Disputed memory. Jewish past, Polish remembrance
- From: "Alexander Sharon" <a.sharon@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 20:51:04 -0600
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-steffen-en.html
or
http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2008-11-27-steffen-en.pdf
Published 2008-11-27
Katrin Steffen
Disputed memory
Jewish past, Polish remembrance
Before WWII, over 3 million Jews lived in Poland. Almost all of them were
killed during the Shoah. The Communist regime forbade commemoration of Jews
as a special group of victims. That has changed since 1990, but remembrance
of Jews still polarises Polish society. That is shown by the debate over
Jedwabne and the post-war pogroms. There exists a competition of victims
between Jews and Poles. A mythological and symbolic figure of "the Jew" is
still at work in Polish memory. Moreover, a "virtual Jewry" has come into
being at former sites of Jewish life.
"Our memory is a place where there are no Jews." This is how cultural
anthropologist and ethnologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir characterised Polish
society's collective memory of WWII in January 2001. In 2008, Barbara
Engelking-Boni confirmed this judgement with respect to Polish
historiography:
The historiography on the National-Socialist occupation of Poland has
a tradition going back 60 years, with patterns for categorisations and
principles
of chronology.
In most cases, Jews have no place there.
The Holocaust has still not become part of Poland's history.[1]
Tokarska-Bakir made her assessment not long after the publication of Jan
Tomasz Gross's book Neighbours.[2] In this book, Gross reconstructed how
the Polish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish
fellow citizens in 1941. By apportioning a share of the blame for the Shoah
to the Poles, Gross triggered the most intense and most emotional post-war
debate on Polish-Jewish relations during WWII.
Engelking-Boni expressed her views in a discussion on Gross's latest book
Fear.[3] The book deals with anti-Semitism in Poland after WWII. The public
debate sparked by this book in early 2008 was not as intense as the
Jedwabne debate of 2001 to 2003.
The topic of Polish-Jewish relations during WWII was left on hold during
the Cold War in that it was not possible to discuss it in public in Poland.
It did emerge on a superficial level during the 1980s, but it was only
during the Jedwabne debate that it moved to the centre of society.
Meanwhile, three generations have passed since the war and the Holocaust.
Even so, the Jedwabne debate gripped and shocked almost all of society.
Some people welcomed it as an admission of Polish guilt and perceived it as
a catharsis. Others branded it anti-Polish and feared that it would damage
Poland's image throughout the rest of the world. They wanted to defend
themselves against such a prospect. This division in society deepened
during disputes over other issues related to reassessing the past,[4] and
it has again surfaced during the debate surrounding Fear.
This division also reflects a split reality. On the one hand, the
assessments made by Tokarska-Bakir and Engelking-Boni are accurate. They
are based on the specific manner in which the Polish nation and state have
been created. On the other hand, the Jewish population is very much present
in the Polish remembrance culture in three ways. While it is claimed that
Jews do not exist as a distinct group of victims, they are still present as
something that has been suppressed. Second, there exists a notion of the
mythical, symbolic Jew, which is important to the stereotype of Polish
self-perception. And third, Jewish history is present in the public sphere
in the form of folklore.
The fact that Poland's Jewish population failed to be recognised in Polish
memory as distinct victims is rooted in a number of factors. Between 1949
and around 1980, a type of "official remembrance" predominated that was
defined by those in power in the Socialist state. It increasingly drew on
the traditional historical canon of national history. Although
internationalism and friendship among the peoples were promoted in official
ideology, the Communists' nationalism, which was designed to stabilise
their hold on power, was by contrast highly traditional and xenophobic.[5]
Reflection on Polish history, open and public debates of self-perception
over Polishness, patriotism, and the nation, as well as discussions about
the Holocaust or the minorities living in Poland were thus prevented.[6]
Topics of this nature tended to be discussed in private, where a
counter-memory existed. To this extent, it would be wrong to assume that
Poland had only a monolithic, official culture of remembrance. The Jews
were very much present in the memory of private individuals. In public,
however, they were not mentioned.[7] This changed significantly only after
1989, when there were no longer any taboos, and historical gaps began to be
filled.
Throughout eastern central and eastern Europe, including Poland, this was
accompanied by a pluralisation of historical memory. Beyond this general
political framework, there were numerous other factors that prevented the
public mourning of the murder of Poland's Jews.
The Reduction of History
One of these factors, according to historian Marcin Kula, is the distance
that separated Jews and Poles before WWII. Jews and Poles, he writes, knew
little of each other, which is why the Poles were unable to lament the loss
of Poland's Jews. Furthermore, he adds, it is difficult to remember people
who were viewed negatively; thus negative stereotypes of Poland's Jews
would also have been a reason to forget them.[8] Even if this argument
appears plausible at first, the fact is that the two sides were not so
ignorant of each other. Many of these three million or more Jews - first
and foremost, but not only those who spoke Polish - showed a deep-rooted,
genuine interest in Polish history and culture. This interest, however, was
barely reciprocated and generated little affection in return.
Many of these Jews used the Polish language as writers, journalists,
academics, and teachers.[9] In many Yiddish-speaking families, parents made
sure that their children were no longer affected by a severe language
division. Isaac Bashevis Singer remembers that: "there was an unwritten law
among the wives of Yiddish writers and of the great number of so-called
Yiddishists that their children should be raised to speak the Polish
language".[10] Historians and the general public have yet to delve into the
pre-war interests and contacts between Jews and Poles. To this day, the
divisive features of this relationship have been at the fore, not least
because the contemporary discourse on Polish-Jewish relations in Poland and
elsewhere has been dominated by the events of the twentieth century,
particularly the Holocaust. In this way, the legacy of 1,000 years of
living among one another as neighbours has been reduced to just under a
century of exclusion, mistrust, hostility, and despair. Consequently, the
fact that the history of Jews in Poland-Lithuania and Poland was more than
a history of exile, persecution, and isolation, let alone something that
should be reduced to "ghetto history", is all too easily forgotten. This
history is also the history of a Jewish homeland, Jewish presence, as well
as specific types of Jewish modernity in eastern Europe.[11]
From the moment the first Jews arrived in eastern Europe - especially in
Poland - in search of a haven from persecution in western Europe during the
late eleventh century, they strived to achieve equal rights as citizens,
while at the same time preserving their cultural differences. On a daily
basis, it was necessary to find a compromise between Jewish religious law
and concepts on the one hand, and state law and practises on the other.
Living conditions among Jews in Poland were therefore contingent upon the
result of cultural, political, economic, and legal arrangements between
Jews and other ethnic and confessional population groups. These
arrangements were neither ideal, nor did they result solely in conflict.
They varied according to the situation. Jews and non-Jews lived alongside
each other in clearly defined structures. Each group had its own
administration and autonomy. At the same time, there were spaces where the
groups came into contact with each other, whether in the tavern run by a
Jewish innkeeper or when trading at the market. These arrangements and
contacts took place whenever religious, national, ethnic, or other groups
encountered one another. They form an important and lasting part of
Polish-Jewish history. After WWII, however, this history was perceived
almost solely as a history of destruction. "Auschwitz" has become the
universal catchword for this destruction, a symbol that goes far beyond the
German-Polish-Jewish framework of remembrance.
