certainly an exception in the otherwise mainly German-speaking Church in the kingdom.

The 150th anniversary commemoration

The second jubilee took place in late 1931. The geopolitical and social situation had changed markedly. The First World War had led to a decrease in the number of Warsaw Lutherans. It was a time for final decisions to be made on nationality, forced upon them by the German occupiers of the former Privislinskiy Kray during the war (1915–18). New Lutheran Church authorities, nominated by Germans, tried to restructure it according to the national ideal, re-Germanise it and bind it to the Reich, although they encountered decisive opposition from the clergy, most notably from the General-Superintendent (since 1904/5) Juliusz Bursche, after he returned from internment in Russia in 1917. Cultural Germanness could not remain a regional, a-national identity and Polishness soon saw its emancipation, with the rise of the interwar Polish state after 1918. Everyone had in fact to decide if they were Polish citizens or members of the group now defined as the German national minority. That led to polarisation and sharp divisions within the parish, as well as to a wave of German emigration from Warsaw. Bursche, an assimilated Pole, led the pro-Polish faction in the Warsaw-based Lutheran Church, which included a growing number of Polish pastors (or priests, księża; singular ksiądz, as they started to be more widely called in analogy to the Catholic clergy). In Warsaw he could feel confident in his credentials, as Poles made up three-quarters of the 19,000-odd parish.Footnote ⁴⁴ Not only Warsaw, but the whole new Polish state was heterogeneous, a third of its inhabitants being non-Polish, many of them Protestant. The new policy of the post-partition Lutheran Church in Warsaw, open to the state and loyal to it (even though its position vis-à-vis the state was legally still not fully settled), meant, besides the Polonisation of the clergy, also establishing new Polish-speaking parishes in the former German and Austrian partitions, where separate Unionist (Lutheran-cum-Reformed) Churches, heirs of their nineteenth-century German and Austrian selves, still served the mainly non-Polish population. Bursche's policy met with suspicion from the German part of the Church, which further polarised this community. The German priests who opposed this policy included Alfred Kleindienst of Łuck in Volhynia, the future leader of the official opposition to Bursche (in the form of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Pastoren [the working-group of German pastors]). As Eduard Kneifel, pastor of Brzeziny near Łódź and a historian, has put it, Bursche's policy was increasingly hated by those Lutherans in Poland who retained their German identity because of his drive to Polonise the Church, favouring Polish parishes and taking insufficient care of the German flock.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was the view of a member of a distant parish, but one may extrapolate this opinion to at least a part of the German minority of the Warsaw parish. To be sure, the official German Lutheran publications in Warsaw espoused a generally favourable view of Bursche's policy (the editors of the Hausfreund [the House's Friend], seemed satisfied with the scale of the 150th anniversary celebrations),Footnote ⁴⁶ but Germans in Warsaw had no way to express publicly any opposing views. This policy was of course very supportive towards the Polish state in the context of its complicated geopolitical situation. At times, the state knew how to reciprocate, at least symbolically.

Figure 5.

Anatoliusz Masłowski, photograph of Juliusz Bursche, c. 1920: Polish National Library.

This explains the very official character of the anniversary celebrations, and their scale. And this was despite the fact that they took place – again – in difficult circumstances, as the beginning of the 1930s saw a growing economic crisis after the worldwide collapse of 1929, which only slowly affected agriculture-oriented states like Poland. No costly commemorations could be conducted:Footnote ⁴⁷ the idea, originating in 1929, of installing marble busts of two important Lutheran figures, G. Ringeltaube (the Warsaw pastor back in 1781) and L. Otto, was rejected.Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead, the community limited its actions to more symbolic acts of memory connected to the church building. An album was published in which the material contribution of the parish to Warsaw's urban fabric and public sphere was displayed as in an exhibition. This included a few dozen images of the seats of Warsaw Lutheran charitable institutions, along with the Evangelical Hospital (one of the city's most modern), parish schools (including both boys’ and girls’ gymnasia, or secondary schools) located in different parts of the city, and images of the most outstanding historic leaders of the parish council, including the author of the first Polish dictionary, Samuel Bogumił Linde. The main focus was, however, on the church building, its interior and exterior, and the parish buildings surrounding it. All these images were later published separately as postcards and sold to Warsaw Protestants in a bid to publicise the parish's achievements not only among parishioners, but also among their correspondents.Footnote ⁴⁹

