'Children of Warsaw We'll Go into the Fight: Discourses of Polish Cultural Memory in Games About the Warsaw Uprising

Piotr Sterczewski, JU Krakow

The presentation will offer an analysis of three Polish games depicting the Warsaw Uprising -Little Insurgents [Mali PowstaƄcy] (2009), Uprising44: The Silent Shadows (2012) and Enemy Front (2014) - in terms of their connection with the dominant discourses of Polish cultural memory. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against the Nazi Germany occupation was a major, two-month long urban battle which ultimately resulted in a disastrous failure and around 200 thousand casualties, but remains one of the central events of heroically oriented threads of Polish cultural memory. The presentation will elaborate on the design choices used in these games to approach this complex topic, their relation to both dominant (heroic, sacrificial) and contested (civilian, herstorical) discourses of history, and the discursive filters and omissions employed in order to adapt the tragic theme to well-known game conventions. The place of these games among the other pop cultural works on the Warsaw Uprising will also be assessed.


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