The Embassy of Poland in Poland: The Polin Myth in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (MHPJ) as narrative pattern and model of minority-majority relations
The Embassy of Poland in Poland: The Polin Myth in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (MHPJ) as narrative pattern and model of minority-majority relations

Summary/Abstract: The text offers an analysis of the MHJP’s core exhibition, the architecture of the Museum’s building as well as the transformations of its surroundings, seen as operations in as well as on a space that is a sign and a designate of the Holocaust. This observed de-Holocaustization of the Holocaust story takes place in the context of progressing Holocaustization of the story concerning the past of ethnic Poles. The main narrative uniting the MHJP’s surroundings, building and core exhibition is the idyllic myth of Polin which dictates the selection and presenting of information. The story of Polish hosts and Jewish guests that is inherent to the Polin myth establishes inequality and dominance/subjugation as framing principles of a story of majority-minority relations. It also constitutes a mental gag and an instance of emotional blackmail which precludes any rational – analytical and critical – conversation based on historical realities. Furthermore, in practice, it is a part of a pattern of culture which produces – and at the same time legitimizes – violence and exclusion. The article reconstructs the principles governing the Polinization of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe (a term coined by Konrad Matyjaszek). These principles include: emphasizing the Polish over the Jewish lieux de mémoire; presenting the figures and landmarks of importance for both groups through the prism of those aspects which concern the majority group; refraining from problematization of specific phenomena (like Judaism or transboundary character) and from applying to the a longue durée perspective; and decontextualization (e.g., by passing over anti-Semitism – Christian but not only Christian – and its significance for the construction of the majority group’s collective identity, an identity that over time increasingly determined the Jews’ conditions of life, until eventually it determined their fate). In relation to the core exhibition the text discusses such issues as: “last minute” censorship; affirmation of anti-Semitic phantasms (like the Paradisus Iudaerum or Esterka); the abandonment planned – and prepared – part of the exhibition dealing with the period after the regaining of independence by Poland in 1989; presenting numerous events and questions in a way that contradicts the state of research not only known but often arrived at in Poland (a particularly outraging example of this is abstaining from a realistic presentation of the Polish context of the Holocaust in favor of a return to the outdated category of the innocent, or indifferent, Polish bystander to the Holocaust). The stake of this retouched story is the image of Poland and reputation of Poles, that is to say – the complacency of the non-Jewish majority. The price is the mystification of Eastern European Jewish history and the thwarting of the potential for change which arouse as a result of the Jedwabne debate. This potential promised a chance for a revision of culture and a remodelling of social relations in the spirit of equal rights and integrated history. Apart from the period from 1944/45 to 1946, this chance was unprecedented in the Jewish-Polish and Polish-Jewish “common history that divides”.

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