On the Patriotism of Foreign Wives
The genesis of this story is that the president of PAU instructed me to provide some title for it. I then thought about how interesting a field of research it would be to examine, in the light of memoirs (not only published ones) and old correspondence, as well as reliable oral traditions – to examine the situation of nationally mixed marriages, which occurred quite frequently in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. So I gave the title as above, because after all, the entire cycle of our lectures concerns patriotism. But someone immediately pointed out to me that there were also foreign husbands who became Polish patriots. Of course. My intention is only to signal a topic that could, and perhaps should, interest sociologists, psychologists, cultural historians, and historians in general, especially at the threshold of our entry into the European Union. What especially prompted me to address this topic were those oral traditions, sometimes supported, as I mentioned, by handwritten correspondence or memoirs, and those three books I read not too long ago: “Europe in the Family” by Maria Czapska (1970), the catalog of the Henryk Rodakowski exhibition, edited by Anna Król (1994), and “Memoirs” by Michał Pawlikowski (1998). Maria Czapska’s mother was an Austrian from a family that had been settled on the Elbe for hundreds of years, Maria’s grandmother, the wife of Emeryk Czapski, the creator of the Czapski Museum, came from the Baltics, i.e., from a cultural mix of German-Russian-Latvian.
Rodakowski’s wife was Austrian, and Michał Pawlikowski’s beloved grandmother was a German from Swabia. To draw any generalizing conclusions from such mixtures, one would need to have much more abundant material. But already here, certain similarities strike, which probably are not so difficult to explain.
The mother of Prince Witold Czartoryski, a significant figure in Galicia even during the First World War, was the daughter of a Czech painter. The very caste-like Viennese-Galician society frowned a little on this misalliance, which could be one of the reasons for the marriage’s willing move to the Polish countryside, to Pełkiń. It was probably in Pełkiń that the eleven children of Prince Witold, i.e., the grandchildren of that Czech lady, were raised, among them such outstanding people as the Dominican Father Michał, who died in the Warsaw Uprising. The insightful historian of Polish Renaissance thought, Paweł Czartoryski, and Urszula Czartoryska, author of an important book on the role of photography in art, are already the next generation. Well, this eleven spoke unanimously about their Czech grandmother: it was primarily grandma who taught us Polishness, which undoubtedly meant that she deepened and strengthened their conscious and reasonable patriotism. Let us compare their conviction with the memories of Maria Czapska – author of excellent studies on the history of Polish Romanticism, sister of the painter Józef – who writes about herself and her siblings that these children of an Austrian mother and a completely nationally indifferent father, raised in White Ruthenia by French and German women, were characterized by a fervent Polish patriotism (in the French edition there is even “aggressive” patriotism), undoubtedly instilled in them by their mother. Mrs. Czapska, at the age of twelve, told herself that she must marry a Pole because Poles are a very unhappy nation. She realized this resolution and developed it by raising her children. It was the mother who taught them to sing “God Save Poland,” as well as the Czech national anthem, and she, as Maria Czapska writes, cultivated the ability to think about Poland’s past and the legacy that we all received from this past, along with learning and delving into prayer.
Michał Pawlikowski’s German grandmother never learned Polish well and preferred to speak German herself, but when Michał once, wanting to please her, greeted her in the morning with some German phrase, she suddenly replied in Polish: are you some kind of Swabian, talking to me in German?
Finally, Rodakowski. A large correspondence between him and his Austrian wife has survived. If anything temporarily separated them, they would sometimes write to each other twice a day, always in French. The only almost Polish words that appear in these letters concern the rural estate, like barn, threshing floor, etc. There is more German, because if they only tell each other about a conversation that took place in German, they switch to that language and write it in Schwabacher. They settled very comfortably in Paris and it seemed that they lacked nothing there. But Rodakowski insisted that he must raise the children in Polish, so despite the painter’s brothers’ urging not to leave Paris, as he would lose contact with the artistic community, they packed up their mansion in Passy and moved to Pałachicz far beyond Lviv, and then to Bortniki, almost as exotically located. As far as is known, Mrs. Rodakowska, raised between Vienna and Paris, never complained about these relocations. During the trip to Poland, the children, to the surprise and joy of their parents, were delighted with everything, and even earlier the four or five-year-old son of the Rodakowskis dictated a note in French asking his father for some Polish book, because he definitely wants to learn Polish. Who helped the toddler compose this note if not the mother, who almost never parted from the children? (Zygmunt Rodakowski learned Polish perfectly. His biography in the “Polish Biographical Dictionary” is an extremely interesting page in the history of Polish technology).
I mentioned a moment ago that if we can discern certain similarities between the lives of these very different ladies, their explanation may turn out to be simple. For example, this: many wives from the late Romantic era took the principle of ubi tu Caius very seriously – where you are, there I should be. The husbands and fathers-in-law of these ladies were often imprisoned in various fortresses, and they themselves sometimes brought small children to prison – their patriotism was one form of marital fidelity and constancy. By marrying Poles, foreign women somehow connected with their duties, as well as their vision of history.
Another explanation, perhaps more psychological. A French writer noted that while men often like intellectual speculation, sometimes a little abstract, for women, even a religious idea or thought c’est toujours quelqu’un: it is always someone. If that someone was a husband or son, the ladies identified with the cause in a particularly deep way. The third explanation is sociological in turn. Regardless of their origin, foreign ladies brought into the atmosphere of Polish homes, often strongly disrupted due to the vicissitudes of our history, a certain order, which in our country is usually called bourgeois. Emilia Plater would probably not have been the ideal of Emerykowa Czapska, who, after her husband’s death, meticulously prepared the edition of further volumes of his numismatic catalog. I observed in the granddaughters and even great-granddaughters of those foreign wives strong traces of those habits of order, which we unfortunately often lacked. We lacked them not only for historical reasons but also due to the predominance of the rural culture model, which left its mark on Polish cities, prevailing over urban culture, which triumphed in many regions of Western Europe. Simplifying the matter enormously, one could say that rain, snow, thaws, heat, and drought were more important for our lives than time marked by clocks. And foreign wives brought under Polish roofs specific elements of metronome customs, even when they were originally drawn to Poland by the custom of impromptu.