Grudzień ’70 w prasie Republiki Federalnej Niemiec
December of 1970 in the West German Press

Accounts and Political Analysis

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the presented article is to indicate to what an extent and how the most opinion-forming dailies and weeklies in Germany reported events taking place on the Polish coast in December 1970. The workers’ revolt, which ended with a bloody suppression by the army and militia, took place only a week after the agreement between the People’s Republic of Poland and West Germany had been concluded. Analyzing this issue, research questions can be asked, both about the number and size of articles as well as their nature. Were they predominantly accounts of the course of events or were commentaries also popular? Was, and if so, to what an extent social unrest in the People’s Republic of Poland and the removal of Władysław Gomułka from power perceived as a threat to the just initiated process of rapprochement on the Warsaw–Bonn line? To what an extent did the publications in dailies and weeklies differ from each other? Finally, the question is whether the press appearing in the Federal Republic of Germany published information on reactions of the public of this country, acts of solidarity, or voices of condemnation addressed to the authorities in Warsaw? The study undertook a critical analysis of texts describing the events of December 1970, establishing the chronology of these events. This analysis was also comparative in nature, as the content of the articles was compared with the former researchers’ findings on the course of individual days of the December tragedy. No less important for this text was the linguistic analysis, aimed at indicating to what an extent reports and columns regarding the situation in Poland were emotionally loaded, and to what an extent they constituted substantive, emotionless political analyzes. The next research method used in the presented research was the quantitative method. Its application made it possible to determine the number of articles referring to events in Poland and to indicate specific days when they had appeared in individual dailies and weeklies. The results of the query and analysis of press articles indicate that, despite the information blockade, journalists managed to map, with a high degree of vagueness, the real course of workers’ protests, especially their causes and the actions of the authorities leading to the brutal suppression. From the point of view of the West German editors, reports obtained from journalists from Scandinavia who had managed to get to Szczecin and Słupsk played a significant role here. In this way, the descriptions of events from both cities quickly obscured the dramatic situation in Gdańsk and Gdynia, including the symbol of December 1970 – an episode related to the death of Zbyszek Godlewski (“Janek Wiśniewski”), which hardly appeared in the media in Germany. A separate research problem to which special attention should be paid are the numerous social and economic analyzes of the situation in Poland published in West German press in December 1970. They pointed to the economic premises as the main reasons for the outbreak of protests, while criticizing the policy of Gomułka, which had led Poland to the economic stagnation. A similar position was taken by the government of Chancellor Willy Brandt, who at first took an expectant attitude, and then, through the words of the government’s spokesman Conrad Ahlers, drew attention to the chronic economic problems of the so-called Eastern Bloc. Despite some anxiety, journalists calmly accepted events in Poland, especially the removal of Gomułka from power and him being replaced by Edward Gierek. It was anticipated that the new Polish leader would continue the policy of rapprochement with Germany, and more broadly with the West.

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