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ABSTRACT
Fantasies of Jews returning to Poland after the Holocaust have become a staple of post-Communist Polish cultural expression. Recent Polish films, Aftermath (2012), Ida (2013), and Demon (2015) represent Polish Holocaust memory through Expressionist cinematic techniques, including spectral figures and non-realistic lighting and camera angles. This essay examines how Jewish ghosts excavate suppressed Holocaust knowledge and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, forming a post-Holocaust Polish critical exegesis. These films defy redemptive resolutions to questions about Polish-Jewish historical and ethical relationships during the Holocaust, Polish Holocaust memory, second and third generation Polish survivors, and the absent presence of Poland's slaughtered Jews.
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Notes
1 For discussions of this observation, see Assmann, “Ghosts of the Past”; Mroz, “Re-imagining the Neighbour”; Safran, “Dancing with Death”; and Stanczyk “The Absent Jewish Child.”
2 Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards, 17.
3 Zuzanna Dziuban analyzes the figure of the ghost ‘both as a non-figurative entity and as a productive metaphor,’ introducing ‘the spectral turn,’ see Dziuban, “Memory as Haunting,” 111.
4 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 23.
5 Dziuban, “Memory as Haunting,” 112.
6 Dziuban, “Memory as Haunting,” 113. Despite its response to Communism, Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’ deploys the image of the ghost, not present and not absent, liminally between life and death, as indebted to linguistic analysis that supersedes historical particularity.
7 Underhill, “Next Year in Drohobych,” 581.
8 For studies of second and third generation responses to the Holocaust, see Aarons and Berger, Third-generation Holocaust Representation.
9 Brenner, The Ethics of Witnessing, 23.
10 Waligórska, “Healing by Haunting,” 7.
11 Ibid., 209.
12 Kapczynski, “The Singular Jew,” 120.
13 Waligórska, “Healing by Haunting,” 209. Esther Pereen makes the salient point that ghosts reveal secrets from the past, exact revenge, and function as ‘unwelcome reminders of past transgressions, causing personal or historical traumas to rise to the surface.’ However, the films I discuss are bound to specific historical memory rather than Pereen’s ‘existential threats,’ 2.
14 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 103–28.
15 Webber, “Keep Your Distance,” 191.
16 Neighbors examines the July 1941 massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by the town’s Polish residents. Controversy arose when Gross revealed that despite German occupation, the perpetrators were not Nazis. Polonsky and Michlic view Neighbors as a ‘counter-memory’ to that of Poles as rescuers, The Neighbors Respond, 33. Mroz, “Re-Imagining the Neighbour,” discusses a range of media responses to the Jedwabne massacre.
17 Stanczyk, “The Absent Jewish Child,” 361. Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory, surveys Holocaust memory scholarship.
18 Haltof, Polish Film, 2.
19 Ibid.
20 Bayer, “After Postmemory,” 117.
21 Spender, The God that Failed, 234.
22 Turner, Film as Social Practice, 148, 149, 151. See also Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema.
23 See Behr, Expressionism; and Barron and Dube, German Expressionism.
24 Hirsch, Afterimage, 3.
25 Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Locked Doors and Hidden Graves,” 149, 150.
26 Timothy Snyder argues that in Jedwabne the Germans incited the Jews’ murder by appealing to ‘psychological and material resources: Poles could exculpate themselves from their own association with Soviet rule by killing Jews, and taking Jewish property’; Snyder, Black Earth, 161.
27 Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Locked Doors and Hidden Graves,” 150.
28 Ibid.
29 Grollmus, “A Controversial Holocaust Film.”
30 See Lamm, “The Unveiling.”
31 Bell, “The Ghosts of Place,” 820.
32 Wigura, “Ida Raising Tempers.”
33 Timothy Snyder discusses the myth of ‘proclaimed identity of Jews with communism’ in Black Earth, 19–22. In “Cultural Transmutations,” Rachel Brenner studies the inscription in Polish literature of interwar and wartime propagandist denunciations of Jews as the fifth column (Żydokomuna Judeo-Communism) – and therefore enemies of the Polish people.
34 Although Ebbrecht-Hartmann also recognizes the film’s emphasis on ‘anxiety, grief and disillusion,’ I do not find ‘a moment of establishing a new order and an adequate form of mourning’; Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Locked Doors and Hidden Graves,” 155.
35 Quoted in Bloom, “Courage of Conviction.”
36 Denby, “Ida.”
37 Quoted in Heuring, “Variety’s 10 Cinematographers to Watch.”
38 Bradshaw, “Ida Review.”
39 Perlez, “Pope Orders Nuns Out of Auschwitz.” See also Suchecky and Dobie, “The Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz.”
40 Kowalska, “The ‘Ida’ of Contention.”
41 Haltof, Polish Film, 163.
42 The term ‘gothic-expressionist’ is applied by Zehavit Stern to the 1937 film version of The Dybbuk, which, she notes, features a gravestone as a symbolic representation ‘of the strength and continuity of the [Jewish] community,’ recalling Aftermath; Stern, “The Dybbuk,” 83, 86.
43 Dziuban, “Memory as Haunting,” 116.
44 Borschel-Dan, “Complicity of Poles,” 6.
45 Quoted in Borschel-Dan, “Complicity of Poles,” 4.
46 Hoffman, “Hearing Poland’s Ghosts,” 4.
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Phyllis Lassner
Phyllis Lassner is Professor Emerita in The Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and The Gender Studies and Writing Programs at Northwestern University. Her publications include studies of interwar, World War II, and postwar women writers, including two books on Elizabeth Bowen, British Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, and essays on Holocaust representation in literature, film, and art. Her most recent book is Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2017). She was the recipient of the International Diamond Jubilee Fellowship at Southampton University, UK for her work on Holocaust representation. Her current research concerns Holocaust refugee art, Polish post-Holocaust film, and British Holocaust theater. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Companion to New Directions in Holocaust Representation and Culture.