Reading The Memoir of a Clairvoyant (1976): Divination, Censorship, and the Past in Late Socialist Poland

Abstract

Józef Marcinkowski (1905–1982), alias Akhara Yussuf Mustafa, was a Polish fortune-teller and clairvoyant. He began his career in the first half of the 1930s, gaining fame in the esoteric milieu in Warsaw. During World War II, he was a prisoner in the Dachau and Bergen-Belsen death camps. He described his experiences in The Memoir of a Clairvoyant [Pamiętnik jasnowidza], published first in 1976 and again in 1985 in an impressive print run of two hundred thousand copies. The manuscript was controlled by the Main Office for the Control of Press, Publication and Public Performances. However, the censors’ comments did not concern supernatural aspects, but communist persecutions in the Stalin period, as well as some events at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The purpose of this article is to analyze The Memoir, to present the text and the life of Mustafa against the background of autobiographical documents of other fortune-tellers and clairvoyants active in late socialist Poland, and the reaction of the censors to Mustafa’s book. The first part of the article outlines the main facts of Mustafa’s biography and discusses the most characteristic features of The Memoir. The second part focuses on the socio-cultural context of the text, especially the audience’s attitude towards paranormal phenomena, based on press articles and autobiographical accounts of other psychics, while the third one examines the censor’s opinion from the perspective of communist memory politics.