Autor pisze o trzech eseistycznych filmach poświęconych obozom koncentracyjnym. Powstały one w różnym czasie, a także w różnych krajach. Ich twórcy – choć charakteryzują się odmienną wrażliwością, a ich dzieła dowodzą pojemności formuły eseju – przemawiają poniekąd wspólnym głosem. Chcą mówić o tym, co w istocie nienazwane, co wykracza poza możliwość wyobrażenia sobie ogromu zła Zagłady. Żaden z nich nie jest dokumentalistą. Zamiast głośno oskarżać, eksplorują sferę milczenia. Autor artykułu próbuje dotrzeć do tego, jak można zmierzyć się z trudnym tematem – kiedyś, niemal na gorąco, i dzisiaj, kiedy przez Europę i świat przetacza się fala ruchów neonacjonalistycznych.
EN
The author writes about three essayistic films concerning to concentration camps. They were created at different times, as well as in different countries. Their creators – although they are characterized by a different sensitivity, and their works prove the breadth of the formula of an essay – speak in a way with a common voice. They want to talk about what is in fact unnamed, which goes beyond the possibility of imagining the magnitude of the evil of the Holocaust. None of them is a documentalist. Instead of loud accusations, they explore the realm of silence. The author of the article tries to find out how to face a difficult topic – in the past, almost at the time of perpetration, and today, when a wave of neo-nationalist movements is sweeping through Europe and the world.
The author is mainly interested in the chosen aspect of autobiographic dispute, namely a film autobiographism understood as a defined communication attitude of the film author and the audience reaction generated by it. In this paper Maszewska-Łupiniak discusses autobiographism included in the fictional film narration of "The Third Part" of the Night by Andrzej Żuławski. His film, presenting a part of a family history, matches the autobiographic dispute. As a text about Holocaust it creates a universal message – the duality in the film structure makes us think about the relations between a creator and his work, between the ethical conditions of that relation. All that is reflected in the style and poetics of the film, which, in turn, makes the receiver of the story adopt a distant attitude.
The article is a reflection on the topic of connection between a legal procedure and a performance and its role during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. After almost two decades of intentional silence surrounding the subject of the Holocaust survivors in the official Israeli discourse, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which took place in Jerusalem in 1961, for the first time the victims where given an opportunity to speak about their experiences to the public, wheras the Israeli society of early sixties, for the first time faced these stories. In the paper the author argues that the trial of Adolf Eichmann was not only a legal procedure, but also – in the light of strategies determining its final shape – a performance that was supposed to construct a new perspecitve of Holocaust narratives in Israel of early sixties.
The principal notion of the article–a “backward catastrophe”– stands for a catastrophe which occurs unseen until it becomes recognized and which broadens its destructive activity until it has been recognized. This concept in the article has been referred to the Shoah. The main thesis is that the recognition of the actual influence of the Holocaust began in Polish culture in the mid-1980s (largely it started with the film by Claude Lanzmann Shoah and the essay by Jan Błoński Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto [“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”]), that is when the question: “What happened to the Jews”, assumes the form: “Did the things that happened to the Jews, also happened to the Poles?”. Cognitive and ethical reorientation leads to the revealing of the hidden consequences of the Holocaust reaching as far as the present day and undermining the foundations of collective identity. In order to understand this situation (and adopt potentially preventive actions) Polish society should be recognized as a postcatastrophic one.
Summary In this article the author is trying to find the similarities between Holocaust and animals’ situation in a cruel world. The author analyses and interpretates novel Beatrycze i Wergili written by Martel. In this story, the protagonists of narrator’s play are animals (donkey and monkey), who like Jewish society during Second World War, live in cages (similar to ghetto). They are treated as objects. Moreover, they are victims of violence. They have to deal with fear, insecurity (features typical for trauma). After they escaped, they tried to understand what had happened to them.
W artykule zajęto się tekstami autobiograficznymi w kontekście rozrachunku z Holocaustem. W centrum uwagi znajdują się powieści Meine Schwester Antigone i Der Brautpreis Grete Weil, autorki żydowskiego pochodzenia. Interpretacja podkreśla problematykę tożsamości pisarki jako Żydówki i Niemki oraz daremne usiłowanie opowiedzenia tego, czego powiedzieć się nie da – literackiego ujęcia grozy Auschwitz/ Oświęcimia.
The text is an attempt to analyze literary postmemory representation in three scenes confronted with the language of art. The subject matter are novels: Zagłada (Extinction) by Piotr Szewc, Tworki by Marek Bieńczyk and Pensjonat (Pension) by Piotr Paziński and an exhibition: Poland – Israel – Germany. Auschwitz Experience at the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCAK in Krakow. These books had their premieres at intervals of at least ten years, becoming marks of consecutive decades of duration of the concept of postmemory. Zagłada (1987), Tworki (1999) and Pensjonat (2009) could be read as another mainstream views of the postmemory and building a horizon of contemporary Polish literature. In dialogue with these novels an exhibition open on the 15th of May, 2015 in MOCAK has been submitted to analysis. The intention of the text is to point transformations in postmemory in different fields of artistic activity.
