Not only Polish artists referred to uprising stories. One of the foreign bands interested in the history of the Warsaw Uprising is the Swedish black/death metal group Marduk, which specialises in war and religious themes (ranging from satanic to biblical). Their Warsaw-centred song can be found on the 2004 album Plague Angel, which contains other songs referring to Central-European history. These include The Hangman of Prague telling the story of Reinhard Heydrich, the organiser of Operation Tannenberg (which resulted in the murder of 20,000 Polish intellectuals) and of the terrifying Wannsee conference dealing with ‘all the necessary preparations for the global solution of the Jewish question on the European area under German influence. The Final Solution to the European Jewish Question.’
How did Marduk discuss the uprising? The lyrics can be translated like this:
Annihilation, obliteration, cremation,
Death declaration, genocide by the triumphant,
Crushing the resistance, inflicting pain,
Fierce sacrifice, rule of terror,
Draconian punishments sealing the fate,
Proudly presenting the moments washed down with blood.
'Morowe panny' by Majelonek
Malejonek's ‘Morowe Panny’ album, photo: press materials Dariusz Malejonek is one of the leading Polish alternative music artists of the 1980s, who performed in famous Polish bands such as Izrael, Moskwa and Armia, and later founded the band Maleo Reggae Rockers. Today, he is mostly associated with Christian music, like the rock band 2Tm2,3 and the children’s band Arka Noego.
In 2012, Malejonek released an album called Morowe Panny (Daring Girls) on which female artists paid tribute to women who fought in the uprising. The album is described as ‘a multi-layered campaign promoting contemporary femininity (…) It refers to the history of women heroes of the Warsaw Uprising.’
Among vocalists who contributed to the project were Jadwiga Basińska, Lilu, Mona, Marika, Anna Brachacek, Katarzyna Groniec, Halina Mlynkova, Paulina Przybysz, Anita Lipnicka and the hip-hop duo Paręsłów. In the song Idziemy w Noc (Going Into the Night) Marika sings:
Zabrałeś jakąś wodę, strasznie tu gorąco
Przysiągłbyś jak dziewczyna w tańcu na zabawie
Lecz oni idą w noc jak w bagno i na końcu
Zamiast się kochać z sobą – kochają w Warszawie
Did you take some water, it’s so hot in here
Like a girl dancing at a party, you’d swear brother
But they’re going into the night like into a swamp and in the end
It’s Warsaw the make love to – instead of each other
It is worth mentioning the discussion which recently took place in the press. In her book Płeć Powstania Warszawskiego (The Gender of the Warsaw Uprising), Weronika Grzebalska proposed a neologism that could underline the gender of the women fighting in the uprising – as a result, Polish gained a new word, ‘powstanka’ (the English equivalent could be translated as ‘insurgentess’). Ewelina Kaczmarek wrote for Kultura Liberalna:
When I first saw ‘powstanka’ when reading Weronika Grzebalska’s book, I frowned. But after I read the entire publication, this reference to the women fighting in the Warsaw Uprising no longer seemed unfamiliar and weird. I was surprised how easy it was to get used to it.
Krystyna Zachwatowicz, a professor of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, set designer and field nurse during the Uprising had a different opinion. She wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza:
Why can’t the women fighting in the uprising be full powstańcy [insurgents] but have to be ‘powstanki’ which sounds like a diminutive? Did they fight in a powstanko [a little uprising], not a powstanie [uprising]? The feminist word formation tackled a very delicate matter here: today, powstanki are elderly women, who are having their life reduced to somebody else’s – and not their – imagination. None of them had so far realised that she was actually a powstanka and everyone we spoke to was surprised by this fact, some even felt ridiculed. After all, powstanka is not that different from wańka-wstańka [a Polish word for roly-poly toys – ed.].
‘Głośniej od Bomb’ by Pjus