The nation's "Foreigners" or the right to a homeland
Another reason why Jews have been excluded from Polish collective memory is
related to the history of the Polish nation's formation, during which the
concept of a nation without a state was created.[12] At the end of the
eighteenth century, Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned the Polish
Commonwealth. For Poles, the desire to re-establish the state became so
powerful that nationalist ideas gained the upper hand over other political
ideas, including liberal ones. During the late nineteenth century, the
concept of the exclusive, ethnically homogeneous nation-state had already
gained dominance over the idea of a shared republican identity for all
citizens, regardless of their nationality and faith.[13] National
self-identification took on forms that were accompanied by the drawing of
clear boundaries between the Poles and the other, who were treated as
foreigners. Anti-Semitism, the roots of which extended back to Christian
anti-Judaism, became an important element in Polish society's mentality.[14]
That the construction of the nation was accompanied in political and
cultural terms by a hostility towards Jews is not unique to Poland.[15]
Every nation strives for homogeneity. The fact that such homogeneity is a
fiction, since antagonistic and plural elements are intrinsic to every
collective, was ignored.[16] In its concept of the nation, a majority
within Polish society frequently defined Jews as the epitome of the
"foreign element", as the "enemy within", which was hollowing out and
destroying the "healthy" national and social fabric.
In the wake of the partition of Poland, a Romantic and messianic
understanding of history became popular among Poles. In this perception of
history, the suffering of the divided Polish people was defined as a moral
distinction.[17] The sense of moral superiority that ensued negatively
influenced popular relations with Jews. Religion was also important in
shaping these relations. The Roman Catholic faith was considered the
guardian of Polish national identity and played an important role in the
formation of the nation-state.[18]
Already before the modern era, the religious identity of Jews had made them
the "others", the "foreigners". In the eyes of many Christians, Jews were a
prime example of the non-believers, while the national element in Poland
was in turn largely based on Christianity.[19] The religious, ethnic, and
social anti-Semitism that existed in Poland during the pre-modern era saw
Jews as the embodiment of a demonic "anti-Christ" and assigned them an
"unsafe place" that could vanish from the face of the earth at any
time.[20] The Jews retained this demonic role during the Second Republic,
from 1918 to 1939. Nationalism, which reached its peak in Europe at this
time, also held sway in Poland. Nationalist concepts also played a role in
numerous other political movements beyond the Roman Dmowski's rightwing
National Democracy movement.[21]
The effect that National Democracy had on many Poles should not be
underestimated. The writer Kazimierz Brandys called Dmowski, the author of
several anti-Semitic works, a devastating figure for the Polish
intelligentsia, the man "responsible for greater intellectual damage than
the partitioning powers, since he poisoned the minds of three
generations".[22] During the 1930s in particular, Poland was dominated by a
dichotomous view of the world, which was divided into "ours" and "the
other". Depending on one's political views, the enemy could be a fascist, a
communist, a capitalist, a freemason, a spy, or indeed a Jew.[23]
Between 1918 and 1939, anti-Semitism was widespread among most political
parties and within society. The political sphere was dominated by national
attributions and categories from the nineteenth century.[24] These included
the anti-Semitic scenario that Jews posed a threat. It was insinuated that
they wanted not only to damage Poland, but to destroy it. Jews became the
subject of numerous debates and were encouraged to leave the country.
In cultural and literary circles, anti-Semitism was considered to be almost
de rigueur. So it was that in 1933, the well-known writer Karol Irzykowski
announced in the Jewish newspaper Nasz Przeglad that he was also willing to
become an anti-Semite: "I, too, will have to write an anti-Semitic article
at some point."[25] He picked up on this thought again in 1937 and began
his contribution by noting that an anti-Semitic article had been on his
mind for a long time. In the article, he called Jews "Poles with
reservation", since a Jew could easily stop being a Pole, while non-Jewish
Poles were bound to their fatherland for better or worse. He then called
for an "intelligent anti-Semitism" as opposed to a violent
anti-Semitism.[26]
The language and ideas used in reference to Jews were frequently pejorative
during this period. A young writer called Zbigniew Unilowski described the
largely Jewish district surrounding Warsaw's Nalewki Street as an "urban
abscess" with a "sickly vitality" and as a gloomy "ghetto" where the
residents were unhappy and anaemic.[27] Such notions of the urban
environment of Jews contributed to the development of certain ideas of
Jewishness. Jews were regarded as a backward mass of city dwellers who
voluntarily cut themselves off from the rest of society, and who turned the
cities into unpleasant places simply by their presence.[28]
With regard to later developments, the importance of the interwar years and
the attitudes that developed during this time should not be underestimated.
Many unresolved social and national problems, such as the failure to
implement land reform or the minorities policy, which erupted in bloodshed
during and after the war, have their origins in the Second Republic.[29] To
this day, it still casts a long shadow over the prospect of mutual
understanding between Poles and Jews. Many Jews had hoped that, with Polish
independence, they would obtain equal rights in that country that they had
helped to create. These hopes were for the most part dashed. Writer Zusman
Segalowicz, for example, described the city of Warsaw as a shared
achievement of Poles and Jews.[30] Singer expresses a similar view in his
memoirs:
The Poles still considered us aliens, but Jews helped build this city
and participated
enormously in its commerce, finance, and industry. Even the statues
in this church
represented images of Jews.[31]
Few Poles were at the time willing to express such a view so clearly as
writer and journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who noted in 1960 that Poland's
Jews should not have been denied their right to a homeland, because they
had helped to create the country over the centuries.[32] Most people
between the wars saw things differently: Many continued to consider Jews
"foreign" and "disloyal", no matter how much they had acculturated to the
majority population. The nation-state required homogeneity and clarity.
Flexible notions of identity among Jews, which by no means entailed
disloyalty to Poland, appeared not to fit in.
The murder of Polish Jews and its repercussions
The murder of almost all of Poland's Jews during WWII did not lead to a
change in Polish attitudes. Instead, it deepened both fictitious and real
divisions.[33] This occurred, for one, due to the isolation of Jews through
the German policy of ghettoization and then murder. Furthermore, there
were, to a limited extent, some Poles who played an active part in the
Holocaust. It became known that others, after being forced by the National
Socialists into the highly compromising role of witnessing the Holocaust,
they allowed themselves to be tempted into exploiting the situation and
demanded large payments for providing hiding places for Jews or blackmailed
Jews for these services.[34] On many occasions, these Poles may have saved
the lives of Jews concerned, but their conduct created new rifts.
Memories of the war period also created divisions. The memories of Jews and
the Poles drifted far apart from each other. For Jews, the Shoah formed the
basis of all remembrance of WWII. Non-Jewish Poles mourned their own,
immense sacrifice. Due to the historical constellation of the August 1939
German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland,
and the establishment of the Communist system after 1944, the history of
WWII is in Polish cultural memory above all the history of a confrontation
with Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.
