Anatomia donosu ks. Stanisława Trzeciaka na ks. Tadeusza Pudra

Author(s): Jan Grabowski,Dariusz Libionka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

The materials presented in the article include documentation of the German Special Court (Sondergericht) in Warsaw proceedings against Tadeusz Puder, a Catholic priest of Jewish origin arrested by the Gestapo in the spring of 1941. His imprisonment was a consequence of a denunciation made by Fr. Stanisław Trzeciak, one of the leading Polish anti-Semites. Sentenced to several months in prison, Puder managed to escape from the prison hospital in autumn 1942 and survive in hiding. He died a few days after the liberation of Warsaw in a car accident. Despite the cooperation with the German security police, Trzeciak was among the victims of mass executions during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. The introduction of the article presents a broader context of Trzeciak’s anti-Semitic activity and the reasons for his personal hatred for Puder, as well as unknown details of collaborative attempts in the first months of German occupation.

Czy Zagłada jest ich historią, czy naszą? (Plaidoyer w przedmiocie ustanowienia w Polsce miejsca pamięci poświęconego Zagładzie)

Author(s): Jan Tomasz Gross / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Kiedy mówimy o polskiej historii, to można od biedy dopuścić – nie łamiąc konwencji poprawnego posługiwania się językiem – że bierzemy pod uwagę przede wszystkim (wyłącznie?) losy polskiej ludności. W tym sensie polska historia byłaby po prostu opowieścią o Polakach. Ale już historii Polski w ten sposób opowiedzieć się nie da.

Akcja „Reinhardt” w świetle najnowszej niemieckiej literatury przedmiotu

Author(s): Stephan Lehnstaedt / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Akcja „Reinhardt” to niemieckim określenie maskujące, za którym kryje się wymordowanie w latach 1942–1943 co najmniej 1,8 mln Żydów w obozach zagłady w Bełżcu, Sobiborze i Treblince. Spośród Żydów skierowanych do tych obozów przeżyło mniej niż 150 osób. Dwie z nich to ocaleni z Bełżca, pozostali zaś mniej więcej po połowie przeszli przez obozy zagłady w Sobiborze i Treblince. Prawie wszyscy wyjechali po wojnie z Polski – do Izraela albo do Stanów Zjednoczonych.

Wreszcie w kalendarzu? Tereziński obóz rodzinny w Auschwitz-Birkenau w czeskiej świadomości historycznej

Author(s): Michal Frankl / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

W kwietniu 2017 r. czeska Izba Poselska przyjęła nowelizację ustawy o świętach państwowych, w której 9 marca – rocznica masowego mordu więźniów terezińskiego obozu rodzinnego w Auschwitz-Birkenau w 1944 r. – została zakwali fikowana jako ważny dzień. W ten symboliczny sposób czescy posłowie chcą zamknąć długi okres, gdy owo przerażające wydarzenie, uznane za największe popełnione jednorazowo morderstwo czechosłowackich obywateli podczas drugiej wojny światowej, odsuwane było na margines czeskiej świadomości historycznej. Posłowie jednocześnie dodali do czeskiego kalendarza, jako wspomnienie „drugiego oporu” 18 czerwca, rocznicę „bohaterskiej” walki zabójców Reinharda Heydricha przeciwko Waffen SS i Gestapo, i jednocześnie oficjalnie potępili ludobójczą przemoc; ludobójstwem nazwali również prześladowanie Ormian w imperium osmańskim podczas pierwszej wojny światowej.

Rūta Vanagaitė, obywatelka, która zadała pytanie. Mit bohatera narodowego a „prawda historyczna”

Author(s): Natalia Judzińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 13/2017

Na początku 2016 r. w Litwie, za sprawą książki Rūty Vanagaitė Mūsiškiai, rozpoczęła się głośna debata publiczna dotycząca współudziału Litwinów w Zagładzie. Szerszy kontekst debaty wprowadza i przybliża Agnieszka Stawiarska w artykule Potrząsnąć społeczeństwem. O znaczeniu dla Litwy książki Rūty Vanagaitė Mūsiškiai. W licznych relacjach prasowych Vanagaitė porównywana była do Jana Tomasza Grossa, czy wręcz nazywana „litewskim Grossem”, zestawiana z Timothym Snyderem, oskarżana o finansowanie zarówno z Rosji, jak i z Izraela, zarzucano jej „nastawienie antylitewskie”, próbowano śledzić jej „pochodzenie”.