On the day of the anniversary, a solemn service was conducted by Bursche and the parish priest August Loth in the presence of the city authorities, followed by an ‘evening of word and song’ organised by the Society of the Polish Evangelical Youth (Stowarzyszenie Młodzieży Ewangelickiej) and professors from the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at the University of Warsaw (the establishment of the Faculty in 1921 was in itself a sign of good relations between the Church and the authorities). The main celebrations were postponed to the spring of 1932. The Lutheran press, along with – again, as in 1881 – Tygodnik Ilustrowany,Footnote ⁵⁰ welcomed the event by publishing articles devoted to the history of the church building and the Warsaw parish. The community's pride in the church building was expressed by means of historical reflections on its location. The site had been on the periphery of the city at the end of the eighteenth century – according to the narrative – with only wooden sheds and small houses around the church, but in the twentieth century it was at the very centre of the city, surrounded by modern multi-storey apartment houses and representative public edifices, including the wealthiest Warsaw banker's palace, an art gallery and the seat of the Landed Credit Society.

The central element in the programme of celebration was a solemn service in the church, this time with state representation. The church was full, with a congregation of around 5,000, including officials.Footnote ⁵¹ The education minister (the ministry which regulated the functioning of churches) was accompanied by a vice-minister and the chief of the Confessions Department; chiefs of similar departments charged with non-Catholic affairs from the Ministry of the Military Issues and the President's Office; the Warsaw voivode and vice-president, along with the head of the police and a colonel from the General Staff, all were present on that day. Moreover, the spiritual heads of the Orthodox Church in Poland, the Reformed Church and the Methodist Church, not counting the Lutheran Consistory and at least forty Lutheran priests from around the country, were also there. The most important guest was however the Polish president, Ignacy Mościcki, who was greeted outside the church by Lutheran young people and pupils from the parish schools, and inside it by the head of the parish council, senator Józef Evert, A. Loth and one of the council members. The president was seated near the altar, where he could hear the sermon.

The sermon, preached by Juliusz Bursche (see Figure 5), was the key element. Soon (in 1937) to be elected as bishop of the Church, now organised legally within the structures of the state, Bursche presented his vision of the Lutheran communities in Poland, in which he followed in the path of Leopold Otto. The Lutheran Church was legitimised in Roman Catholic Poland by its deep, sixteenth-century roots stemming from the Reformation, which had swept across the Commonwealth and nearly led to the establishment of a separate national Church. According to the published version of the sermon, the Church's recent history owed much to Otto, who believed that Polish Protestants could transform and modernise the whole of society. This mission was obsolete in the twentieth century, but Lutherans could still influence Poles by giving them access to the pure Scripture and helping to make them independent in their beliefs. Bursche did not hesitate to condemn the ‘dark’ moments of Polish history, which were personified by the obscurantist Jesuits and the backward nobility of Saxon times (1697–1763). The Lutherans’ mission was still to some extent to modernise the way Poles thought and to defend Christianity against rising atheism.Footnote ⁵²

One might have gained the impression at that moment that Lutherans formed an extremely important and indispensable part of society, just as the church building had become a key feature in the central Warsaw landscape (see Figure 6). The celebrations were about the new role of Lutherans (and other Evangelicals) in the ‘resurrected Poland’, who had their place in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Warsaw in particular, and were endowed with a mission to revitalise and modernise society. It was indeed the triumph of Bursche's vision, which was legitimised by the presence at the celebration of state authorities. His idea was state-oriented and loyal to the Polish raison d’êtat. This policy can also be seen as a way to put Lutherans on the track of cultural – but not confessional – Polonisation and assuring legitimacy for the Church, which was still, more or less, two-thirds German.Footnote ⁵³

Figure 6.

Maurycy Pusch, ‘The Lutheran church in Warsaw’, 1890s, from the photograph album Vues de Varsovie: Polish National Library

The jubilee occasion showed one more face of the Lutherans in Warsaw and Poland in general. It was the voice of young theologians and priests, who matured on the eve of Polish independence, or after 1918, and who fully embraced both Protestantism and Polishness in its modern form. They were focussed upon the Association of Evangelical Youth, which had as its aim the reassurance of the young in their Protestant identity, countering the trend towards Catholicisation. The evening organised by the association in December 1931 was the main event that day (except for the Sunday service, of course), but in May the next year, the key celebrations were dominated by the higher church officials, and the voice of younger theologians was limited to the press. It was however in the Zwiastun Ewangeliczny that a credo of the young priests, opposed to Bursche, was published by the editor-in-chief Zygmunt Michelis.