In Polish memory, the support for Communism among a small part of the
Jewish community was exaggerated and generalised. Although many Jewish
Communists did not see themselves as Jewish, they were nonetheless
perceived precisely as such and, with that, as different from other
Communists: they were considered collaborators in the Soviet annexation of
eastern Poland after the Hitler-Stalin pact and accomplices in establishing
the Communist system in Poland after the war.[35]
No language for remembrance
Remembrance of the Jewish population after the war was also difficult
because almost all of the Polish Jews had been murdered, and most of the
survivors had emigrated. As a result, by the early 1950s there were
relatively few bearers of collective memory. Such a collective memory
usually has an appellant, trans-generational character: those who are born
later commit themselves to shared memories and thus compensate for the
passing of the generation that experienced the events first hand.[36]
The non-Jewish members of Polish society failed to take on this role. The
sociologist Hanna Swida-Ziemba has made an interesting observation on this
subject: after the war, the "Jewish question" was treated among young
people as if the world had gone back to the pre-war period and the
Holocaust had never happened. For this reason, society was again dominated
by either the adherents of anti-Semitism, who continued to invoke the
arguments of the pre-war era, or their staunch opponents. This emerged from
a certain sense of time: whereas the post-war era was assuming an
indistinct shape for Polish youth, the war era was set apart as a closed
matter. The pre-war years, on the other hand, were perceived as very much
alive. The unpleasant realities of the war and the insecurities of the
present were blotted out.[37] This situation, Swida-Ziemba writes, resulted
in the preservation of anti-Semitic attitudes, which were then passed on to
the next generation and polarised the intelligentsia. This constellation
should not be underestimated either, when it comes to the issue of
remembrance.
The few Holocaust survivors who remained in Poland were either unwilling to
acknowledge their Jewish origins in the light of the post-war pogroms, or
they were so traumatised by their wartime experiences that they suppressed
the memory of what had happened to them. There was no question of their
becoming bearers of remembrance.[38] Furthermore, right after the war,
there was quite simply no language available to describe what these two
groups - separated from one another, yet living side-by-side - had
experienced in the same country during that period. The unimaginable could
not be articulated at first.
Warsaw as paradigm
The killing of three million Poles of the Jewish faith had destroyed social
structures, not just Jewish ones. The middle classes and the
intelligentsia, including the Jewish intelligentsia, had been murdered, and
those who had survived had lost the settings in which they acted. Warsaw is
a clear example of the lack of ability to articulate grief over the murder
of Jews. The fact that the entire Jewish quarter around Nalewki Street and
the 380,000 Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw were simply no longer there, was
not discussed. This was due not only to the traumas that they had
experienced, but also to the fact that Warsaw was an empty city after the
war. All that remained was rubble.[39] Following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
in 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the city had lost over 50 per cent
of its pre-war population. Warsaw had to integrate thousands of people who
had never lived there. The Polish capital changed dramatically as a result.
When it comes to remembering Polish-Jewish relations, Warsaw is almost a
paradigm. Remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was
overshadowed by remembrance of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, during which
180,000 people died and thousands of Warsaw families lost their relatives.
In official Communist propaganda, no mention of the Warsaw Uprising was
permitted, yet this ban on remembrance tended to have the opposite effect
in the memories of many Polish families.
That the Ghetto Uprising was the first armed conflict involving
street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in a German-occupied city in
Europe, or that the Ghetto Uprising could have provided inspiration for the
Warsaw Uprising, was not an interpretation of events that came from Polish
historians. However, the Bulgarian-born writer Tzvetan Todorov has shown
that the arguments presented by Jewish and Polish underground leaders were
strikingly similar.[40]
On the other hand, according to Marcin Kula, the Ghetto Uprising tends to
be degraded in the minds of many Poles to a form of self-defence and is
denied the honourable label "uprising" in Polish history.[41] Already
during WWII, it was not regarded as a Polish tragedy. According to
historian Tomasz Szarota, the tragedy of their murdered Jewish fellow
citizens did not provoke the same kind of response as the crimes that
Germans committed against non-Jewish Poles in the Pawiak prison. According
to Szarota, "We will avenge the ghetto" was never written on the walls of
Warsaw as justification for the Warsaw Uprising, only "We will avenge
Pawiak".[42]
Due to the influx of immigrants to Warsaw from the countryside after the
war, the memory of the Holocaust was lost. The city was no longer
multinational. There was hardly anyone left to keep alive the memory of the
old Warsaw.[43] At the same time, the national Communist ideology that
pursued the vision of a homogeneous culture and nation was consolidated.
Even sculptor Nathan Rapaport's well-known monument to the ghetto fighters,
erected in 1948, was in keeping with this ideology. With its mythologised,
proletarian figures depicted in a mix of Romanticism and Socialist Realism,
the monument is saturated in proletarian ideology, thus successfully
eradicating the religious affiliation of the insurgents as a mark of their
identity. Jews were not to be recognised as such; they were instead
instrumentalised as the fighting proletariat. In this way, the monument
contributed more to forgetting than to remembering.[44]
Only writer Hannah Krall's famous 1976 interview with Marek Edelman, one of
the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising, and the translations of works by Nobel
Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978, showed the Poles just how
interesting and varied Warsaw once was. For while the city was for many
Poles the mother of the patriotic resistance, for many Jews it was one of
the largest Jewish cities in Europe, a centre of religious and political
thought, of literary life, a kind of "new Jerusalem".[45]
These two memories were not reconciled after the war, not in Warsaw, nor
anywhere elsewhere in Poland. On the contrary: until the 1980s, Jewish
memory simply did not exist. This is one of the reasons why there remains
to this today only limited knowledge of the fact that Warsaw was also a
Jewish city before the war. However, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto
also spawned feelings of guilt, as one observer diagnosed: Poles suffered
from "guilt by neglect", from the guilt of being witnesses.[46] A further
result of this trauma is that there is hardly anything in Warsaw's public
spaces to remind us that a Jewish quarter ever existed. The "ghetto"
established by the Germans is now an empty space, a place that does not
recall the ghetto's destruction, a place that has been filled with
residential buildings, but that calls on the observer to interpret the
empty space.[47]
Possibly, this empty space can be filled to some extent by the Museum of
the History of Jews in Poland, which is currently under construction.[48]
It remains to be seen whether this can compensate for the suppression of
memories, that were so difficult to process emotionally. Those who
participated in the atrocities or made money from Jews during or after the
war had a vested interest in this suppression. Furthermore, many Poles were
ashamed of their negative attitude towards Jews.[49] Sometimes, their
incapacity to show sympathy veered to anger, aggression, and anti-Semitism.
At any rate, the events of WWII left deeply wounded memories.[50]
Competition among martyrs and victims
The way in which the Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising have been
treated is an example of competition among victims. At times, this
competition has dominated the dialogue between Poles and Jews and
contributed to the failure to remember Jewish life in Poland as well as
Jewish suffering. The almost inflationary use of the term "victim" today is
in historical debates always linked to an assumption of innocence. Jan
Philip Reemtsma has also spoken of the interpretative authority of the
victim, "as if great suffering could only generate insights, rather than
hinder them at the same time".[51] Moreover, victims and guilt are not only
to be understood as opposites; they can certainly function in a
complementary manner. Against the backdrop of the aforementioned romantic
paradigm, which created a victim myth in Poland that "is so rooted in our
awareness that we regard it as historical reality",[52] there developed
among Poles a type of self-immunisation against the view that their own
victim status did not protect them from taking responsibility for
injustices done to others. The human rights activist Jacek Kuron put it
this way in May 2001: "The problem is that [...] we have cultivated
ourselves as a nation of martyrs and have difficulty recognising that there
are other nations of martyrs."[53]
The competitiveness between Poles and Jews goes back a long way. It can
already be found in the messianic ideas of Polish national poet Adam
Mickiewicz. Both peoples, he claimed, were chosen by God. Poles and Jews
had to travel the road of exile and suffering in order to be "redeemed".