TRADITION AND SUBVERSION IN IMRE KERTÉSZ’S WORK

Author(s): Zsuzsanna Varga / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2004

This article offers a complement to previous readings of Kertész’s Nobel-Prize winning novel Fateless and his other significant fiction The Failure. While previous critics of these key texts often read Kertész’s representation of the Holocaust experience in the context of twentieth century European history or that of his personal biography, and The Failure in the context of the author’s own experience of authorship in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay argues for his indebtedness to the classic nineteenth century topos and genre of the Bildungsroman and to the genre of Künstlerroman. While in Fateless, the structural elements of the plot redeploy the elements of the Bildungsroman, its fundamental indebtedness to the modernist concept of the contingency of plot, action and character, and the essentially postmodernist contention about the futility of knowledge display a degree of tension in the text. The Failure also explores the well-known late-nineteenth century topos of the Künstlerroman and the representation of literary authorship. Studies about Kertész’s work, the article suggests, could be further expanded by exploring the relationship between Kertész’s work and different Hungarian literary traditions.

KERTÉSZ AMONG THE GERMANS

Author(s): Peter Bergmann / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2004

Imre Kertész’s current role in the German debate about the Holocaust is contrasted to the reception of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the influence of György Lukács, and the prominence of Martin Walser. Kertész’s popularity in Germany dovetailed with that of Goldhagen, but whereas the latter’s impact was fleeting, Kertész has become a guardian of Holocaust memory in Germany. While Goldhagen repudiated past German culture, Kertész is both a survivor of the Holocaust and champion of a lost Central European Jewish-German culture, in the tradition of Wagner, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann. In this capacity he serves as an anti-Lukács, reviving or rather honoring a lost cosmopolitan tradition. Both Kertész and Walser capture the adolescent confusion, but the message and cosequences of Kertész’s camp experiences of 1944 and 1945 and Martin Walser’s autobiographical account of the same years in the Hitler Jugend are starkly different. In the present German dialogue on the Holocaust, Kertész’s language of homelessness acts as an antedote to Walser’s cult of the Heimat.

THE TREMOR OF CAIN: RETURN OF THE DEPORTED TO HUNGARY

Author(s): Alice Freifeld / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2004

Imre Kertész was among the 82,000 Hungarian Jews who returned in 1945. The transition from camp to home, the adjustment fom adolescent trauma to adult life is only hinted at in his works. This paper situates Kertész in the identity crisis of the immediate postwar period. The confusion of displaced identities in the aftermath of WWII, prompted psychologist Erik Erikson to universalize the adolescent identity crisis as a central contemporary problem. In Hungary not only Jews but the entire society was reforging identities. Borders were porous, so were political and religious affiliations. Kertész’s identity was defined, at least in a negative way, by the Holocaust: as a Jew without being a Jew, as a survivor when it was best to keep quiet. He lived in the constant of the world of Buchenwald and of Stalinist Hungary, with their constricted options and ideological imperatives fashioned upon twisted idealisms. His recreation of the Holocaust in Fateless and of the existentialist experience of living with memory in Kaddish, has made for disquieting reading abroad, as well. In ignoring heroic clichés he has transgressed the identity of victim and victimizer.

