Holocaust w powieści Wasilija Grossmana "Życie i los"

Tematem artykułu jest książka bezpośrednio nie zaliczana do literatury Holocaustu, wybitna powieść Życie i los, rosyjskiego pisarza i dziennikarza Wasilija Grossmana, który dziś uznawany jest za jednego z najważniejszych twórców rosyjskich XX wieku. Życie i los okazuje się przykładem ujęcia dramatu Shoah na tle wojny jako części wielkiej Historii poddanej szaleństwom ideologii i polityki nazistów oraz terroru i rosnącego z drugiej strony antysemityzmu w państwie bolszewickim. Jednocześnie Zagłada pozostaje w tym utworze przede wszystkim tragedią konkretnych osób, widziana w porządku pojedynczej ludzkiej egzystencji, która nie daje się nigdy całkowicie sprowadzić do tego, co bezosobowe i masowe. Indywidualna perspektywa humanizuje obraz historii, ale też i go podważa w jego ogólnych strukturach i narracjach. Artykuł opisuje elementy, które składają się na żydowski wątek utworu. Dla jego odczytania ważny okazuje się szerszy kontekst biografii Grossmana i historia powstania oraz wydania powieści Życie i los. Jak widać – rosyjski pisarz dokonał dwóch znaczących gestów w odniesieniu do problemu reprezentacji Zagłady: z jednej strony zwrócił się ku konwencjom literackim, wykorzystał epicki rozmach, kompozycję wielowątkową i panoramiczne ujęcia wraz z ich koncepcją realizmu, wehikularności słowa, a jednocześnie wyszedł poza estetyczne ramy tekstu literackiego, wprowadził elementy lirycznych opisów i autobiograficzne akcenty oraz podkreślił etyczny wymiar całości – jako formy pamięci o tych niezliczonych ofiarach nie tylko Zagłady, ale i każdego XX wiecznego totalitaryzmu.

Metaphorizing the Holocaust: The Ethics for Comparison

This paper focuses on the ethics of metaphor and other forms of comparison that invoke National Socialism and the Holocaust. It seeks to answer the question: Are there criteria on the basis of which we can judge whether metaphors and associated tropes “use” the Holocaust appropriately? In analyzing the thrust and workings of such comparisons, the paper also seeks to identify and clarify the terminology and concepts that allow productive discussion. In line with its conception of metaphor that is also rhetorical praxis, the paper focuses on specific controversies involving the metaphorization of the Holocaust, primarily in Germany and Austria. The paper develops its argument through the following process. First, it examines the rhetorical/political contexts in which claims of the Holocaust’s comparability (or incomparability) have been raised. Second, it presents a review (and view) of the nature of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. It applies this framework to (a) comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Hitler in Germany in 1991; (b) the controversies surrounding the 2004 poster exhibition “The Holocaust on Your Plate” in Germany and Austria, with particular emphasis on the arguments and decisions in cases before the courts in those countries; and (c) the invocation of “Auschwitz” as metonym and synecdoche. These examples provide the basis for a discussion of the ethics of comparison. In its third and final section the paper argues that metaphor is by nature duplicitous, but that ethical practice involving Holocaust comparisons is possible if one is self-aware and sensitive to the necessity of seeing the “other” as oneself. The ethical framework proposed by the paper provides the basis for evaluationg the specific cases adduced.