Failure as a nation could thus be re-interpreted as a sign of "God's
grace". Such a self-image was able to convert a history of defeat and
victimisation into an expression of a "divine plan". Feelings of
inferiority could thus be tempered and reinterpreted as strengths. Here,
parallels can be seen in the concepts of identity and the memory of both
Poles and Jews.[54]
Under the influence of growing nationalism, an identity competition emerged
from these parallels. It manifested itself in debates on how much Jewish
blood was flowing in the veins of certain Poles: in the interwar years,
several court cases were held that aimed to prove that the individual in
question was not of Jewish origin. The issue was discussed with regard to
Mickiewicz himself and the composer Chopin. After 1989, presidential
candidate Tadeusz Mazowiecki had to field questions in public as to whether
he was a Jew. Those individuals who look "Jewish" find it necessary to
explain themselves or are publicly forced to do so.[55]
Since 1945, the competition of victims has been expressed by the fact that
many Poles, given their own suffering, find it difficult to acknowledge the
victim status and unique nature of Jewish suffering during the Shoah. A
symptomatic example from the 1960s is the entry "concentration camp" in the
new Great Encyclopaedia. Here, a distinction was made between concentration
camps and extermination camps, with Treblinka and Birkenau being included
in the latter. This was met with protests by the nationalist oriented
faction within the Polish United Worker's Party, led by Mieczyslaw Moczar,
who claimed that all concentration camps had been extermination camps, and
that the Polish people had also been threatened by extinction. According to
this logic, the history of the Polish Jews should not be granted a unique
status.[56]
The competition of victims was repeatedly reflected in the way the symbolic
site of the concentration camp and killing centre Auschwitz was treated.
The Communist government made Auschwitz a symbol of the persecution and
resistance of the Polish nation, while the murder of Jews was to a large
extent ignored. After the visit of Pope John Paul II to the memorial site
in 1979, the camp gained a new religious, Polish Catholic significance as
well, which resulted in numerous conflicts after 1989. One need only recall
the controversy surrounding the Carmelite nunnery in a building bordering
the camp and the crosses erected there in the former gravel pit.[57] This
unilateral appropriation of Auschwitz has since then been corrected: today,
Auschwitz is for many Poles a Polish, Jewish, multi-national, and universal
symbol.[58]
Treatment by historians
After the war, Polish historans failed to make any contribution to the
process of coming to terms with the Holocaust. The terror of the German
occupation, the martyrdom of the Polish nation, and the heroic armed
struggle against the occupiers took centre stage. In general, Polish
historians regarded the Poles and Jews as separate subjects of enquiry.[59]
This tendency can also be found in other nationally oriented histories,
such as Jewish or German history writing. Since the late 1960s, Polish
history writing has become somewhat more complex, and the fate of Jews has
to some extent been incorporated into studies on WWII. However, the
emphasis has remained on the political history of the occupying regime.[60]
Until the 1980s, Jews were omitted from the history of Poland and were not
treated as a distinct victim group in official works on the war.[61]
During the 1980s, the traditional stories of armed resistance and the
heroic conduct in Poland during the occupation were put into perspective.
The impulses for this came from international research on the Holocaust,
which described the Polish population's behaviour as marked by passivity,
indifference, or schadenfreude. The indifference among the Poles to the
genocide of Jews was also literary critic Jan Blonski's thesis in his
essay, "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto", which unleashed the first broad
debate on Polish-Jewish relations during WWII.[62] After 1990, the genocide
of Jews became the subject of intense study, leading to a wave of popular
representations in films, works of art. Academic research also had a great
deal of catching up to do. Independent research on the Holocaust in Poland
had been possible only from 1945 to 1947 and to a certain extent during the
early 1960s - and then with only limited public impact.[63]
New frameworks of memory: Remembrance after 1989
Since 1990, the persecution of Jews during WWII has been the subject of
intense examination. The fact that all of the extermination camps were
located on Polish soil makes this examination particularly dramatic and
historically explosive. The close spatial connection between the genocide
of Jews and the persecution of non-Jewish Poles in places such as Auschwitz
raises such questions as: What kind of national and international
remembrance is appropriate? What does balanced commemoration involve?[64]
The location of the extermination camps has repeatedly focused world public
attention on Poland. Some Poles regard this international dimension as a
burden, because they fear Poland's standing in the world will be damaged,
something that cannot be reconciled with the Polish self-image of moral
superiority. As a consequence, there is a competition in Poland between
Polish and international remembrance; this is obvious, for example, when
Israeli youth delegations visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and have hardly any
contact with the Polish population. They have little interest in
contemporary Poland or the fact that numerous Poles also lost their lives
during WWII in general and at Auschwitz in particular. It is the same with
the annual "March of the Living", which is held in Poland every April.
At the same, however, Poland is also part of the international developments
that have taken place since 1989 and is involved in shaping them. In the
early 1990s, seemingly fixed constructs of memory from the immediate
post-war years started to crumble throughout Europe. During the late 1940s
and early 1950s, a rather stable collective memory had taken shape in the
countries concerned. At the core of these constructs was the uncontested
fact that Nazi Germany bore responsibility for WWII and had caused great
suffering to Europeans in the course of the conflict. Issues of
collaboration with the National Socialists were suppressed. In many
countries, a myth of resistance was created.[65]
In Poland, the effects of this myth have not been eliminated completely. It
was only during the debates over Neighbours and Fear that the many
different degrees of collaboration and culpability became known. This
development is due not least to the fact that the generations that
experienced these events are dying in increasing numbers. Since 1989, a
fundamental, Europe-wide shift has taken place away from memory of the war
to cultural memory. The Holocaust became the centrepiece of these cultural
memories, but so did the genocide of the Sinti and Roma and the persecution
and murder of homosexuals and the disabled.[66]
However, the fact that the Holocaust has become a type of "negative
founding myth", particularly for Europe's West, cannot simply be carried
over to "the East". Remembrance cannot be homogenised in the name of a
common European culture: nobody can be forced to remember in accordance
with a particular norm. The Holocaust cannot play the same role for Polish
society as it does for German society. Nonetheless, Poles are also
demanding that the Holocaust be recognised as a universal event, as a
never-ending mourning ritual, in which Poles should also participate. This
mourning should be an ethical attitude, according to literary critic Maria
Janion, who quotes Maria Czapska, writing in the Paris-based exile magazine
Kultura in 1957:
The most terrible genocide in the history of mankind, the massacre of
several million
Jews in Poland, which was selected by Hitler as the place of their
execution, the blood
and ashes of the victims, which seeped into Polish soil, form an
important bond linking
Poland to the Jewish nation, and it is not in our power to release
ourselves from this bond.