He divided the 150 years of the church in Warsaw into four stages: the first two being the stages of organisational development, and the third stage of fighting for Polish independence. This third stage was crucial, but brought with it the danger of Lutheran identity being lost. Access to the Polish irredentist movements and the patriotic fight against Russification often led to full integration with Polish, Roman Catholic society, which also entailed the changing of confession. The fourth stage, after 1918, should, according to Michelis, give way to a regrouping of the Lutherans, and to a fresh attempt at finding support in the confessional tradition and history (since the sixteenth century) in a bid to reassure Polish Protestants in their identity, which also included standing up to the narratives of the proponents of a ‘perennially’ Catholic Polish identity. Poland had to be freed from re-emerging Catholic parochialism, by which was meant the rising nationalistic, and by the same token clerical (Catholic) sentiments in Poland, which evoked similar sentiments among the Catholic Poles in the nineteenth century, now believed by the proponents of the movement to be truly old-fashioned. No-one could now steer society towards Protestantism, as Otto had imagined back in the mid-nineteenth century, but a strong and unambiguous Lutheran voice had the potential to bring plurality and open-mindedness to the Poles.Footnote ⁵⁴ This viewpoint was similar to that of Bursche, but was perceived by its Lutheran proponents as a decisive step forward. Other organisations took the same nationalistic view in the 1930s, one example being the Federation of Polish Evangelicals (Federacja Polskich Ewangelików), which evolved under the guidance of Władysław Ludwik Evert (the son of the senator and head of the parish council) into a secular organisation, which in 1938, shortly before the Second World War, took over control of Zwiastun Ewangeliczny. Footnote ⁵⁵ The celebration of 1931/2 thus served as a true litmus test, mirroring the different paths that Polish Lutheranism followed in the 1930s.

This paper aimed to show how Christian parishes, just like other social groups, conceived of as communities of memory, establish ties between the distant and often barely relevant past and the present, in order to strengthen their cohesiveness. While this stance has been relatively well established in scholarship, this paper ventured to give a diachronic view and show how the same communal-symbolic framework could and was employed by members of a community defined in confessional terms across generations. Both jubilees described here served the needs of Warsaw Lutherans, a heterogenous and sometimes conflicted group, and helped to move them away from their differences and emphasise their shared history as a group in terms of confession and also location in space. These were acts confirming historical continuity and a constant identity, which constituted the construction of ‘time maps’,Footnote ⁵⁶ or establishing a (modern) myth, which masked the complexity of the past.Footnote ⁵⁷ As members or their families came from different regions and joined the group at various points in time, the community bound by a religious creed had also to be located spatially and temporally. The church edifice (conceived of as a Warsaw Lutheran heritage avant la lettre) and its consecration was a natural choice for establishing these ties. By conceptualising the group as a community of memory, the parish priests and secular activists hoped not only to bind it by its common tradition, but they also tried to ‘convey a fabricated sense of destiny’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Reflections on history and, as in this case, a physical object, relate clearly to the category of collective memory, which has the potential of binding the past, the present and the future.

That however does not exhaust the potential conclusions. Besides serving the entire community, the jubilees were endowed with different meanings by different social actors. Acts of memory were and are examples of symbolic activity and are thus connected to bringing meanings, which are always versatile, and, as Victor Turner has pointed out, change within times; symbols evolve and each generation interprets them in its own way.Footnote ⁵⁹ While the proponents of the jubilee in 1881 preferred to stress its unifying value, the jubilee of 1931 was approached in different ways by different actors. This, while expressing group unity vis-à-vis other confessional groups and the state, allowed differences within the group to be displayed versus the inner, opposing groupings. The memory of a community is symbolic, as is the community itself. It is multivocal and relational in nature, and its meaning changes according to the groups towards which it is expressed in the acts of memory. It is thus the practice of everyday activity and independent choices made by the community members that affects the result, and in this case made the celebration a reflection of different opinions and modes of behaviour. That behaviour, which was set and performed within the limits of tradition and approved means of bringing meaning (Sunday services, biblical evening, press articles), was to a large degree constantly invented and imbued with value anew. Thus it was not a simple statement of identity, but a cultural practice, which involved more creative power than is often assumed and efforts to bind together an in fact heterogenous group of parishioners.