Overview
- Explores how the category of “indifferent bystander” functioned in Polish culture between 1942 and 2015
- Analyses the discourse in this area, revealing how the category of “indifferent bystander” establishes the framework of talking and thinking about the Holocaust in Poland
- Contributors are participants and specialists of the culture discussed, leading to a critical analysis of the culture in which they partake
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PSCHC)
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About this book
This book concerns building an idealized image of the society in which the Holocaust occurred. It inspects the category of the bystander (in Polish culture closely related to the witness), since the war recognized as the axis of self-presentation and majority politics of memory. The category is of performative character since it defines the roles of event participants, assumes passivity of the non-Jewish environment, and alienates the exterminated, thus making it impossible to speak about the bystanders’ violence at the border between the ghetto and the ‘Aryan’ side. Bystanders were neither passive nor distanced; rather, they participated and played important roles in Nazi plans. Starting with the war, the authors analyze the functions of this category in the Polish discourse of memory through following its changing forms and showing links with social practices organizing the collective memory. Despite being often critiqued, this point of dispute about Polish memory rarely belongs to mainstream culture. It also blocks the memory of Polish violence against Jews. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in memory studies, the history of the Holocaust, the memory of genocide, and the war and postwar cultures of Poland and Eastern Europe.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This is a very important book with a clear and strong message. One of its biggest contributions is the critical light in which a number of important Polish books and cultural and literary artifacts are shown, revealing their silences as well as angles that helped present Polish Jewish history from a more positive perspective. … it is a must-read book for graduate students and scholars interested in the debates as well as a critical overview of many critical Polish texts.” (Anna Müller, The Polish Review, Vol. 69 (2), 2024)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Maryla Hopfinger is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. She works in the areas of the theory of culture and social communication. She has authored numerous books and articles and has also acted as editor to a number of collected volumes. Her most recent publication in English (2010, translated in 2020) is entitled Literature and Media.
Tomasz Żukowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. He is a literary historian interested in the identity and discourses in the context of the Shoah. Previous works include The Great Whitewash (2018) and Under Pressure.(2021).Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015
Book Subtitle: The Story of Innocence
Editors: Maryla Hopfinger, Tomasz Żukowski
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66408-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Rights Holder, under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66407-7Published: 17 March 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66410-7Published: 19 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-66408-4Published: 16 March 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-6419
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6427
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 364
Number of Illustrations: 39 b/w illustrations
Topics: Cultural Heritage, History of World War II and the Holocaust, European Culture