The global rise of populism in the contemporary world (Mudde 2004, Moffit 2016) and the recent historical museum boom in Poland, are related to changing discourses about the postwar European past (Judt 2006, Ochman 2013) and redefining national collective identity (Gillis 1994, Zubrzycki 2006). 'Populism was a new political phenomenon for a new era in history. Modern populism was anchored in the Cold War and was originally a response to the crisis of political representation that had first created fascism and then contributed to its demise' (Finchelstein 2017:211). The main purpose of my presentation will be to show how populism permeates history. What I mean is historical discourse which is constructed mainly on the nation-centered narrative. What happens when historical narratives become populist? In my approach historical populism is characterized by an affirmation of "the people", vilification of national and global elites, and the effective use of affective tools: employing anger, pride and blame in public communication (Mueller 2016). It is strongly emotional and full of moral judgment which reveals an irrefutable division between 'we-the people' and 'they' - who are outside of the core of the nation. But who are the people? From the perspective of discourse analysis such collective identity is always a question of symbolic representation.
Currently in East Europe, and especially in Poland, we are witnessing a symbolic struggle for a right to the naming and creating national identity in terms of historical politics (Mink, Neumayer 2013, Łuczewski 2017). One of the most spectacular elements of this policy is the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk opened in 2017. We can find there various discursive strategies constructing the national identity representation on many different levels: intellectual, affective, and sensual. I would like to analyse the transition from the victimisation to building heroic ethos of Poles as a subject of war history (Markowska 2019). After a number of changes in the permanent exhibition visitors can observe the process of collective re-identification. I intend to compare visual materials which were established one by one as the final elements of the whole museal narrative. In the primary movie we find a story about Polish society and other societies of Eastern Europe living behind the Iron Curtain. In the new one introduced just several months after the opening of the museum we can admire a cartoon story about Polish warriors who won and finished the war in 1989 entitled "The Unconquered". Thus, there is a need to ask a plausible question about its new political and symbolic stake: an attempt of creating a new subject of historical discourse: not polish society - but a united 'nation' identified with 'people'. This example will allow me to show how historical populism is constructed, and how it works.