This obligation, Janion adds, applies equally to Poland and to Europe.[67]
She calls on her countrymen to show an empathy hitherto withheld, to lament
the Holocaust, and to re-write the history of Poland. Similarly, the writer
Kazimierz Brakoniecki appeals to Poles to respect Jewish pain and sorrow,
for they are the inheritance of all mankind.[68] According to Janion, this
path can be followed by taking a critical approach to one's own myths.[69]
The Jedwabne debate
must be seen as a step along this path, which leads through a
differentiation and pluralisation of memories.[70] The fact that this is
not a linear or irreversible process lies in the nature of memory.[71] A
secure consensus shared by all that is never again called into question is
a foreign concept in democracy. After the Jedwabne debate, in which a
general consensus was not reached, there followed a counter-wave of renewed
heroisation and a return to a confrontational history of the war, as if a
shock reaction to the loss of innocence.[72] This was seen in the history
policy that the government was promoting so as to generate a positive sense
of community, an "affirmative patriotism", and a favourable image of Poland
abroad.[73] The same can be said for the controversy over German plans to
create a Centre against Expulsion. Among this history policy's advocates,
the Jedwabne debate raised the question: "If we agree on a collective sense
of shame, why can't we reach an understanding on a collective sense of
pride?"[74]
To some observers, it now appeared as if history policy had been initiated
in order to eliminate the topic of Polish-Jewish relations from the public
sphere.[75] That this did not, and could not, succeed has been shown by the
recent discussion of Gross's book Fear. According to Gross, Polish
anti-Semitism, which he confirmed was widespread in post-war society, can
be traced back to fears on the part of the Poles that they would have to
return Jewish assets to returning Holocaust survivors as well as to
feelings of guilt arising from their conduct during the occupation.
The positions taken by representatives of the national rightwing parties
and of the episcopate have made it particularly clear that they are not yet
willing to part with old myths. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz wrote in an open
letter to the Catholic publishing house of Fear that its task was not to
stir the demons of anti-Polishness and anti-Semitism. He also claimed that
the book created an atmosphere of tension among nationalities in
Poland.[76] However, in a democratic society, controversies and debates
over self-perception are an indispensable component of political culture
and a measure not only of its existence, but also its quality. Such debates
do not aim for acquittal, or conviction, but for insight and understanding.
The ongoing discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland is nothing more
than a Polish-Polish, democratic debate over self-perception. As such it is
incapable of blocking the Polish-Jewish dialogue, as sociologist Ireneusz
Krzeminski claimed.[77] On the contrary, the Polish-Polish debate can if
anything support the Polish-Jewish dialogue, since one's own memories are a
prerequisite to showing empathy for the memories and the suffering of the
others.
The "mythical" Jew
As these debates have shown, hardly anybody in Poland, whether an academic
or a member general public, is indifferent to this topic. Few "if any
narratives in contemporary European history are as fractured as that of
Polish-Jewish relations in WWII".[78] This brokenness has lasted to this
day, and there continues to be no other historical subject that has such a
polarising effect in Poland: moral sensibilities collide with anger and
resentment.[79] After all, for a significant share of Polish public
opinion, the "Jewish question" in the twentieth century meant more than
just the task of shaping the co-existence with a community that had another
religion, different customs, and in part different professions. The "Jewish
question" formed the core of the worldview of Poland's national rightwing
parties. In this worldview, Jews were to be the embodiment of satanic evil,
treason, and perfidy.[80]
Since nobody else could take on this demonic role, the "symbolic, mystical
Jew" survived in society's collective imagination, even though there were
hardly any Jews left in Poland after the war. Since then, a symbolic Jew
has existed in the Polish consciousness. This symbolic Jew constitutes a
key element of the auto-stereotype of many Poles.[81] That is why it is
possible to revive the image of the "perfidious" Jew in any political
crisis. This image appeals in different ways to existing patterns of
thought. These range from Jews as Communists or capitalists, to dissidents
or Zionists hiding behind the scenes, conspiring against the Poles, and
secretly pulling the strings.[82] The result is a Judaisation of the
rejected "other" - and it has never been left to Jews or the "others" to
decide who was a Jew and who were the "others". Those who are drummed out
of the national corpus by means of definitions or oppose such putatively
absolute values as Catholicism or the family, which have always been
regarded as the pillars of the nation, can pose a potential threat.
Formerly, it was Jews who bore the brunt of this argument; nowadays, it
affects others, according to historian Andrzej Walicki.[83] In the
perception of the political Right, these are primarily feminists and
homosexuals.
With regard to the stigmatisation of homosexuals, the arguments put forward
today are astonishingly similar to anti-Semitic sentiments of the 1920s and
1930s: homosexuals are considered the enemy within, just like Jews, without
their own territory; both are branded as being anti-Polish, as "foreign",
and as an internal danger for the Polish family, the pillar of the nation.
At demonstrations, direct comparisons are sometimes made in terms as in the
slogans: "We'll do to you what Hitler did to Jews" and "It's no myth, it's
so true: where there's a gay, you'll find a Jew".[84]
This recourse to anti-Semitic set pieces is not representative of Polish
society. It is used by rightwing and extreme rightwing parties. Most Poles,
particularly younger Poles, do not share these attitudes. However, this
recourse shows that the pre-modern, anti-Semitic thinking and the
anti-Semitism of the interwar years are still alive.
Here, one has to ask what it is that Jews or homosexuals threaten. For
those who harbour this worldview and the media that propagate it, such as
the popular Radio Maryja or the daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik, their own
identity is at stake. They fear losing the traditional family, which they
regard as the foundation of the nation. What Jews and homosexuals have in
common is their place in the construct of a national, Catholic identity
structure.[85] The symbolic Jew is still present, as is also shown in the
use of the term "Jew" - in different linguistic forms - in public discourse
and set phrases.[86] In colloquial speech, on the streets, where children
use the word "Jew" to insult one another, in the football stadiums, where
the opponent is vilified as "Jewish", in everyday conversations while
shopping or talking to workmen, in which Jews stand for a symbol of
whatever is fickle, unreliable, dirty, perfidious, fraudulent. "The Jew",
this "abstract negative symbol", as he has been defined by Leszek
Kolakowski, remains a traditional object of aggression.[87]
As a foil to the presence of the "mythical Jew", initiatives and
associations such as Borussia in Olsztyn, Pogranicze Sejny, or the
German-Polish project Spurensuche have begun to pluck the Jewish life from
oblivion. Their way of life, their streets and squares, their works and
buildings, synagogues and customs are to be made visible on site. These
initiatives are frequently organised by non-Jews. This results in the
creation of what Ruth Ellen Gruber calls "virtual Jewish": a putative
Jewish culture without Jews. There is always a danger of a folklorisation
of Jewish life and its clichéd distortion. Klezmer music and Jewish
restaurants are booming in Berlin just as they are in Kazimierz in Cracow,
places that used to be centres of European Jewish life, and where there are
no longer any Jews left. However, klezmer music and Jewish restaurants are
flourishing there precisely because there are no longer any Jews
remaining.[88] This appears to be the alternative: Jewish culture will
either be forgotten, as has generally been the case in Warsaw to date, or
it will become virtual. But this also means that notions of the East
European Jews and who they were will increasingly be defined by this
virtual Jewishness.[89]
Paths of remembrance
In the attempt to summarise the different levels of remembrance of the
Jewish population, it is noticeable that, since 1990, the landscape of
remembrance in Poland has changed dramatically despite certain
continuities. The process of analysing the entangled history with Jews, as
well as Polish-Ukrainian, Polish-Russian, and Polish-German history, can be
observed in historiography and numerous public debates. Former Foreign
Minister Stefan Meller sees these debates about the past as a blessing for
his country in the long term.[90] In its treatment of the past, Poland is
going through an interregnum. The past can no longer be found where it used
to be. The country is poised between different myths, of which some are not
yet accepted, while others have been rejected.[91] On the one hand,
received attitudes towards the persecution of Jews are now being
questioned, attitudes that have tended to be remembered as giving
assistance to persecuted Jews or as standing by helplessly.[92] On the
other hand, there is a split between the Polish general public and
historians as to how the limited participation of some Poles in the Shoah
should be classified. It is impossible to predict whether an integrated
culture of remembrance can be achieved, or whether in the long term there
will be two separate remembrance communities that hardly communicate with
each other. Historians currently scrutinising the period of the German
occupation will find it just as difficult as the general public to ignore
the fact that despite the ghetto walls, the Poles were involved in the fate
of Jews in a number of ways and to a far greater extent than has been
assumed to date.[93]
Those who wish to pursue the path of an integrated history and culture of
remembrance, those who wish to abandon an exclusive way of remembering that
separates the Poles from Jews in favour of an inclusive remembrance that
incorporates the two groups in their shared history will probably have to
leave behind the level of nation-state, or at least question it critically.
