Monumentalna monografia
Review: Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939-1968) [Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968)], ed. by S. Buryła, D. Krawczyńska and J. Leociak, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012.
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Review: Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939-1968) [Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968)], ed. by S. Buryła, D. Krawczyńska and J. Leociak, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012.
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This is a Polish translation of a chapter from Berel Lang’s latest book, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, published by Yale University Press in 2013. Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jewish chemist and writer, is best known for his autobiographical accounts of his experiences at Auschwitz. His best known works, Se questo è un uomo [1947; If This Is a Man] and I sommersi e i salvati [1986; The Drowned and the Saved], present philosophical reflections on people’s behaviour and reactions in liminal situations. This chapter from Lang’s book deals with Levi’s sense of identity and the impact that his camp experience had on his understanding of Jewishness.
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This article discusses attempts by members of the Frankfurt School to establish collaborations with the American film industry. Kracauer’s screenplay for the film Jacques Offenbach as well as Horkheimer and Adorno’s screenplay for Below the Surface have both been preserved. They shed light on the processes of institutional negotiation, which lead to theory’s critical position with respect to the cultural industry. Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea for a film was rooted in their research on anti-Semitism. Their colleagues in Hollywood reworked this idea, and although their film was never produced, its premises inspired other productions about racial prejudice, such as Gentelmen’s Agreement (1947). This case study reveals that contingency is a crucial factor for theoretical production, which suggests the possibility of a symmetrical relationship between theory and its ‘passive’ subject.
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Kad su u ožujku 2014. objavljena Heideggerova »Promišljanja II-XV«, niz Crnih bilježnica, ko je je sam tako zvao, postalo je očito da se ti tekstovi razlikuju od svih dosad poznatih Heideggerovih spisa. Oni kao da jasnije i neposrednije govore o filozofskim motivacijama i intencijama, kao da jasnije pokazuju protiv čega se okreće Heideggerovo mišljenje tridesetih godina, i dokazuju da se Heideggerovo mišljenje krajem tridesetih godina, u okruženju Drugog svjetskoga rata, otvara prema antisemitskim idejama.
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During World War II the Polish legation in Bern provided considerable help to Polish Jews in Switzerland and occupied Poland, not only through inancial and material support, but also its engagement, for instance, in the campaign to aid Jews in Shanghai by offering its diplomatic channels to various organisations and mediation in obtainment of South American documents. Those activities would have been impossible without the support, engagement, and efforts of legate Aleksander Ładoś and his subordinates. The article discusses Ładoś and the role of the Polish legation in Bern in rescuing Jews.
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Do otprilike tridesetak godina prije kraja devetnaestog stoljeća, sve istočno od zamišljene linije povučene negdje između Grčke i Turske zvalo se Orijent. Kao etiketa stvorena u Europi, ≫Orijent≪ je stoljećima predstavljao poseban mentalitet, na primjer u frazi ≫orijentalno mišljenje ≪, a isto tako i skup posebnih kulturalnih, političkih pa čak i rasnih obilježja (u koncepcijama kao što su orijentalni despot, orijentalna putenost, raskoš, neshvatljivost).
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Osnivanje države Izrael nekad se percipiralo kao suprotnost holokaustu, njegova najsavršenija antiteza: Holokaust je bio destrukcija i pulzija smrti, Izrael je konstrukcija i pulzija života; u logorima smrti crkavalo se ≫poput ovaca za klanje≪, u Izraelu se također umire neprirodnom smrću i redom koji je suprotan slijedu generacija, ali barem su vojnici poginuli u ratu i civili pokošeni u atentatima – do danas njih oko 30.000 – pokopani na grobljima na kojima im se može odati tiha počast, dok je gotovo 6 milijuna njihovih predaka lišeno pokopa ili je imalo pravo tek na zajedničku raku.
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Suvremenim zapadnim društvima predstoji zadaća ponovnog raskrivanja vrijednosti susjedstva među različitim vjernicima i različitim religijama u doba koje nazivaju globalizacijom. Ljudi je na zemaljskoj kugli sve više, pa i susjedstva treba biti više. A što je, u najkraćem, susjedstvo?
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Recently interest in monuments of the late medieval Crimea amplified. However their studying will be hardly possible while there is no clarity with localization of the settlements mentioned in written sources. With the purpose to approach permission of this problem, we will try to formulate our reasons on the history of the Eski-Yurt.
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This article presents an attempt to analyse concepts from Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and to apply those concepts as interpretive tools. Ubertowska uses them in her readings of post-traumatic literature, in particular texts and images that concern the Holocaust. In the analytical part of the interpretation Ubertowska focuses on motifs of bones and fish-bones in Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s popular novel Grain of Truth, but also in Jonasz Stern’s paintings. The Cracow-based painter’s methods are described as a spectral ‘substitution above and beyond genre’.
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In her careful new reading of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia Dauksza traces elements that indicate the essential role of passages concerning the war, its impact and consequences. Her affective analysis reveals Gombrowicz’s singular obsession with the war, with the lack of agency and with (anti)testimony. A particularly important problem is the presence/absence of Jews in the novel’s fictional reality. Dauksza explores Gombrowicz’s relationships to Jews and points out how important that relationship is within his work. She also engages with his diagnoses and comments on postwar Polish society and with his remedies for the spectral status of that formation.
