Introduction to the special issue – disputed Holocaust memory in Poland

There is no political power without the control of the archive, if not of memory¹

The politics of Holocaust memory in Poland has for many decades been an arena of dispute and, at times, bitter public controversy, as with the disputes over the Auschwitz Carmelite convent in the 1980s and Jedwabne in the 2000s. The Nazi German occupation in Poland had destroyed the largest pre-War Jewish population in the world and six extermination camps were placed in occupied Polish territory. While post-War Poland inevitably became a major site of Holocaust memory and commemoration this has always been entangled with contemporary Polish and international politics, both in the Communist and post-Communist periods. These issues were again thrown into sharp relief in January 2018 when the Polish ruling party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Justice and Law) introduced the ‘anti-defamation law’ prohibiting claims that ‘the Polish Nation’ was responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes. It was initially made a criminal offence, with up to three years imprisonment, to accuse Poles of complicity in Nazi war crimes. The law asserted extra-territoriality and ‘applies throughout the world, regardless of local laws.’ The ensuing outcry in Europe, Israel and the US continues – for example, under the Twitter hashtag #PolishDeathCamps² there is widespread condemnation of the defamation laws, and in one post the Simon Wiesenthal Centre issued a travel advisory for Jews urging them to limit their visits to Poland following ‘Poland’s government campaign to change the historical truth by denying Polish complicity in the Nazi atrocities.’³ In May 2018, the law was modified to render ‘defamation’ a civil, not a criminal offence, although under the PiS government controversies continue to arise – for example over the compromise in November 2018 between President Andrzej Duda and the neo-Nazi Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR (National Radical Camp) that allowed the latter along with other European Nazis, to follow the Independence Day march.

There are multiple issues here of how the Holocaust is represented and remembered and, indeed, of historical accuracy vs denial in a European context where antisemitism is mobilized again on the populist far-right (and some sections of the left). The issue of memory and commemoration here is essential to Jewish identity since the curse Y’mach sh’mo v’zichrono (may his name and memory be erased) has already befallen millions killed without a trace and is at stake in distortion and minimization of the Holocaust.⁴ The contributions to this Special Issue address various aspects of memory politics that inform the current situation but also and draw out nuances and differences between national and local levels of commemoration practices.

Holocaust and cosmopolitan identities

The disputes over Holocaust memory in Poland are a perhaps egregious example of the current European culture wars over identity, nationalism and history. Twenty or so years ago Levy and Sznaider famously claimed that Holocaust commemoration is a point of reference for future-oriented European cosmopolitan ethics in the Second Modernity. The Holocaust, they argued, was a ‘tragedy for modernity itself’ and the representations and shared memories of an event of absolute evil constituted a paradigmatic case for ‘future-oriented memories.’⁵ This is the basis, they suggested, for humanist and universal identifications and a new cosmopolitan memory in a post-national global condition. The fragmentation of the nation-state, as a key feature of the Second Modernity, enabled a ‘deterritorialization of memory.’ This would be future-oriented in that the future was no longer ‘mechanically driven by the past’ but rather, once freed from naturalized concepts of nation, could be turned to universal symbols evil and vehicle for memories of myriad victims.⁶ They do add though that this is not necessarily a linear or continuous process, and were of course aware of the Historikerstreit and the spread of ethnonationalism.⁷ We are now witnessing a resurgence of what Nikolay Koposov calls ‘national romances’ that bring memory politics in the service of cultural patriotism and national heritage.⁸

This has been particularly apparent in former Communist nations where the politics of memory has focused on ‘victims of Communism’ but were there has also been a shift from ‘memory laws’ to ‘memory wars.’ The European Union, through for example the Fundamental Rights Agency, encouraged legislation to combat racism and xenophobia, including laws to prohibit denial and justification of the Holocaust, exemplified by the German Memory Law, 1985 and the French Gayssot Act, 1990. However, this process of Verrechtlichung (Juridification) as Habermas has called it, entails a potential conflict between law (norms) and culture (values) and the problems of securing legitimacy in post-national formations.⁹ For reasons elaborated below, in relation to Poland, the process of legislative protection of Holocaust memory was flipped into attempted prohibitions on memory and indeed historical enquiry. Illustrating this, the Polish PM, Mateusz Morawiecki defended the defamation laws by claiming that similar laws operate in other countries across Europe.¹⁰ The upshot of these moves is that Holocaust memory becomes not a universalistic foundation of future-oriented cosmopolitan ethics but guardian of sacred symbols of particular communities. It also illustrates how binary ideological constructions (such as national vs cosmopolitan) and hierarchies of suffering exploit past events as resources for the transformation of identity. Let us examine memory politics more closely.

