Erica Lehrer

Can there be a conciliatory heritage

The scholarship on heritage has been preoccupied with discussions of conflict and discord. But might heritage not also be deployed for conciliatory functions after national trauma? Kazimierz, the historical Jewish district of Cracow, Poland is a unique urban space whose recent Jewish‐themed development both reflects and extends grassroots Polish–Jewish relationship building in the post‐Holocaust, post‐Communist era. It is one of the few sites in the world today where (non‐Polish) Jews and (non‐Jewish) Poles regularly encounter one another. Based on the everyday interactions and understandings of local participants, rather than top‐down memorial schemes or official proclamations of the achievement or expectation of reconciliation, this paper considers heritage spaces and landscapes as key sites for conciliatory civil society development through meaningful engagement with difficult histories.

Cur(at)ing History

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.

Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing

What happens when the invisible is made visible, when knowledge relegated to society’s margins or swept under its carpet is suddenly inserted into the public domain? The iconic images of German civilians forced to view the newly liberated Nazi camps, standing at the edges of hastily dug trenches full of emaciated bodies are emblematic of an era in which we have faced not only previously unimaginable episodes of mass violence, but have been consternated by how we might engage with these pasts: who should look, at what, how, and to what end? There is an enduring sense that reluctant publics must be forced to confront horrific realities with which we may be somehow complicit—if only in our desire not to really know.

Relocating Auschwitz: Affective Relations in the Jewish-German-Polish Troika

In recent years, Jews, Germans, and Poles have stood at three corners of a triangle, labeled, respectively, as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders by genocide researchers treating the Holocaust. The formulation advanced previous equations, where scholars could only imagine the duality of victim-perpetrator.3 Newrevelations about kinds and layers of complicity, competing claims to victim-hood, and the recognition that individuals may inhabit more than one of the categories, force us to confront the complexity of interrelations. Yet, the rise of attention to public memory in Holocaust studies suggests, rather than a permanent two-dimensional geometry, a different idiom: an active, jockeying troika of nations, yoked together by a difficult history. This new metaphor allows us to anticipate and attend to the ongoing tensions and shifts that occur among members of the team, on whom different memorial burdens may be placed. In this chapter, I address the circumstances of a major, and quite recent, transmogrification of the symbolic Jews-Germans-Poles constellation. Namely, I argue that in the framework of Jewish Holocaust tourism to Poland, Nazi Germany (i.e., the perpetrator) disappears. In its place, Poland has emerged as much more satisfying object of opprobrium, even as—and indeed, I will argue, because—Poland is also beginning to be excavated as a site of more general relevance in Jewish memory-culture.

‘A Picnic Underpinned with Unease’: Spring in Warsaw and New Genre Polish-Jewish Memory Work

Poland, whose pre-war Jewish population of 3.5 million was decimated during World War II and further reduced by anti-Semitic incidents in the post-war Polish republic, has only a small Jewish presence today, but over the last two decades has come to recognize and work through the painful Jewish past with an increasing intensity. After Communism fell and this past was released from state censorship, there was a flood of publicly suppressed information — accompanied by public expressions of collective memory — regarding the 1000-year history and violent destruction of Poland’s Jews. Spurred by new scholarly and journalistic writings, as well as the visits of foreign Jews (many with Polish roots), the 1990s and early 2000s saw public spaces reassigned some of their former Jewish meanings through official memorial forms like ceremonies, signage, renovation of historic sites and monuments (Kapralski, 2001; Meng, 2011; Murzyn-Kupisz and Purchla, 2009). A flagship project representing such official memorial efforts is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in Warsaw in 2014. Other, more grassroots forms of remembering were also growing up in response to and alongside these, in the realms of tourism and heritage brokering (Gruber, 2002; Lehrer, 2013; Waligorska, 2013). But in parallel fashion — and picking up speed in the mid-2000s — another kind of memory work was beginning to claim public attention. Social and cultural ‘interventions’ undertaken by artists, academics, youth groups and other culture brokers, began to create provocative spaces of dialogue and self-reflection, in staged installations or happenings in which individuals were asked to participate in active, social, critical forms of remembering.