Abstract

Victory in war does not translate to political legitimacy. This essay examines how contested political identities prevent the formation of legitimate national communities in the aftermath of war, using Andrzej Wajda’s (1958) Ashes and Diamonds as a critical case study. It argues that the film visualised post-1945 Poland as a battleground where power is disputed because rival identities, one rooted in national sacrifice and the other in burgeoning communist modernity, produce irreconcilable ‘imagined communities’. Analysing the film as a political text through a lens of performative theory, the essay demonstrates how this stalemate is enacted through competing rituals of power: 1. The state’s coercive spectacles of normalcy, 2. The resistance rituals of martyrological memory, and 3. The consequent foreclosure of a public realm in which individual freedom and the synthesis of rival political identities could occur. This analysis reveals that when power is exercised through exclusionary and violent performances, it perpetuates the conflict it initially sought to end, rendering legitimacy impossible. Ultimately, this essay contends that Wajda’s framework provides a vital lens for diagnosing contemporary ‘memory’ struggles where unhealed historical identities continue to fracture communities and destabilise political legitimacy long after ‘formal’ transitions of power.

Introduction

On May 8th, 1945, the Second World War in Europe ended. But in the provincial town, Ostrowiec, depicted in Andrzej Wajda’s (1958) Ashes and Diamonds, the conflict merely shifted forms. The film opened with a jarring contradiction: a quiet, serene landscape interrupted by a botched assassination. In a single frame, Wajda captured the central dilemma of the post-war condition, the gap between peace on paper and the ongoing, latent, and violent contest for legitimacy. A few frames later, fireworks erupted in the public square, while in the private corner of a hotel bar, a man in sunglasses waited for an assassination order.

This is not the classic portrayal of the Second World War but a hangover story. Yes, the war has ‘officially’ ended, but the morning after has a cost. Ashes and Diamonds is a portrait of unresolved aftermath, the space in which legitimacy remains unresolved despite formal victory.

Decades after its release, Ashes and Diamonds does not read as a period piece but as a primer for today’s weaponised memory. From the dismantling of Confederate statues in the United States to the contemporary Polish government’s efforts to rewrite Polish complicity in the Holocaust, contemporary politics is fiercely engaged with the same struggle Wajda captured, a battle for more than power, one over who will be sanctified, which sacrifices will be remembered, and who, therefore, belongs to the legitimate political community (Aguilera, 2020; Bethke, 2018). The film depicts two competing claims to power: the anti- Communist Polish Home Army, whose struggle is rooted in the
identity of patriotic sacrifice, and the Communist state, which projects an identity of modernising order. Together, these representations speak directly to contemporary struggles over how political communities form and legitimise authority.

Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds presented postwar Poland as a space where legitimacy is unresolved despite the official victory against the Nazis. This essay examines how Wajda visualises this struggle for legitimacy. First, this essay will qualify film as a critical medium of political text, analysing how competing national identities are performed and how power operates beyond spectacular warfare. It then conducts a close reading of key scenes to show how each party’s claim to authority is staged and why both fail. Finally, it argues that the film’s enduring insight lies in its warning: when the authorities reproduce the violence they seek to end, legitimacy remains an illusion, and the nation’s communities remain repressed, divided, and unfree.

Conceptual Framework

To interpret Wajda’s cinematic argument, film must be established as a medium of political scholarship. Literature suggests that cinema is a form of political interpretation, this analysis approaches Ashes and Diamonds not merely as a historical narrative but as a deliberate intervention in debates over Poland’s post-war identity and legitimate authority (Rosenstone, 1995; Shapiro, 2008). Cinema functions as a political playground, where directors can visualise political concepts, thereby making theoretical claims more accessible to a broader audience (Shapiro, 2008).

At the core of Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda illustrated the concept of legitimacy. Here, legitimacy is defined as the capacity to exercise power while being reliable and upholding a social contract, without relying on violence (Day et al., 2020, pp. 21-22). The authors asserted that in moments where state authority collapses or is violently contested, legitimacy itself becomes a battleground, fought through competing narratives of the past and visions of the future. This struggle is fundamentally about identity and community. Anderson (1983, pp. 5-6) argued that nations are ‘imagined communities’ sustained by shared symbols and memories. In the aftermath of a war, rival groups representing competing ‘imagined communities’ each offer a different answer to the question: who are we, and who therefore has the right to govern us?