The politics of institutional memory and silencing

According to Aleida Assmann, the forms of social memory that become institutionalized within cultural frames and social institutions are mediated by media, symbols, and practices ‘which have to be grafted into the hearts and minds of individuals.’¹¹ Further, the institutional control of memory transforms the ‘ephemeral social memory into long-term collective memory,’ and involves the ‘employment of events in an affectively charged and mobilizing narrative.’ According to this view, the past is deliberated because it is made the matter of public concern or it is the interaction that makes the past an important common affair.¹² Therefore, social memory is, as Jonathan Friedman says, about the past as

practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself, but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity … The past that affects the present is a past constructed and/or reproduced in the present.¹³

On the institutional level, which is the focus of the articles in this collection, we are dealing with memory politics that are aimed at confirming or redefining the contents of collective memory. The stake for both sides involved in this process, individuals and the state, is ‘mnemonic security’¹⁴ whereby some forms and contents of memory are secured by delegitimizing or even criminalizing others, as in the defamation laws. This securitization of memory contributes to ‘ontological security,’ that sometimes may be understood as protecting an identity against change through building the continuity of the group’s life and the durability of its institutions in which an individual life is embedded¹⁵ and sometimes as a reflective transformation of identity that leads towards an adaptation to new circumstances.¹⁶ Individual recollections and institutional politics of memory meet in the public sphere not in order to record and commemorate the past as it really happened but largely ‘in order to seek stability and purpose in existence’¹⁷ or to instrumentally exploit the past events as the resource for the transformation of identity.

Public debate and commemoration of the Holocaust in Poland emerged largely in the post-Communist period where it raised uncomfortable questions. One of these was the allusion to the profit that some non-Jewish Poles made as a result of the persecution of the Jews. The void in the social tissue caused by the Holocaust had been quickly filled in by the non-Jewish Poles for whom this was by and large a social promotion into the middle class. According to Andrzej Leder,¹⁸ this genealogy of the Polish middle class had a tremendous impact on social memory and identity of Polish society. Members of a large segment of society, who marched to their new social position over the corpses of murdered Jews, prefer not, for obvious reasons, to reflect on their origins. They tend to repress their own sociogenesis and replace it with mythologies, in which antisemitism often plays a role of protection and justification of their uncertain identity.

Revisionist memory politics has also seen the breaking of taboos on articulating antisemitism. One reason for the reproduction of these clichés is a psychosocial mechanism with reference to one of the Polish taboos: the violation of national unity during and after WWII. Over the course of the war, a segment of the non-Jewish Polish population collaborated with the Germans in the Holocaust; after the war, a segment of the Polish population engaged in the installation of the new communist system. ‘In channeling disquiet and anxiety associated with these taboos, Jews (as those upon whose shoulders could be projected one’s own troublesome involvement) were simply indispensable. Thanks to them, one could think of Stalinism as a “Jewish conspiracy against Poland”’.¹⁹ As Kate Korycki discusses in this volume, the Żydokomuna (Jewish-Communism) obsession thus comprised yet another symptom of mechanisms by which to escort evil beyond the boundaries of the community and rescuing its unity.

More broadly, being involved in the Holocaust threatened the identity of non-Jewish Poles, leaving them with questions regarding their positive self-image, moral integrity, audacity, human solidarity, religious values. This was articulated in Jan Błoński’s (1987) famous essay, ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto.’ Such questions cause discomfort and the forgetting of the situation that gave reason to ask them is a convenient way to avoid the answers. From a cognitive perspective, it is equally important that to remember the past adequately, people need a classificatory scheme, a narrative, a concept that would organize their personal recollections, give them a meaning, and a language in which they could be expressed. This was clearly missing in the non-Jewish Poles’ interpretation of the Holocaust, partly because of the nature of their involvement, and partly because of the lack of a discourse in which their testimony could be expressed.

