A Monument for Future Memory: The Ringelblum Archive as a Classical Archive
A Monument for Future Memory: The Ringelblum Archive as a Classical Archive

Summary/Abstract: The author analyzes the Ringelblum archive as a counter force that challenges other historical narratives, especially the dominant ones. Ringelblum's archive is read as a model for cultural resistance, successfully creating the conditions for a productive memorialization of Polish Jewry, based on their own sources. The author faces the following questions: What is it in this archive that enables it to function as resistance? The fact that Jewish instead of German sources were collected by Ringelblum does not seem to be a guarantee. Because it is not only what is being stored in the archive that matters, but also how that archive is being organized. In other words, what is it in this archive that enables us in the present to have memories of the Holocaust past that differ, and are in that sense counter-, from the prevalent narratives about that past?

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