This struggle with identity is made visible through competing performances of power. Political authority cannot be simply assumed; it is continually enacted and reaffirmed through rituals, spectacles, and symbolic acts. (Kertzer, 1988). Drawing on Kertzer’s scholarship, political rituals are “dramas of power” that use symbolic action to define social relationships and legitimise authority (p. 1). Through participation in these acts, citizens can identify with larger political forces that are visible only symbolically (pp. 1-2). Similarly, Foucault’s (1977) analysis in Discipline and Punishment emphasises how power operates in different contexts. Foucault distinguishes between the spectacle of sovereign power, the loud and obvious kind, and disciplinary power, which operates by imposing a “principle of compulsory visibility” (p. 187). In disciplinary regimes, as depicted in the film’s landscape of post-war Poland, citizens are constantly judged and are seen internalising the norms of authority (p. 187). Thus, in a post-conflict setting, public rituals like victory parades function dually: first as Kertzerian dramas of sovereign legitimacy and as Foucauldian examinations that seek to normalise and discipline the populace.

This performative contest is especially fraught when the transition of power is incomplete. Scott (1990, p. xii) theorised that the “public transcript” of peace and authority often coexists with a “hidden transcript” of continued resistance and latent violence. The gap between the official narrative (“The war is over!”) and the unofficial persistence of conflict creates a zone of contested legitimacy in which power remains in an unstable limbo. Here, legitimacy is tested not by the cessation of open warfare alone, but by whether performances establishing the new order can synthesise a shared political identity or instead deepen fractures within the nation. Finally, the tension between the collective demands and individual experience illuminates another defining dimension of post-conflict legitimacy. Arendt (1958, p. 198) noted that true political freedoms require a “public realm” where people can act and speak among peers. When this public realm is dominated by coercion, the possibility of such freedom and the everyday liberties that make human life so special are foreclosed (Arendt, 1958). Thus, this legitimacy is also felt at the intimate level, in the freedom to love, work, and imagine a future without fear (Arendt, 1958; Kertzer, 1988).

This theoretical framework allows Ashes and Diamonds to be interpreted as an open wound and a visceral exploration of Poland’s postwar crisis of legitimacy. The conceptual tools assembled above illuminate the precise mechanisms by which legitimacy is won or forfeited scene by scene, ritual by ritual, in the world of the film. Each theory traces a different dimension of the same central failure, the impossibility of building a shared political community when the tools of governance remain coercive and deaf to the memories of the governed.

Historical and Narrative Context

Poland was the first country invaded by Nazi Germany in World War II. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, led by the Polish Home Army, resulted in catastrophic loss and profound national grief. This history forms the backdrop to Andrzej Wajda’s war film trilogy—Pokolnie (1955), Kanał (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958)—which chronicles the wartime and postwar experiences of his generation.

Ashes and Diamonds is set over the course of one day: Victory in Europe Day, May 8th, 1945. In the ensuing vacuum, a new Communist backed regime and the surviving structures of the Home Army both claimed to speak for the nation, leading to an immediate contest for legitimacy. The film follows Maciek, a Home Army assassin, and Szuczuka, a top Communist official, over a single fateful night. Maciek is ordered to kill Szczuka but fails in his first attempt. The narrative traces their parallel paths through a town superficially celebrating peace, culminating in Maciek’s successful assassination, his fleeting dream of escape with a barmaid named Krystyna, and his own death in a trash- strewn field as a state parade marches nearby.

The stakes are existential, circling what the film presents as two half-truths. Maciek’s camp believes that sacrifice establishes the right to decide Poland’s future. Having bled for the flag, they feel a bloody debt grants authority. Szczuka’s side believes that stability establishes that same right. His claim is rooted in state- building capacity and the promise of a secure modern future. These are not merely rival political platforms but competing foundations for the nation itself, one legitimising power through control of the future (Heywood, 2019; Day et al., 2020). The victor will not only seize administrative control but will also authorise the definitive narrative of Poland’s emergence from war.

Scene Analysis

Scene 1 – Public Peace, Private War

The opening plays like an ironic joke. Birds sing. Flowers sway. The world is trying to return to normal, but it is not. In a sudden movement, Maciek and his partner are shooting at a man and miss, accidentally killing two bystanders. The scene cuts to a victory banquet taking place at Hotel Monopol, where a cabaret and some joyful toasts almost make us forget about the violence. The habits of violence, as Day et al. (2020, p. 3) described them, are the residual behaviours and loyalties that war leaves behind in private life after formal hostilities have ceased. These habits are the mundane continuation of wartime logic into peacetime reality, the soldier who still takes orders, the assassin who still has targets, and even the man who cannot imagine a life not structured by violence. The gap between the public declaration of peace and the private conduct of war is where legitimacy is contested. Legitimacy, as this essay has established, is dependent on whether the governed recognise the authority of those who govern them. The new communist-backed order declares itself a legitimate power, but Maciek’s continued violence is a material refusal of that claim. He refuses the new order’s right to declare the end of the war, because for him and the Home Army, the political question of who speaks for Poland remains unanswered.