One consequence of the fall of Communism for Poland was the opening of ideas previously blocked by the communist ideology. This included the international Holocaust discourse and coincided with the process of its cosmopolitanization that Levy and Sznaider interpret as part of the effort to establish value-consensus and reorganize international cooperation. However, perhaps an important cause of the rejection of the Holocaust discourse in Poland of the 1990s was precisely its perceived cosmopolitan nature and an analysis of this rejection may draw on the resources of postcolonial theory. After decades of living in the cultural landscape marked by political ideology and concept of history that have been perceived by many Poles as having been externally imposed and supporting the political dependency of their country, some sections of Polish society experienced the new Holocaust discourse as part of yet another external system of cultural domination correlated with the passage of Poland into the domain of Western countries and their political and economic interests. In this context, it has been suggested that many ‘postcolonial Poles’ found themselves ‘in danger of self-colonization through the wholesale acceptance of Western ideas which may lead to a new dependence – on the Western construction of cultural memory.’²⁰ This potential for cosmopolitanism was recognized by Levy and Sznaider, who ‘have themselves acknowledged the risk that cosmopolitanism may be conceived and perceived as a deeply Eurocentric project, as a new form of universalism which has its roots in the Enlightenment.’²¹ As such, cosmopolitanism may be viewed as a ‘core European project’ for Europe’s periphery, intended to mollify Eastern European nationalisms, frozen under Communism, that apparently resurged with the collapse of this system.²²

The collapse of the Communism meant, among other things, the liberation of the repressed alternative Polish memories of oppression and suffering under the communist rule. Unfortunately, this reemergence of memory took place exactly in the time when the memory of the Holocaust has been instituted as the cornerstone of the European ‘transnational memory, providing the EU with a “foundation myth” and a moral yardstick for new member states.’²³ This peculiar ‘bad timing’ caused a situation perceived by many Poles as the denial of their newly regained history whereby ‘the focus on the Holocaust … prevents people from investigating or taking equally seriously cases which do not appear to be exactly like it.’²⁴ This created a sense of injustice that was aggravated by the attitude and practice of the Western European public intellectuals and institutions, for whom, as in the often-quoted sentence by Tony Judt, the recognition of the Holocaust became ‘a contemporary European entry ticket,’ and required, among others, a critical examination of one’s own role in the Holocaust.²⁵

This caused a backlash in some sectors of the Polish society that perceived their situation as a passage from one form of the ideological control of memory to another, equally not allowing them to express the vision of the past they would like to call their own. Since this passage could be construed as part of a larger social, economic and political neoliberal transformation masterminded by the Western experts, the globalized discourse of the Holocaust started to be seen as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe, in which its inhabitants were expected to adopt the cultural codes of Western Civilization with no reciprocity.²⁶ This perception has placed Holocaust discourse within wider political divisions and unrest, augmented by the transformation of social structure.

The globalized narrative of the Holocaust has been endorsed by a certain sector of the Polish society that largely contributed to the transformation of collective memory by publications, debates, film and theater productions, academic conferences, educational programes, curriculum changes, artistic events, museum exhibitions, and public commemorative events. The result, however, was a split of cultural frames of memory as well as a growing gap between elitist and popular discourses that contributed to the political divide and unrest. This result supports Levy and Sznaider’s thesis that globalization does not mean homogenization of standpoints but rather ‘divides each national political culture into several competing worldviews, some of which are more globalized than others.’²⁷ This gap has complicated and deepened when the popular, anti-elitist resentment started to be represented and supported by counter-liberal, nationalist groupings, whose approach to the past can be characterized as one of ‘mnemonic warriors’ who, according to Kubik and Bernhard,

tend to draw a sharp line between themselves (the proprietors of the “true” vision of the past) and other actors who cultivate “wrong” or “false” versions of history. They usually believe that the historical truth is attainable and that once it is attained it needs to become the foundation of social and political life. … The content of collective memory appears to warriors as largely non-negotiable; the only problem is how to make others accept their ‘true’ vision of the past.²⁸

To answer the question about the absence of Jews and the Holocaust in social memory or public space, one can turn firstly to the way Polish-Jewish pre-war coexistence and the Holocaust have been remembered in the mode of mnéme, that is according to the perception that it is predominantly the nature of past events that has determining impact on people’s future memories. Here we may focus on the, often antisemitic, social and cultural exclusion of Jews from the pre-war Polish community, which lead to the fact that the Holocaust did not affect the identity of the non-Jewish Poles, which in turn accounted for the post-war exclusion of Jews from the ‘mnemonic community.’ An additional factor was the suffering of the non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War that occluded in their memory the tragedy of the Jews. However, one needs to mention the trauma of witnesses (and sometimes accomplices) of the Holocaust. Although the Holocaust itself did not seem to affect the identity of the non-Jewish Poles, the witnessing of the Holocaust did. Some of the most important and often mythologized features of Polish collective identity might have been subverted by the memory of the Holocaust and thus this memory has been largely erased. Finally, there is also the fact noted above that for large segments of post-war Polish society, the murder of Jews offered a chance to fill in the gaps in the economic and social space for social advancement. For various reasons such genealogy of the contemporary Polish middle class is usually carefully erased from memories.

