The Striped-Sock-Wearing Polish Beatniks: The Life & Styles of the Bikiniarze
With their striped socks, slicked-back hair, suave suits and soft spot for jazz, the bikiniarze – the American-influenced youth subculture of the early post-war period – became a prominent part of post-war life in Poland.
Particularly rife in the utopian socialist realist district of Nowa Huta, but also found across Poland, the bikiniarze had an influential, if often controversial, impact on Polish culture during the early years of the communist-regime era.
But just how did Americana take hold in Poland, then under the oppressive communist regime? And how far did the bikiniarze – with their leisurely approach to life – really rebel against official culture?
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In November 1951, picture of the so-called bikini boys. In the photo, along with the evidence from the case, from the left: Burmeister, Wysocki, Grochulski and Ciołek, photo: Antoni Nowosielski / PAP
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The word ‘bikiniarze’ was coined around the late 1940s. As Rodger P. Potocki Jr notes, according to the general consensus, the term was inspired by the growing popularity of neckties which featured a variety of hand-painted images of America – ranging from depictions of women lounging around in bikinis, to decidedly more ominous images of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll. Surprisingly, this imagery was of vast cultural influence in Poland – ‘American, exotic, erotic, and explosive, all in one’ (Katherine Lebow):
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The birth of the ‘Atomic Age’ had a big impact upon Polish youth and it was common for members of youth subcultures like the bikiniarze and gangs to use nicknames such as ‘Atom,’ ‘Atomik’ and ‘Bomba.’
Many poems and songs, writes Potocki, also described Western youth counter-culture as having roots in ‘Bikini’.
Nonetheless, the term ‘Bikiniarze’ was initially used as a pejorative term by the regime to refer to the Western styles, active consumerism and hooligan behaviour of Polish youth. American culture was criticised and ridiculed in the press and in schools – as part of campaigns, drawings were disseminated of bikinarze-looking characters, depicted as slouching around in ill-fitting American attire and pursing on Camel cigarettes. The backlash against the bikiniarze could also, at times, become physical, with individuals engaging in such behaviour getting beaten up, expelled, and even prosecuted.
Counter-culture in a communist utopia
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A view showing the urbanistic layout of Nowa Huta, photo: Piotr Tomaszewski / wikimedia.org
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But for all of their counter-cultural mores, the growth of the bikiniarze was surprisingly linked to the development of an ideal communist settlement. Although the origins of bikiniarze culture are contested – historians suggest the first youths engaging in such behaviour were urban and wealthy teenagers from Warsaw who had the means to acquire Western goods – the trend became particularly prominent among the Polish working-class.
Recalling his 1956 visit to Poland in his autobiography Ways of Escape, British writer Graham Greene claimed that much of the country ‘seem[ed] unchanged’:
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The wide grey windy square of Cracow with its stone market colonnade full of toys and gay peasants’ clothes and the apple-women sitting in black shawls by the piles of bright apples: in Czestochowa the trumpets wail as the silver curtain descends at the lass Mass over the most convincing portrait ever painted of Our Lady […] in the countryside there are still native craftsmen carving wooden saints…
But his later depiction of Nowa Huta – the socialist realist district near Kraków, which was designed as a Polish version of Russia’s Magnitogorsk – also suggests contemporary political resistance, even at the very heart of the communist project:
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Even the workers […] filled the churches – not always for religious motives, but as a little gesture of independence […] nevertheless the number of communicants (and a man will not go to Communion as a political act) had grown enormously.
Nowa Huta (Polish for New Foundry) had been created to bolster communist ambitions to increase steel production in Poland. At the heart of the settlement was the gargantuan Vladimir Lenin Steelworks; surrounding the plant were houses specially built to house the construction workers, radiating out from the area’s Central Square in a geometric and symmetrical pattern. Allegedly, the positioning of the district just east of Kraków was also politically-motivated, to transform an area populated by the anti-communist elite into an archetypal workers’ city.