To date, the point of reference in most debates is the nation-state, which
is conceived as being mono-ethnic. However, the Polish people were never
mono-ethnic. The modern nation-states were not really ethno-national
entities, but emerged from historical constructs and are based on myths. In
European history, the nation and the nation-state have been an extremely
strong gravitational force in the forging of identity; this phenomenon also
applied to Zionists. The nation continues to provide an important point of
reference. However, a portrayal of history that focuses solely on the
nation-state tends to create a clear division between national groups, even
though, as is still the case today, these people by no means regarded
themselves as being as purely "Polish" or "Jewish", as nationalists
imagined.[94]
Leaving behind the level of the nation-state also presents an opportunity,
since in this way, a national self-image based predominantly on continuity
and homogeneity becomes more difficult. The current Polish debates are so
painful precisely because they have departed from the national (protective)
space as transnational debates over self-perception. The Holocaust, for
example, has become a universal point of orientation in commemoration as
well as political reception, albeit with very different functions.
But maybe this is what is needed for an open historical memory: leaving
behind the nation-state, opening oneself up, and searching for other points
of reference that can be researched and debated. In this way, memories of
history can become less vertical and more horizontal. Differences, rather
than homogeneity, can come to the fore.[95] If it is possible to overcome
the current incompatibilities within national remembrance, without
apportioning blame or pursuing a competition of victims; to adhere to the
principle of self-questioning, while recognising the suffering of others
and one's own guilt, then the normative exclusivity of the individual
stories among Jews and Poles could itself be consigned to the past.
* [1] Barbara Engelking-Boni, "Dolary skupuje, koty przechowuje",
Gazeta Wyborcza, 16 February 2008.
* [2] Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish
Community in Jedwabne (Princeton 2001). The Polish edition was published in
2000 as Sasiedzi: historia zaglady zydowskiego miasteczka; Joanna
Tokarska-Bakir, "Obsesja niewinnosci", Gazeta Wyborcza, 13-14 January 2001,
published in German in Ruth Henning, ed., Die "Jedwabne-Debatte" in
polnischen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften (Potsdam 2002).
* [3] Jan Tomasz Gross, Strach. Antysemityzm w Polsce tuz po wojnie.
Historia moralnej zapasci (Cracow 2008). On the related debate, see Wokol
Strachu. Dyskusja o ksiazce Jana T. Grossa (Cracow 2008). The arguments
that unify Gross' opponents are summed up in Robert Jankowski, ed., Cena
"Strachu". Gross w oczach historykow (Warsaw 2008).
* [4] Bartosz Korzeniewski, "O polskich debatach historycznych
krytycznie", Znak, 9 (2006), 14-20, 15 (2006), p. 15.
* [5] Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm.
Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja wladzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw
2001), p. 399.
* [6] Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory
of the Holocaust (Syracuse 1997), pp. 63-74.
* [7] Aleksander Smolar, "Tabu i niewinnosc", Gazeta Wyborcza, 12-13
May 2001, first publ. Aneks, 41-42 (1986), in German as: "Unschuld und
Tabu", Babylon, 2 (1987), pp. 40-71; Piotr Madajczyk, "Kriegserfahrungen
und Kriegserinnerungen. Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Polen", in Jörg
Echternkamp, Stefan Martens, eds., Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Europa.
Erfahrung und Erinnerung (Paderborn et al. 2007), pp. 97-111, here p. 104.
* [8] Marcin Kula, "Amnesie - ein nur teilweise selbstverschuldetes
Leiden", in Friedhelm Boll, Peter Hengstenberg, eds., Europäische
Gesellschaften und der Holocaust (Warsaw 2004), pp. 69-75, here p. 70.
* [9] Katrin Steffen, Jüdische Polonität. Ethnizität und Nation im
Spiegel der polnischsprachigen jüdischen Presse 1918-1939 (Gottingen 2004);
Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939 (Portland 2004); Anna
Landau-Czajka, Syn bedzie Lech...: asymilacja Zydow w Polsce miedzywojennej
(Warsaw 2006).
* [10] Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile. An autobiographical
trilogy (New York 1984), p. 187.
* [11] Katrin Steffen, "Zur Europäizität der Geschichte der Juden im
östlichen Europa", H-Soz-u-Kult Forum "Zur Europäizität des östlichen
Europa" hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de; Gershon Hundert, Jews in
Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity
(Berkely 2004).
* [12] Kula, "Amnesie", p. 71.
* [13] Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York and Oxford 2002), pp.
157-232; Maciej Janowski, "Polen im 19. Jahrhundert: Europa an der
Weichsel?" in Claudia Kraft, Katrin Steffen, eds., Europas Platz in Polen.
Polnische Europa-Konzeptionen vom Mittelalter bis zum EU-Beitritt
(Osnabrueck 2007), pp. 131-155, here p. 143; Maria Janion, "Spor o
antysemityzm. Sprzecznosci, watpliwosci i pytania", in Do Europy tak, ale
razem z naszymi umarlymi (Warsaw 2000), pp. 127-166, here p. 157.
* [14] Tomasz Gasowski, "The Second Republic and its Jewish Citizens",
in Slawomir Kapralski, ed., The Jews in Poland, 2. (Cracow 1999), pp.
125-136, here p. 127.
* [15] Peter Alter, "Einleitung", in Peter Alter, Claus-Ekkehard
Bärsch, Peter Berghoff, eds., Die Konstruktion der Nation gegen die Juden
(Munich 1999), p. 8.
* [16] Maria Janion, "Der Gründungsmythos des polnischen
Antisemitismus", in Boll, Europäische Gesellschaften, pp. 13-55, here p. 35.