Kluczem do rozumienia sposobu funkcjonowania ramy gatunkowej w dyskursie na temat Zagłady jest kategoria postpamięci. Współczesne pokolenie pisarzy i odbiorców literatury podchodzi całkiem odmiennie do doświadczenia Holokaustu. Pierwsze sygnały tego zjawiska można zaobserwować już w tekstach z lat sześćdziesiątych, np. w powieści „Malowany ptak” Jerzego Kosińskiego czy w opowiadaniu „Szukając gwiazd” Marka Hłaski. W kontekście kultury postpamięci gatunek literacki funkcjonuje jako figura komunikacyjna i refleksyjna, stosowany przede wszystkim do krytyki pamięci społecznej, która temat Holokaustu wypiera i zafałszowuje. Służy wypracowaniu przestrzeni dialogu z odbiorcą i przestrzeni refleksji na temat własnych możliwości reprezentacji. Takie zjawisko możemy zaobserwować właśnie w tekstach wykorzystujących ramy genologiczne paraboli. Artykuł jest próbą odpowiedzi na pytanie, jakich możliwości reprezentacji doświadczenia Holokaustu dostarcza opowiadanie paraboliczne Marka Hłaski „Szukając gwiazd”.
EN
Postmemory is the key to understand the literary frame function in the Holocaust discourse. The contemporary generation of writers and literary audience’s approach to the Holocaust experience proves to be entirely dissimilar. The first symptoms of the phenomenon may be observed as early as in the texts produced in the 1960s, e.g. in Jerzy Kosiński’s novel “Malowany ptak (The Painted Bird)” or in Marek Hłasko’s short story “Szukając gwiazd (Searching for Stars).” In the context of postmemory culture, a literary genre functions as a communicative and reflexive figure used first and foremost to social memory criticism which denies and falsifies the subject of the Holocaust. It serves to work out a space of dialogue with the audience and a space of reflection on one’s own representative potential. The situation thus conceived is visible in the texts which exploit the parable literary genetic frame. The article is an attempt to provide the answer to the question concerning the possibilities of the Holocaust experience representation as seen in Marek Hłasko’s “Searching for Stars” parabolic short story.
The article deals with the history of Jews in Kraków during the German occupation. After discussing the origins and essence of the Judenrat as an institution, the author presents its legal determinants as well as the history of the Kraków Judenrat established by a decision of the Nazi occupation authorities. The author’s contention is that the Kraków Judenrat evolved from an institution focused on helping the local Jewish community into an institution blindly following the German orders, and that the change was associated with a change of people responsible for this policy.
The contribution is devoted to a frequently overlooked, yet very important aspect of the professional activity of the Czech scholar, pedagogue and translator Pavel Oliva, who is celebrating his 90th birthday this November. The author of this contribution defined important facets of his work, which have not yet been evaluated in Czech Classical studies so far: producing portraits of significant historical figures (Solon, Demosthenes, Polybius, Spartacus), popular-synthetic synopses about the history and culture of Ancient Greece, encyclopaedic entries, translations of Classical authors (Greek poetry, Polybius, Demosthenes, Aristotle), and the Holocaust as a memory of a distant past.
Raphael Lemkin is hardly known to a Polish audiences. One of the most honored Poles of the XX century, forever revered in the history of human rights, nominated six times for the Nobel Peace Prize, Lemkin sacrificed his entire life to make a real change in the world: the creation of the term “genocide” and making it a crime under international law. How long was his struggle to establish what we now take as obvious, what we now take for granted? This paper offers his short biography, showing his long road from realizing that the killing one person was considered a murder but that under international law in 1930s the killing a million was not. Through coining the term “genocide” in 1944, he helped make genocide a criminal charge at the Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in late 1945, although there the crime of genocide did not cover killing whole tribes when committed on inhabitants of the same country nor when not during war. He next lobbied the new United Nations to adopt a resolution that genocide is a crime under international law, which it adopted on 11 December, 1946. Although not a U.N. delegate – he was “Totally Unofficial,” the title of his autobiography – Lemkin then led the U.N. in creating the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December, 1948. Until his death in 1958, Lemkin lobbied tirelessly to get other U.N. states to ratify the Convention. His legacy is that, as of 2015, 147 U.N. states have done so, 46 still on hold. His tomb inscription reads simply, “Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), Father of the Genocide Convention”. Without him the world as we know it, would not be possible.