But aside from the district’s meticulously designed layout, Nowa Huta was also seen as the epitome of the communist sociocultural ideal. Home to young workers drafted in from nearby villages and towns, the settlement was intended to reinforce communist hopes for youth education – in keeping with the ambitions to ‘purify [the younger generations] into refined, stainless human steel’ (Marian Brandys).
As Katherine Lebow writes,
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When Poland’s twentieth-century communist leaders planned their flagship city, Nowa Huta, it was a given that its inhabitants would have a full range of worthwhile recreational activities. Leisure in the new town would be the very antithesis of its pre-communist form […] of those who migrated to Nowa Huta in its early years, a vast majority were under the age of thirty […] the Stalinist regime hoped to hasten their rapid transformation into ‘new men.’
At first, the artistic and cultural world of Nowa Huta appeared promising – but the situation rapidly turned into disappointment. The glossy communist cultural centres were, in fact, dismal and leaky, providing little rousing entertainment or escapism; additional plans for theatres were ultimately shelved; and some acts had to be cancelled due to ideological differences.
This was to prove a disillusioning reality for Polish youth, who already considered themselves a ‘lost generation’ due to the impact of World War II.
In this environment, interest in the sparkling, colourful world of the West flourished. At face value, this appeared a belligerent and rebellious act: donning gaudy American garb – including narrow trousers, striped socks and combed-back hair – jamming along to jazz, purring a few stock Americanisms, and chain-smoking one’s way through a communist utopia became further ‘little gesture[s] of independence’, designed to be as provocative as possible.
Describing the Polish youth of the day in 1956, Stefan Mękarski claimed teenage immorality could be traced back to the lack of ‘positive hero[es]’ promoted by communist authorities.
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Communism has not succeeded in capturing the young people’s imagination […] and the people long for heroism or, more modestly, they feel the need of prestige in their environment.
With their penchant for bourgeois, prosaic amusements – as well as the ‘forbidden’ – these teenagers meandered around city centres from café to dance, quipping in ‘juicy’ urban slang, and occasionally engaging in brutal acts of violence. Delinquency, Mękarski added, had infested not only urban centres but also small villages, combining political cynicism with local and regional traditions.
But, as Lebow emphasises, the extent to which the bikiniarze truly opposed communist authority is actually contested. Whilst officials pitted the bikiniarze against communist culture – and whilst Polish youths certainly ‘flouted the stodginess, repression, and hyper-conformism of official Stalinism’ – they also clashed with intellectual elites who also criticised the regime, with the youth of Nowa Huta expressing little interest in high culture. The bikiniarze can therefore be seen as more as an example of transnationalism – and of assimilation into the metropolis – than as a consciously political act of dissent:
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[Youth behaviour was] apolitical: it was the by-product of a bumpy transition from a rural to an urban way of life – if not inevitable, then at least part of an intelligible social process […] urban consumption habits, including fashionable clothes and heavy drinking, are far easier to acquire than the putative inner qualities of a cultured person.
Indeed, the very conspicuousness of the bikiniarze – with their vivid and undeniably foreign fashions – is an indication that the movement cannot be simply classed as a clandestine subculture, in opposition to the communist dream.
Kokteili across the Eastern Bloc
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Actor Maxim Matveyev (C) seen on the set of the Stilyagi film directed by Valery Todorovsky, photo: ITAR-TASS / PAP
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In fact, the development of bikiniarze culture also had its roots in wider global and Polish traditions. Drawing on Sabrina Ramet’s claim that urban youth across the world are drawn to more Western styles, Rodger P. Potocki Jr. argues ‘the West has traditionally played an integral role in the Polish psyche’, noting Western influences across the arts and society.
And similar fashions also developed among Soviet youth, with the Stilyagi movement also embracing bright American clothing and mannerisms:
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Soviet youth not only dressed in what they thought to be the latest in American fashion, but adopted English names, drank kokteili, dropped American slang, smoked Lucky Strikes, and danced to hot dzhaz.
