Józef Mackiewicz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Józef Mackiewicz in the Słowo editorial office (center of the photo, photo between 1935 and 1939)

Józef Mackiewicz (born April 1, 1902 in Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire ; died January 31, 1985 in Munich ) was a Polish writer.

Life

Józef Mackiewicz was the child of wine merchant Antoni Mackiewicz and Maria Pietraszkiewicz, who came from the landed aristocracy; his older brother was Stanisław Mackiewicz . The family moved to Vilnius in 1907 .

In the Republic of Poland

At sixteen he became a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War . After graduating from high school in 1920, he studied natural sciences at the University of Warsaw , graduating as a biologist. He then became a freelance writer and publicist in Vilnius. In 1924 he married Antonina Kopańska, they had the daughter Halina and separated in 1936. From 1935 he worked in the conservative newspaper Słowo (Das Wort) published by his brother . In 1936 he published a first volume of short stories. The publicist and writer Barbara Toporska (1913–1985) had been his life partner since 1938, and because of the Catholic Church's ban on divorce, he was denied a second marriage. In his volume of reports Bunt rojstów (The uproar in the swamps), published in 1938 , he criticized the nationalist polonization policy in eastern Poland and caused a sensation. In the Vilna area, which was disputed between Poland and Lithuania, he advocated coexistence of language groups.

In World War II

After Poland's military defeat by the Wehrmacht and Red Army in September 1939, Vilnius briefly became part of Soviet Belarus . Vilnius then briefly became part of Lithuania and Mackiewicz in Vilnius was the publisher of the Polish-language daily newspaper "Gazeta Codzienna", which he founded. He now criticized the Lithuanization of the region. Vilnius then became part of the Lithuanian SSR . During this time Mackiewicz stayed as a farm worker and coachman in the countryside near Vilna and thus escaped the Soviet deportation, which was aimed at the Polish intelligentsia in Vilna. In June 1941, Vilnius was conquered by National Socialist Germany. The SS propaganda squadron offered Mackiewicz the management of a Polish-language collaboration newspaper “Goniec Codzienny”, which he refused. But he wrote four columnist articles for the newspaper about the terrible time under the Soviet regime.

On the initiative of the communists of the Polish Workers' Party in the underground, a field court of the AK underground army sentenced him to death as a collaborator. But the AK commander of the Vilna district, who had himself witnessed the Soviet terror, obtained the overturning of the death sentence. In April 1943, the underground leadership approved Mackiewicz's trip to Katyn . Mackiewicz was one of a group of Polish journalists who were asked by the German occupiers to view the exhumation work on the victims of the Katyn massacre . Mackiewicz gave the "Goniec Codzienny" a detailed interview about his impressions of the exhumation work and quoted documents found on the corpses.

In exile

Mackiewicz fled when the Soviet armed forces were approaching in early 1945 from Krakow to Italy to the headquarters of the Anders Army , the Polish units fighting on the side of the British under the command of General Władysław Anders . There he was busy creating a documentary about the mass murder of Katyn. In 1946 he moved to London, where he lived in exile for the next few years under poor conditions. This collection of documents was published in London in 1948 with a foreword by Anders, although Mackiewicz was not mentioned by name as the responsible editor. Anders feared that the Soviet propaganda, referring to Mackiewicz's cooperation with the occupying press during World War II, would attempt to discredit the entire collection of documents.

In 1949 Mackiewicz's first popular science book about Katyn was published on the basis of the document collection, first in German translation in Switzerland. In his publications he pointed out that the Nazi version that the perpetrators of Katyn were "Bolshevik Jews" was untenable. There were also numerous Jews among the murdered Polish officers. He also proved that a sensational report in the Stockholm daily " Dagens Nyheter " on February 13, 1948 about Katyn was a fake. The Swedish newspaper, citing alleged NKVD documents, reported that the Krakow public prosecutor Roman Martini had been murdered in 1946 because he had discovered that the Katyn perpetrators were to be found in the NKVD. His publications on Katyn analyzed the Foreign Office in London, but there was no clear assessment of how out of the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler written memorandum about the attitude of the British government to Causa Katyn ( Butler memorandum stating).

