TWENTY YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE 317innovation, the main sources of inspiration obviously lay elsewhere. Polish cul-
ture has never thrived on state sponsorship. The lifting of the cultural Dark Age,
formerly imposed by foreign, imperial regimes, is explanation enough for the
cultural renaissance which accompanied the restoration of the Polish state. By
the same token, the independent spirit which was given its head in the 1920s and
1930s does much to explain the extraordinary resilience of non-official culture
in the face of philistine communist rule in the post-war period.^32
Inter-war Warsaw possessed an unmistakable, bitter-sweet quality. It was
characterized on the one hand by the pride and optimism generated by national
independence, and on the other hand by the sad realization that the appalling
problems of poverty, politics, and prejudice could not be alleviated by existing
resources. The new government elite was jubilant. The Polish bourgeoisie rel-
ished the city's profitable metropolitan role. But the working class were restless;
the Jews were apprehensive; and the intellectuals were openly critical. Existing
tensions were aggravated by the renewed demographic explosion. In less than
two decades, Warsaw's population almost doubled once more: from 758,000 in
1918 to 1,289,000 in 1939. Employment in the city was dominated by state enter-
prises - by the mushrooming bureaucracy, by the state railways, and by indus-
tries taken over from the German administration. Unemployment, which stood
at 100,000 in 1918, was returning to similar levels in the 1930s. But still the immi-
grants came. The outer suburbs spread far and wide to accommodate the new-
comers. Zoliborz was extended by one model housing settlement for army
officers, and by another for civil servants. Nearby Marymont was submerged by
one of the capital's reeking shanty towns. The city centre was adorned by a rash
of modern, monumental architecture, and by the restoration of the choicest aris-
tocratic palaces for official use. Intrusive reminders of the recent Russian past
were replaced by patriotic monuments to Jozef Poniatowski (1923), to the
Unknown Soldier (1925), and to Frederyk Chopin (1926). The Jewish quarter,
and many of the working-class districts, deteriorated into undisguised slums.
Warsaw was a city of blatant contrasts, and of growing social polarization. The
growth of the Civil Service, which employed some 113,000 people in 1938, was
matched by the growing empires of the ponces, who employed some 30,000.
Local elections were dominated by the NZR and by the Jewish Folkspartei -
both of them entrenched in sectional interests, but neither representative of
wider values. The politics of the capital had little in common with that of the
Republic as a whole. Even so, from the cultural point of view, Warsaw was able
to exert a dominant influence. The University of Warsaw, which in professors
such as Jan Lukasiewicz, the logician, possessed men of international distinc-
tion, quickly overtook the prestige of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
Warsaw's writers, from the established names of the older generation, such as
Staff, Zeromski, or Kaden-Bandrowski to the rising poets of the Skamander
Group - Jan Lechori (1899-1956), Julian Tuwim {1894-1953), Jaroslaw
Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980), Bolestaw Lesmian (1877—1938), and Antoni Stonim-
ski (1895-1976) - outshone all competitors. Warsaw's press, from the National