Przestrzenne formy upamiętniania Zagłady

This book is a synthesizing reflection on the Holocaust commemoration, in which space becomes a starting point for discussion. The author understands space primarily as an amalgam of physical and social components, where various commemorative processes may occur. The first part of the book draws attention to the material aspect of space, which determines its character and function. Material culture has been a long ignored and depreciated dimension of human culture in the humanities and social sciences, because it was perceived as passive and fully controlled by human will, and therefore insignificant in the course of social and historical processes. An example of the Nazi system perfectly illustrates how important were the restrictions and prohibitions on the usage of mundane objects, and in general, the whole material culture in relation to macro and micro space management — the state, cities, neighborhoods and houses, but also parks and swimming pools, factories and offices or shops and theaters. The importance of things and space was also clearly visible in exploitative policies present in overcrowded ghettos and concentration and death camps. For this very reason, when we study spatial forms of Holocaust commemoration, it should be acknowledged that the first traces, proofs and mementoes of the murdered were their things. The first "monuments" showing the enormity of the destruction are thus primarily gigantic piles of objects — shoes, glasses, toys, clothes, suitcases, toothbrushes, etc., which together with the extensive camps’ space try to recall the scale of a crime impossible to understand or imagine. The first chapter shows the importance of introducing the material dimension in thinking about space and commemoration, and it ends with a question about one of the key concepts for the book, a monument, which can be understood as both object (singular or plural) and architecture (sculptures, buildings, highways). However, the term monument tends to be used rather in a later and traditional sense, as an architectural, figurative form commemorating the heroic deeds, carved in stone or cast in bronze. Therefore, the next chapter reconstructs this narrower line of thinking, together with a discussion about what form a monument commemorating a subject as delicate and sensitive as the Holocaust should take on. This leads to an idea of the counter-monument, the concept which was supposed to be the answer to the mentioned representational dilemma on the one hand, and which would disassociate it from the Nazi’s traditional monuments on the other hand. This chapter clarifies the counter-monument definition and explains the misunderstandings and confusions generated on the basis of this concept by following the dynamics of the new commemorative form and by investigating monuments from the ‘80s and ‘90s erected in Germany. In the next chapter, I examine various forms of the Holocaust commemoration in Berlin, a city famous for its bold, monumental, and even controversial projects. We find among them the entire spectrum of memorials – big, monumental, and abstract forms, like Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe or Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin; flat, invisible, and employing the idea of emptiness, like Christian Boltanski’s Missing House or Micha Ullman’s Book Burning Memorial; the dispersed and decentralized, like Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Memory Places or Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Blocks. I enrich descriptions of the monuments by signaling at this point their second, extended life, which manifests itself in the alternative modes of (mis)use, consisting of various social activities or artistic performances. The formal wealth of the outlined projects creates a wide panorama of possible solutions to the Holocaust commemoration problems. However, the discussions accompanying the building of monuments and their "future life" after realization emphasize the importance of the social component that permeates the biography of the monument, and therefore significantly influences its foreseen design. The book also addresses the relationship of space, place and memory in a specific situation, when commemoration is performed secretly or remains as unrealized potential. Although place is the most common space associated with memory, today the nature of this relationship changes, and is what indicates popularity and employment of such terms as Marc Augé’s non-places or Pierre Nora’s site of memory. I include and develop these concepts about space and memory in my reflections to describe qualitatively different phenomena occurring in Central and Eastern European countries. These are unsettling places in rural areas like glades or parking lots, markets and playgrounds in urban settings. I link them to the post-war time and modernization processes and call them sites of non-memory and non-sites of memory. Another part of the book deals with a completely different form of commemoration called Mystery of memory. Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre in Lublin initiated it in 2000 and as a form it situates itself closer to the art of theater than architecture. Real spaces and places of everyday interactions become a stage for these performances, such as the “Jewish town” in Lublin or the Majdanek concentration camp. The minimalist scenography modifies space and reveals its previously unseen dimensions, while the actors — residents and people especially related to places like survivors and Righteous Among the Nations — are involved in the course of the show thanks to various rituals and symbolic gestures. The performance should be distinguished from social actions, because it incorporates tools known from religious rituals and art, which together saturate the mystery of memory with an aura of uniqueness. The last discussed commemoration mode takes the form of exposition space. I examine an exhibition concerning the fate of the incarcerated children presented in one of the barracks of the Majdanek State Museum in Lublin. The Primer – Children in Majdanek Camp is unique for several reasons. First, because even though it is exhibited in the camp barrack, it uses a completely different filter to tell the story of the camp in comparison to the exhibitions in the rest of the barracks. For this reason, one experiences immersing oneself in all subsequent levels of space and narrative accompanying them – at first, in a general narrative about the camp, and later in a specifically arranged space marked by children’s experiences, their language and thinking, and hence formed in a way more accessible for younger visitors. Second, the exhibition resigns from didacticism and distancing descriptions, and takes an advantage of eyewitnesses and survivors��� testimonies instead. Third, the exhibition space evokes an aura of strangeness similar to a fairy tale or a dream. It is accomplished thanks to the arrangement of various, usually highly symbolic material objects, and by favoring the fragrance and phonic sensations, movement, while belittling visual stimulations. The exhibition creates an impression of a place open to thinking and experiencing, and functions as an asylum, a radically different form to its camp surrounding characterized by a more overwhelming and austere space.