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Langlot analyses Charlotte Delbo’s Spectres, mes compagnons [Ghosts, My Companions] to examine the role of the ghost or spectre that appears on many levels. This figure helps writers picture the workings of memory and the status of the witness, as well as the prisoners’ situation. It also helps us understand if literature (in, about and after) Auschwitz is impossible and void of meaning, or to what extent it turns out to be necessary to maintain our humanity and the links between witnesses, victims, and those who receive the testimony; to testify about the camp in the face of the difficulties with representation. Delbo’s text, the beliefs expressed in it and the many meanings of the figure of the ghost or spectre can become the key to interpreting other works by this author.
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Review of Benoît Peeters, Derrida, Grandes biograpies (Paris: Flammariom, 2010)
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The text “The Book of Exit” delineates a perspective of animal studies understood as a consequence of the trauma theory and the Holocaust studies. At the foundations of the article are the views of Dominick LaCapry from 2004-2014, included by the author in the context of the current Polish and American cultural debates. In this interpretation the posthumanities and monster studies—vividly developing nowadays—are not only transformation but also overpower the melancholy of studies into trauma, completed at the price of parting from an individualistically crafted version of a liberal subject.
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The article is an attempt to apply the theoretical and analytical tools derived from ecocriticism and the environmental studies, in the analyses of the literature of the Holocaust. The author proposes a thesis that a full recognition of the role of non-human factors (non-humans), such as nature, landscape, climate, plants and animals became only possible after the anthropocentric paradigm in the humanities have been overcome and a new, supra-species kind of “agency”—elaborated from the theory of Brunon Latour—became widespread. The principal part of the essay contains the analyses of the role of landscape, organic and inorganic nature in the autobiographical prose of Piotr Rawicz, Henryk Grynberg and Wilhelm Dichter. In all of the studied writings nature assumes the function of an ethical subject and additionally the role of anti-historical narration.
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The author of the article studies the literary and cultural topos “Never more!”. He discusses its social and historical contexts as well as the instrumentalization of the anti-war rhetorics in the period of Peoples’ Republic of Poland (Pol. abbr. PRL). The outline also presents the place of anti-war rhetorics in the modern culture.
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In the literary recollections of camp survivors the figure of the Muselmann is a recurring motif. The author puts forward a thesis about the existence of a dominating, prototypical narration about a Muselmann, which occurs not only in literary texts but also in scholarly studies. The questioning of the exemplary forms of depicting a Muselmann may lead to irritation and evoke in readers the feeling of “disturbance”. The re-enactment of such disturbances possesses a hidden analytical potential, as it reveals routinized and partly problematic cultural structures of reception and cquisition apparent especially in the context of post-catastrophic narrations and remembrance of the Shoah.
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As far as the question of the Holocaust is concerned, the Polish culture is characterised by some peculiar feature. On the one hand, it embraces the texts which quite uncompromisingly describe the Polish role in extermination, noticing a continuum between collective discriminating behaviours of the non-Jewish part of the society and the exterminating activities of the Nazis. Such voices deconstruct narration, in which the Polish majority remains an isolated, bystanding and passive witness of the Holocaust, and demonstrate some forms of participation. On the other hand, the message of this kind does not permeate into social consciousness, does not become known and does not improve the knowledge of the society about itself. The studies of Protest by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wielki Tydzień (“Holy Week”) by Jerzy Andrzejewski are used for the description of the mechanism of this “becoming acquainted”. A key role in this mechanism is played by preoccupation with self-image of the group. The Holocaust, to a certain degree, undermined the obviousness of Polish discriminating practices towards Jews. In the awareness of elites there appeared a premonition of other criteria of evaluation of Polish behaviours, going beyond the mentioned practices (a phantasm “eyes of the world”). In the light of such criteria, the attitude towards exterminated Jews proves to be discrediting. At the same time, there appear narrations whose aim is to restore the order of discrimination and the hierarchies connected with it, which comes down to forcing the victims into inferior position—in contrast to the dominating majority—and concealing the knowledge about participation in the crime. Consequently, culture remains in the state of unrest. Unwanted knowledge (and the feeling of guilt) returns and the attempts to become purified by the renewed concealment and repudiation of the awareness of evil always prove unsuccessful. The signs of repudiation are the recurring symptoms and repetitions of the same scenario of denial of never clearly stated accusations.
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The article discusses select literary images and presentations of March 1968, which are treated as an example of a postcatastrophic narration. The author states that the events of the years 1967-1968 are often depicted in Polish literature as a kind of a “recurring catastrophe” – predicting an event of the calibre of the Holocaust. Similarities and parallels can be noticed on the artistic level (ways of representation) and ideological (judgement of events). Consequently, the catastrophe does not fulfil its cathartic function and does not become a breakthrough, instead its characteristic features are repetitions and new configurations. Finally, the author asks whether, and to what extent, Polish remembrance of March overlaps with the remembrance of the Holocaust, and to what degree the struggle with anti-Semitism in 1967-1968 was simultaneously a struggle with anti-Semitism during WWII.
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The article recalls two literary texts which signalled the facts denied or marginalized in Polish historical memory: a phenomenon of szmalcownictwo (blackmailing for money of Jews who were hiding) and the search for “Jewish gold”. The context for the study of both narrations is the contemporary historical discourse and its evolution that can be observed in the recent 10-20 years in the Polish public sphere.
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