Polska opinia publiczna wobec Niemiec i wydarzeń 1968 roku w Niemczech
Authors: Szymoniczek Joanna 
Published: January 2021

The media system formed in Poland after the Second Word War was subordinated to political practice. The ruling communist party treated the radio, press and television as one of the most important tools for exercising power and controlling social processes. All the content being conveyed was scrupulously censored. The same applied to articles concerning the Federal Republic of Germany. Throughout the entire era of the People’s Republic of Poland, the RFG was ‘the villain of the piece’. The press published numerous articles in reminder of the Second World War and successive anniversaries of specific crimes, incessantly recalling their scale, the destruction and the number of victims. The texts frequently referred to the revisionist policy of the post-war RFG. West Germany was thus presented as a militaristic state, striving to obtain nuclear weapons and rockets, exerting pressure on her Western partners to push armament programmes and frustrating disarmament, a state where the left was suppressed and the German Communist Party was persecuted by the police while the Nazis (NDP) grew in strength. In view of Bonn’s obsession with regard to the re-unification of Germany, Poland, went the narrative, could not trust West Germany. Such an image of the RFG in the Polish media was congruent with the objectives of Poland’s foreign policy toward that country.In 1968, the events occurring in the FRG, the youth’s protest on a mass scale, the brutal methods of the police, the passing of emergency laws which restricted citizens’ freedoms, were reported accurately, emotionally and with a propaganda bias. These reports were given an additional emphasis by their tone, which was alarmist, often hysterical and with no shortage of loaded headlines, which usually made reference to the Second World War and the perpetual threat posed to both Poland and the other Eastern Bloc states by the FRG. There were few references in the Polish press to 1968 in Germany. They were recalled, in principle, only when criticising the Western life style and the ‘moral collapse of the West’, reporting terrorism-related events in Germany, in particular, the Red Army Faction in the 1970s and the appointment of Joschka Fischer as foreign minister of the FRG in 1998. On the other hand, mention was frequently made of the events related to the Second World War, associating them with the German expectations of apologies for the expulsions, statements puing a question mark over the Oder and Lusitian Neisse rivers, and so forth. Throughout these years, a relatively considerable amount of column space was devoted to the German political scene, expressing interest in particular elections. In the entire period analysed here, the Polish media were very eager to report German problems and troubles such as the titles. the fall of a government, economic woes, terrorism, the excesses of the young people, the defeat of Germany’s national football team, or the FRG’s ‘only’ winning a silver medal in the Olympics. Pre-1989, this willingness to pesent the FRG unfavourably is highly visible; later it becomes less direct, though it can still be perceived in some of the titles.