Mackiewicz testified in 1952 in Frankfurt am Main before the Madden Commission , the investigative committee of the American Congress on Katyn, as a witness. In articles for the Polish press in exile, Mackiewicz pointed out that the sensation witness "John Doe", who appeared before the commission, was completely untrustworthy. The English (1951) and American editions of his Katyn book were censored; in the Federal Republic of Germany the translation was only published in a small edition in 1958, but was later reprinted repeatedly.

In 1955 he moved to Munich near the Polish émigré groups that were gathering around Radio Free Europe (RFE) and continued to write essays and political novels. In 1971 Józef Mackiewicz was honored by the Polish government in exile with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta . He worked for RFE in Munich until the end of his life. His urn was buried in St. Andrew Bobola, the Polish Catholic Church in London.

Political positions

Mackiewicz was an opinionated loner who criticized and was sharply criticized. In communist Poland he was on the list of non-persons and his novels were on the index. His main opponent was Bolshevism , he was a symbol of the Polish anti-communist opposition. But he also dealt with the chauvinism of the Polish national-conservative-authoritarian governments under Józef Piłsudski . During the Second World War, he criticized the alliance policy of the Western Allies with the Soviet Union and accordingly also the policy of the Polish government in exile and the Polish Home Army with the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement . During the Cold War , he criticized the programming of Radio Free Europe , the editors of the Polish exiled newspaper Kultura in Paris, which he even refused to accept a literary prize, the adaptation policy of the Catholic Church in Poland and the Eastern policy of the Vatican under John XXIII. and Paul VI.

Until his death, Mackiewicz was also accused in the West of having spread an infamous anti-Soviet lie with his publications about Katyn in an anti-communist madness. In national patriotic circles in Poland he is reproached for his alleged collaboration with the German occupiers in World War II up to the present day. The associations of former combatants of the AK underground army rejected his rehabilitation, and the former Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski also opposed it.

While he castigated historical myths, he considered tsarist Russia to be a state of order with positive traits - the structure of which he described in his novel The Colonel. Seeing the Myassoyedov Affair (1962) go down. In the novels The Path to Nowhere (1955) and Nie trzeba głośno mówić (1969) he dealt with the communist takeover in Poland. In 1957 Mackiewicz wrote the novel Kontra , which dealt with the extradition of the Cossack units to the Soviets by the British at the end of the war.

Works

  • 16-go między trzecią i siódmą . Słowo, Vilnius 1936. (On the 16th between three and seven o'clock)
  • Colorful rojstów . Słowo, Vilna 1938. (The uproar in the swamps)
  • Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów z przedmową gen. Władysława Andersa . Gryf, London 1948 (The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents)
  • Zbrodnia w lesie katyńskim . Gryf, London 1949 (The crime in the Katyn forest)
    • Sprawa mordu katyńskiego. Ta książka była pierwsza . London 2009, ISBN 978-0-907652-65-6 .
    • Katyn - unpunished crime. From political conspiracy to unpunished crime . Thomas, Zurich 1949.
    • The Katyn Wood Murders . Hollis & Carter, London 1951.
  • Never trzeba głośno mówić . Contra, London 1953. (You can't talk about it out loud)
  • Poland and Germany in my view. In: Foreign Policy. Journal for international issues . 1954, pp. 13-19.
  • Droga donikąd . Orbis, London 1955.
    • The way to nowhere . Translation: Armin Droß. Bergstadtverlag, Munich 1959.
  • Karierowicz . Orbis, London 1955. (The careerist)
  • Cons . Instytut Literacki, Paris 1957.
    • Tragedy on the Drava or Freedom betrayed . Translation: Armin Droß. Bergstadtverlag, Munich 1957.
  • The so-called East of Europe . Translation by Ulrike Bischoff. In: Marek Klecel: Poland between East and West. Polish essays of the 20th century. An anthology . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 1995, pp. 150-166. (first 1957)
  • Sprawa pułkownika Miasojedowa . Świderski, London 1962.
    • The colonel. The Myassoyedov affair. A historical novel . Translation: Wolfgang Grycz. Pfeiffer, Munich 1967.
  • Zwycięstwo prowokacji . Self-published, Munich 1962.
    • Victory of provocation. The phases of the development of communism in Russia and Poland and the question of German-Polish relations . Translation: Wolfgang Dohrmann, Artur Roland. Bergstadtverlag, Munich 1964.
  • Pod każdym niebem . Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, London 1964. (Under every sky)
  • Leva wolna . Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, London 1965. (Left ran)
  • W cieniu krzyża . Kontra, London 1972. (In the shadow of the cross)
  • Watykan w cieniu czerwonej gwiazdy . Kontra, London 1975. (Vatican in the shadow of the red star)
  • Facty, przyroda i ludzie . Kontra, London 1984. (facts, nature and people)
  • with Barbara Toporska: Droga Pani . Contra, London 1984. (Madam)