* [17] Claudia Kraft, "Geschichte im langen Transformationsprozess in
Polen", in Helmut Altrichter, ed., GegenErinnerung. Geschichte als
politisches Argument im Transformationsprozess Ost-, Ostmittel- und
Südosteuropas (Munich 2006), pp. 129-150, here p. 137.
* [18] Anna Landau-Czajka, W jednym stali domu ... Koncepcje
rozwiazania kwestii zydowskiej w publicystyce polskiej lat 1933-1939
(Warsaw 1998), p. 57.
* [19] The equation between Poles and Catholicism had its roots in the
seventeenth century, and was rejected during the period of reform by the
promoters of the enlightenment among the nobility before enjoying a
renaissance in the nineteenth century; Hans Henning Hahn, "Die Gesellschaft
im Verteidigungszustand. Zur Genese eines Grundmusters der politischen
Mentalität in Polen", in Hans Henning Hahn, Michael G. Müller, eds.,
Gesellschaft und Staat in Polen. Historische Aspekte der polnischen Krise
(Berlin 1988), pp. 15-48, here p. 27
* [20] Joanna Tokarska Bakir, "Zydzi u Kolberga", Res Publica Nowa
(July-August 1999), pp. 30-38, here p. 38.
* [21] Krzysztof Kawalec, Wizje ustroju panstwa w polskiej mysli
politycznej lat 1918-1939. Ze studjow nad dziejami polskiej mysli
politycznej (Wroclaw 1995), p. 17; Jerzy Jedlicki, "Polish Concepts of
Native Culture", in Ivo Banac, Katherine Verdery, eds., National Character
and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe (New Haven 1995), pp.
1-22, here p. 21.
* [22] Kazimierz Brandys, "Oktober 1978", Warschauer Tagebuch. Die
Monate davor 1978-1981 (Frankfurt/Main 2002).
* [23] Kawalec, Wizje, p. 166.
* [24] Kula, "Amnesie", p. 71.
* [25] S. Pomer, "Intelektualisci polscy o przesladowaniu zydow w
Niemczech. Ankieta ONaszego Przegladu' wsrod przedstawicieli polskiego
swiata intelektualnego", Nasz Przeglad (28 April 1933).
* [26] Steffen, Jüdische Polonität, p. 296.
* [27] Zbigniew Unilowski, "Blaski i nedze", in Jestesmy w Warszawie,
Przewodnik literacki po stolicy. Praca zbiorowa staraniem Zwiazku
Zawodowego Literatow Polskich (Warsaw 1938), pp. 43-53, here p. 43.
* [28] Katrin Steffen, "Connotations of Exclusion - 'Ostjude',
'Ghettos' and Other Markings", Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Institutes, 4
(2005), pp. 459-479, here p. 479.
* [29] Kazimierz Brakoniecki, "Bez znieczulenia. O antysemityzmie
polskim szkic osobisty", Przeglad Polityczny, 87 (2008), pp. 32-41, here p.
34.
* [30] Zusman Segalowicz, "Tlomackie 13, czyli trzy szkice o zydowskim
srodowisku literackim w Warszawie", in Elzbieta Traba, Robert Traba, eds.,
Tematy zydowskie (Olsztyn 1999), pp. 201-245, here p. 203.
* [31] Singer, Love and Exile, p. 209.
* [32] Tadeusz Mazowiecki, "Antysemityzm ludzi lagodnych i dobrych",
in idem, Druga twarz Europy (Warsaw 1990), pp. 57-76, here p. 67, first
published in Wiez, 5 (1960).
* [33] Jerzy Jedlicki, "Polacy wobec zaglady Zydow", Polityka (10
February 2001).
* [34] Engelking-Boni, "Dolary skupuje".
* [35] Madajczyk, "Kriegserfahrungen", pp. 103-106.
* [36] Aleida Assmann, "Wozu Onationales Gedenken'?", in Ewa
Kobylinska, Andreas Lawaty, eds., Erinnern, vergessen, verdrängen.
Polnische und deutsche Erfahrungen (Wiesbaden 1998), pp. 111-119, here p.
112.
* [37] Hanna Swida-Ziemba, Urwany lot. Pokolenie inteligenckiej
mlodziezy powojennej w swietle listow i pamietnikow z lat 1945-1948 (Cracow
2003), pp. 92-94.
* [38] Kula, "Amnesie", p. 71.
* [39] Jerzy Pilch, "Zaleta warszawskich wad", Wiez, 4 (2006), pp.
29-34, here p. 32.
* [40] Tzvetan Todorov, "Skazani na heroizm", Gazeta Wyborcza (18-19
April 1998).
* [41] Kula, "Amnesie", p. 72.
* [42] Tomasz Szarota, "Powstanie warszawskie jako odwet za niemiecke
okupacje", in Kazimierz Krajewski, Tomasz Labuszewski, eds., Powstanie
warszawskie. Fakty i mity (Warsaw 2006), pp. 21-26, here p. 23.
* [43] Antoni Libera, "Czy Warszawa da sie lubic?" Wiez, 4 (2006), pp.
25-28, here p. 26.
* [44] Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors
Respond (Princeton 2003), p. 6.
* [45] Marta Zielinska, "Stracona i odzyskana, Warszawa w lekturach",
Wiez, 4 (2006), pp. 52-56, here pp. 52-53.
* [46] Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish? Reinventing Jewish Culture
in Europe (Berkely et al. 2002), p. 57.
* [47] Jacek Leociak, "Aryjskim tramwajem przez warszawskie getto,
czyli hermeneutyka pustego miejsca", in Lidia Burska, Mark Zaleski, eds.,
Maski wspolczesnosci. O literaturze i kulturze XX wieku (Warsaw 2001), pp.
75-87, here p. 83.
* [48] See also the contribution by Zofia Woycicka in this Osteuropa
8/2008.
* [49] Kula, "Amnesie", pp. 72-73.
* [50] Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead, pp. 4345.
* [51] Berliner Zeitung (12 June 2006).
* [52] Ks. Janusz Salamon, "Uwolnic sie od strachu", Gazeta Wyborcza
(6 March 2008).
* [53] Quoted from Henning, "Die 'Jedwabne-Debatte'", pp. 16-17.
* [54] Steffen, Jüdische Polonität, pp. 125-129 and p. 374.
* [55] Irena Grudzinska-Gross, "Podejrzane pochodzenie jako kategoria
kultury polskiej", in Maria Janion, Claudia Snochowka-Gonzalez, Kazimierza
Szczuka, eds., Inny. Inna. Inne. O innosci w kulturze (Warsaw 2004), pp.
98-109, here p. 101.
* [56] Karol Sauerland, "Literatische und mediale
Erinnerungskultur(en) in Polen", in Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, Jürgen
Zinnecker, eds., Zwischen Zwangsarbeit, Holocaust und Vertreibung.
Polnische, jüdische und deutsche Kindheiten im besetzten Polen (Weinheim
and Munich 2007), pp. 19-41, here p. 22.
* [57] Stanislaw Musial, "Die Wahrheit über das Kreuz in Auschwitz",
Transodra, 18 (1998), pp. 78-81.
* [58] Marek Kucia, "Auschwitz in der öffentlichen Meinung Polens",
Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 2002, pp. 189-216, pp. 205-206, here
p. 214.
