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Tomasz Kalniuk
by Edward Said: "As a result, the Orient seems to be not so much a vast area beyond
the known and tame European world, but a limited space, theatre stage open only
to Europe (...), a stage, on which the whole East has been closed" (Said 1991:
105).
The super-West was becoming no less attractive than the esoteric East. For
many observers in 1930s, Americans were superheroes. Capitalists from across the
ocean seemed as adept at financial and technological matters as Hindu gurus were
at spiritual ones. America was the country of technological wonders, whose charm
seemed even intensified during the Polish interwar period by those two contrasting
realities: on one hand there was America, almost untouched by wars, enjoying plenty
of constitutional freedom; on the other hand there was Europe, hardly recovered
from one war and facing the imminence of another. Desire for the new world was
also prompted by the mass media. The printed word and photography facilitated
consumption on the symbolic level. The Pomeranian press of that time functioned
as a communication channel (Schindler 2002: 236) that facilitated encounters
with Others in the domestic space. Newspapers, to increase their attractiveness
and gain more readers, published photographs more and more often. These images
often excited people’s imaginations and, in a way, materialised the idea of the super¬
West. This phenomenon confirmed Susan Sontag’s opinion when she stated that
she sees addictive behaviours in photography, intrinsically linked with the state of
contemporary societies characterised by a constant desire for goods (Sontag 2009:
33). Sontag in her deliberations perceives photographers as poachers continuing
imperialism by ‘shooting’ pictures of people: “Taking photos of people is to rape
them—to see them the way they never see themselves, to gain knowledge about
them, which they will never have, and this way to make them objects, which can
be symbolically taken over” (Ibid.: 22).
The Other from a Distant Country
Because every place without us is America...
(Mysliwski 2008: 334)
The analysis of press material from 1935-1939 shows an increasing interest in the
world of Others. Although confrontational concepts of ‘Others as enemies’ prevail,
we can observe the emergence of other ways of presentation. The Pomeranian press
from the interwar period presents strangeness as the ‘anti-world’, although in doing
so it was not devoid of a fascinated tone. It is an example of strangeness manifesting
itself, as pointed out in numerous studies, in a bipolar fashion: tremendum et
fascinans (Otto 1993; Caillois 1995).
In the Polish interwar press, the world of Others and the Others themselves are
misfits who undermine fundamental beliefs of social groups (Perzanowski 2009:
48-49). Normal cognitive categories fail in the attempt of their clear definition.