In Memoriam: Władysław Markiewicz Has Died at the Age of 97

‘I also dream of the concentration camp. I do not like to talk about it, not even to my children. … But some kind of compensation is necessary. For me, compensation was the 12 years I spent on the German-Polish Textbook Commission; that was my revenge on those who wanted to destroy me in the concentration camp.’ (W. Markiewicz, 2 December 1995)

Władysław Markiewicz was born in Ostrów, Greater Poland, in 1920. In 1941 he came to Hessen as a forced agricultural labourer, before being moved to Wiener Neustadt with a railroad repair unit. In late 1941 he received a prison sentence of several years for ‘conspiratorial actions’, leading to detention in the concentration camp Mauthausen-Gusen for two years, among other places. After liberation, he joined the Polish combat forces in Italy and England before returning to Poland in 1947. After the war Markiewicz studied sociology at the Adam Mickiewicz University Poznán (UAM). In 1962, one year after publishing his second book, he became director of the Institute for Sociology at the UAM, where he specialised on the history of sociology and questions of political culture, especially concerning the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1966 to 1973, he became director of the Western Institute in Poznán; from 1972 he was a professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw. From 1972 to 1983 Władysław Markiewicz served as secretary of the Division of Social Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), where he was a member of the presidium from 1972 to 1989 and vice-president from 1984 to 1989.

From the first German-Polish textbook conference in February 1972 onwards, Markiewicz was chairman of the Polish side, which led to his appointment as deputy president of the Polish UNESCO Commission. After he and Georg Eckert institutionalised and secured the work of the Textbook Commission before Eckert’s death in early 1974, Władysław Markiewicz and Walter Mertineit (PH Flensburg) took on co-chairmanship from 1974 to 1984, leading the Commission through a difficult period surrounding the publication and discussion of their recommendations in 1976. Markiewicz’s dismissal as Polish chairman of the Textbook Commission at the end of 1984 had already begun to crystallise in the summer of 1980: right after the major wave of strikes and the subsequent approval of free unions in Poland, Markiewicz – who had maintained good relations with the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party since the 1950s – gave an interview with the magazine Kultura in which he expressed understanding of the mass protests and criticised the propaganda of success as a ‘mockery of the people’s intelligence’. Despite his dismissal, he remained one of the most visible heads of the German-Polish Textbook Commission.

Up until a few years ago, Władysław Markiewicz continued to conduct research and teach, always following politics and current developments in Poland, Europe and the rest of the world. His 2016 autobiography, conceived of in interview form, is titled Sto lat przeciw głupocie (One Hundred Years against Stupidity) and should be understood programmatically: it reflects Markiewicz’s leftist, liberal beliefs, which always brushed against the current political grain. It is only a shame that he was unable to round off the full one hundred years.

The GEI and the Joint German-Polish Textbook Commission are mourning our companion of many years, who embodied the ideas of German-Polish understanding and cooperation in scholarship and education with passion and conviction. We would like to extend our deepest condolences to his family.