Michał Głowiński, who has been so far perceived primarily as a distinguished literary critic, well known for his analysis of the communist newspeak, is also the author of autobiographical narratives. The article analyzes certain aspects of Głowiński’s writing, such as the characters, time, space, fragmentariness, contexts and language. After almost sixty years of silence, in his texts Głowiński uncovers the layers of memory which come from “the epoch of gas chambers”. He does it in order to face the trauma of the Holocaust.
The memory of the Holocaust was one of essential problems in the post-war art of Europe. The social and political situation of post-war Germany caused the aspect of the memory of the Extermination had belonged and still is belonged to the most sensitive topics in the history of this nation. Nothing so strange, that references to Auschwitz we could find in the artistic work of one of the most important contemporary German artists – Joseph Beuys. A fact is, that this references has been noticed by few academics and critics only.
Identities and their representation and expression in different social contexts became one of the key problems of social sciences and humanities in the late 20th century. Sociology – which is the approach taken in this paper – doesn’t understand identity as something given or fixed, but rather as a social construction created in the processes of interaction and negotiation. Emphasis is on the temporal mutability and fluidity of the identities, their social origin (membership in different social groups and identification with them), and the premise that an individual in contemporary society uses a variety of different identities in social interactions. First part of the paper presents the archive, which is the source of the data; the second part is a short overview of key theoretical aspects of sociological research on identities; and the final part is dealing with different ways of expressing a collective (Jewish) identity in biographical interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, interpreting it in the broad context of sociological reflections on personal and collective identity
Repressed memories remain active and their outcomes bring undesirable effects for education about the Holocaust. How can facts and events that have been repressed or dismissed from the individual and collective memory be reintegrated into social consciousness? When will the memory of the Holocaust in Poland become a shared, collective legacy for Poles? How can education about the Holocaust deal sensitively with the Polish national sense of martyrdom? This remains a crucial question for Polish society. Can memorial sites, museums, historians, writers, educational institutions and civic organizations in post‑communist Poland create space where the voice of Jewish victims and second and third generations can be heard and where communities of memory can integrate? Or will Polish society continue to be characterized by rivalry between competing memories? These questions form the foundation of my empirical studies and trigger interest in the evaluation of existing educational programs. A qualitative research, namely a participant observation of the Forum for Dialogue among the Nations program ‘School of Dialogue’ in Warsaw, will attempt to answer the above questions.
The dispute over German past is not reserved for historians only. You can find both “advocates of German guilt” and “bards of German suffering” (Aleida Assmann) among many German writers. In the following article I ana-lyze essays by Maxim Biller and Bernhard Schlink – authors who each has differ-ent views on such a painful for Germans past.
The presented text is an analysis of materiality of memory in Elżbieta Janicka's book Festung Warschau. The text presents two approaches of defying the relation between space and memory. The first approach is related to searching for past signs, while the second approach uncovers past traces. In the studied book each approach is bonded to a different narration style. Furthermore, the presented text conceptualizes the city space of Warsaw, created by Janicka, as a space of memory (S. Kapralski's term).
The article deals with the Jewish Memory in Zakrzówek in the Lublin Voivodeship. Just prior to the Second World War, over 800 Jews lived there. The article is based on interviews with present inhabitants of the village and consists of five parts. The author makes an attempt to reconstruct the memories of interviewees about: landscape of the village before the war, Jews, Polish–Jewish relations, the Holocaust, hiding Jews and Jewish pits. This is a pretext for discussing distinctions between individual, cultural and collective memory, the notion used by Maurice Halbwachs.
The smoke stacks of Auschwitz have changed our perception of the world for ever, and even though so many years have passed since the end of the 2nd world war, the memory of the Holocaust is still alive. A great merit can be attributed to the artists, who constantly remind us of the time of Shoah with their works. The most visible here are the „monument” realizations in Treblinka (by Franciszek Duszeńko and Adam Haupt), Belżec (by Zdzisław Pidek with the team: Marcin Roszczyk and Andrzej Sołtyga), Buchenwald (by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz), as well as Berlin (Peter Eisenman’s project), in which the main emphasis was put not only on the sculptural form, but rather on the commemorative aspect of each concept. The memory of Shoah and the motif of death have become one of the main factors changing the aesthetics of the second part of the 20th century. Wywód otwiera analiza najważniejszych założeń pomnikowych, następnie autor omawia wybrane realizacje artystyczne, zarówno malarskie jak i instalacyjne, całość kończy zaś przykładami podejmowania tego tematu w książkach obrazkowych dla dzieci. The disquisition is started with the analysis of the most important monument concepts, then the author discusses selected artistic realisations, both from the field of painting and installation art, while the whole is concluded with examples of treating this subject in picture books for kids.
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