A complementary way of addressing this it to refer to the circumstances in which the visions of the Jewish-Polish past have been produced, that is, to examine memory in the mode of anámnesis: a perception that it is mostly the nature of the present of the remembering subject(s) that determines the content of memory. The lack of Holocaust discourse during and immediately after the War accounts for the lack of adequate recognition of the murder of Jews. Then, when the discourse was developed, Poland was isolated behind the Iron Curtain and it did not have a significant impact as a factor that organized collective/social memory. Finally, after the collapse of Communism, Poland was exposed to the globalized version of the Holocaust discourse which was largely rejected in different sectors of the Polish society and debates about Polish-Jewish past launched by intellectuals and artists caused defensive reactions as part of the social cleavage.

These factors may help to understand why in contemporary Poland, in spite of serious commemorative efforts, intellectual revisions and reformed education, Jews and the Holocaust remain commemorated but not remembered in the social memory of large segments of society. Considering the new historical politics of the government elected in 2015, especially the newly adopted law on the Institute of National Remembrance, we may predict that in the near future the official commemoration of Poland’s Jewish past will be systematically waning. This politics of memory has been clearly masterminded for those sectors of society, whose existential insecurity recently seems to have been anaesthetized by a mixture of xenophobic nationalism and populist economic programs, thus legitimizing the new rulers. However, our contributors offer a diversity of styles of memory politics that demonstrate how, often at local levels, these can diverge (or at times reflect) national narratives.

Memory strategies and discourses

The articles in this issue begin with Marek Kucia’s wide-ranging account of the meanings of Auschwitz in Poland since 1945, in which he discusses the development of its symbolic meanings, in the context of Polish history and memory and in particular the memory of the Holocaust and disputes. Analyzing various kinds of representations, Kucia chronologically charts the major aspects of symbolism of the former camp – Polish, international, universalist, and Jewish – while identifying the periods of their development. He discusses Carmelite Convent controversy, which prompted the first debate in Poland about Holocaust commemoration. Kucia argues that Auschwitz has had various meanings in Poland, and while it is a symbol of the Holocaust, it has not attained in Poland the international status it has as the symbol of thereof.

Zofia Wóycicka’s article on new Polish museums dedicated to the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust examines four recently (re)opened Polish exhibitions dedicated to people who helped Jews during World War II: The Eagle Pharmacy, Kraków (2013), the Żabińskis’ Villa in Warsaw (2015), The Ulma Museum in Markowa (2016) and the Holocaust gallery in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw (2014). She argues that each display approaches the topic from a different standpoint, revealing the scope of possible narratives on Jewish rescue in contemporary Poland. The study argues that while the establishment of these museums is part of a broader European trend to commemorate Jewish aid and rescue, global patterns are being adapted to local needs, especially that of countering accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. However, although this national ‘politics of remembrance’ sets a general framework for the displays in these museums, the content also depends on the museums’ actual stakeholders and audiences. This illustrates how in addition to national political discourse there are also local forms of social memory and commemoration.

In some ways continuing this theme, Diana Popescu, writing on the Letters to Henio presents insights from an audience research, qualitative study conducted with young people participating in the annual memorial initiative Letters to Henio in 2016. She argues that this project is among the most emblematic examples of a performative memorial practice developed by the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre, a local governmental and cultural organization from Lublin. Her article offers an account of this action and its reception and discusses some key aspects of younger people’s immediate reflections on the meaning of remembrance of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Lublin. Popescu aims to reveal Polish youth’s reactions to this memorial project and whether these show any departure from polarized memory narratives of the Holocaust. She concludes that the Letters to Henio commemorative practice might lead to ‘transformative learning’ and allow the growth of an empathetic attitude among young Poles the ‘little Jewish boy’ and by proxy towards Lublin’s Jews. Such an engagement sends a covert but powerful message to younger people: that what is different, or the other, is to be liked, to be discovered, and to be engaged with. The multi-vocal local memory discourse does not indicate a polarized view of the past, but that nothing is yet settled in the way younger generations create meaning out of the past.