Pytanie o pamięć. Relacje autobiograficzne więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych

This book consists of two main parts. The first part offers a basic methodological introduction, presenting a concise but multifaceted overview of current problems of collective memory. The second part contains a set of interviews with former prisoners of concentration camps carried out by the authors. The research was conducted by Paweł Greń and Łukasz Posłuszny and focuses on issues of collective and cultural memory illustrated by individual life experiences of concentration camps prisoners. The field of oral history serves as the framework of analysis and narrative inquiry as its research tool. Interviews and additional research materials were collected by the authors and are not available in previous publications, making this work a precious supplement to the current scholarly body of knowledge and achievements in the discipline of memory studies. According to the authors, current historical and literary publications provide an incomplete picture of the WWII and its aftermaths for survivors, because descriptions of the war and imprisonment in the camp play still a dominate role in narratives. The importance of these issues in autobiographies is unquestionable and highly needed to create a common identity among generation of prisoners, though authors often wanted to perceive the fate of individuals in a broader perspective – including the periods before and after the war. Hence, interviews stressed personal experiences and their understanding over time by former prisoners. The interviews covered many topics on life before, during and after the camp – among them daily and neutral routines, but also difficult matters. The latter were connected on the one hand with traumatic events or harsh memories and emotions, and on the other hand with less extensively highlighted threads of prisoners’ lives - such as issues of the body and sexuality – and their dependence on particular representation or narrative. The authors are convinced that the book serves not only as a record of past remembered by eyewitnesses, but it also depicts their accounts in wider contexts and discourses, which expose specific dimensions of told and written stories. In the book Questions for Memory one examine the approach proposed by young scholars. Interviews were conducted from 2009-2011, seventy years after the end of the second world war, and this initiative was the result of questions and doubts of the authors from the existing literature. They also wanted to use the unique opportunity to meet with eyewitnesses and record their stories, because when they pass away we will irretrievably lose the possibility to listen to them and to pose sensitive questions. The majority of the interviewees were prisoners of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their experiences differed greatly from each other based on social background and specific experience in the camps as well as their post-camp and postwar life. Aside from persons whose stories are already well known and open, readers will hear the stories of those who spoke only reluctantly and very rarely, or who had remained silent until the present author’s research. Qualitative differences between interviews occurred on the level of established relationship and atmosphere of trust, which varied according to circumstances and individual character and personality. For P. Greń and Ł. Posłuszny, each interviewed person is equally and highly valued due to the collected material and the personal experience of the meetings. Among the ten interviews placed in the book, seven of them are the stories told by women. Their testimonies exemplify realities of everyday prisoners’ existence and gravitate towards mirroring specifically feminine perspectives of imprisonment. For women, crucial problems stemmed from experiences of body that intertwine with suffering, feeling of shame and humiliation. Early discussions on holocaust literature and issues of representation that shaped the Polish narrative and collective memory imposed imperatives of silence on certain topics. A solution for reconciling heroic and inhuman deeds in stories with completely human physiology was impossible and improper for many years. There were also questions about life after, ways of dealing with a trauma or reflections on the present time. During conversations the authors attempted to come closer to something distant and incomprehensible for their generation and for people who did not experience the camps. Despite the fact that there have been seventy years of dealing with these events in literature, art, drama, film, memoirs and scientific works, the past still breeds more questions than answers. The book Questions for Memory serves as an example of this phenomenon.

DOŚWIADCZENIE PRZESTRZENI W PAMIĘCI O HOLOCAUŚCIE

This paper analyzes different experiences of space by which memory of Holocaust could be passed on. The Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin gives visitors the feeling of insecurity and overwhelms them with monumentality. For that reason it is criticized as reflecting the other side of German memory: The Third Reich’s megalomania and dream about power. The Hamburger memorial against fascism designed in 1986 by conceptual artists Jochen and Esther Gerz offers quite an opposite experience of space. A twelve-meter-high pillar has been established for visitors to sign on it. Once the area was covered by signature it was lowered into the ground till it completely disappeared. The intention of the artists was to put memory not into the monument but into people. Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich (Greetings from the Jerusalem Avenue, 2002) by Joanna Rajkowska – a fifteen-meter tall artificial palm tree installed in the centre of Warsaw – is an attempt to infuse with Israel's scenery a Warsaw's street whose name and history sends the observer to the history of the Jews in Poland. In another work called Dotleniacz (Oxygenator, 2007) Rajkowska created an artificial lake with oxygen concentrators, gold fish, flowers and banks. Again, the installation was placed in a very meaningful place – Grzybowski Square – which is strongly connected with Jewish life in Poland as well as Polish anti-Semitism. The synagogue in Poznan was transformed during the Nazi occupation into a swimming pool which it has remained until the present day. This fact ( just like the building) seems to be invisible for most citizens. In 2003 Rafał Jakubowicz changed the fact by projecting a Hebrew inscription הייחש-תכירב (swimming pool) on the façade of the former synagogue. In Berek (The Game of Tag, 1999) by Artur Żmijewski a group of naked men and women of various age play tag. The artist filmed them in two rooms: in a symbolically neutral space and in a gas chamber of a former Nazi death camp. The film is an attempt at breaking the spell of this horrifying and paralysing space.

Narracyjne i antynarracyjne modele egzystencji w naukach humanistycznych i praktyce literackiej

Wydział Nauk Społecznych