Latający Cyrk im. Kazimierza Wielkiego przedstawia: „Najwęższy dom świata – wydarzenie na skalę globu”. Rekonstrukcja historyczna w 70. rocznicę Akcji Reinhardt
Casimir the Great’s Flying Circus presents: ‘The narrowest house in the world – an event on a global scale’. Historical re-enactment on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Aktion Reinhardt

Summary/Abstract: The article provides a multifaceted analysis of the Keret House as an artistic installation and a cultural event. The construction is placed in the analytical context of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, Le Corbusier’s machine for living, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Pojazd dla bezdomnych (Vehicle for the Homeless), Big Brother and XTube. Other interpretative contexts are: the history of the Warsaw ghetto, the Aktion Reinhardt as well as the ensemble of issues connected with the third phase of the Holocaust (i.e. “the margins of the Holocaust”): the history of Jewish hideouts, the hunt for the Jews (Judenjagd), the plunder of Jewish mobile and immobile property, the Polish part of the biography of Etgar Keret’s parents. From such a perspective, the Keret House takes the form of a macabre historical re-enactment. The analytical framework comprises Erving Goffman’s stigma theory as well as the history of the attitude of the Polish majority towards the Jewish minority. With increasing frequency, anti-Semitic symbolic violence assumes the form of philosemitic symbolic violence. The poetics of gift and the category of “a Jewish writer with a sense of humour” function as an instrument of blackmail that place the individual subjected to it in a situation with no way-out. In Polish majority culture, the image of Jews as guests, which corresponds to the representation of Poland as home and Poles as hospitable hosts, heirs of the myth of King Casimir the Great, plays the same role. The Keret House proves to be a machine for the reproduction of the Polish majority narrative about the majority attitude of Poles towards Jews, also during the Holocaust. What is at stake within this narrative is the image of Poland and the Poles. [The project was prepared with a financial support of the National Science Centre; decision no DEC-2011/03/B/HS2/05594

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