Legitimacy is therefore contested in this gap between the celebratory banquet and the assassination orders enacted by Maciek and his partner. This is precisely what Scott’s (1990) theory of public and hidden transcripts illuminates. The viewer experiences the state’s performance of victory (the banquet and fireworks), which is instantly breached by the continued Polish resistance (the botched assassination). What makes this scene politically powerful is that Wajda shows both transcripts operating simultaneously. The new order does not know, or refuses to acknowledge, that its public transcript is being contradicted in real time. The space between the story the state tells and the violence it cannot see reveals how ongoing violence undermines the public declaration of peace. The assassination attempt exposes the state’s claim to have restored order as performance rather than reality because the state’s authority is not yet recognised. No statement, however official, can conjure the consent legitimacy requires when men are still shooting in the dark while others toast in the light.

Scene 2: The Banquet – The State’s Ritual of Normalcy

The banquet at the hotel is a carefully staged spectacle of forced gaiety. Ordered seating and political toasts perform a ‘new normal’ into existence. Consent is manufactured through compulsory participation, as attending the celebration is an endorsement of the new order. This sequence functions as Kertzer’s (1988, pp. 1, 78) “drama of power”, a ritual that functions in order to make the state’s desired reality of control and normalcy visible and shared. That desired reality is visualised through the mise-en-scène itself, with long tables that resemble hierarchy and order and the scripted toasts that invoke collective purpose. The state stages legitimacy, trusting that the performance will translate into reality. Through Foucault’s (1977) lens, the banquet dually acts as a disciplinary mechanism. The compulsory attendance and visible conformity enact what Foucault calls the “principle of compulsory visibility” where citizens are expected to comply and internalise the new order’s norms (p. 187).

Yet, the veneer of peace and conformity is thin and revealed when Maciek wears his drunken cynicism openly and the revelry feels brittle. These are traces of hidden violence pressing through the surface of spectacle which is what makes the revelry feel so hollow. This hollowness points to a deeper failure that Anderson’s (1983) framework makes legible; the banquet and celebrations presuppose a unified imagined community that does not yet exist. For a ritual of collective celebration to be successful, those participating must share a collective story about their identity. But the men in the room do not. The Communist officials and the Home Army remnants seated at the same tables belong to irreconcilable imagined communities. The ritual cannot manufacture the shared identity it performs because Anderson’s community must be built slowly through shared symbols, memories, and narratives (pp. 5-6) – none of which the
new order has yet earned.

The absence of the shared imagined community reveals the banquet’s ritual as coercive memory manipulation rather than genuine celebration. The attempt to overwrite the trauma of the war with a performance of normalcy ultimately fails in that it rings false to the viewer and is not able to politically produce genuine consent and therefore no legitimate community. The spectacle deepens the fracture between the rival nationalist and communist camps because those who cannot authentically participate, men like Maciek for whom this is not their victory, are excluded by the very ritual meant to unify (Kertzer, 1988). The manufactured legitimacy cannot deliver on even the most ordinary freedoms, exposing the hollow facade of its claim.

Scene 3: The flaming shots — Resistance’s Ritual of Memory

In stark contrast with the state’s public spectacle, the resistance stages its own ritual in the bar. Maciek and his friend are, in true Polish fashion, indulging in vodka shots. Maciek lines these shots up and ignites them, dedicating them to fallen comrades. Memorial candles are a ritualistic symbol of Polish loss and grief; these flaming shots are akin to those often lit for the dead (Dudek, 2018). Wajda films this with solemn, liturgical gravity. The close-ups on the flames and the men’s faces transform a private act of grief into a public, political claim. Filming this act of mourning with the visual grammar of a religious ceremony, Wajda encodes it as a sacred witness rather than personal sorrow. What is experienced together becomes a shared truth, and shared truths are the basis of political communities (Kertzer, 1988).

This performance binds the men through co-authorship, by jointly naming and honouring the dead, they produce a shared version of history where their sacrifice was meaningful forging a collective identity out of collective loss (Kertzer, 1988). Simultaneously, it acts as a Foucauldian (1977) counter- performance where a rival system of knowledge about who suffered and therefore has the right to speak for Poland directly contests the communist narrative that erased these sacrifices. This ritual constructs an imagined community defined by martyrdom, those who bled under the nationalist banner are Poland’s true people and those who did not are excluded. Through Anderson’s (1983) theory of shared symbols and memory, this ritual reproduces the boundaries of belonging, determining who is represented within the national narrative. Yet, their method, while emotional and visceral, is also divisive as it keeps the conflict alive by reinforcing a partisan identity which prevents the synthesis needed for a unified nation.