NARRATIVES AND FRAGMENTS: IMRE KERTÉSZ AND LÁSZLÓ MÁRTON

Author(s): László Bengi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2004

In this essay, I interpret two Hungarian novels from the field of Holocaust literature concentrating upon the problems of representation. I argue that neither Kertész nor Márton can avoid facing the question whether the challenges of remembering and representation can be bound and reflected in a literary form. Past events are repeatedly narrated in present tense in both novels. For Márton, the fragments of narration do not constitute a story, and the invasion of imaginative elements provokes the conventional frames of depicting historical facts in an epistemological horizon. On the other hand, in Fateless storytelling emphasises the inconceivable character of the Holocaust, and Kertész’s work sheds light on philosophical paradoxes beyond epistemology. In this sense these two novels prove to be different but connected forms of Holocaust literature.

BEDRÄNGNISVOLLE VERGANGENHEIT IM HAFEN DER NACHTRÄGLICHEN REDAKTION

Author(s): Péter Dávidházi / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2004

Der auf Ungarisch 1993 erschienene Aufsatz analysiert das Galeerentagebuch von Imre Kertész als eine Art Tagebuchroman, was als eine moderne Neufassung der literarischen Tradition des Bildungsromans aufzufassen ist. Die Interpretation zeichnet den im Werk dargelegten Weg von der Existentialphilosophie der Selbstschaffung und dem verdrängten Anspruch auf Religiosität bis zur Erschaffung einer apokrifen Liturgie und Ritual der Selbsterlösung nach. Es wird Kertész’ Verhältnis zum eigenen Judentum erläutert und schließlich ein Vergleich mit dem Weltbild und Stil Sándor Márais durchgeführt.

NARRATIVLOSIGKEIT

Author(s): Dávid Kaposi / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2003

Die Studie mit dem Titel Narrativlosigkeit deutet auf die wortwörtliche Übersetzung des ungarischen Titels, Schicksallosigkeit. Das Schreiben ist bestrebt, mit der Annäherungsweise der Narrativen Psychologie die für Texte von Kertész charakteristische Wiedergabetechnik des Holocaust zu untersuchen. Die Hauptthese ist, daß die Schicksallosigkeit – trotz der oberflächlichen Unterschiede und der Absurdität, das Werk als eine Erinnerung zu lesen – in der Handhabung des Themas gewisse Ähnlichkeiten mit den ausgesprochenen Bezeugungen des Holocaust aufweist (oral testimonies). Genau wie die Holocaust-Erinnerungen nach Forschungen der berufenen Autoren bewiesen, so weist auch der Roman von Kertész auf die Unbrauchbarkeit der kulturellen Rahmen und Begriffe dem Holocaust gegenüber hin. Die Studie strebt an, unter anderem anhand der Begriffe von Gefühlen, Identität, Freiheit und Judentum vorzustellen, wie diese durch den Roman ruiniert werden und anknüpfend die Narrative der Narrativlosigkeit aufgebaut wird.

ENTSCHEIDUNG UND URTEIL

Author(s): ÁGNES PROKSZA / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2003

Der Text versucht, die Doppelheit der Entscheidung und des Urteils, ausgehend von einer der Schlüsselszenen des Romans – der Visite des Lagerarztes –, als eines der Grunddilemmas des Roman eines Schicksallosen aufzuzeigen. Der Unterschied zwischen einer Entscheidung und eines Urteils kann wie folgt dargestellt werden: Die Entscheidung setzt eine gegenwärtige Situation voraus, in der dem Entscheidungsträger kein externes System von Normen oder Kriterien zur Verfügung steht, das ihm beim Entscheidungstreffen helfen könnte. Das Urteil, das aufgrund von vorher bekannten und angenommenen Kriterien gefällt wird, stellt den Gegenpol der Entscheidung dar. Die Schoah wird im Roman aufgefaßt als ein metahistorisches (außerhalb der Geschichte stehendes) und mit externen Maßstäben unmeßbares „Ereignis“, also als der Gegenstand einer Entscheidung. Der Grund dafür liegt einerseits darin – wir können dies mithilfe von anderen Kertész-Texten feststellen –, daß die Schoah nach der Meinung von Kertész die Gültigkeit des externen Normensystems (der Rationalität) aussetzt. Andererseits, wenn wir den Holocaust als ein Teil der Geschichte auffassen, dann wird dieser in Vergessenheit geraten, in dem Sinne, daß die Radikalität der Bedeutung dieses Wortes allmählich verschwindet.

