How Polish history is viewed by other countries textbooks

i wouldn't. i guarantee you that what they say isn't even close to the truth.. they again think Stalin was the greatest leader ever.


them? guzzle on..


not really


you either flunked or there is something else wrong with you as US books definitely talk about the partitions and PL becoming a country again after WW1.. Copernicus is also mentioned.. there may be a few other things.. well, of course the 89 stuff or what not.


it's true because it is true.. it may say it;s a myth or whatever, grandpa told me otherwise.. so i tend to believe him as he was there on the front line when the nazis came through on sept 1.. and not some wiki or any other source.. poles had cavalry and not tanks so they fielded what they had..


lol

yes, i must be stupid if I do not cite wikipedia as a legitimate source....you poor fool.

In the honours history course in Ireland (Polish matura course) the only mention of Poland in our history books is the invasion of the nazis and then during tha Fall of the Iron Curtain. If you did music you might of heard that Chopin was Polish and Copernicus might have been mentioned in passing in Science and that's about it really.

More likely...that Copernicus was German and Chopin French.

Were they?

Were they like John Aldridge & Ray Houghton?

So they couldn't stand to be German and French. Why did they prefer to be Polish? What is so attractive in being Polish? If you answer that question successfully, you will find the key to promote Poland abroad.

Chopin had Polish mother and he felt that he was Polish. He took many inspirations from Polish folk music. So yes he is Polish.

Copernicus case is indeed disputable.

I am sure it depended on how they were raised, treated by others, and what influences they had.
Obama is black and white, but he embraces one and denounces [seemingly at times] the other.

How about this...we're not as organised nor do we have nice drivable roads like our oft-misunderstood Germen nighbours, but at least we not cheese-eating surrender monkeys like the French (who robbed Tatar off us)

He felt he was half Polish?

Obama?

He felt half Polish?

yes. he even asked for his heart being bury in Poland in the place he was born (Żelazowa Wola).

His father even though he was a Frenchman, was very attached to Polish society during the times of partition:


Here you have also about Chopin's feeling on his nationality: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fryderyk_Chopin#Nationalism

His father took part in the Kościuszko's uprising, spoke fluent Polish and despite being a Frenchman considered himself a Pole saying it openly in most letters.

Unlike the son, who could have lived his life as a Pole but instead declared himself French.

so why he ask to burry his heart in Poland?

Not sure this quite fits into your citizenship schema, Hal. Declaring oneself Polish after 1795 was perhaps a little more problematic than it has become of late. The kind of args you've used about fellow PFers don't really apply straightforwardly avant la lettre, especially in Chopin's case (born 1810, way after Poland ceased to exist on the map). By the same reasoning, what are we to make of fellow Parisian Poles like, well, Mickiewicz?

Secondly, don't forget that Chopin was a musician of the kind of wan, nervous disposition that would have guaranteed a heart attack at even the mention of taking up cudgels. Not one of life's resistance fighters. His, erm, forte lay elsewhere.

Sit back and enjoy the oeuvres. Or, if you're like me, develop early onset arthritis trying to play the damned things :)

Mickiewicz is a mess ethnically - and just shows what utter nonsense it is to claim any sort of "100% Polish"ness. When you look at what different people claim him as, it's absolutely impossible to make any judgement on what he actually was.

About the only thing that can't be argued is that he spoke Polish.

Nope, he's Polish.

Oh yes, he was:

O Lithuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee.

Of course, that was the region he was born in and loved, just like some of my famiy was born in Wilno and loved it, but he wrote it in polish, his parents were both polish and his first language was polish (he couldnt speak lithuanian).

So yeah he was Polish.

Pantomime season again - lovin' it :)

Not only that, my dear friend! He invented the concept himself and put it into practice.

youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7a6j17VWhBc

...national identities are constructed. They're invented. They're, in a way, imaginary. One of the most interesting sort of historical things you could do as an historian is to try to figure out, from where do these identities come? Language plays a lot of it.

Plenty of Lithuanians couldn't speak Lithuanian - the language of the nobility was Polish. No different to how in the Middle Ages in England, French was the language of choice among the educated classes, not English.

