Abstract
The aim of these three lectures is to investigate the impact of three separate but interrelated phenomena about the way present-day Poles see the past. The first of these is the extent to which the traditional Polish belief that the study of the past has clear and obvious lessons for the present is still valid today. The second is the way that the Poles’ idealized vision of their country as historically a “martyr and hero”—necessary to sustain the difficult and long-lasting struggle for national independence—has been undermined since 1989. The last is the weakening of interest in the past in Poland under the impact of the need for national consolidation, of globalization, and of the postmodernist concept that the past is merely an ideological construct and that each different version of it serves the needs of the individual or group using it to tell their own “story.”