Dimitrije Ljotić and World War II

Author(s): Zoran Janjetović / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Based on memoirs, historiographical works and archival sources, the article deals with the role of the contraversial right-wing politician and the leader of the Zbor movement during WWII. His ideology and its changes before the war were depicted in order to present his wartime activities. Under occupation he became one of the leading and most influential collaborationists and the only one to wield his own armed forces. Although small they played significant role in struggle for power and against the communist-led partisans. The wartime conditions forced him to relinquish some of his lofty principles. It is shown how he remained true to his strongest convictions until the end: Yugoslavism and anti-Semitism.

„VOM HOLOCAUST [...] LÄSST SICH NUR MIT HILFE DER ÄSTHETISCHEN IMAGINATION EINE REALE VORSTELLUNG GEWINNEN“

Author(s): Pál Kelemen / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2002

Der Beitrag verortet die aktuelle Debatte um das Verhältnis der Literatur zu deren Bildlichkeit als Rhetorizität und Materialität als Schrift historisch durch eine Lektüre von den Romanen Kaddisch für ein nicht geborenes Kind, Fiasko und Ich – ein anderer von Imre Kertész. Dabei wird von dem paradigmatischen Modernitätskonzept Walter Benjamins und der Mimesis- und Körperauffassung Adornos ausgegangen. Auf deren anthropologischer Basis werden mögliche Zugänge zum Holocaust als geschichtliches und ästhetisches Ereignis ermessen. In Kertész’ Romanen wird das Verhältnis vom Gedächtnis und implizitem Mediendiskurs der Literatur im Zusammenspiel vom Gedächtnisbild, rhetorischem Bild und schriftlicher Materialität umrissen.

Amikor antiszemita eszmék és zsidó törvények találkoznak. Magyarország esete

Author(s): Jehuda Hartman / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2018

Холокауст у Србији (немачко окупационо подручје) – нумеричко одређење и квантитативна анализа

Author(s): Dragan Cvetković / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2017

An attempt is made to show the victims of the Jewish community from the territory of occupied Serbia on the basis of the partially revised list “Victims of War 1941–1945”. The article deals with the territorial belonging of the victims of the Jews, their gender, age and professional structure, as well as the circumstances and places of their destruction.

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

Author(s): Elżbieta Janicka / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2016

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”.

Tervuren. The Belgian Mirror

Author(s): Marcin Komosa / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2016

The paper describes the history and the ideology of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, founded in 1898. The role of the museum and its exhibition is analysed in the context of Belgian history, taking into account the tensions between Flemings and Walloons as well as changes in the attitude towards Africa and Africans. The author proposes to divide the history of the evolution of the RMCA exhibition into four stages: from the colonial exhibition to the current reconstruction of the museum.

Trzcianne – a case study. The Polish-Polish war over Jews in witness accounts

Author(s): Łukasz Konopa / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2016

Łukasz Konopa endeavors to reconstruct the process of the annihilation of Trzcianne, a town where the Jewish population was dominant before 1939. This case study is based on ethnographic interviews conducted presently with members of the Wasilewski family, the Righteous among the Nations, who both witnessed and participated in the events. The paper also refers to the accounts presented after the war by the surviving Jews and witness testimonies given during the trial conducted in 1950–51 against a few Poles accused of murdering Jews. In the course of his analysis, the author reveals the silence and secrecy surrounding the fact that some Poles were involved in the murder of Jews whereas those who risked their lives to help Jews were punished by their Polish neighbors after the war. The shameful episodes in the past of a small town in the Podlasie region were deleted from the local historical discourse.

Reply to Krzysztof Persak

Author(s): Mirosław Tryczyk / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2016

This is a reply to the review of author’s book Miasta śmierci. Sąsiedzkie pogromy Żydów [Cities of death. Jewish pogroms by neighbors] penned by Dr Krzysztof Persak in Zagłada Żydów (2016).