Erica Lehrer and Roma Sendyka, writing on vernacular art as a base for ‘bystander’ Holocaust memory in Poland, ask what insights can be found about Polish Holocaust memory and testimony by examining the prolific folk art made by Polish ‘naïve’ artists. They focus on the arts of woodcarving, and to a lesser extent folk painting, that in some way register the persecution of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. They ask what can art history and visual culture studies, oral history, anthropology, and museum studies tell us about the motivations, functions, and ethical implications of such works of witness? They consider the status of vernacular art in the contexts of Holocaust art history, museology and bystander testimony. They conclude that there seems to be a receding horizon for authentic ‘arts of witness’ in the sense of works displaying some, if not all of the qualities of being deeply felt, empathic, personal, spontaneous and non-commodified. However, they find these objects interesting for the ways that they elude, or exceed, many of the imposed categories and discourses at hand during the time of their creation. Their awkwardness both during the People’s Republic-era and today raises important aesthetic, memorial, and historical questions about our habitual modes of imagining, depicting, feeling, and communicating about the genocide of Poland’s Jews.

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, writing on the development of Holocaust education in Poland after 1989, identifies a new historiography of the Holocaust, revealing the dark pages of national histories (group and individual collaboration with Nazi Germany) which makes the Polish state, national groups, and individuals, feel ‘uncomfortable.’ She develops the idea of ‘suppressed shame’ and the way this intersects with international agreements on teaching about the Shoah, such as the Stockholm Declaration and membership of bodies such as the IHRA, EU, Council of Europe and UNESCO. She argues that disparities have grown between Holocaust research and education elsewhere but it was only Poland that passed the defamation law, which defined Polish collective identity with reference to behavior toward Jews during the Holocaust. Ambrosewicz-Jacobs argues that cognitive dissonance and supressed shame further create serious pedagogical challenges. The Holocaust defamation laws officially proclaimed a replacement of a ‘politics of shame’ with a ‘politics of pride’ which threatens to distort the historical facts in curricula and textbooks. The ‘pedagogy of pride’ is right-wing rhetoric reflecting the position of the radical supporters of the idea of Poles as an exclusively positive nation, whose ‘just and courageous actions’ go unrecognized in the world. This is rooted, in part, in long-lasting complexes, conflicts and resentments such as those discussed above.

Kate Korycki’s article on politicized memory in Poland traces how political and intellectual elites in post-1989-transition Poland weave the stories of the recent past, paying particular attention to the way they narrate Polish Jewish relations and their imbrications with Communism. Deploying the concept of collective memory, expanded to encompass the political realm, Korycki argues that elite narratives establish the past as the ‘symbolic currency’ of the politics of the present, and that they furnish the participants with particular political identities. Korycki further argues that these narratives reveal and circulate authoritative interpretative frames for understanding the past. She traces the main narrations of the past and identify their divergent themes and structures, and then turns to specify their consonant and similar motifs, arguing that despite narrative differences, all major political actors conflate Communism with Jewishness. That is, in their various ways, they all circulate the myth of Żydokomuna, noted above. In so doing, they discursively establish a symmetry of suffering between the groups, which in turn affects the way contemporary Poles think about and remember the Holocaust.

Malgorzata Wloszycka’s article on Holocaust memory in Mszana Dolna, like Popescu and Wóycicka, examines the politics of memory in a local community, of Mszana Dolna, a town in southern Poland. This was the place of a massacre of almost one thousand Jews in August 1942. Mszana Dolna rediscovered its Jewish heritage early in the 2000s through two main activities. One is the local commemoration of the shooting of Jews of Mszana and the other is the local schools’ involvement in the educational programes on the history and culture of Polish Jews. The article explores how the memory of Jews in Mszana evolved through the last two decades and the impact it had on the community of the town. Her conclusion, similar to others writing about local initiatives, is positive in that those who are a part of the process of commemoration are a dynamic group in the community. That these involve the young generation of inhabitants and have the support of the authorities of the town suggests that even with the rise of nationalism in Poland, the memory work continues.