But as Joseph S. Roucek argued, even in the Soviet case, distinctions were drawn between lower-class delinquency – mere hooliganism – and the new class roots of the Stilyagi. In fact, the numerous Soviet youth countercultures in the post-war period all adopted more nuanced views towards officially-endorsed culture, as well as attracting membership from a wide variety of social backgrounds. This mirrored wider complexities in global youth subcultures – many of which defied traditional understandings of social structures:
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In the end, for Nowa Huta’s youth as well as Britain’s teddy boys, Italy’s teppisti, or Germany’s Halbstarken, the adoption of transatlantic cultural styles represented above all a rejection of hierarchical understandings of cultural value bound to caste, class, or Volk.
But, as Lebow adds, the bikiniarze were particularly unique for their focus on youthful self-fashioning through the world of leisure – opposing the communist regime’s emphasis on refining younger generations. And far from simply resistance to the communist authorities, this trend can be traced back to the growing popularity of Western culture in Poland after the end of World War II.
As Potocki writes, Polish culture of the immediate post-war period was saturated by Americana. Polish access to Western culture, fashion and goods was facilitated by Polish soldiers, repatriated to the country after fighting on the western front or living in exile in the West. But this also had a fundamentally practical side.
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Zbyszko Siemaszko, queue outside Stolica movie theatre on Narbutta Street, between 1955 and 1965, photo: National Digital Archives (NAC)
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Zbyszko Siemaszko, queue outside Stolica movie theatre on Narbutta Street, between 1955 and 1965, photo: National Digital Archives (NAC)
Warsaw – the pre-war arts capital – had been devastated by bombing, meaning the only culture available to Poles was foreign-produced material. This was especially the case in terms of visual cultures: 204 films were imported from the west between 1945-1950, with domestic film production slow to resume. Many of the films available in the period depicted classic Hollywoodised American stories, with Western slang, music and fashion to boot. Domestic films also featured characters dressed in American fashion.
Similarly, the dissemination of Western literary works also brought Poles into contact with new cultural ideas. Potocki notes that 234 translations of English works were published between 1948-49 alone.
Dorota Walczak-Delanois argues that Polish literature even began developing along similar lines to the Beat Generation – with its focus on opposition to the mainstream, experimentation and exploration. Whilst Beat literature was not generally available in Poland due to censorship, Polish literature became more alternative, more surreal and more spiritually-oriented – in short, more Beat-like – as a result of the bikiniarze, and their fascination with all things America:
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Bikiniarz became the symbol of a new kind of protest against uniformity […] Leopold Tyrmand – a great advocate of jazz – Marek Hłasko – a kind of hobo adventurer – and Edward Stachura – a vagabond singer – can be considered as representing a Polish version of Beat. Labelled as ‘marginal’ or émigrés, they succeeded in renewing Polish literature from the 1950s onwards.
‘A clown in colourful socks who spouts gibberish about jazz...’
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The jazz band Melomani in concert, 1958, from left: Andrzej Trzaskowski, Witold Sobociński, Andrzej 'Idon' Wojciechowski, Krzysztof Trzciński (Komeda) & Jerzy 'Duduś' Matuszkiewicz, photo: CAF / PAP
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But of all the Western cultural goods which influenced Polish post-war society, one of the most significant – and a prominent feature of bikiniarze life – was jazz. Jazz had, of course, already been a popular musical style during the interwar period, with adroit Polish (and often Jewish) musicians inspired to experiment in the genre after hearing numbers from their American and western European counterparts, or in American films.
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In postwar Poland, demobilized jazzmani put down their weapons and took up their instruments. Jazz clubs were established at the (United States founded) YMCAs in Warsaw and Cracow. Warsaw’s postwar cafes and nightclubs were once more filled with the sounds of ‘In my solitude,’, ‘Tea for Two’, and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.
