Retroactive Catastrophe
Retroactive Catastrophe

Summary/Abstract: The article posits a concept of “retroactive catastrophe” (katastrofa wsteczna)— understood as the retriggering of an event or occurrence that happened long ago, with ongoing effects that continue unseen which, once finally perceived and recognized, broaden in their destructive force. The operative concept is used in reference to Polish collective identity. Up till the mid-1980s, Polish post-war collective identity to a large extent assimilated the Shoah to Polish suffering and national martyrdom such that the murder of three million Polish Jews was never properly acknowledged or mourned. A survey of major debates over Polish–Jewish relations during a period beginning roughly with the 1985 Polish screening of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah reveals major problems with the form and basis of Polish unity. Furthermore, Jan Gross’s 2000 book Neighbors, by linking the Holocaust with the sociological category of ordinariness, showed the fundamental problems with the basis for Polish collective identity: family, faith, work, and nation. Under rigorous scrutiny, these foundations of Polish “normalcy” turn out to be sources of catastrophe during the Shoah as they comprise an exclusionary mechanism. For each of them, as well as their joint operation, have the reprehensible effect of casting out the Jew as “other” under the guise of what seem to be otherwise unobjectionable and even laudable ideals of Polish collective identity. Hence, the compelling conclusion of this historical analysis: contemporary Polish society needs to be reconceived as post-catastrophic, and a new normal, less exclusionary in its effects, needs to be sought.

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