„You Were a Statue of Steel for Us...” – Józef Piłsudski: Mourning and Memory in the Pages of the “Płomyk” Magazine (1935–1936)

Abstract

The immortal leader of the nation, the kind commander, the liberator, Poland’s finest son, and finally, beloved grandfather. This is how, inter alia, the newspapers described Józef Piłsudski after his death. The press emphasised that he had fought steadfastly for the freedom of Poland, freed the country from the shackles of slavery and then defended its borders, protecting Poles from their enemy. How the magazines addressed to children and adolescents wrote about it in the middle of the 1930s? The author looks for an answer to this question by analysing the successive issues of the weekly “Płomyk” magazine. He checks what picture of mourning emerges from the articles published in the magazine. He studies how the memory of the Marshal was built, maintained and cared for. The author of the article analyses, inter alia, poems, stories, mentions and letters sent to the magazine and the staff’s responses to the received correspondence. In this way, he tries to reconstruct the emotions, to which the authors of the papers published in “Płomyk” are responding or trying to evoke.