The sexy, syncopated sounds of jazz – which rapidly became the ‘way of life’ (Potocki) for the bikiniarze – could also be heard by tuning into US and European radio stations. Arguably the most prominent Polish post-war proponent of jazz, the bespectacled novelist and flaneur, Leopold Tyrmand, described the irresistibly foreign nature of the music:
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From the radio came the slow tempo of an American-made entertainment product, melodious, very un-Polish, seductive because of its superior westernness…
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Tyrmand, quoted by Potocki
Tyrmand, as Anne Applebaum writes, was one of the residents of the Warsaw YMCA:
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All around was nothing but mud, dust and the ruins of Warsaw […] in the evenings, Tyrmand dressed in brightly coloured socks and narrow trousers, the latter specially made for him by a tailor who also lived at the YMCA, and went to the jazz concerts downstairs […] Tyrmand himself wrote later that the YMCA represented ‘genuine civilization in the middle of devastated, troglodyte Warsaw’.
But as jazz was forced underground – into the catacombs – and alternative, bourgeois cultures repressed, the Warsaw YMCA was eventually disbanded by the authorities, though it proved a lengthy process to remove the building’s residents. Some, like Tyrmand, never actually left, with the building resembling more of a slum by the mid-1950s.
In his 1954 Diary, Tyrmand described himself as ‘a clown in colourful socks who spouts gibberish about jazz’ – a nod to the puerility and play of the jazz scene, but also to the incomprehensibility of jazz culture to the communist regime.
In fact, though the communists tried to repress jazz music, wily musicians tuned into banned American radio broadcasts – especially DJ Willis Conover on Voice of America, who was immensely popular in Eastern Europe – and reconstructed the songs organically, taking it in turn to scribble down bars; a lesson both in music construction, and in the English language. Jazz became synonymous with the escapism yearned for by Polish youths – as one student from the era put it:
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The ‘mad tempo [of jazz] permits me to forget everything.’
So too did jazz appear in Tyrmand’s 1955 detective novel Zły (Bad), set in the ruins of Warsaw. Wojciech Tomasik argues references to jazz in the novel are literal, metaphorical and structural, with the work constructed with jazz-like improvisation, including tangential narratives – another example of the American, Beat Generation-esque style of Polish post-war literature.
During the so-called ‘Thaw’ following Stalin’s death, however, jazz became a more permissible and more visible art form in Poland. Rüdiger Ritter notes the ‘official politics to create, propagate, and encourage an “own” jazz and an “own” jazz life so as to reduce the attraction to the American original’. This trend prompted a jazz-based ‘battlefield’, where Soviet authorities attempted to ‘integrate jazz in their cultural paradigm’, in opposition to ‘bad’ American commercial jazz – whilst the US ‘intended to weaken the loyalty of Eastern Bloc inhabitants to their governments’ through Conover’s radio broadcasts. Jazz musicians began to visit Poland; festivals were launched; and the sound also began to appear in films. One of the most prominent examples was Roman Polański’s 1962 Nóż w Wodzie (Knife in the Water), composed by rising jazz musician Krzysztof Komeda: the music in the film, ‘spiced […] with rising tension’ (Istvan Szabo), mimicked the complexities regarding jazz in the period, which was simultaneously seen as dangerous, and cultural fodder.
The complicated world of Polish communist-era subculture – especially in terms of the bikiniarze – can thus be seen to have played out through jazz music. As Tyrmand himself described it:
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Jazz was for us a system of latitudes subject to a freely accepted discipline of integral bonds between an individual and a group. As such, it became perhaps the best metaphor for liberty that any culture has ever come up with.
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Tyrmand, quoted by Wojciecj Tomasik.
Whilst the bikiniarze had a vibrant impact on culture in the post-war period, the trend ultimately died out in the mid-to-late 1950s, as western culture was gradually appropriated into official culture– and particularly following 1956, when policies of de-Stalinisation revoked such a tight control on Polish youths. All countercultures are subsumed into the mainstream in the end…
Written by Juliette Bretan, May 2021. Hover mouse here for sources.