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OCR
314 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 superWest. 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.