* [59] Wlodzimierz Borodziej, "Abschied von der Martyrologie in
Polen?" in Martin Sabrow et al., eds., Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte.
Große Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich 2003), pp. 288-305, here p. 293.
* [60] Madajczyk, "Kriegserfahrungen", p. 99.
* [61] Smolar, "Tabu".
* [62] Jan Blonski, "Biedni Polacy patrza na Getto", Tygodnik
Powszechny, 11 January 1987; Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, "Die Erinnerung an die
Besatzung während des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Polen. Transformationen und
Kontinuitäten der polnischen Erinnerungskultur 1980-2005", in Bernd
Faulenbach, Franz-Josef Jelich, eds., "Transformationen" der
Erinnerungskulturen in Europa nach 1989 (Essen 2006), pp. 55-78, here p. 63.
* [63] Bömelburg, "Erinnerung", p. 66.
* [64] Ibid., p. 67.
* [65] Tony Judt, "The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in
Post-War Europe", in Jan Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War
Europe. Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge 2002), pp. 157-183,
here p. 163.
* [66] Michael Jeismann, "Die Holocaust-Erinnerung als Passepartout.
Geschichte ohne Erfahrung - Erfahrungen ohne Geschichte: Wie das kollektive
Gedächtnis der Gegenwart eine Prognose stellt", in Joachim Landkammer et
al., eds., Erinnerungsmanagement. Systemtransformation und
Vergangenheitspolitik im internationalen Vergleich (Munich 2006), pp.
257-264, here p. 259.
* [67] Maria Janion, "Polen in Europa", in Kraft, Steffen, Europas
Platz, pp. 31-66, here pp. 59-60.
* [68] Brakoniecki, "Bez znieczulenia", p. 39.
* [69] "Opowiadac o ludzkim cierpieniu. Z prof. Maria Janion rozmawia
Andrzej Franaszek", Tygodnik Powszechny (6 February 2007).
* [70] Marek Ziolkowski, "Pamiec i zapominanie. Trupy w szafie
polskiej zbiorowej pamieci", Kultura i spoleczecnstwo, 3-4 (2001), pp.
2-21, here p. 20.
* [71] Gesine Schwan, Birgit Schwelling, "Einleitung", in Gesine
Schwan, Birgit Schwelling, eds., Demokratische politische Identität.
Deutschland, Polen und Frankreich im Vergleich (Wiesbaden 2006), pp. 9-34,
here p. 29.
* [72] Adam Krzeminski, "So viele Kriege wie Nationen" (6 April 2005);
www.perlentaucher.de.
* [73] Korzeniewski, "O polskich debatach", p. 15; Katrin Steffen,
"Ambivalenzen des affirmativen Patriotismus. Geschichtspolitik in Polen",
in Quo vadis, Polonia? Kritik der polnischen Vernunft (Berlin 2006) [ =
Osteuropa 11-12/2006], pp. 219-233.
* [74] Marek A. Cichocki, "Historia powraca", Rzeczpospolita (14
December 2004).
* [75] "Zydzi a polityka historyczna", Midrasz, 9 (2006), pp. 41-45,
here p. 44.
* [76] "List otwarty Kardynala Stanislawa Dziwisza", in Wokol Strachu.
Dyskusja o ksiazce Jana T. Grossa (Cracow 2008), pp. 74-75.
* [77] "Ksiazka Grossa blokuje dialog", Rzeczpospolita (6 February
2008).
* [78] John Connelly, "Poles and Jews in WWII: the Revisions of Jan T.
Gross", Contemporary European History, 4 (2002), pp. 641-658, here p. 641.
* [79] Jedlicki, "Polacy wobec zaglady".
* [80] Jerzy Jedlicki, "Problem winy i odpowiedzialnosci", in Wokol
strachu, pp. 32-42, here p. 34.
* [81] Ibid; Ireneusz Krzeminski, "'Neuer' oder Oalter'
Antisemitismus? Anmerkungen auf der Grundlage soziologischer Untersuchungen
in Polen und der Ukraine", in Bernd Kauffmann, Basil Kerski, eds.,
Antisemitismus und Erinnerungskulturen im postkommunistischen Europa
(Osnabrueck 2006), pp. 53-87, here p. 59.
* [82] Jedlicki, "Problem winy", p. 34.
* [83] Andrzej Walicki, "Mit jednosci narodu", Gazeta Wyborcza (19
August 2006).
* [84] Agnieszka Graff, "Gej, czyli Zyd", Gazeta Wyborcza (25 June
2006).
* [85] Adam Ostolski, "Zydzi, geje i wojna cywilizacji" (op. cit., 2
(2005)).
* [86] Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, "Legendy o krwi (z cyklu Obraz
osobliwy)", Teksty drugie, 4 (2007), pp. 47-72, here p. 47.
* [87] Ibid., pp. 51-54.
* [88] Konstanty Gebert, "Nieautentycznosc?", foreword to Ruth Ellen
Gruber, Odrodzenie kultury zydowskiej w Europie (Sejny 2004), pp. 11-16,
here p. 13.
* [89] Ibid., p. 15.
* [90] "Ein wundes Land. Noch ist die Vergangenheit in Polen nicht
vergangen - Gespräch mit dem Historiker Stefan Meller", Neue Zürcher
Zeitung, (27 August 2007).
* [91] Jeismann, "Holocaust-Erinnerung", p. 260; Judt, "The Past", p.
180.
* [92] Bömelburg, "Erinnerung", p. 74.
* [93] Borodziej, "Abschied", pp. 293 and 297.
* [94] Claudia Kraft, Katrin Steffen, "Europas Platz in Polen", in
idem, Europas Platz, pp. 7-30, here p. 11.
* [95] Jeismann, "Holocaust-Erinnerung", p. 262.
Published 2008-11-27
Original in German
Translation by Anne Güttel
First published in Osteuropa 8-10/2008
Contributed by Osteuropa
© Osteuropa
© Eurozine
----------
Impulses for Europe
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Eighty per cent of Jewish people worldwide have eastern European
roots, yet how far are the countries of eastern Europe ready to
integrate Jewish life and influences into their national commemorative
cultures and present day identities? Eurozine publishes a selection
of articles from the issue of Osteuropa, "Impulses for Europe. Tradition
and Modernity in East European Jewry". [ more
http://www.eurozine.com/comp/jewishlifeandthought.html ]
Anna Lipphardt, Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel
Impulses for Europe
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-editorial-en.html
Delphine Bechtel, Michael Brenner, Frank Golczewski, Francois Guesnet,
Rachel Heuberger, Cilly Kugelmann, Anna Lipphardt
Remembrance between Scylla and Charybdis
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-roundtable-en.html
Micha Brumlik
From obscurantism to holiness
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-brumlik-en.html
Manfred Sapper
Overcoming war
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-26-sapper-en.html
Anatolij Podol's'kyi
A reluctant look back
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-28-podolskyi-en.html
Katrin Steffen
Disputed memory
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-steffen-en.html
Vytautas Toleikis
Repress, reassess, remember
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-27-toleikis-en.html
Osteuropa International
For further reading see the new website of Osteuropa International.
www.osteuropa.dgo-online.org
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