Intimacies under state socialism? : Poles emotional self-realization in the 1960s

This chapter elaborates the following problem: how did the economies of communist states in XX century Eastern Europe make people feel. It focuses on the intimacies of Poles in the 1960s, particularly on the question, how they understood their emotional self-realization. To answer it, I have analyzed a collection of works – Mój chłopiec, moja dziewczyna (My Boyfriend, My Girlfriend) – submitted to a memoir-writing competition organized by the weekly Dookoła Świata (“Around the World”) in 1966. The editors received 850 letters containing stories of personal love experiences. The texts are self-presentations in the form of biographical narratives, in which Poles – mostly young people – tell stories about their emotional experiences as part of the process of becoming “people they want to be”, mature, self-contained, “normal”. Most of these accounts are cast in the similar mode: the narrative of self-help. In these memoirs, young Poles demanded to be supported in their decisions about who they are, what they feel, and how they express their emotions. Here the narrative of recognition is balanced with a narrative of self-help that presents a character who fights alone for their better future. Young people and youths had been at the center of the public discourse in the PRL since the end of WWII. Nevertheless, at the time young people mostly operated in the public sphere as a passive subject of the regime’s discourse and only in around 1956 were they allowed to speak for themselves.