Scene 4: The Chapel – The Individual’s Quest for Freedom

The film’s most intimate scene occurs in a dim chapel between Maciek and Krystyna. He confesses his exhaustion and fantasises about escaping with her to a normal life. He offers routes of escape as a way to test a world defined by small freedoms rather than grand ideologies. This scene directly engages Arendt’s (1958) notion of political freedom. Maciek desires a space in which he can act and love without the threat of violence. The failure of their romance is political, as Maciek’s duty and the ambient violence dictate his choice, demonstrating how the unresolved conflict destroys his possibility of private liberty (p. 58). Legitimacy’s true measure, the film argues, is ‘everyday freedoms,’ and here those freedoms are shown to be impossible. The unresolved conflict leaves Maciek with no choice at all as his commanding officer’s orders and his loyalty to the deceased foreclose the possibility of freedom. When coercive power fills all available space, Arendt’s public realm, the condition of true freedom, simply does not exist (p. 198).

Scene 5: The Finale – Death and the Indifferent Parade

The film refuses to declare a clear winner at the end. Maciek, after having killed Szczuka, is himself shot and dies in a trash-strewn field. In the background, the state’s victory parade marches on, its music faint and indifferent. This final dichotomy is the ultimate visualisation of failed unification. The state ‘wins’ merely by outlasting its rival, not by conceding it or integrating the narratives of the ordinary citizens. Power is maintained through the brutal, silent erasure of alternative forms of resistance. The parade, the ultimate public transcript of order, continues oblivious to the corpse that represents the extinguished hidden transcript. This is coercive legitimacy, and it guarantees that the ‘hangover’ of unresolved conflict will be permanent (Heywood, 2019, p. 170). The state’s indifference to Maciek’s death ensures his martyrdom will become the next generation’s grievance. By choosing spectacle over reconciliation, the hidden transcript will outlive its authors. The state holds power, but its legitimacy is hollow, having erased competing memories, and made freedom irrelevant.

Ashes Without Diamonds: Beyond 1945 and the Film

The film’s diagnosis extends far beyond 1945 Poland. It offers a critical lens for understanding any post-conflict society or contemporary “culture war” in which power is contested but legitimacy remains unresolved. Antebellum America is one case where the Union’s military victory did not translate into legitimate, integrated nationhood, allowing segregation and racial violence to endure for a century longer because the imagined community was never incorporated into a shared national narrative. Post-apartheid South Africa offers an instructive contrast. There, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created an institutional mechanism for acknowledging competing memories and incorporating rival narratives into a shared national story (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998). The result was imperfect, but meaningfully different from Wajda’s parade marching past the unacknowledged corpse. The film teaches us to scrutinise the methods of claiming power after a rupture. When those methods replicate the logic of the preceding conflict, the resulting order will be unstable and its legitimacy perpetually in doubt. However, Wajda’s framework has its limits as a diagnostic tool as the film is an anatomy of a failure without a path to success. It is not able to forecast how inclusive memory is institutionally achieved or how deeply divided communities can reconcile. The film poses these questions rather than answering them.

Conclusion: An Unformed Diamond

The title Ashes and Diamonds is drawn from a 19th-century poem by Cyprian Norwid (1866), which asks: “Will only ashes be left,/Hurled into the abyss from the tempest?/ Or do the ashes hold the glory/ Of a celestial diamond/ The Dawn of everlasting triumph”. The metaphor poses the central question of the film, and of post-war Poland: From the ashes of conflict, will there emerge only debris, or a hard-won diamond of legitimacy?

The film demonstrates that legitimacy remained a phantom in post-war Poland because competing camps employed methods that perpetuated violence and prevented a political community from forming. True legitimacy requires the aforementioned absent ingredients: an end to violence, an inclusive memory that honours sacrifice, and the liberty to exercise everyday freedoms. This is derived from the convergence of the theoretical frameworks. Arendt’s public realm demands freedom from coercion, Anderson’s imagined communities require inclusive memory, and Heywood’s definition of legitimacy requires a social contract that the governed actively recognise (Arendt, 1958; Anderson, 1983, Heywood, 2019). What Wajda’s film contributes is the visualisation of what happens when all three are absent.

In contemporary Poland, the metaphor of ashes and diamonds remains tragically apt. Even after the fall of Communism in 1989, the memory of the war and its aftermath continues to be manipulated and weaponised. Political parties of the left and the right still contest the narrative of Polish identity and victimhood, often deepening social divisions rather than healing them (Bethke, 2018). The open wound of the past, as Wajda depicted, has never fully closed.

Diamonds, like legitimate nations, take time and immense pressure to form. Ashes and Diamonds suggests that legitimacy cannot be established in the space of a single victory night. It requires the patience to engage with living memory and the mercy to incorporate competing stories. If a new regime ignores its people’s memory, it does not secure peace and instead fuels the next conflict, prolonging the political hangover. Wajda’s film endures as a masterpiece because it reframes Poland’s historical dilemmas as a timeless question of identity, community, and power. A question that every society, in its own dawn after conflict, must eventually come to answer.

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