But there's certainly sufficient doubt about just what he was - a crossbreed, like most Poles, would be the best answer :)

Watch the video. Here goes an interesting part of the presentation:

Let's look at why at the end of the nineteenth century Lithuanian nationalism develops.

Who spoke the Lithuanian language? It was spoken by the peasants. At the end of the nineteenth century, you've suddenly got all these Lithuanian intellectuals and grand dukes and priests and various people saying, "Wait a minute. We are Lithuanians and happily, the Lithuanian peasantry has saved our language." The last Lithuanian duke who spoke Lithuanian died before Columbus discovered America, Tim Snyder informed me. Some may say, "These Lithuanian peasants, we won't treat them anymore as the scum of the earth. They have preserved our language for us." Suddenly, you have poets writing in Lithuanian. It's no longer a disgrace to be seen as a Lithuanian. One of these poets, a guy called Kudirka, who died in 1899, he recalled when he was in school as a smart Lithuanian kid, he said, "My self preservation instinct told me not to speak in Lithuanian and to make sure that no one noticed that my father wore a rough peasant's coat and could only speak Lithuanian. I did my best to speak Polish, even though I spoke it badly."

Kudirka's story (continuation):

"When my father and other relatives visited me, I stayed away from them when I could see that fellow students or gentlemen were watching." He was embarrassed to be basically Lithuanian and the son of a Lithuanian peasant. "I only spoke with them at ease when we were alone or outside. I saw myself as a Pole and thus as a gentleman. I had imbibed the Polish spirit." By the end of the century he sees himself as a Lithuanian. He is one of these people who are pushing Lithuanian nationalism and it is embraced. How does this physically happen? You don't wake up and say, "I was Polish yesterday and a subject of the czar, because Poland is divided between Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. But if you were in the Russian part of what they called Congress Poland, then suddenly today I'm Lithuanian. How does that happen? Because Lithuania is next to Germany. This is also something that will make you again think of what I said about the Enlightenment..

Why only his heart? Why did he request that the vast majority of his body was not buried in Poland?


He could easily have lived in Paris as a Pole. Admittedly his passport wouldn't have been Polish but he certainly didn't have to use the French citizenship which he had been born with.

O tem że dumać na paryskim bruku,
Przynosząc z miasta uszy pełne stuku,
Przeklęstw i kłamstwa, niewczesnych zamiarów,
Za poznych żalów, potępieńczych swarów!

Biada nam, zbiegi, żeśmy w czas morowy
Lękliwe nieśli za granicę głowy!
Bo gdzie stąpili, szła przed nimi trwoga,
W każdym sąsiedzi znajdowali wroga,
Aż nas objęto w ciasny krąg łańcucha
I każą oddać co najprędzej ducha.

What can be my thoughts, here on the streets of Paris,
when I bring home from the city ears filled with noise,
with curses and lies, with untimely plans,
belated regrets, and hellish quarrels?

Alas for us deserters, that in time of pestilence,
timid souls, we fled to foreign lands!
For wherever we trod, terror went before us,
and in every neighbour we found an enemy;
at last they have bound us in chains, firmly and closely,
and they bid us give up the ghost as quickly as may be.

Because then Ryan Air would have charged full price.

Probably because he considered the heart to be symbolically important and the rest of the body
to be just organic waste. That's why he wanted his heart to be burried in Poland.


As far as I know, Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola and France had always followed
ius soli and not ius sanguinis, so what do you mean "French citizenship which
he had been born with"?

You are mistaken. The 1804 French civil code (in force when he was born and when his parents were married) makes it crystal clear that Chopin was born French. Please see title 1, chapter 1, paragraph 10 "Every child born of a Frenchman in a foreign country is French. Every child born in a foreign country of a Frenchman who shall have lost the quality of a Frenchman, may at any time recover this quality by complying with the formalities prescribed in the ninth article."

If you also look at paragraph 12 of the same chapter, you'll see that Chopin's mother was also French (she became French on her marriage) "The foreigner who shall have married a Frenchman, shall follow the condition of her husband." I don't know whether Poland at that time permitted its citizens to have dual nationality or whether a Pole who took another nationality was by operation of law stripped of their Polish nationality.

Here is a link to an English translation of the 1804 French Civil Code.
napoleon-series.org/research/government/c_code.html