Bezcenna Zagłada. System ekonomii a problem autentyczności przedstawień Holocaustu
Priceless Extermination. Economy System and the Problem of Authenticity of Holocaust Presentations

Summary/Abstract: The author compares the role of money as a medium of communication in post-capitalist culture with the category of authenticity, which became a vital field of valuating Holocaust literature. Referring to Anthony Giddens, Fredric Jameson or Jochen Hörisch on the one side, and on the other to texts of culture, such as disputes recurring every couple of decades over the works of Tadeusz Borowski and the place of the author in events he recounts, Lidia Ostałowska’s attempts to determine the ownership of paintings made in Auschwitz by Dina Gottlieb (crucial from the point of view of the Sinti community to consider Roma victims as subjects, not objects of these paintings) or intertextual contaminations of presentations of Holocaust and popcultural texts in such works as Survivor’s Dance on YouTube, the author specifies the common denominator of both discourses as a simulacrization of the presented reality, similar to the renouncement of the monetary gold standard, which thus becomes its own reference. This assignment allows to understand, how the authenticity category (often ethically valorized, under the guise of “appropriateness” for example) conditions the Holocaust discourse, thus changing into a separate convention with its own topoi.

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