Kultura (Paris)
Kultura was the most important journal of Polish emigration , Polonia , after the Second World War . It had a formative influence on the intellectual and political life of Poland.
Kultura appeared in the years 1947 to 2000 and was significantly connected to the person of the editor Jerzy Giedroyc (1906-2000). In 1946 he founded the Instytut Literacki publishing house in Rome , which was supposed to promote Polish literature abroad. This is where the first issue of Kultura appeared in June 1947 . The second responsible director of the first issue was the writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński . Just a month later, the entire team moved to the town of Maisons-Laffitte near Paris , where the magazine appeared monthly from autumn 1947 until its end.
In addition to Giedroyc, the writers Józef Czapski , Zygmunt Hertz and Zofia Hertz worked on it . It soon became apparent that the charismatic figure Giedroyc, who stood for the traditions of a liberal and democratic Poland and a good relationship with neighbors in West and East, should gather leading representatives of the cultural life of Poles in emigration. One of the closest collaborators after his escape was Czesław Miłosz , who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature . Those who profited so decisively from the “Kultura” milieu in the following years were world-famous writers such as Witold Gombrowicz or Marek Hłasko , but also important authors for the Polish context such as Andrzej Bobkowski , Jerzy Stempowski or the journalist Juliusz Mieroszewski . A series of books, the Biblioteka Kultury , has been published in parallel since 1953 , and the historical journal Zeszyty Historyczne since 1962 .
The special themed editions of the "Kultura", which u. a. dealt with the Polish-German , the Polish-Russian, but above all with the Polish-Ukrainian relationship . The Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation after the fall of communism, but especially after the orange revolution of 2004, would not have been possible without the intellectual preparation by the Kultura . The same applies to the relationship between Poland and Lithuania . Giedroyc was made an honorary citizen of Lithuania in 1997 for his services to bringing the two countries closer together. Giedroyc's death on September 14, 2000 also marked the end of the magazine.
literature
- Włodzimierz Bolecki : Kultura (1946–2000) , in: John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (eds.): The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009
- Bernard Wiaderny: “School of Polish Thought”. The Polish exile magazine “Kultura” in the struggle for Poland's independence 1947–1991. Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2018.