Abstract

For about a decade, approaches to a new interdisciplinary people’s history have been developing in Poland, also in response to the growing interest in reflecting the peasant or plebeian genealogy of modern Polish society in literature, film, art, and popular culture. In this context, renegotiations of the history of the Polish People’s Republic play an important role. This paper takes as its starting point current attempts to renew the discourse on (late) socialism in research as well as in cultural productions, and discusses the new approaches to people’s history in the light of the specific Polish semantics of the people (lud). In the process, the competing left-wing and right-wing concepts of thinking about the people as well as about the Polish People’s Republic become visible.