literature

  • Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime (= C.-H.-Beck Paperback . Volume 6192). Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67366-5 .
  • Józef Mackiewicz in the Munzinger archive , accessed on October 19, 2015 ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Krzysztof Ruchniewicz , Marek Zybura (Ed.): Between (Soviet) Russia and Germany. History and politics in the work of Józef Mackiewicz (1902–1985) (= Studia Brandtiana . Volume 4). Fiber, Osnabrück 2012, ISBN 978-3-938400-57-9 .
  • Marek Zybura : Józef Mackiewicz i krytycy, antologia tekstów . Wydawnictwo LTW, Łomianki 2009
  • John Neubauer: Exile. Home of the Twentieth Century. In: John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Ed.): The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021773-5 . (English p. 33f. ).
  • Włodzimierz Bolecki: Kultura (1946-2000). In: John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Ed.): The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe. A compendium. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021773-5 . (English)
  • Reinhard Veser : Speaking out loud about the most difficult questions. The novels Józef Mackiewicz. In: Jahrbuch Polen 2003. Volume 14, Deutsches Polen Institut, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, ISSN  1432-5810 / ISSN  1863-0278 .
  • Klaus-Peter Friedrich: The "Józef Mackiewicz Case" and Polish Contemporary History. In: Journal of History . 2000, pp. 697-717.
  • Czesław Miłosz : Koniec Wielkiego Xięstwa. O Jozefie Mackiewiczu. In: Kultura. H. 5, Paris 1989, pp. 102-120.

Web links

Commons : Józef Mackiewicz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Klaus-Peter Friedrich: The "Case Józef Mackiewicz". ZfG, 2000, pp. 697-717.
  2. ^ Obituary in: Josef Mackiewicz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1985 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Jacek Trznadel, Józef Mackiewicz i inni pisarze świadkowie Katynia, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 5 (1995), pp. 25-26.
  4. ↑ John P. Fox: The Katyn Case and the Propaganda of the Nazi Regime. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Volume 30, 1982, issue 3, pp. 462-499 ( PDF ).
  5. ↑ Józef Mackiewicz, Widziałem na własne oczy, in: Goniec Codzienny , June 3, 1943, p. 3.
  6. ↑ Zbrodnia Katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. London 1948, p. 261.
  7. ↑ Marek Zybura, Józef Mackiewicz jako świadek i monografista zbrodni katyńskiej w powojennych Niemczech, in: Józef Mackiewicz (1902-1985). Świadek krótkiego stulecia. Pod red. Krzysztofa Ruchniewicza i Marka Zybury. Łomianki 2013, p. 91.
  8. ↑ Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. London 1948, p. 277.
  9. ^ Wojciech Materski: Murder Katyński. Siedemdziesiąt lat drogi do prawdy. Warszawa 2010, pp. 50-51.
  10. ^ The Butler Memorandum, p. 11.
  11. ↑ United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre, The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty -second Congress, first [-second] session, on investigation of the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia. Washington: US Govt. Print. Off., 1952.
  12. ↑ Józef Mackiewicz, Tajemnicza śmierć Iwana Kriwoziercewa, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 7 (1997), pp. 366-367.
  13. ↑ Maciej Urbanowski, Mackiewicz versus Skiwski in: Józef Mackiewicz (1902-1985). Świadek krótkiego stulecia. Pod red. Krzysztofa Ruchniewicza i Marka Zybury. Łomianki 2013, pp. 123–126.
  14. ↑ Jacek Trznadel, Józef Mackiewicz i inni pisarze świadkowie Katynia, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 5 (1995), pp. 25-26.
personal data
SURNAME Mackiewicz, Józef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish writer and emigrant
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1985
Place of death Munich