Hannah Wilson’s article draws on her research in Holocaust archeology on the site of the Sobibór Death Camp, where around 250,000 Jews were murdered. In post-war memory discourses of the Holocaust, public awareness of Sobibór has been relatively less visible than that of other sites of killing in Poland, partly because of the small number of survivors but also because of the silencing Holocaust memory under the Communists. Wilson aims to provide an overview of the impact that the initial post-war treatment of the site had on the public awareness of Sobibór, and of the international research conducted by individuals in the following years. It also follows the earlier stages of commemoration at the site, and how these developments reflect the wider debates of Polish Holocaust memory throughout this time. She highlights the success of the most recent archaeological excavations which began in 2007, which have since resulted in the discovery of physical remains and hundreds of artefacts that have been publicized in the Polish media. She discusses plans for a new museum and memorial and which are currently undergoing construction. She concludes, in the context of the fascist National Radical Camp demonstrations noted above, that the impact of the archaeology, as well as the new museum and memorial, might encourage further research and pedagogical practices on the subject of Sobibór, and the Holocaust.

In a further piece of research on museums, Aleksandra Kubica and Thomas Van de Putte write about an encounter between Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and rural memories of Jewish absence. The POLIN Museum in Warsaw runs a traveling exhibition (Museum on Wheels) which has visited places in rural Poland since 2014. The exhibition’s aim is to educate on ‘the centuries of coexistence of Jewish and Polish culture.’ The Holocaust is one of the elements presented but, as with the museum, is not central. They undertake a lexicometric analysis of interviews with visitors from five towns visited by MoW between 2015 and 2016 which indicates that the needs articulated by visitors differed from POLIN’s agenda. They show that the Holocaust and Jewish absence in the rural Poland of the present were the most prominent topics appearing, rather than the continuity of Jewish life and culture, emphasized more by the museum. Kubica and Van de Putte attempt to move away from examining Holocaust memory through iconic sites, in favor of focusing on those members of the constituency who have only a minor impact on the development of these discourses. Focusing on the responses of the people who engage with a museum’s outreach project in small towns and villages allowed them to point out how the collective memory of the Holocaust in these places is multi-layered and dependent on interactions between numerous actors, not only those with dominant and most articulate voices in the public sphere.

The picture these contributions create, against the background of political memory controversies, is of a disjuncture between the national discourse of collective memory and the dynamics of local commemorations. Despite a core tension, or conflict, in Holocaust memory between national and internationalist or cosmopolitan discourses, there are local and situated commemorative practices that enable the expression, formation and transmission of collective memories. One characteristic of many of the ethnographic accounts here is the medium of remembrance is visual, visceral, material and performative rather than embedded in a more abstract dispute of justifications and competing victimology. Visual memory and practices of active engagement feature in several of these contributions. Like the Letters to Henio they offer the potential for evoking empathy across generations and as Walter Benjamin suggested, marking catastrophic encounters that call for ‘solidarity backward’ with the dead and victims of injustice.²⁹

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. His research and publications address social theory, globalization, post-communism, ethnonational conflict, sociology of memory, Jewish Studies, and the sociology of violence. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Sławomir Kapralski, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the Pedagogical University of Kraków and a recurrent visiting lecturer at the Graduate School for Social Research/The Centre for Social Studies in Warsaw. His research focuses on theory of culture, nationalism, ethnicity and identity, collective memory, antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the Roma communities in Europe.

Notes

1. Derrida, Archive Fever, 4.

2. This is a provocative allusion to the phrase that was at the center of the defamation charges.

3. See http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/s/content.asp?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4442915&ct=14928497.

4. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 69–70.

5. Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory, 4.

6. Ibid., 195.

7. Ibid., 120–1.

8. Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars, 54.

9. Deflem, “The Legal Theory of Jürgen Habermas.”

10. Belavusau and Wójcik, “Polish Memory Law.”

11. Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory,” 55.

12. Ibid., 55–6.

13. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, 141.

14. Mälksoo, “Memory must be Defended.”

15. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.

16. Browning and Joenniemi, “Ontological Security.”

17. Törnqvist-Plewa, “The Jedwabne Killings,” 158.

18. Leder, Prześniona rewolucja, 90–2.

19. Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi, 577–8.

20. Uffelmann, “Theory as Memory Practice,” 111.

21. Bull and Hansen, “On Agonistic Memory,” 3.

22. Ibid.

23. Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory,” 27.

24. Stone, “Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute,” 28.

25. Judt, Postwar, 803.

26. Pearce, “Delete, Restart, or Rewind?” 262.

27. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory, 18.

28. Kubik and Bernhard, “A Theory of the Politics of Memory,” 13.

29. Benjamin, Illuminations, 120.